30

The yard was concrete—walled on two sides, barred on the third and fourth. Barbed wire topped the square like a misguided attempt at Christmas decoration. Forty men were out for morning exercise, most of them stripped to the waist, prison-blue shirts slung low around their hips, sleeves wrapped and knotted below their navels. They’d segregated themselves, whites to the left, dark-skinned blacks to the right, shades of coffee and cream in-between. Thanks to mirrored sunglasses, I could stare without fear of repercussion at some of the best pecs, abs, and biceps I’d ever seen.

What a country, huh? Nobody’s fit except the very rich and the hard-timers, sharing the twin luxuries of time and easy gym access. No swimming pools, saunas, personal trainers, or health spa extras for these guys, though—unless you counted the morning’s humidity as a steam bath. But their gym had to be stocked with serious machinery. Nautilus, I diagnosed by muscle definition.

In my sexless attire, I drew minimal attention. A black man wearing a kerchief headband dropped to the sweltering pavement and did five quick one-handed pushups for my benefit.

I walked briskly down the pathway indicated by the guard. Eyes seemed to pierce my skin.

Every doorway was a challenge, an airlock-type arrangement called a sally port. Into a tiny room, door clanging shut behind me, locking automatically. Questioning and identification procedures before the next barred door opened. Security cameras monitoring the entire business.

Concrete and steel. The sound of chains dragging along the floor, a man’s abruptly shouted command. My hands felt clammy. I tried not to think of prison riots, news articles naming the hostages.

I was treated well. No strip search. I was asked to sign a book, list my address, phone number, Social Security number, and the name of the prisoner I wished to visit. I had to formally declare that I carried no weapons. A metal detector backed my word. I wondered exactly who Mooney had called. Possibly, Albert’s public defender was held in high esteem. Maybe the guards were so surprised that somebody’d come to visit Al-Al after all these years, they were cutting me a little leeway, hoping for some action.

I fell into step behind two visitors, women dressed to display it, bright flowers in a sea of drab, a treat and a temptation to their men. Husbands, boyfriends, lovers? Fathers of their children? I couldn’t overhear more than a brief snatch of their conversation from the enclosed carrel to which I was led. A flat-voiced guard explained that my prisoner would be escorted to a corresponding carrel on the opposite side of the glass partition. We could speak via telephone hookup. No one would eavesdrop on our talk. We were not allowed to touch the glass.

A second guard with a bumpy boxer’s nose and wire-rimmed glasses steadied Al-Al with a two-fisted grip, one hand on each shoulder. Without help, Al would have toppled from the chair. I have seldom seen a sorrier specimen. He looked dried up, wrinkled as an old man. Mooney’d said his public defender had given his age as forty-two.

What had he looked like as a teenage killer?

At first I assumed he was drugged to the eyeballs. Thorazine, something that in large doses turned humans into extras from Night of the Living Dead. In a whispered throaty response, our first communication, he assured me he wasn’t taking anything. Unless it was in the food, he murmured conspiratorially.

“I want to talk to you about some things that happened a long time ago, Al,” I began. “Would you like me to call you Mr. Albion? Al? Albert?”

“Who told ya my name?”

“Your lawyer,” I lied. “Harve Kelton. The man who defended you at your trial. Remember him? He sometimes writes to you. He told me he represented you at a parole hearing this year.”

“Yeah?”

“Can you talk about your hat?” It wasn’t what I’d planned to discuss. I didn’t really want to know, to tell the truth, but the fact remained that I was chatting with a convict wearing headgear constructed of patchwork aluminum foil, possibly remnants from assorted chocolate bars, twisted and folded together to form a crude knight’s helmet.

“Pretty smart,” he said with a chuckle I can only describe as weird. It held no hint of humor.

“Your hat?”

“The rays,” he said. “Keeps out the rays.”

“They shoot X rays at you?”

“Particle rays,” he said. “They haven’t used that X-ray shit since the Aryan Brotherhood stole the machines.”

“Particle rays,” I agreed.

“Zap ’em. Particle-beam radiation fields. You can never tell when you’ll get zapped.” He nodded solemnly and his makeshift headgear took a dive, almost covering his nose. He hastened to right it.

I had to assume the headgear postdated the crimes or he’d be in Bridgewater no matter if they had to wedge him in with a shoehorn. Unless the guards believed he was feigning his mania, wearing the helmet as a gag, searching for a Catch-22 release to a better environment.

If Al-Al thought Bridgewater was better than this, given the latest round of budget cuts, he was crazy enough to belong there.

“I’m Carlotta, Al,” I said. “That’s my name.”

“Lawyer?”

“Investigator.”

“Like cop?”

“Something like a cop.”

“I ain’t done nothin’. I been here ’most forever.”

“I know, Al. You’ve been here a long time. Have they been shooting rays at you a long time?”

“Yeah, long time. Long time. Long time.” His voice turned singsong and his eyelids fluttered. Nap time. Great. I took advantage of the break to fish my tiny notebook out of my pocket. I’d recorded the names of Al-Al’s victims, the particulars of his confessions.

“Al,” I said loudly. His head jerked, knocking the headgear further askew. “Do you remember Anne Katon? The waitress? The woman you killed?”

“Oh, jeez. Oh, jeez,” he whispered. “I don’t wanna talk about her. She’s not mad with me or nothin’. I love her. I love her.”

“Anne?”

“Yeah, man, why you gotta say her name?”

“Did you know her?”

“Sure, I know her always. She was my girl. I watch her grow up. Are you protected from the rays? Your hat lined with foil or something?”

“Do you remember Thea Janis?”

“Is your hat lined?”

“Yeah. I’m safe. What about Thea?”

“What kinda name is that, Thea? Tay-ah. Tay-ah. Tay-yah.”

“How about Dorothy Cameron? Thea Janis. Dorothy Cameron. Do either of those names ring a bell?”

“Bells, bells, bells,” he chanted. “I like bells, bells in hell.” He giggled, muttered, “’S’cuse me very much.”

“Anne Katon,” I repeated.

“I’m sorry, Annie,” he keened. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Your mouth wouldn’t stop talking, wouldn’t stop talking, wouldn’t stop talking, wouldn’t stop, wouldn’t stop.”

“Did Annie have yellow hair?”

“Brown hair, long hair, sometimes she let me touch it. Long braid. Let it loose, Annie, let your hair hang loose and soft.”

I consulted my notebook. Eileen Evans had been the third victim. Thea, the second. I’d try them out of order.

“Did Eileen have brown hair like Annie’s?” I asked.

“Eileen?”

“Eileen Evans?”

“Is that your name? You have nice red hair, Eileen. I’d like to touch your hair, but don’t you dare take off that hat. They’ll zap you for sure.”

“Did you go out with Eileen?”

“With Annie, Annie, Annie. Her name was Annie, not Anne, not Anne, Eileen.”

“‘Thea was small, just five feet tall, with brown hair in a long braid, and bare feet. She was waiting for me by the side of the road. She’d taken off her sandals.’” I was reciting from the man’s own confession, a document suspect if only for its perfect grammar. But you can never tell. Confessions are usually taped, and sometimes transcribers decide to pretty them up.

He didn’t react in any way.

“Did Thea have long brown hair?” I asked. “Did she look like Annie?”

He scrunched up his face. I stared at him for a good five minutes before he opened his eyes. I wondered if he thought he was under ray bombardment. Maybe I ought to scrunch my face too.

“Her,” he said abruptly.

“Thea,” I prompted. “Dorothy.”

Al gazed at me for a long time, adjusted his aluminum helmet. It looked a little like the Tin Man’s headgear in The Wizard of Oz.

After running his fingers over each wall and banging the telephone rhythmically on the ledge of the carrel, he said, “You won’t tell anyone?”

I said, “My hat lets me listen. It won’t let me tell.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding slowly.

“Ah,” I repeated, mimicking his nod.

“The five o’starfish was walking by the sand-oh. The five o’starfish was walking by the sand-oh. The five o’starfish was walking …”

His voice trailed off. Half the time when he spoke it didn’t sound like conversation, more like recitation. It reminded me of something.

Of course: “The Walrus and the Carpenter were walking close at hand …”

“The starfish said Thea belongs in the sea,” he continued singsong, staring into my eyes. “She belongs in the sea, the sea star said, in the sea, in the sea, in the sea, in the sea, in the sea, in the sea, in the sea, sea, sea, sea, sea, sea, sea …”

“Al—”

“In the sea, in the sea, in the sea—”

His voice rose and the guard materialized from another section of the room. He took the phone from Al’s unresisting hand.

“You want to listen to him chant?” the guard asked, bored as bored could be. “’Cause the guy goes on for hours.”

“No. It’s okay.”

He hung up and started Al-Al back on the journey to his cell without another glance in my direction.

Confessors. They come out of the woodwork on serial killer cases. For the Boston Strangler, they’d had thousands. Of course this man had actually been convicted, had actually killed. That gave him a certain credibility.

Still, if I’d asked him whether he’d killed Amelia Earhart, I could guess the response: A star told him she belonged in the sky, in the sky, in the sky …

Traffic was better on the drive home. I rolled down the window and sang low-down dirty blues to a wind accompaniment, every tune I could think of that had to do with jail, from “Ain’t No More Cane on the Brazos” to “Hard-Time Blues.”

Where did Al get the money for all those chocolate bars? Did other cons contribute Hershey wrappers? How much money was in his prison account, if any? What sort of work did he do at the prison, if any? Did his attorney bring him aluminum foil, smuggling in Reynolds Wrap boxes with the serrated edging removed?

One thing: Al-Al had known Anne Katon. He’d remembered the color of her hair, remembered that he’d done something bad to Annie. His last victim, Eileen Evans, drew a blank.

And Thea belonged in the sea. Maybe she’d looked like a starfish. Which—to a man as disturbed as Albert Ellis Albion—she may very well have done.

I pulled right, stopped abruptly on the grassy verge as several cars honked their disapproval.

I’d gotten it wrong.

Not the five o’starfish. The five-oh starfish. Five-oh’s been slang for cop as long as I can remember. An old TV series, set in Hawaii and probably still in syndication in Albania, had started it, and the practice clung. I could see the wriggly lines on the back of MacAvoy’s hand. Not an odd five-pointed star. A starfish.

The five-oh starfish said that Thea belonged in the sea.