Jeremy returned. He’d lost the wig, washed the makeup from his eyes and removed the concoction or mechanism altering their shape. Though his skin remained unnaturally dark, he again looked like my brother.
“Where were we? Oh yes, the –”
I interrupted. “Let’s talk about the first woman you killed, Jeremy.”
He spun away and began pacing, moving faster and faster, chased by a fire I couldn’t see. The candle flames shivered as he swept past with his fists clenching and releasing. I jumped in front of him. Took his shoulders and pulled him tight.
He held on to me a full minute, as if finding his equilibrium. He reclined on the bright Oriental carpet and stared into the white ceiling, thinking a long time before he spoke.
“I was supposed to do it, the release. I entered the room, accepted the holy knife, and walked toward the woman, but my legs died.”
“Died?”
“I fell to the floor. Nothing was holding my weight.”
“You couldn’t get to her?”
“I tried five times.”
Five? “This happened on every attempt?”
“My legs worked backing up but died going forward.”
I saw the women on the floor, naked and terrified, screaming into tape or a gag. My brother starting toward them with the weapon. Falling to the floor, wriggling and impotent.
“Day was there?” I asked. “In the room?”
“Of course, Carson. It was his party.”
“What did he do?” I asked.
“The knife was dishonored by my cowardice. He took the knife to the bathroom to be reconsecrated beneath water. The knife returned, clean and bright and ready for its mission. The knife always returned.”
The knife entered the room …
“What did you do, Jeremy? While Day butchered the women.”
“I watched. And then I’d throw up and crawl away.”
“You never once …?”
He put his hands over his eyes and lay without motion. I walked to the window and stared out at a world where most people lived ordinary lives, no dark secrets, no hidden tragedies, no nights that followed you across the room with wadded sheets and covers.
I turned back to my brother. “You finally confessed to Vangie. The whole story. Everything.”
“Every word, Carson. From my first memories.”
“Because Vangie had become your psychoanalyst.”
His hands slipped from his eyes. “At the Institute she was just a warden. Dealing with savages. Burnouts. People who thought devil dogs were eating their brains. ‘You’re different, Jeremy,’ Prowse told me for years. ‘I wish you’d let me behind that last door, Jeremy.’”
“So after all those years, you opened the door.”
“I got tired of hiding.” He rubbed his eyes like he was getting weary. “I said we’d talk if I was a regular patient and not one of the savages. I told her get me a phone and we’ll keep regular hours.”
“You met – so to speak – on Saturdays.”
“One to three o’clock. She sat at her desk in Gulf Shores, I laid on my bed with my phone and told her everything.”
“Harry found a photo of you on her wall.”
“She wanted a photo to look at when we spoke, something to personalize her experience and diminish the distance. I was baring my soul, Carson. I wanted my picture to reflect it, made her take it with my dingus and orbles hanging out. I made her promise to put the picture up just like I was in the room telling my story: JEREMY STRIPPED BARE.”
Jeremy had always claimed to be viscerally disgusted by Vangie, and over the years had generated a litany of pejoratives: Slut Queen, Doctor Whore, the Cuntessa, Our Lady of Perpetual Misery. It would have been easy to shut Vangie out of his life: Simply stop talking, or request another psychiatrist be assigned to him. Had my brother actually respected Vangie Prowse? In his world, she’d have been his only equal in raw intelligence. Were his relentless anti-Vangie rants and insults a mask?
I said, “When you told Vangie about Day, she tried to track him down, I take it?”
“She’d seen people like Jim Day before. She said he would be killing women. It was what he saw as his mission in life. She asked me everything I could remember about him, even the tiniest things, like the fact that his mama had once told him his daddy-o was from New Yawk City. She eventually concluded Jimmy Day HAD to be somewhere in the New York area, a spiritual destiny. He could come to New York when he was man enough. When he was ready.”
“She was dead right,” I said.
“One thing about old Prowsie, brother, she knew Mommy and Daddy issues.”
I shook my head. “Unfortunately, she didn’t know how to wipe away her prints as she investigated.”
“The Prowster tracked down some of Jimmy’s drooling relatives. Word got back to Jimmy that a doctor lady in the old home country of Alabamy was asking after him. He wasn’t a happy pup.”
“Day went South, broke into Vangie’s home.”
Jeremy nodded. “And that’s when he found old Prussy’s precious little secret.”
“The power he had over her,” I said. “What was it?”
He rolled to his stomach and cradled his chin in his hands. A smile ghosted his thin lips. “The secret that made her spring moi? That brought her here? That made us stay in a hotel near Chelsea? The secret she traded her life for? You don’t know what it is?”
“I have no idea.”
He started laughing.
Shelly Waltz opened his desk drawer and removed a vial containing blood-pressure medicine. He was supposed to take one every morning with about a half-dozen other pills, but for the past two weeks he’d needed another in the evening. He could tell his BP was spiking by a tension in his neck, a low hiss in his ears.
He popped the pill, washed it down with coffee, and looked out over the detectives’ room. It was quiet, most of the dicks out turning over rocks in the search for Folger.
He heard a rustle of paper from inside a gray cubicle. Cluff was still at work, hunched over the wide sheet of paper unfurled from the large roll on the floor beside the desk. Waltz had watched Cluff work out problems on the paper for so long it seemed normal.
Waltz walked over and leaned on the cubicle wall.
“What’s up, Detective?”
“Ah, just scratching out some new shit,” Cluff wheezed. Waltz saw him push the edge of the paper over a dog-eared pair of files. Hiding them.
“What’s with the files?” Waltz asked.
Cluff’s hairy ears reddened. “Nothing. Just a few loose ends.”
Waltz’s hand pushed the paper away. “Then you won’t mind if I take a look, right?”
Cluff leaned back in his chair, made a sound like a steam train shutting down, his lung-scarred version of a sigh. “It’s not anything. Just some old records from a couple different places.”
Waltz studied the pages. “My, my …old admission records from Newark’s Child Welfare office and Bridges Juvenile Center. I thought the Lieutenant shut down this area of inquiry so we could –”
Cluff swatted the air. “Yeah, I know. Look for a crazy in an Armani eating at the Four Seasons and living in a Park Avenue penthouse. I can’t run all over like I once did, Waltz. I hate it, but that’s the way it is. I got to spend half my time in my goddamn chair catching my breath, so I figured I’d do a little something while I sat. And Ryder never really convinced me there was no New York in Ridgecliff’s background.”
“Sounds like an admirable line of inquiry, Detective,” Waltz said, rapping his knuckles on the top of the cubicle. “Have at it.”
If Cluff was at his desk digging through moth-eaten records, Waltz thought, it was one less chance to find Jeremy Ridgecliff. And thereby doom Alice Folger.