The Savage Kind

by John Copenhaver

  “My dad is expecting me,” I said, stepping toward the door.

  “Wait,” he said, slipping between me and the exit. “I have no one to talk to. The girls, they’re getting their dos done. Dos. Done. Donest. Ha!” His breath reeked of whiskey, and underneath it, I detected something sour, perhaps halitosis. The liquid in his decanter sloshed and, in a stray beam of sunlight, glistened like amber.

  “I don’t have much time. He’s waiting—” I said.

  “Shhh!” he said and waved his empty tumbler at me. “I know you’re lying. You just want to run away from the sad drunk. Well, okay. I’ll let you go.” He stepped to the side. “The women come and go… come and go talking of Michelangelo. Isn’t that from something?”

  I smiled, but not warmly. He was putting me on edge.

  “My poor little girl,” he went on. “We should’ve been there for her, you know, but that’s all over now.” He raised his glass to his lips, found it empty, and frowned. “It’s never over, is it? Never. Jackie and then Judy. Poor Judy. You know, she rose out of Jackie like a phoenix from the ashes. But this bird, the Judy-bird, she has burned feathers—and a terrible temper.” He leaned in and poked my shoulder, the tumbler dangling between his thumb and pinky. His breath was unbearably ripe. “Did you know the fairy godmother brought us little baby Jackie—Judy, I mean. She wasn’t a replacement. She was a placement.” He continued, his voice lowering, “But fate, it laughs, and laughs hard.” He swayed, his gaze falling on something behind me. “Judy was justified in smashing Jackie, although I wish she hadn’t done a number on the table. To tell you the truth, I’ve wanted to smash her too. Many times.” He smiled, but it quickly vanished. “Don’t tell Edith. Oh, God, don’t tell her.” He belched and surprised himself. “Excuse me.”

  “I should go,” I said, nodding toward the door.

  “Fine,” he said. “The girls come and go.”

  * * *

  As I walked home, Bart’s babble wormed its way in. He’d said that Judy was a placement, not a replacement. Whatever that meant. He’d also mentioned that a “fairy godmother” had brought her to them. Could that be Moira? I remembered what she told Judy: “I know you better than you know yourself.” When I was eavesdropping on Bart and her while Judy was searching his study, he said to her, “You’ve been good to us.” Perhaps there’s something deeper between them, and that something is Judy. But why use the word “placement”? Had Judy been unwanted from the beginning? Were the Peabodys upholding part of a deal by taking her? That couldn’t be the case. It didn’t fit with Edith’s obsession with her early on, all the daydreaming and the fake memories.

  As I passed through Lincoln Park, I paused at the Emancipation Memorial and stared into Lincoln’s shadowy bronze face. “I understand what being shackled is all about,” Judy remarked the day I met her. And she’s right; she does. She’s bound to Jackie and to the mystery of her childhood. The Peabodys are also tethered to the dead girl, to her murder and her murderer. That’s what Bart hates. Not Jackie, but the memory of her, like a rope tangled around his feet, keeping him from moving on. Maybe that’s how my father feels, stuck between the death of my mother and me. I wonder if he regrets pressuring her to have me. Does it ever hurt him to be with me, to look at me?

  I wanted Lincoln to unfreeze and impart some wisdom. As I was about to tear my eyes away, I noticed something that I’d overlooked: The liberated slave is gripping the links to his own severed chain. Is he clutching them because he’s newly in control of his destiny? Or is he squeezing them out of rage? After all, the manacles are still around his wrists, and he’s still kneeling. “Have you really freed me?” his blank eyes seem to ask. “Or is this just another trick?”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  We were avid cineastes. At first, we bonded over films we’d seen separately. Then, we began grabbing matinees together at the Penn or trekking down to the National Theatre for a double feature. Philippa was initially leery of crime dramas, refusing to admit her attraction to them. With Miss Martins’s permission (by way of the Ray Kane novels) and Judy’s enthusiasm for that species of film, she shrugged off her snobbery and sank into them, their shadowy cinematography, their twisty plots, their viciousness, their fatalism. So often, they were films about outsiders, and those outsiders—the luckless detectives, the hapless petty crooks, the cheaters, the swindlers, and of course, the femmes fatales—almost always were punished, such were the restrictions of the Hays Code.

  But it didn’t matter. We would fall in love with these characters, especially the femmes fatales, even when they were at their most despicable—Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past or Kitty Collins in The Killers or Nancy Fuller in The Locket. That wasn’t by accident. The directors crafted them to be loved, luxuriated in, and cast away. But we’d rewrite the endings. We’d un–Hays Code the plots. In our versions, these women would escape, reinvent themselves, and find financial independence. They would crossover from their respective storylines, meeting up in a tropical location, sipping daiquiris and soaking their sore feet in a turquoise sea. We’d sentence the “good girls,” the chaste love interests, always glittering and intangible on screen, to a truly horrible fate: they would wind up married and lonely, darning stockings and changing diapers.

  I don’t think we understood these characters—or rather, we only understood their relationship to the world and the world’s disapproval of them. Still, we didn’t understand their relationship to one another. They guarded and wielded their secrets. It was their source of power. In the original movies, it’s often why they were punished or even killed. In our versions, it’s how they leveraged the means for their escape. But a kept secret isolates you. These women had no hope of finding each other, no means of connecting. They would always be alone.

  If only we’d understood that sooner.

  * * *

  PHILIPPA, NOVEMBER 22, 1948

  I can’t sleep. I haven’t been able to sleep since it all happened. Every moment flashes and spins like a kaleidoscope—or more like a collide-o-scope. I shift between panic and horror and grief and another more peculiar feeling—a sense of awe, I think. You see, it’s not the violence or the nightmare that followed that surprised me; it’s the strange beauty of keeping a secret about it. That’s why I haven’t slept. The secret burns too brightly. That’s why I have to write all of this down. Once I do, I’ll be able to dim the light and get some rest.

  So, where do I begin?

  Horsfield’s, I guess. Quincy called the house and asked me to meet him for breakfast. He sounded distant, even a tad fatherly. With still no word from Judy, I was happy to meet up. I needed someone to talk to. When I arrived at the counter, Iris was telling him that she’d observed a dissection in the medical program at Howard: “I wasn’t fazed by it. You wear a different hat, you know, and it’s okay.” She poured his coffee. “Like I do here—which is why I shouldn’t be discussing dead bodies.” She spotted me. “Looks like your date’s here.”

  Quincy spun around wearing a somber expression. I slid onto the stool and ordered two eggs over easy, toast, and an orange juice. He’d already placed his order. For a few minutes, we chatted about the surprise twist in the presidential election, the birth of Prince Charles, the Redskins–Detroit Lions game at Griffith last weekend, and Sorry, Wrong Number, which Quincy had seen the night before. “Maybe if you watch more movies about crime, Phil, you’ll feel less compelled to star in your own crime story.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  He cleared his throat. “So, the Peabodys spoke with my boss, Paulson, and told him about the negative influence you’re having on Judy, especially how you’re encouraging her to pry into Jackie’s and Cleve’s cases.”

  “What! I couldn’t influence Judy to eat eggs for breakfast.”

  He smiled and took a sip of coffee. “I know, but you can’t deny that you’re meddling. Both of you.”

  I lingered on our funhouse reflections in the chrome behind the counter. I missed Judy so much. She could thin
k on her feet; she’d know what to say.

  “Although he doesn’t know the extent of it,” he continued, “your father asked me to talk to you about your friendship with her. He thinks she’s no good.” I turned to him, and his dark eyes narrowed. “And, well, I agree.”

  I glared back, straight on and unblinking. “Everyone thinks that. The Peabodys. The Closses. Sophie. The kids at school. She’s an easy target. Her hair, her clothes, her way—but she’s not what you think. She’s not playing at being rebellious. She just knows who she is.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” he said, retreating, “but it doesn’t change that your interference has become an official police matter. You have to back off.”

  Iris arrived with OJ and silverware. I picked up the juice and drank it in big gulps. As I set it down, the thin napkin in my lap drifted to the floor. As I reached for it, my reflection in the chrome became sharp; all my twisted parts coalesced. It was a sign. I knew what I needed to do. I righted myself and said, “I know things that could be useful to the police—and to you.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  I told him about walking in on Halo Closs and Miss Martins, about our snooping at the marina, and about how we think Halo attempted to frame Bogdan with the yearbook. I touched on Moira’s threatening us after the funeral and explained that Moira’s connection to the Peabodys might have something to do with Judy’s adoption. But I didn’t mention Charlene Peters; I felt protective of Judy. Of course, I didn’t tell him about finding Miss Martins’s body. I didn’t want to talk about it, and besides, it would’ve spooked him. “We’re in danger, I know. I’m not stupid,” I said. “But even if we back off, we’ll still be in danger. Halo Closs is responsible for this. We know it.”

  When I said “we,” I meant Judy. I still wasn’t sure she was right. It didn’t add up, and that bothered me. Yes, he was there. Yes, he had a motive. But how did he do it so fast? And why would he unframe Bogdan?

  “Jesus, Phil,” Quincy said, shaking his head, causing his dark bangs to fall across his forehead boyishly. “Maybe you’re the one who should be the police officer.”

  “Maybe,” I said and smiled.

  Iris arrived with eggs and toast. “Here you go,” she said and winked at me, which made me think of Miss Martins. Iris possessed that same self-respect, poise, and intelligence. It was amazing that she, a Negro woman, was in medical school. She wouldn’t have to sling milkshakes and pie much longer. Emboldened by her fearlessness, I said to Quincy: “You understand why we can’t leave it alone.”

  “You’ll end up dead like your teacher and the Closs boy,” he said. “You have to take it seriously.”

  I tilted my head. “Are you saying they died the same way?”

  “Come on, Phil. I’m not telling you,” he said gloomily.

  “Most likely, Cleve was drowned,” I said. “He had traces of Bon Ami in his lungs, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could he have been drowned in a tub and later dumped in the river?”

  He perked up. “That’s a good theory.”

  So, both murders might have happened in bathtubs. AHKA connected them. Halo Closs connected them. What else? Who else?

  As Quincy drank his coffee and started in on his food, I visualized Miss Martins’s suite at the Daphne Arms: There were the two mugs, one clean and the other toppled and drained of cocoa or Ovaltine. There were the tangled contents of the jewel box. There was her stripped bed. There was the sheet draped over her body. There was Miss Martins, clothed, in the tub. Clothed. I played it backward and forward like a filmstrip, and as I did, I began to understand it: Miss Martins collapsed while she drank her cocoa. Drugged perhaps. Halo, or whoever it was, tore the sheet from her mattress so he could roll her body on it and slide it from the dayroom to the bathroom with ease. I’d learned this technique in first-aid training at school. We’d assumed the sheet was symbolic, but maybe it was practical. He then hoisted her into the tub, ran the water, and started to drown her, but she woke up. Perhaps she hadn’t consumed enough of the drug, or the water roused her, so in a panic, he took his tie off and strangled her to finish the job—except of course, he wasn’t wearing that tie.

  As I picked at my eggs, I remembered that Halo had kept the medicine bottle he purchased at the pharmacy before dumping his groceries and heading to Miss Martins’s apartment. I looked at Quincy and asked, “Were both Cleve and Miss Martins poisoned before they were killed?”

  He stopped midchew.

  “Was it with Veronal?”

  His eyes, blaring like megaphones, confirmed it.

  “I knew it!”

  “Settle down,” he said, wiping his mouth. “Cleve consumed a large dose of it, enough to put him out for a long time, but it wasn’t what killed him. The coroner thinks he drowned, but like I told you, it’s difficult to determine. He hasn’t confirmed Veronal for Christine Martins, but it’s the same MO.”

  “She was strangled, right?” I blurted, then bit my lip. What was I thinking?! I didn’t want him to know that I’d been at the crime scene.

  “Why would you think that?”

  I had to think fast, think like Judy: “Jackie was strangled, wasn’t she? I just thought…”

  “Your Miss Martins wasn’t strangled. That’s for sure. She probably drowned like Cleve.” He frowned and stabbed his fork at an egg, yolk oozing out. “You got it out of me. Satisfied?”

  My mind was galloping. So, Halo, or whoever, hadn’t finished her off with the shamrock tie. Then, why was it there, around her neck?

  “I’m going to tell your father everything. I have to.” Quincy said, checking my face, bracing for my reaction.

  “I know,” I said, and thought to myself: That’s why I have to act now.

  * * *

  I gave the Peabodys’ knocker three hard swings. Footsteps approached, and the door opened. Edith was herself again—hair set and sculpted, dress pristine, earrings dangling, and makeup like the glaze on a cake. Before I could ask for Judy, before I could lie that I’d come bearing homework, before I could try any angle at all, she said, “Go away.”

  “Please,” I said, placing my foot across the threshold so she couldn’t slam the door. “Let me talk to Judy. Just for a minute.”

  “We told the police about you,” she said. “You’re pressuring her into dangerous situations. You’re a bad influence.”

  I smirked. I couldn’t help it.

  Edith lifted her chin. “She may be strange and sullen, but she’s never been a troublemaker.”

  That was a one-eighty! I wanted to say: “What about Roy Barnes? Or the trick we’d played on Ramona and Mrs. Whitlow? Or our clash with Cleve?” Judy lived for trouble, and days ago, Edith would’ve agreed with me. I couldn’t figure her out. Either she was lying and trying to scapegoat me, or it was too terrifying for her to believe that Judy would never be a suitable replacement for Jackie. Then, I had another thought, which was perhaps the most frightening of all: that Judy and Edith had made amends, that Judy had capitulated. After all, she went to the beauty parlor with her.

  “You don’t know her at all,” I said, barely concealing my fury.

  “I’ll let Detective Paulson and your father know what you’re up to,” she said, advancing, closing in on me. I lost my footing and braced myself against the doorframe. Edith’s face was near mine; her breath was cigarette-tinged, and white hairs on her upper lip were alert like little antennae. I swayed, still not having regained my balance. In a low growl, she said, “Do you know the pain you’ve caused?”

  She gave me a little shove and slammed the door. The knocker bounced.

  * * *

  JUDY, NOVEMBER 22, 1948

  I was in my room, listening to Charlie Parker’s “Chasin’ the Bird,” hoping the alto sax’s muffled squeak would thread together my shifting thoughts, when I heard the front door knocker slamming.

  I went to my window: it was Philippa, but I didn’t move.

  This week, I had spent an afternoon
with Edith shopping, getting a trim, and eating ice cream. I’m not sure why I didn’t kick and scream my way out of it. I was—I am—flattened by Bart’s news about my origin story: child of a rape victim! It zapped my will, made me pliable. So, I played along, letting her drag me through Woody’s and to the beauty parlor and lunch at the Occidental. I’ll give it up to B and E; I punched hard by smashing Jackie’s photo, but they punched back twice as hard. I should be furious, but I don’t have the energy to be. I’m down for the count, I guess, and on the verge of being… what? Compliant? Ha! The odd thing, though, is that I didn’t completely hate letting go. For an afternoon, I was a pleaser, their Jackie—or some idea of who their Jackie might’ve been. Occasionally, Edith would smile at me, and there was an authentic glimmer of affection in her eyes.

  As I listened to her bitch at Philippa, I knew that she was doing it for me. Testing me. Had I actually changed? Was I Jackie now?—which of course, would mean rejecting Philippa. In a flash, I saw the allure of melting into Jackie’s mold. It’s insane, but right then, it seemed as if it might be like falling asleep. As I began to resist its draw, I felt a strange overwhelming sadness for Edith, that she’d do that to another human to feed her sorrow. But as I stood and shook it off, I couldn’t be angry at her. It was too pathetic.

  I wouldn’t choose her. I would never choose her. I would choose Philippa every time. Besides, we had work to do. Both Cleve’s and Miss M’s killer was out there and, Philippa’s doubts aside, Halo was our chief suspect. I couldn’t let Edith cloud my focus.

  PHILIPPA, NOVEMBER 22, 1948

  I channeled PI Calvin McKey and decided to pursue the truth on my own. Really, I didn’t have a choice. When Quincy alerted Dad, he’d ground me. I needed to ask the Closses questions and gauge their responses. Before going over, I swung by the house and, as a precaution, slipped one of Bonnie’s steak knives into one of my coat’s cavernous side pockets.