by J. A. Kerley
“Why didn’t he let you see the art?”
“I’m not sure it was his idea to be so secretive. I’m sure it was Calypso’s idea. We saw pieces. Had special viewings. We’d study it, praise him, the beautiful work. There was always a viewing and reading before an…affirmation.”
“Affirmation was when someone would die?”
“When someone was selected.”
Harry said, “How did this happen, how was it determined?”
“It was simply announced. The planning started, then, several weeks later, the event. Calypso was in charge.”
“Was the group in on the event?”
“Everyone had roles. I was never chosen for a major role. I was a lookout, just one time, in a phone booth, supposed to call if anyone came along. I could have called…someone. Told what was about to happen.” Her hand started shaking and she dropped a pin. Harry retrieved it from the grass.
“Easy, Carla,” he said. “It’s all in the past, dead and gone. There’s nothing in front of you but real and honest life. You’re safe.”
She turned to Harry. A ragged sob tore from her throat and she stumbled toward him, fell into his arms. She cried almost without sound. They stood like that for a full minute, until she slowly pushed away, palming tears from her cheeks.
“I’m sorry, Detective Nautilus. I’m…all right now. I guess I need to hear that more often, that the past is dead.”
Harry produced one of his cards, took her hand, pressed his card into her palm. “Take it, Carla. Keep it somewhere close. You ever need to talk, call me. Day or night, twilight or dawn.”
She closed her hand around the card. “You never sleep, is that it?”
He winked. “It’s overrated.”
We turned as a green Subaru wagon passed by, a man at the wheel, a woman in the passenger seat. The driver wore a Stetson, the woman a long-billed ballcap. They were turned away, as if focused on something in the opposite field, fallow, filled with dry vines. When the car was only dust in the air, Hutchins walked slowly to the basket on the table and refilled her apron pocket with clothespins.
Harry said, “Who was the woman crying in the courthouse? The one who killed him.”
“Calypso,” Hutchins said. Her voice was stronger, as if she’d absorbed some of Harry’s strength.
“She must have been either very high or very low on the totem pole, very dispensable or very honored.”
Hutchins glanced toward the sun for a moment, turned away. “She was iron, Detective. In mind, spirit, body. His total protector. Cross Calypso and she’d slap your eyes half out of your head, or shred your heart with words. It was her idea, the courtroom scene. He knew he’d be sentenced to die and didn’t want death at the hands of the government. His original plan was to be smuggled poison, to take it in the courtroom. He’d make his speech and die magnificently, artistically.”
“But Calypso concocted plan B?”
“She’d dress in mourning clothes, wear the make-up of an older woman - she was in her early twenties, though I swear that woman was born a hundred years old, she knew so much. With the dark veil she’d be hidden. A woman shows up in a black dress and veil at a murder trial crying her eyes out - one of many grieving family members, extended family, friends of deceased - what guard’s going to search her? And she was an incredible actress as well.”
“Sounds like she knew people, how they think.”
“She knew systems. She saw us, his followers, as a system for his self-preservation. She saw the courthouse as a system that gave a wide berth to grief.”
“But braving detection on a daily basis? I see what you mean about iron.”
“It excited her. There were just a few of us by that time. The cops were all over the farm, and we’d moved to a rented house not far from the courthouse. She’d return and need sex. Again and again. Maybe she figured, since she was going to die, she’d better get in a lifetime’s worth.”
“A hungry woman.”
“You could smell the hunger on her. Hunger for everything, especially…him. For caring for him, keeping him working. Passing us out to him in public, but keeping his totality to herself in private. They spent most of the days together in the studio, a converted barn. The rest of us stayed in the farmhouse. They had their own little world out there. Now and then someone from the elite would take food or drink out to them. Calypso created wild jealousies among the rest of us. I think that was part of the purpose: channeling our anger against her, increasing our reverence toward him.”
“She truly loved him, obviously, to die for him.”
“We all would have, sad little girls, needy little girls, willing to do anything for him, to die for him, convinced it would keep us together for eternity. He never challenged the idea, of course.”
Harry shook his head. “Today they might be suicide bombers. I can’t conceive of the kind of power Hexcamp held.”
Hutchins shook her head. “I would have burned myself at the stake for a promised kiss from Marsd—…him. Does that tell you anything?”
Hutchins’s back was to me. I looked at Harry and mouthed Willow.
He nodded with his eyes. “Did Hexcamp ever mention a cop by the name of Willow?”
“He was the one who figured it out, put the pieces together. Too late for so many, of course. M-Marsden hated Jacob Willow, which is to say he respected him. Anything worthy of an emotion as potent as hate also demanded respect.” She paused. “Jacob Willow came here a year ago. And a few years before that. I stayed inside. He stood out here a long time.”
Harry said, “Tell me about the art.”
“He kept his work in the studio, the barn, which was always locked. Locks the size of apples. When he was taken to create - that’s how he said it, ‘taken’ - he was like a man in a trance. Calypso was always with him because he had to be fed. Only Calypso or those few could take him food and supplies. Wash his…his soiled clothes. He’d get carried away and mess himself. When he finally finished working, he was exhausted for days.”
“All that work but he never sold pieces?”
“It was to be his gift to the world; his ‘legacy’, he sometimes called it. Not the world of the ordinaries, but the world of us as we thought ourselves - those knowing how to interpret it, to use it. He said if you put words and pictures together perfectly, the effect was greater than any individual pieces. Something he’d said he started to discover while at the Institut des Beaux-Arts…”
Harry said, “The what?”
“A famous art academy in Paris. He won a full scholarship there; he was proud of that, never stopped talking about it. Sometimes he spoke in French.”
“Anyone else speak the lingo?”
“One other girl, Persephone. I gathered they met in Paris, while he was at art school.”
“Was there anything special about her?”
Hutchins shook her head. “Calypso wouldn’t allow us to be special or distinctive. Persephone, I recollect, was one of the ones permitted - can you believe it, permitted - to enter the barn and haul out his shit. We all thought she was special, y’know.” Hutchins shook her head slowly, laughed without humor.
“There were levels? Like a caste system?”
She thought a moment. “Not a whole system. There were two or three allowed into the studio to bring food, remove his shit can, clean the place. Persephone was among the elite, as far as it went. Maybe because she’d come over from Paris. But that’s all I really know of her. We never spoke of our pasts, or our futures, only of…him.”
Apparently that’s all there was on Persephone, who could only have been Marie Gilbeaux. Harry said, “You were telling me his feelings about the works he created.”
“They would shift the earth on its foundation, Detective Nautilus. His words. The art would make him famous forever.”
Harry said, “You haven’t seen any of these pieces of art recently have you, Carla? Not in the mail or anything?”
She was blindsided by the question, eyes wide
in sudden fright.
“My God, no. Why?”
Harry waved it away. “Nothing, just thinking out loud. But these earth-shifting works, Carla. This collection of pages and paintings and whatnot. You have no idea where it went after his death?”
Hutchins’s hands balled into fists. Her eyes lit with distant fire. She turned to Harry, her voice a ragged whisper.
“I hope it drilled itself into the ground and went straight back to hell.”
On that note, we headed south to compare notes with Jacob Willow.
Chapter 14
It was dark when we got to Willow’s. There was a breeze and the three of us walked to the edge of his dock and looked into the sweep of Mobile Bay. The western shore was a chain of glittering light. Waves lapped the pilings and Willow’s boat thumped against the bumpers.
“Hutchins saw the damned thing,” I told Willow. “Or what went into it, like a collection of individual pages. Some art, some text, some a combination.”
“Like the pages I found,” Willow said. “What Poll slipped out the back door.”
I said, “Hutchins reiterated the nightmare lifestyle of sex, servitude, and predation. Hexcamp had an aide-de-camp, or perhaps gatekeeper from hell. Her name was -”
“Cheyenne Widmer. Aka Calypso, aka the Crying Woman,” Willow interrupted. “Never got much background on Widmer, though she ended up dead on the courthouse floor after eating a .44 hollow-point. Same path as the others, I’d think. She followed him over from France.”
“Same path?” Harry said.
“Runaways, girls mainly, drifters from busted-up families, rejects from the drug culture. No pasts. There were a few males, but they drifted on, probably too hard to compete with Marsden.”
“Hutchins said interactions between Hexcamp and the others went through Calypso. Except you spoke of how cool and calm Hexcamp was. Hutchins has a slightly different picture. The Hexcamp she describes sometimes retreated to his ‘studio’ and arted his heart out for a couple of weeks. Barely ate, crapped himself, basically fell apart.”
Harry sighed. “Thirty years later, the stuff this guy painted in the middle of a shit fit sells for thousands of dollars.”
Willow said, “That’s individual pieces, Detective Nautilus. The collection itself, offered as a single purchase, would be worth a lot more.”
“Guess,” Harry said.
“A half-million dollars. At least.”
A ship’s horn sounded and we turned to watch a bulk carrier out in the ship channel, a shadow against black, its lights no more than fireflies. We watched it push south toward the mouth of the Bay, using the moment to gather our thoughts.
I turned to Willow. “Poll gave us nothing but history. Is there a way to connect with these people you were talking about? People who might have hard information on this collection…where it is today.”
“Major collectors of serial-killer memorabilia,” Willow said. “A tight band; you need to know someone to know someone.”
“They’re all over the country, right?” Harry said.
“There are a couple of collectors in the area, and one of the country’s biggest dealers lives in Spanish Fort, a squid named Giles Walcott.”
“You know this Walcott personally?” Harry asked.
Willow kicked at a piling. “Can’t get near him.”
I said, “Cops looked into him before?”
“There’s nothing illegal about obtaining objects associated with killers. Walcott keeps tax records, all the aboveboard stuff. Doesn’t consort with active killers. He brokers pieces from people dead or in prison, or pieces with pasts so clouded he can’t be nailed for receiving stolen goods.”
“How would I manage an audience with this Walcott geek? As, say, a new collector on the scene.”
“Impossible. It takes years to make the connections, get known.”
“At the intersection of greed and money,” I said, “anything’s possible. How could I force the issue?”
Willow stared at the sky and scratched his chin. “You’d need a major piece, a signature piece, to tempt Walcott past his caution.”
“Signature piece?”
“Something personal to the killer. Directly involved in the crime, physically or psychically. You’ve heard of Willy Palemountain?”
I nodded. Palemountain was a predator who wandered between southwestern Indian reservations in the forties. Before dispatching his victims with a hatchet, he dressed in buckskins and a feathered headdress and loaded his head with peyote. There’d been a movie based on his life.
Willow said, “Five years back a headdress of Palemountain’s went for over a hundred grand. That’s an example of a signature piece.”
“Feathers from a killer’s head?” Harry said. “People want that in their homes?”
“The Nazis murdered millions of human beings, Detective Nautilus, turned Europe into a bloodbath. People laughingly trade Nazi memorabilia at swap meets.”
I walked to the end of the dock, stared into the shimmering black water.
“I might come up with something.”
“Carson,” Harry cautioned, “we can make something up. A fake.”
Willow shook his head. “Tough to do. You’d have to construct a plausible chain of how the item got to you. Anyone can spatter a shirt with pig blood and claim it was Jeffrey Dahmer’s favorite dinner-party shirt. Fakes are everywhere. That was Poll’s ace in the hole; stuff he sold came with evidence tags attached, authenticity verified by the MPD. Collectors demand verification by an authority. Blow it, and Walcott’s lost to you.”
“Don’t go there, Carson,” Harry said.
I said, “Walcott wants a major piece, I’ll find something to make his heart go pitty-pat. I guarantee it.”
“Where would you find something like that?” Willow asked.
Harry whispered, “Carson, no.”
“I’ve got connections,” I said.
The old cop was smart enough to stop asking questions. Harry turned away, shaking his head and watching the carrier move from Mobile Bay into the horizonless black of the Gulf beyond.
I walked in my door at nine-thirty. A single message waited on my machine. I pressed the button. Two bars of Ellington played in the background before I heard Harry’s voice.
“Don’t go down this road, bro.”
The machine clicked off.
I went outside, but the breeze had died. I waved mosquitos from my face and ears and looked down the beach, the high moon making the sand appear to glow. To the east, the Blovines had at least two televisions cranked to chain-saw volume. I took a final swipe at the insects and retreated inside to the phone. Jeremy kept his hidden away in a manner time-honored among prisoners. I dialed the number and was directed to voicemail.
“Jeremy, call me back,” was all I said. I sat and waited for seventeen minutes.
“Carson,” my brother trilled, “I knew it was you. Either that or my butt left a wake-up call.”
I pictured him in his room at the institution, almost a dorm room - bed, desk, chair, chest of drawers, the Mylar mirror that skewed reflections, like watching yourself in mercury. But there was no campus outside, only guards and succeeding rings of cyclone fencing topped with razor wire.
“You’ve got to find a more comfortable hiding place, Jeremy.”
“I did. I was just teasing.”
“Good,” I said.
He cackled wickedly. “A friend hides it for me. What do you need, Carson?”
“I was calling because of your call to me.”
“THAT WAS TWO DAYS AGO,” he screamed. “I TOLD YOU TO CALL BACK AND YOU DIDN’T.” He did a sad little boy’s voice. “Why din’cha call me back, bruvver? Don’t you luuuv me?” His voice shifted back to reasonable, pleasant. “Hi Jeremy, how are you doing? Are the creamed peas to your liking? Are the toilet seats sanitary? Can I send you a case of MoonPies? WHAT MAKES YOU TOO BUSY TO CALL YOUR ONLY BROTHER?”
My brother alternately screamed, sang, whispere
d, spoke in hauntingly perfect impressions of other voices, or talked rationally. With Jeremy you never knew which was coming, or when. I decided to get to the point, hoping my odd request would evoke one of his more rational characterizations.
“It’s a case I’ve been assigned, Jeremy.”
“DETAILS, CARSON. Gimme, gimmee, gimmeeeee…”
“It’s not…your kind of case, Jeremy. But I need something special. You won’t have it. But maybe you can get it.”
“Something special? Oh suh, you do set mah bones all a-tingle. WHAT IS IT, CARSON?”
“An item used in an…event.”
“An event?” he mused. “You mean like the Fourth of July? You want me to get you a pack of sparklers?”
“An event like the ones that put you there.”
“OH-HO! You don’t want spark-LERS, you want spark-LEEEEES…the other bright things that have lit up many a lonely night. Is that it, Carson, you’re looking for some sparklies?”
“Can you get something like that? Or tell me where something might be found?”
He did his little-girl sing-song. “I know what you’re do-ing, I know what you’re do-ing. You’re baiting a tra-ap, you’re baiting a tra-ap.”
“No. I’m simply using this item to walk through a door.”
“Who’s behind that door, Carson? An adventurer? ARE YOU HOLDING BACK?”
Adventurer meant a psychotic killer; in Jeremy’s twisted world, that equated to friend. I said, “No, not an adventurer. Just a regular man.” Or whatever this Giles Walcott was.
“You’re showing me three cards,” he hissed. “What’s behind the fourth?”
“I’m telling you the truth, Jeremy.”
I could almost hear my brother measuring my syllables; he was a Truth Machine, and no one could slip a lie past him.
He finally crooned, “Tell me what you need.”
“Like I said, an item used in an…adventure.”
“There are categories. Are you talking about A: something in the general area, B: somethingin the immediate vicinity, or C: something that…tasted the syrup?”
I closed my eyes and shook my head.
“It’s probably C, Jeremy. I need something major.”