Dreams in the Key of Blue

by John Philpin

  “She kept shooting until the gun was empty.”

  Squires told Nash that she remembered Lily Dorman screaming, the metallic stink of blood, the illusion of faces in red rainbows, and the roar of blue rage.

  “Maniac talk,” Nash said. “She told me that she used Beckerman’s phone to page her driver, Edgar, then waited on the street. I didn’t know she had a fucking driver.”

  Squires was with the other students when the Volvo nearly drove them off the road. She had not peered through my windows; she was in my house. Nothing made sense.

  Nash spun from the rail. “She said that she killed another man… Stanley.”

  “Markham?”

  “I don’t know. I listened to her, but I was scared shitless. I told her that she couldn’t have killed Mr. Dorman. Today’s paper had that article about what the killer did to him.”

  “I didn’t see it,” I said.

  “One of those ‘unnamed sources’ called the murder a ritual killing. I know what that means. He was mutilated. Parts of him weren’t even there. God. I gave Amanda the newspaper, like I was going to prove to her that she couldn’t have done something like that. She kept saying, ‘Oh no,’ and holding her head. She said she didn’t remember any cutting, that she certainly hadn’t done anything like that. Then I thought she was saying ‘Lily’ again. She wasn’t. She was saying ‘Lilith.’ She staggered around the room muttering about Lilith. That’s when she pulled the gun. I dove across the bed and grabbed my Magnum. I don’t know how many times she shot at me. I fired once, and she ran out.”

  NORMA JACOBS PARKED HER UNMARKED CRUISER IN the E.R. lot. I made the introduction and gave Jacobs a brief description of what Nash had told me.

  “I’ll need a formal statement from you about what happened tonight, Ms. Nash. We can do that at my office. Then I want to have a look at your apartment. Have a seat in the car. I’ll be right with you.”

  Nash touched my arm. “Thanks for everything, Dr. Frank.”

  I nodded and watched her walk to the cruiser.

  Jacobs turned her attention to me. “I interviewed Amanda Squires a couple of days ago. She has a place on Danforth Street.”

  The address was the same building where Katrina, Harper, and Lily had lived for the first two years of Lily’s life.

  “Hers is the only apartment that’s occupied in that building, which is strange with all the students around here. The art school and the museum are right up the hill. Same outfit manages her place. Paul Crandall for MI. Still haven’t caught up with Crandall.”

  “What did Squires tell you?”

  “Said she was in Nash’s apartment the day that Dorman got it,” Jacobs said, pulling at her jeans.

  “Average height, slender, black hair, usually jeans and a flannel shirt.”

  “That’s her. She couldn’t remember times. Said she got there early and left early. She said she knew who Dorman was, but never spoke to him, and didn’t see him that night. Now she’s telling Nash she did it?”

  “Nash will tell you the whole story, but that’s the essence of it.”

  “Squires is a strange duck. I asked her if it worried her to think that she might’ve been in the building at the same time as the killer. She said no.”

  Jacobs agreed to call Jaworski at the Holiday Inn for me. “Tell him it counts as me checking in.”

  “He’s got you on a short leash, does he?”

  “Jasper is certain that I’m guilty of being insufferable, and possibly guilty of obstruction.”

  Jacobs laughed.

  “Tell Herb I’ll be another hour.”

  She nodded. “My case is Dorman,” Jacobs said. “How does Squires connect to him?”

  “What Gretchen Nash observed suggests that Squires is Lily Dorman.”

  “I read that psychologist’s report before I sent it to you. She’s probably wished Dorman dead since she was a kid. Can’t say I blame her, but why is she taking out half the population?”

  “Squires was in my seminar at the college. She talked about a killer hybrid, a woman who doesn’t fit any of the stereotypes. That idea seemed important to her. The psychiatrist who treated Dorman at Maine Central is convinced that she suffers from multiple personality disorder.”

  Jacobs shoved her hands deep into her jacket pockets. “I read about a case like that. Can’t say I buy into that shit.”

  “There’s a personal connection here, too,” I added. “I knew Katrina Martin years ago.”

  “Was she sick then?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. She did a lot of drugs, so she always seemed strange.”

  Jacobs stood beside her cruiser. “Most men won’t believe that a woman did all this killing,” she said.

  “Some women, too,” I added, thinking about Karen Jasper.

  Jacobs shook her head. “Anyone is capable of anything.”

  I PARKED IN AN ALLEY ADJACENT TO THE DANFORTH STREET apartment building. I estimated that I had a twenty-minute lead on the police, who would arrive prepared to arrest Amanda Squires.

  I did not expect her to be at home.

  The street door popped open without a problem. I listened at Squires’s door, heard nothing, and went to work. The lock gave, and I stepped into a twenty-by-forty-foot room. There was an upright piano against the wall to my left, an archway to my right, a curtained archway directly across the room. An easel and canvas stood in the northwest corner of the room. A rolltop desk squatted immediately to my left, against the front wall.

  “Someone just like me,” I muttered, gazing at the desk’s cluttered surface—a stack of unopened mail, grocery store coupons, an aspirin bottle, a dozen paperbacks, and a small basket filled with checks.

  The checks, issued twice a month, were drawn on Maine Marine Bank and Trust, payable to Amanda Squires for five thousand dollars, and signed by Paul Crandall.

  “She never cashed them,” I said.

  I opened a file folder that contained heavily marked highway and topographical maps of the area immediately west of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Somewhere in that maze of dirt roads and rutted logging trails, Stanley Markham had plunged a knife into Darcy Smith’s chest. It was the same area where Lily Dorman had caught up with Markham and put a bullet in his head.

  Everything comes full circle.

  I pictured Gretchen Nash’s caricature of Crandall, the short, rotund man she said was all tics and fidgets. Perhaps a middle-of-the-night visit to Stu Gilman was in order.

  The only opened piece of mail was a letter to Amanda Squires bearing the ink-stamped return address of a California prison. I unfolded the single sheet of lined paper and read the childlike scrawl.

  Dear Amanda,

  Thanks for the stamps and the money put in my jail account. Yes I saw on TV about Stan M’s escape. He stole my idea to get carried out with the dirty sheets. Just joking. We do all our wash here. I’m not sure how to answer your question. You’re a good friend (the best!) so I won’t lie to you. Please don’t be mad. When I first got here I found out about post-conviction relief where you make a case for a shorter sentence. A few girls won theirs. That’s why I said the things I did about my father. He was very strict and a real bastard but no sex stuff. I didn’t want to be here for my whole life. Sometimes I hated my father like every girl does. But not to do what I did. I went animal and I’m paying for it. I never got the p.c. relief anyway. I pray you’ll still talk to me. Please keep writing.

  Your loving friend,

  Sydny

  Squires had fixated on the Clanton case, researched the story, recited details in class. She also had a personal relationship with the fifty-one-year-old multiple killer who admitted fabricating her victimization story to win the sympathy of the court, and an earlier parole-eligibility date.

  “To quote a friend of mine, ‘Sydny Clanton was dreaming the blue dream that never ends.’”

  Was her friend inside her head?

  As I pocketed the letter and several uncashed checks, a yellowed newspaper clip
ping pushpinned to a bulletin board caught my attention. The article from an Idaho newspaper was an early account of the murders of “a married couple in their ranch home near Moscow.” The date was May 1, 1967.

  On the day that Sydny Clanton savaged her parents, Lily Dorman was born.

  I moved away from the desk. The apartment had the distinctive aroma of a pine forest, but I could not determine where the scent originated.

  I walked through the archway to my right and examined a painting on Squires’s easel. Oil pastels swept in broad strokes across the coarse paper. She had smudged and smeared the colors into a shimmering blue sphere streaked with red. It was so vivid that I imagined it pulsating, like a dream screen, the throbbing orb that conceals horrific reveries of night.

  The sphere is a pulsating, living wall, a defense against horror.

  “It’s a talisman,” I muttered.

  It has magical properties—the power to ward off evil, the skill to elude whatever bubbles beneath consciousness.

  I wondered about Lily Dorman’s dreams. She would not want to know what shapes slithered and screamed beyond the grasp of consciousness. Keeping her beast locked in a closet carried a serious liability: she would receive no warning about what surged into the light of her days.

  What most frightens you is what goes on inside your head.

  I stared at her creation, studied its daubed blues, blended hues of sky and sea and cold blue eyes.

  The odor of pine was strong again—through the curtained archway, I thought.

  “She had an aura of fresh-cut pine. The screen turned blue. It made me sad, and I don’t like to feel sad. So I got mad.”

  Sydny Clanton spoke those words. Clanton was not an “exception.” Neither was Aileen Wuornos. Lily Dorman was a living reminder that the rules, based on our cultural myths of female innocence, do not always apply.

  I stepped through the curtain and walked into a dimly lit room that contained ten aquarium tanks. Most wore pink heat lamps fitted to their tops; the remainder were covered with hardware cloth. All of them contained snakes.

  Approach-avoidance, I thought. She was compelled to tease herself with what she most feared. The paired association seemed obvious. As a child, Lily Dorman stood in the swamp and conversed with her snakes, predators that she studied and understood. From where she stood on the dike, she heard her father’s pickup drive into the yard, then heard his gun explode.

  Harper Dorman killed the dog, then raped his daughter.

  I pressed my fingers against the glass that prevented a copperhead from injecting me with its lethal venom.

  You surround yourself with your horror, but keep it behind a curtain, a screen that offers you the illusion of control. You do not fear what you have held in your hand. You are at liberty to tease yourself with free-floating thoughts, sounds, tactile sensations, because you became what you feared.

  The display was a herpetologist’s dream and anyone else’s nightmare. I felt certain that my rattling visitor had been in residence here until Lily Dorman deposited it in my study.

  Squires sat in my house. Someone else drove the Volvo.

  I wanted to spend more time in the apartment, to prowl through bookcases and drawers and file cabinets, to develop a feel for this person. Three quick blasts from the door’s buzzer changed my mind.

  Jacobs’s people would not announce themselves, I thought, as I stepped into the hall and walked to the top of the stairwell overlooking the vestibule. A tall man with thinning hair, dressed casually in khakis and a blue jacket, pulled open the door and strode toward the stairs.

  I retreated to the shadows at the rear of the building and watched as he approached Squires’s door, keys in hand. “She isn’t home,” I said.

  He turned and gazed disapprovingly in my direction. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  Before I could answer, he slipped his key into the lock and said, “I’m calling the police.”

  I walked slowly toward the man. “No need,” I said. “They’re on the way.”

  He glared at me. “What’s going on here?”

  My mystery guest was taller than I, slender, in his forties. His gold Rolex told me that he was not a homeless person seeking shelter for the night.

  “Where is Lily Dorman?” I asked.

  “You’re trespassing,” he said.

  I continued to move toward him. “The police are looking for her.”

  For a man his size, he was quick. He yanked his keys from the lock, clocked me with his forearm, and bolted to the stairs. I hauled myself off the floor and ran after him. As I reached the sidewalk, he climbed into a car and pulled away from the curb.

  I figured that his identity would not be difficult to determine. The personalized license plate on his black Mercedes read “NORT.”

  “You’ve got one coming,” I muttered, rubbing the side of my head and walking to my Jeep.

  I drove down Danforth Street and passed three city police cruisers on their way to Squires’s building.

  STUART GILMAN LIVED IN A CUL-DE-SAC A HUNDRED yards from the Atlantic Ocean. I pulled into his driveway, powered down my window, and listened to the sea.

  The few houses nestled among pines and low scrub growth were dark and silent. Lights glared from every window of Gilman’s modern Cape Cod. I glanced at the dashboard clock: three-thirty A.M., long past my bedtime and long past Gilman’s.

  I walked to the small terrace in front of the house and peered through a window. Gilman sprawled over a hassock, with a yellow rubber duck in one hand and a nearly empty wine bottle in the other. USA Today lay open on the floor in front of him. His suit jacket was crumpled in a heap behind him.

  The door was not locked, so I stepped inside and walked to the living room, which boasted a brick fireplace, puffed white and tan decor, polished hardwood floors with a plush, off-white carpet, copies of Money, Business Week, and The Wall Street Journal. The house and its transient library were about dollars.

  Gilman looked up, his watery eyes streaked with red, his face baggy and sodden, his mouth in twitch mode. “You’ve got more hair on the bottom of your head than I have on the top,” he said, his speech slurred. “What are you doing here?”

  “I want to rent an apartment.”

  He nodded his head, as if apartment hunting in his living room in the middle of the night made perfectly good sense. “My wife took the kids. She pulled one of ‘em right out of the tub.”

  Gilman held up the yellow bath toy. “She took them to a hotel.”

  “She must be angry.”

  He mumbled something that I could not understand, then thumped his bottle on the USA Today weather map. “I’ve been clipping these out of the papers. I intend to prove that these weather maps are more accurate than what those nitwits in Augusta and Boston predict. We have volatile weather here.”

  “Stu, how long have you been acting the part of Paul Crandall?” I asked.

  At first, Gilman did not react. He continued to stare at his newspaper. Then his tics and twitches disappeared, and the color drained from his face. He dropped the rubber duck, released his grip on the wine bottle, and pushed himself from the hassock to a kneeling position. “What the fuck do you want?”

  Gilman’s voice had the same edge that I had heard when he caught me in the college’s roomful of computers. I was determined not to be blindsided a second time in one night. I was also tired, hungry, and pissed off.

  “For starters, an answer to my question,” I said as I grabbed a magazine and rolled it into a tight tube.

  “Get a cop and get a warrant,” he said.

  I gripped my copy of Business Week with my right hand and slapped it against my left. “You ready to post bail?”

  “What the hell are you talking about? I haven’t done anything.”

  “Creating a false identity, Paul Crandall, and conducting business under that name, is illegal. That’s just for openers.”

  Gilman made the move I anticipated. He grasped the hassock, pulled himself
to a halfstanding position, and lurched toward me with the grace, coordination, and dexterity of Frankenstein’s monster.

  I stabbed forward with the rolled magazine and caught him on the bridge of his nose. He fell sideways onto the couch, covering his face with his hands. Blood seeped between his fingers.

  “You broke my fuckin’ nose,” he howled as his blood stained the white sofa. “Shit. Clea’s gonna kill me.”

  Still holding one hand over his nose, he pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at the maroon marks on the fabric.

  “No more stunts, Stu. You’re too drunk to damage anyone but yourself.”

  I walked to the fireplace and glanced at the family photos arrayed on the mantel. “Nice kids,” I said.

  “You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

  “Educate me.”

  Gilman sat upright, the handkerchief pressed to his face. I stared at his drunken eyes, now clouded by something more than an alcohol daze. Fear.

  “Call the cops,” he said.

  “Who are you afraid of?”

  He shook his head and stared at the floor.

  “Okay, Stu. I’ll talk. Harper Dorman was the superintendent of a Martin International building managed by Paul Crandall, a.k.a. Stuart Gilman. Thirty-six hours after somebody left Dorman in pieces, the same somebody killed three Harbor College students. MI owns the building where they were murdered, and you are MI’s main squeeze on campus. One of the students, Jaycie Waylon, was an MI intern.”

  Gilman winced when I mentioned Waylon.

  “You never bothered to tell me that. Then there’s Steve Weld, college faculty member and federal agent investigating MI.”

  Gilman’s head snapped up. “I didn’t know that. Oh shit. I swear to Christ I didn’t know he was a cop.”

  “Should I take that as an admission of guilt?”

  “Take it that I didn’t like the prick. I didn’t kill anyone. Jesus.”

  “That’s right. Your thing is prowling through backyards and peering in windows.”

  “Trespassing,” he yelled. “I was taking a shortcut. It was a misunderstanding. How the fuck do you know about that?”