Chapter 22

The Shutterbug

Wayne didn’t always work through his lunch hour, even though he didn’t punch out on the clock. Sometimes he would climb into an overhead crawl space between the warehouse side of Conlin’s and the sales floor. In the space between these two worlds, where the office canteen was located, right next to the women’s bathroom, he would quietly perch, gazing down through a ceiling vent over the bathroom stalls.

From his confined aerie, he watched the women come and go. They had no idea that the sweet boy who couldn’t get a girlfriend, who swapped cookies with them at Christmas and always remembered their birthdays, who so often flattered them on their attire, watched as they undressed. After he tired of this overhead view, Wayne fashioned another peephole that offered a more eye-level view.

Later, perhaps concerned that the jig might be up, it was the Peeping Tom himself who reported the hole in the wall of the women’s room.

But he assumed a much too righteous posture for Kris to believe that he had nothing to do with it.

“It’s one of the warehousemen,” he told her.

“Who?” She pushed him. “Who is it, Wayne?”

He wouldn’t give a name.

“Okay.” Kris let it go. “Thanks for telling me.”

As soon as Wayne left her office, Kris investigated and found the peephole. It was right where Wayne said it would be. Then she called Rick Mace into the office.

“Look into this, Rick. And fix the wall.”

When Rick confronted Wayne, he got an answer. It was the other guys. Wayne fingered Mike Skillicorn, Todd Zander, and Barry Eiseman.

“No way,” they insisted. “Wayne was the one that showed us.”

That afternoon, Rick patched the hole in the wall and blocked off the overhead crawl space, and though Wayne still maintained that he had nothing to do with it—if he had, why would he have reported it?—Rick knew better. He had every reason to believe the other men, not Wayne. Nothing would come of it. It was chalked up as another incident. Besides, Wayne seemed to have a new obsession.

Wayne had acquired a camera, a cheap Kodak disc model, and he was fast becoming a pest with it. At first the women didn’t mind. As they turned quickly when he called their name, they would be briefly blinded by the flash.

“Hey, Cindy,” came the tease.

“What?” She turned.

Click. Flash.

“Oh, Wayne, come on.”

Wayne didn’t take many pictures of the men, but he was taking roll after roll of the women. Cindy behind her desk. Sheila sitting on a La-Z-Boy. Joyce on a sofa. Close-ups. Overviews. Nearly all the time his technique employed the element of surprise, the ambush shot.

“Oh, I have to get one of you for my dad,” he said to Joyce, bringing up his aim.

“Wayne, go take pictures of those young chicks. Quit doing this.”

“No, my dad says that you’re the best-looking one here. He always wants to see your picture,” Wayne pleaded.

“Who cares?” Joyce gave up.

Click.

“Sheila, don’t cover up your face. I just want a picture.”

Click.

Wayne rarely showed his pictures off, and he never showed Sheila the photographs of her and Sandy McManus, another saleswoman at the store, that were taken during one of their frequent twilight strolls near the University.

Cindy finally became sick of it and got short with him.

“Knock it off, Wayne,” she griped, leveling her voice at him.

He did, but by then he had amassed stacks and stacks of snapshots of the women of Conlin’s. They were generally of poor quality, and the expressions on the women’s faces reflected a definite lack of enthusiasm for the maniacal shutterbug who was taking their picture yet one more time. They were ill posed, parked as they might be on occasion sunk into a floral-patterned deep-line sofa. The flash lighting was harsh. They possibly wouldn’t ever see the picture anyway. What was the point?

By the time Kris had grown just as weary of Wayne’s picture taking as the other women, her complaining slowed him down. Then, after the other women complained to her, she finally had to tell him flat out that he didn’t have permission to do it anymore.

Wayne’s countless pictures of the other women were kept in a box at home, but he had done something special with his even bigger collection of Kris photographs. They were edited, cropped, and archived in a small white album. The first page featured a head-and-shoulders picture of a smiling Kris, bordered by a white oval mat. At the bottom, pasted below the mat, Wayne had placed Kris’s signature, which he had scissored from the bottom line of a Conlin’s insurance form. Page after page of photographs showed her sitting officiously at a desk; sinking into the plush of a showroom sofa; lounged legs-up on another; entering a doorway; standing on the loading dock; perched demurely on the arm of a stuffed chair, hands in lap, legs crossed.

The album pictures had been carefully cropped to eliminate extraneous subject matter. Wayne had meticulously cut off the corners on most all of them, leaving rounded edges. He had jammed up to four pictures on a page. When he didn’t like the smallness of the image, he had blow-ups made. Besides the fifteen 3½ by 4½-inch pictures he got from one roll of disc film, Wayne often ordered enlargements, sometimes up to six per roll. There were requests for 5 by 7 and 8 by 10 prints from the same negative, giving him extra latitude when he made decisions about cropping down to show only Kris’s face. The enlargements made from his snapshot camera were especially grainy, and the washed colors of Kris’s skirts and blouses lack true-life vibrancy, but the notes Wayne scribbled on the backs of some pictures revealed in grainless, stark clarity the powerful nature of his obsession.

“Kris Zimmerman Wells—I love you, Wayne.”

“Kris Zimmerman Wells—I’m crazy ’bout KZ.”

“Kris, I want you to live with me and my La-Z-Boy. Wayne.”

Wayne also carried Kris’s picture in his wallet. He had snipped her handwritten work-order messages into word bits—taking the word “love” from loveseat and “boy” from La-Z-Boy—and pasted together a new message, “I love you, Big Boy,” which he kept in his locked toolbox.

And it didn’t stop there. In a far corner of the warehouse, Wayne had kept another stash, which was a more chaotic but equally telling testament to his desire for Kris. In what once had been a Hickory Farms sampler box, Wayne kept the other odds and ends, the not yet distilled evidence of his monomania. No bigger than a large dictionary, the box contained more than thirty-five additional pictures of Kris, some of them framed. There she was eating a banana, or standing near a mattress. It contained dime-store “Sweetheart” stickers, dozens of Conlin’s red tags that had been trimmed down to leave only her signed initials—KZ. Newspaper and magazine clippings: a TV Guide feature on Benny Goodman; a movie ad for Falling in Love, starring Meryl Streep and Robert DeNiro; Wayne’s business card; Kris’s business card; a large color advertisement of a woman in a yellow Liz Claiborne dress holding a handbag, her head ripped off in jagged abandon; an ad for Victory Chapel, a wedding emporium; a routine office communication from Kris to Rick Mace, saying “Come Find Me.”

Rick knew Wayne fantasized about taking Kris away from Doug. Wayne had told him so. And everybody knew that Wayne bristled whenever Doug came into the store. As a couple, Doug and Kris weren’t inseparable, but Doug did stop in at Conlin’s on a regular basis. They frequently spent the lunch hour together, or if Kris couldn’t leave the store, Doug might bring her a deli sandwich. As the boss, Kris could be one of the gang at Conlin’s, but less so one of the girls. She didn’t go to the Christmas cookie-swap parties or go out after work for drinks, unless the party crowd was big enough to accommodate Doug. Conversational references to “Kris and Doug” were as commonplace as the mention of Kris’s name alone. Their work lives were, it seemed, always intersecting, and that was a problem for Wayne, who had made it known he didn’t like Doug.

When Doug would enter the front door of the showroom and head toward the back to find Kris, Wayne, if he happened to be out front, could be seen clenching his fists. Everyone else at Conlin’s liked Doug. They had learned not to expect much chatter from him. He was quiet—they knew that. But he fit in in every other way. Doug shared the same equivocal view of Wayne that the other husbands had. The fake gold necklaces and stick pins and junky doodads that Wayne had given his wife were no different from those he had given Carey’s wife, Cindy or George’s wife, Joyce.

Doug didn’t know at the time, but he would find out later, that Wayne’s interest in his wife was quite different. For one thing, he would learn that someone had been compelled—for whatever reason—to enter his house, search out Kris’s teal-green silk wedding dress, which was hung deep in a closet inside a zippered plastic garment bag, and streak blood around the collar line, along the sleeve, and down the skirt. Whoever had done this had carefully put the dress back in its liner, leaving no outward sign of disturbance. Kris wouldn’t discover this macabre handiwork until years later. But it would be clear that whoever had done this must have had a key to the front door.

“This’ll have to be cleaned in mineral oil, ma’am,” her dry cleaner told her. “It’ll change the color a little, but it’s the only way.”

“What do you think it is?” Kris asked.

“Blood.”