In the Belly of Jonah

by Brannan, Sandra

  “I do.”

  “The last thing Agent Henry did was look up a website.”

  He moved to the windowsill, noticing the crystal he had seen earlier. Lifting it, he noticed the dust that had gathered underneath. Lifting the surrounding knickknacks, he took note that the dust had gathered around and on but not under each item. The crystal must have recently been placed on the windowsill. He studied it again, realizing it was the rock that was missing from Liv’s dresser.

  “What website?”

  Asante harrumphed. “What, no foreplay, Streeter?”

  “I don’t have time for this, Asante.”

  “You never do,” Asante shot back. “She did a search on Salvador Dalí. Hunted and pecked around until she landed on a museum dedicated to him. The Salvador Dalí Museum. In St. Petersburg, Florida.”

  Streeter hung up without even saying good-bye.

  He didn’t have time. He was conducting an illegal search and hoped not to be discovered at it. Plus he needed to find Bravo as quickly as he could.

  Streeter fumbled with the books on the shelves, pulling three out with Dalí’s name on the spine of each. Thumbing through the pages, he found a color print of a painting that mimicked Jill Brannigan’s murder scene. He leafed through more pages and saw the bizarre renditions of clocks and men and warped faces. He found the naked woman awakening from sleep, posed just as Lisa had been lying.

  The surreal image featured pomegranates.

  “HI, ANN MARIE. HI, Pam,” I greeted the women at the front desk, tucking behind my ear the loose strand of hair that had fallen from my ponytail. After taking the library steps at a dead run, I was winded briefly and welcomed the time to catch my breath while catching up with my acquaintances. “How’s that grandbaby, Ann Marie?”

  Ann Marie reached under the counter and within seconds, she flashed a photo of a pink, wrinkled mass of newborn baby flesh. “Trevor William Trotter. Eight pounds, ten ounces,” she said, her grin stretching from ear to ear.

  “Whoa, that’s a big boy!” I said studying the picture she’d handed to me. “And he has your smile.”

  “I think that’s gas,” Ann Marie said with a wink.

  “Yours or his?”

  Both Ann Marie and Pam laughed, then hushed me for disturbing the other library patrons.

  Pam whispered, “Liv, you are so bad.”

  “Behave yourself,” Ann Marie scolded, swatting the air with her hand before covering her lips to hold back another snicker.

  “Trevor’s a handsome baby,” I said, returning the photograph.

  “Did you make that phone call?”I sighed, “No, Ann Marie. And for the hundredth time, I’m not going to.”

  Ann Marie hefted her ample breasts onto the counter and leaned closer to me. She whispered, “Hundredth? That’s why you don’t get any dates, dear. You exaggerate.”

  “Okay, okay. For the last time, I’m not going to call your nephew. It’s too—”

  “Too what?” Ann Marie glared at me over her glasses.

  “It’s too awkward.”

  Pam giggled. “That’s the best you could do?”

  “Well,” I responded, “it’s . . . it’s just too weird. I don’t even know the guy.”

  Such a command of the English language I have.

  “Because you haven’t called him yet. If you did you’d get to know him. Then it wouldn’t be awkward or weird,” Ann Marie theorized.

  How in the hell do I argue with that logic?

  “Besides, how will you ever get to have grandbabies of your own if you don’t start getting busy?” Ann Marie concluded.

  “I’ll work on it,” I conceded.

  Pam got me off the hook by changing subjects. “What are you studying today?”

  “Art,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s a new one. What kind?” Ann Marie asked.

  “Weird, creepy art,” I answered.

  Pam and Ann Marie started laughing again; this time the laughter was met with glares from all the students seated nearby. The librarians hushed me again and pointed accusing fingers my way.

  “Stop it, Liv.”

  “What? You’re the ones who are laughing.”

  “And you’re the one making us,” Pam chided me. Her reproving eyes darted around in case anyone was watching us. She wrapped her graying brown hair in a large knot at the nape of her neck and pushed her wire rim glasses up her thin nose.

  “What kind of ‘weird, creepy art’ are you interested in, dear?”

  “I was looking for art with fruit,” I said, oddly uncomfortable about sharing the pomegranate word with them.

  “Do you have a particularly disturbing fruit in mind?”

  “Like an artist using bizarre combinations of people and fruit and images that conjure up bad dreams,”I explained, proud of myself for finally verbalizing what I’d been ruminating about ever since the pomegranate had been found.

  “Oh, of course, dear,” Ann Marie said. “That would be Salvador Dalí.”

  Pam shook her head. “No, René Magritte.”

  “Dalí had distortions and bent clocks and never-ending staircases and people and animals and fruit and peculiar images.”

  Pam protested, “But Magritte used people and fruit too. Remember the man in the suit and derby with a piece of fruit for his face?”

  “That was Dalí.”

  “That was Magritte. He painted the bizarre, the surreal.”

  “No one was more bizarre than Dalí,” Ann Marie argued.

  The two women reminded me of the three fairies in the Disney cartoon movie Sleeping Beauty, the two that were constantly changing Princess Aurora’s dress from pink to blue and back again.

  I decided to settle the argument. “Okay, okay. You’ve both been a huge help. Point me to the section and I’ll take a look. Then I’ll let you know which artist I think is more disturbing.”

  Pam cleared her throat. “That would be third floor. You’ll be using the stairs, right?”

  I nodded.

  “At the top of the stairs, turn right, go all the way down the hall, and look on the shelves to your right. Third row from the back.”

  “Thanks, ladies,” I said, heading for the stairwell by the bank of elevators.

  Just as I started up the stairs, I heard the plump fairy call out once more, “Dalí.”

  Once I reached the stacks on the third floor it took me less than five minutes to find expertly bound books displaying the work of both artists. Both men were twentieth-century artists who epitomized surrealism. I flipped quickly through the bios: Magritte, Belgian born, had lived in France for most of his adult life and died at nearly seventy years old in 1967. Dalí was a Spaniard who mastered his craft in Madrid. He had spent the WWII years in the United States, where he remained until his death in 1989 at the age of eighty-five.

  Pam was right about Magritte and his obsession with people and fruit. With people and birds. With people and anything that would cover up the face. He even had a work of art where it looked like there were two heads in the painting, both wrapped in white cloth. Troubling. I thought of what Lisa had told me about Jill and how her head was covered by a dish towel.

  Maybe de Milo was mimicking all forms of art. The first murders in Platteville were mimicking the Venus de Milo. The second murder victim, Jill, was in René Magritte’s honor. The third, Lisa, who knows?

  But it was Dalí who really freaked me out. The funny mustache, kissing his pet bat, throwing kids off balconies, teaching class in a wet suit. The guy was a regular P. T. Barnum of the art world. Born to shock. The greatest showman on Earth. Even Michael Jackson could have learned a trick or two from Dalí. Wacky. He was everything sinister, and based on the first picture I turned to, his artwork followed.

  I was staring at Dalí’s “Soft Self-Portrait”—the dark, warped mask of Dalí’s face propped up with little crutches—when my cell phone vibrated, startling the shit out of me.

  I whispered, “Hello?”

  “Dalí,” E
lizabeth’s excited voice boomed. “Salvador Dalí. I called Agatha and she told me.”

  Agatha is the oldest of us nine, or as Agatha herself likes to say, the oldest and meanest. She’s also a talented artist. I wished I had thought to call her sooner.

  “I’m looking right at it, Boots. A naked woman lying supine, with her arms under her head like she’s sleeping. And there’s a pomegranate next to her. A second pomegranate, a big one, is floating in the air like a freakish planet and a fish and tigers are coming out of it. There’s a bayonet and an elephant on stilts. It’s like it’s a freaking nightmare that doesn’t make sense.”

  I was rustling through the pages, desperate to find the image. “I can’t find it. Does it have a name?”

  I flipped to the index in the back and waited for Elizabeth’s answer.

  “Dalí called it ‘One Second Before Awakening from a Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate.’”

  “You’ve got to be joking,” I said, scanning the entries under the letter O until I found it. “No, I guess you’re not.”

  “See? See? Is that what you were talking about?” Elizabeth pressed.

  I flipped through the oversized pages and found the image. My heart pounded. It was exactly what I was talking about. “Yeah, Elizabeth. This was what I was trying to remember.”

  I studied the image and thought about Lisa. My eyes started to pool with tears. I wiped them away quickly before they soiled the pages.

  “Dalí was twisted,” Elizabeth stated.

  “I see that,” I said, slowly turning the pages one at a time.

  I recognized all the different paintings depicting warped clocks draped over stairs and edges. Probably what Dalí was most famous for, I thought.

  “Well, thanks, Elizabeth,” I said. “This is a huge help. Thank Michael for me too. And Agatha.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “I’m going to see if I can check this book out of the archives and take it to Agent Phil Kelleher. He’ll get it to Agent Pierce for me. Maybe it will shed some light on this guy’s twisted mind.”

  I flipped to a new series of pictures with William Tell as the main character. I speculated that Dalí wasn’t a fan of his own father, considering the painful contortions he painted of William Tell, depicting him as a monster in hideous poses, distortions, and angles.

  “Liv?”

  Elizabeth hadn’t called me that in years. “Yeah?”

  “Be careful.”

  “Thanks,” I said, closing my cell phone and slipping it into my pocket.

  Disturbed by the sick images of William Tell, I turned more pages, delving deeper into the sick psyche of Salvador Dalí. Not a master, a monster, I thought.

  Then I saw it.

  My heart slammed against my chest. The book was splayed open on the table, exposing Dalí’s “The Weaning of Furniture—Nutrition.” My head was spinning and I was sure I was going to throw up. There, in the picture in front of me, was a woman sitting up, her head slumped forward to her chest and covered with a white cloth. A rectangle had been cut from her center. Two wooden cabinets sat near the water’s edge. It was Jill. Or what de Milo was using Jill for as a model in one of Dalí’s sick paintings.

  This was the answer.

  The Venus de Milo murderer wasn’t just mimicking works of art. He was mimicking Salvador Dalí.

  I fumbled for my cell phone. I had to call home, talk to Agent Kelleher immediately. He’d be home by now.

  I felt a hand snake around my head and snatch the cell phone from my ear. For the second time in as many minutes, my heart slammed against my chest.

  PANTING, STREETER ARRIVED AT the CSU library steps.

  The agent in charge had told Zack Rhodes he’d be right back after he tried to catch Dr. Bravo in his office. Zack told Streeter the professor wouldn’t be there. He said that Dr. Bravo never worked when he didn’t have to and only during those times he could ogle the coeds in the halls and on the green below his window. Sunday wasn’t one of the best traffic days around the Fine Arts Building.

  Zack had been right, yet Streeter was glad to have had the office to himself in which to snoop around, despite the breaking and entering laws he had violated.

  Back at the dorm, Streeter had found a note Zack had left on his door for him. There was a change of plans; he had to meet a student about a quick question on a homework assignment in one of the private study rooms at the library.

  Having caught his breath, Streeter entered the library and asked the plump lady at the front desk where the private study rooms were. She explained where to find them on the second floor.

  There were six rooms in the area where Zack had told Streeter to meet him. He knocked on the first door and a rumpled young man opened the door. Streeter could see the room was not much bigger than six by six and contained a small wooden counter and a desk chair. Not too comfortable, but soundproof. Papers and books were splayed across the counter and on the floor.

  “Yeah?” the young man said.

  Streeter waved. “Sorry, just looking for someone.”

  The man shut the door without reply.

  The next two doors were locked and no one answered to Streeter’s knock. The fourth door was closed and a light shown from beneath it. Streeter gave a loud rap with his knuckles.

  A male student, half naked, peeked through the crack. A young lady’s voice sounded, “Who is it, Trey?”

  “Don’t know,” he answered her. He turned to Streeter and asked, “What?”

  “Nothing,” Streeter said. “I’m looking for someone.”

  “Well, she’s already taken, dude, so take a hike.”The student hurriedly closed the door. Kids, Streeter thought.

  The fifth door was open just a crack. Streeter knocked on the door but got no answer. The light was on. Streeter pushed open the door with his elbow, careful not to touch the handle with his fingertips.

  He wasn’t surprised by what he saw. Maybe he would even admit to having had a premonition if it wasn’t so damned embarrassing. He preferred to call it an incredibly strong instinct.

  Zack Rhodes sat in the chair, head and arms sprawled across the small counter in the tiny space. Streeter tapped his shoulder. Zack didn’t move. Slipping a finger beneath Zack’s chin, Streeter felt for a pulse. Nothing. A band was stretched and tied over Zack’s left bicep, a needle still protruding from the vein in his arm.

  “Overdose, my foot,” Streeter said aloud. “De Milo, you’re slipping.”

  Streeter punched 9-1-1 on his cell phone, waiting for the ring, when he saw the note beneath Zack’s head. The note was addressed to Streeter. He pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket and slid the note from beneath Zack’s head.

  He walked over by the window to get a signal and told the emergency response personnel to get an ambulance to the college library. Then he called Phil Kelleher.

  “She home yet?” Streeter asked Kelleher.

  “Liv? No, why?”

  Streeter glanced around to make sure no one was within earshot. “No call?”

  “Not yet,”Kelleher said. “But the note said she was going to the library and would be back in a couple of hours.”

  Streeter’s heart pounded. He spun around looking down the rows of books, wondering if he would recognize her from the small photo Lisa had shown him at Liv’s home. “The CSU library?”

  “Could be the city library,” Kelleher said. “Why?”

  Streeter glanced down and read the note. With shaky penmanship, Zack had explained that he’d killed Jill Brannigan because he loved her and she didn’t love him back. Then he’d killed Agent Henry because she was too close to figuring it out. He was ending his life now because he just couldn’t live with himself anymore.

  “Horse puckey,” Streeter said.

  Kelleher paused. “Streeter?”

  “Oh, sorry, Kelleher. I have another de Milo vic here at the CSU library. The victim left a suicide note. It’s coerced.”

  “Who’
s the victim?” Kelleher asked.

  “Zack Rhodes,” Streeter said, plowing his thick fingers through his white crew cut.

  “Who found him?”

  “I did. I was just over in Zack’s room meeting with him and had to run a quick errand. Zack left me a note that he was helping a student in the library. That note wasn’t coerced. De Milo must have set Zack up, then when he got to this private study room the perp forced him to write the suicide/confession note.”

  “Confession to what?”

  “The de Milo murders,” Streeter said. “But he was forced by the real de Milo to write it.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t something else? A wannabe? A copy cat?”

  “Because Zack’s note mentions using heroin to kill Jill and Lisa. We haven’t told anyone about that yet.”

  “Why couldn’t he be de Milo?”

  “Because Zack left a clue, knowing I’d be the only one to understand it. He said—” Streeter paused, looking at the note. “‘I killed those girls just as surely as I was in the library Monday night.’”

  “What kind of clue is that?” Kelleher scoffed.

  “A good one. One that Jonah Bravo wouldn’t catch,”Streeter explained. “Zack and I had just talked about it. He swore he wasn’t in the library Monday night. I told him I believed him. That’s when he opened up, told me Dr. Jay’s real name was Jonah. Told me he got the drugs he sold around campus from none other than the infamous Dr. Jay.”

  “Heroin?”

  “You got it. As well as several others.”

  “Need help?” Kelleher asked in his naturally tight tone.

  “Yeah, I do. That’s why I was wondering where Liv Bergen was, just in case. Have Brandt check out the city library. If you’ll meet me down here, you can check out the CSU library for me while I’m with the paramedics,”Streeter explained, watching the bubbled lights of the ambulance from his perch at the second floor bay window.

  “I thought you said Zack was dead?”

  “He is,” Streeter said with a sigh. “Probably a hefty dose of heroin, just like the others. Needle’s still in his arm, poor kid.”