by J. A. Kerley
His voice dropped to a whisper. “What do you mean?”
“When the local cops know what you do, it’s bound to leak into the community. How’s it going to be, pulling into the Winn-Dixie and hearing the whispers? ‘That’s him, Giles Walcott. He makes his money from death.’ You ready for that, Giles? Or how about the low-level crazoids who’ll line up at your front gate, drooling for a chance to sniff Vincent Canario’s tee-shirt? Get ready for the parade.”
The phallus took flight again, grazing the ceiling. I had to reach out to make the save. “You know what you’re lacking in here, Mr Walcott?”
“Careful! What?” Sweat beaded his face. I cocked my hand, ready to toss.
“One of those signs.”
“What - put that down, please - what signs?”
“You break it, you bought it.”
He lowered his head. His hand retreated from the phone. “I think we can work something out, sir,” he mumbled. “Please put my penis down.”
I left with Walcott’s promise of a suitable entrée into the world of his buyers. I planned to continue as Carrol Ransburg, now a man with some ready money and newly hot for the idea of acquiring serial-killer memorabilia. As I walked from his house he called to my back.
“One thing, Mr Ransburg. The mask. It is the property of a police department somewhere, isn’t it? On loan?”
I turned and let my eyes say there were no lies left in them. “No, Mr Walcott. The mask resides at my address.”
I felt his confused stare long after the door fell shut.
Chapter 18
The next day Walcott delivered the name of a local collector, Marcella Baines, “a proper woman with exquisite and discerning taste”. When I expressed surprise a woman was involved, Walcott accused me of gender bias.
Baines lived in a high-rise beachfront condo in Pensacola, far enough from Mobile, I hoped, that she hadn’t seen my photo in the Register. I checked in at the desk and after the security guard found my name on a list, he overrode the elevator control, allowing me to reach the penthouse.
Not knowing what aspiring collectors of serial-killer mementos considered fashionable dress, I’d hauled out the black suit reserved for funerals, weddings, and other somber occasions, lacquering my hair flat with something Ava left behind. I stood in a small entryway and smiled warily at a camera above the door, speaking with the clipped precision many associate with intellect.
“My name is Carrol Ransburg. I have an appointment with Ms Baines. Is she…?”
The door opened to a bright room expected of a moneyed dowager: delicate furniture, pretty paintings on the walls, a broad window overlooking the Gulf. Marcella Baines appeared from behind the door. In her mid sixties, I figured, wearing a white chef’s apron over a simple blue pantsuit, a lone strand of pearls around her neck. She was five ten or eleven, with short hair bobbed and dyed to a uniform auburn tint, the color at contrast to her pale skin. Outsized earrings dangled from her lobes like small chandeliers. Ms Baines’s mouth was extraordinarily wide, her smile a wondrous display of dentition. Her green eyes crinkled with delight, as if I was precisely what she’d wished for this morning. Her hand took mine and drew me quickly across the threshold. “I’m so happy you’re here,” she said. “The toast is stuck.”
“Pardon me?”
I followed her to a four-slot toaster on the marble counter of a copper-appointed kitchen. She frowned at the device.
“The toast simply refuses to come out, Mr Ransburg. I can’t figure how this happens, but it’s going on more and more lately.”
I fiddled a moment and discovered a bent wire in the toast rack or whatever. A few deft manipulations and presto, toast. She applauded, teeth beaming like a spotlight.
“Thank you so much, Mr Ransburg. I was hoping to have some caviar and then this problem with the toaster. Please have a seat, it’ll just be a second.”
I went to the living room and sunk into a gray leather couch. A minute later she returned sans apron and sat a serving plate on a low mahogany table between us: chopped eggs and scallions, toast points, lemon wedges, and a mound of gray-black caviar.
“Eat up, Mr Ransburg. Bon appétit.”
We ate fish ova, sipped champagne, and discussed the weather for several minutes. Her eyes turned to me, studied my mouth.
“You have a speck, an egg, right there at…I’ll get it.”
Her finger brushed at my lip as I resisted the urge to draw away. Her hand smelled of fish and lemon. “There,” she said. “A handsome man is tidy again.” She leaned forward in her delicate chair, knees primly together, hands crossed in her lap.
“I understand you’re quite new to collecting. How long have you been in it?”
“A year. Less, maybe.”
She leaned back, crooked a finger beneath her chin. “Are there any celebrities whose work you admire?”
“Celebrities?”
“Even a newcomer must have favorites. Tell me, whose work do you gravitate towards? Whom do you admire?”
I mentioned several serial killers and rapists I’d interviewed in prison. She listened with a series of facial reactions; one name got a twitch, another pursed lips, one a raised eyebrow, another a satisfied smile. She reached over and patted my knee.
“Ah, but they’re all relatively new players on the field, all in the recent past. You must also study the classics.”
I did the dog-ate-my-homework look. “I’m with a group of developers, we’ve been very successful, but success is a thief of time. I haven’t dug into the classics just yet.”
“Tell me who truly fascinates you; who you feel a kinship with beyond all others.”
My selection was determined by the word kinship. There could be only one fitting that description, my only kinsman, my brother. Although we’d shared childhoods, we no longer shared a name. While in college I tried severing ties to my past by replacing my surname with that of an artist renowned for paintings of small boats on raging seas. It had worked about as well as changing my hairstyle.
I said, “Jeremy Ridgecliff.”
Baines stood abruptly and crossed the room to lean against a large buffet. She studied me through unblinking eyes. “Tell me why you’ve selected Jeremy Ridgecliff,” she said, a note of challenge in her voice. “That’s a most interesting choice in a day of Dahmers and Coronas and Gacys.”
“He was so different…so artful with his arrangements, I’ve heard. And his method of, uh, acquisition so unusual. There seemed a sensitivity in his manner.”
I saw a moment of sparkle in her eyes, a ghost of a smile shimmer across her lips.
“Do you recall Charlie Chaplin, Mr Ransburg? His Little Tramp character, beautiful and puzzled and delicate, all rolled up together?”
“Yes. From film festivals.”
“I picture Jeremy like a sweet little Chaplinesque tramp, shuffling between parks and libraries and the lobbies of elegant hotels, sitting quietly and waiting for his mother to come, so blissfully patient, his cherub face the perfect combination of sorrow and longing.”
She was talking about our mother - Jeremy wanting to kill her for not protecting him when my father had wild explosions of violence that ended in Jeremy’s room. But killing our mother would have consigned me to a foster home or institution, so my brother sought surrogates.
I said, “I’ve heard that, to certain women, he was irresistible.”
“Tender-hearted, poetic ladies in their early forties. One look at Jeremy and the maternal instincts bloomed like hothouse flowers. They probably started lactating. Finally, a motherly type, just the right age, just the right look, crossed to him, laid a gentle hand over his neck, said, ‘Can I help you, son? You seem so troubled. Is there anything I can do?’”
“Much of this is new to me,” I lied.
“And later, while he worked, expressed himself…Do you know what Jeremy would say to them, Mr Ransburg, his would-be benefactors?”
“That I don’t know, Mrs Baines.” Another lie - I kne
w exactly what Jeremy said to his victims, what he sang.
Baines put her voice up a register, made it light and shimmery.
“You’re too late, you’re too late, you’re too late…”
I kept my eyes fixed on the deep red carpet. Marcella Baines walked to me. “You’re beautiful, Mr Ransburg. You feel. I watched your eyes when I spoke of Jeremy, saw anguish, respect, that elusive sense of kinship. Your selection of Jeremy Ridgecliff tells me much about you. Only those of subtle taste can discern his true glory.”
“Ms Baines, I’m not sure why I selected -”
“Shhh, Mr Ransburg. You’re young, fresh. New to this bright and shiny world. But there’s one thing I know about you - you don’t collect because you want an interesting investment; you collect because it’s in your soul.”
She strode to the far side of the room, pressed a panel and a mirror slid aside, revealing a doorway. She laughed, a rinkly-tinkly sound like an old-time piano.
“Come back here, Mr Ransburg,” the wide mouth said. “Let me show you where I really live.”
Chapter 19
I stepped through the doorway onto a plush black carpet. The expansive room resembled an art gallery: framed photos, shadowboxes on the walls, display cases, shelves, track lighting.
“Over here, Mr Ransburg. Let’s start with the photographs.”
She gathered me by my forearm as though we were a beachwalking couple, escorting me to a wall of framed photos. They were exclusively male - a clown-suited man blowing out candles on a cake; a man sitting naked on a dirty bed, surrounded by rifles; a man glaring from an old truck. I saw a gilt-framed photograph of a grinning, heavily tattooed man with jumper cables clamped to his nipples. I saw pinched faces, eerie smiles, drooping lids, Methadrine eyeballs…
Marcella Baines’s smile was so wide it seemed the only thing above her neck. “They’re my fellas, Mr Ransburg.”
“You certainly have a lot of them, Mrs Baines - fellas.”
She pointed to a black-and-white photo of a man with porcine eyes and dried spittle in the corners of his mouth.
“Charles Osland,” she said.
Osland was an infamous murderer of the fifties who dispatched five women through ligature strangulation. Tina Caralla was his most famous victim, a TV reporter working in Memphis.
While I studied the photo, Baines walked to a display case, removed something, returned. She offered me a zip-bagged length of rope.
“The clothesline Charles used to confine Tina to her bed,” she said. “Go ahead. Open it.”
“It’s not neces-” I had no need to touch the ghastly thing.
“It’s all right,” she said, patting me on the shoulder as if encouraging a child. “It’s part of your new world.”
I lifted the bag. It’s just ordinary rope, I told myself, woven strands of fiber. I opened it.
“Now sniff,” she said.
I held the bag to my nose and whiffed. Nothing. Marcella leaned her head over the bag and took a long draught. She leaned back, a drowsy smile on her face. “Spins your head, doesn’t it? Chanel Number 5, the perfume Tina wore. She dabbed her neck with it, her sweet, swan-like neck.”
“It’s…lovely,” I said, starting to close the bag.
“Take one more,” she urged. “Please, I insist.”
I closed my eyes, feigning a deep intake of breath. For a moment I sensed the dark scent; not perfume, but the odor of violent death. She said, “Two of the strongest moments in a pair of lives, captured forever on thirty inches of cotton rope.”
“How much?” I asked, closing the bag.
She patted my hand. “It’s not for sale. It’s a personal amulet, one I use for fortification.”
“But if it was?”
“Let’s not prattle over concerns of the marketplace, Mr Ransburg. We’re here to enjoy.”
For the next half-hour I attended a reliquary of savagery - scarves used for bondage, tools employed in obscene fashion, more lengths of electrical cord than I wish to remember. At one point she handed me a small plastic box with simple thumbtacks rattling within. When she told me how the tacks had been deployed, I wanted to flush them down the toilet, keep flushing all afternoon. Instead, I shook the box, raised a discerning eyebrow and said, “Quaint.”
After I’d been shown all the visible objects, she said, “What did you collect previously? Everyone who comes to me has collected something before this.”
“The usual, I suspect. Stamps. Coins.”
A sympathetic smile. “I tried stamps; they were too distant for me, though I collected coins for several years. Not mint, used. I wanted to see the wear, feel the hands jingling the coins in a pocket, judging their weight. It made me a laughing-stock in the coin world, my insistence on grubby, used coins. But then I came into a collection of coins from Merle Banton. You know of him?”
“A bit.” Banton was a brief horror in the thirties. A railroad bull, he savaged a dozen rail-riding depression wanderers, leaving them strewn beside tracks from St Louis to Santa Fe.
“Suddenly the coins came alive, Mr Ransburg. I discovered Mr Banton often put his coins in his mouth, swooshing them from cheek to cheek. I wondered, had he coins in his mouth when he felt the need to…”
She seemed lost in thought for several seconds. “What started you collecting?” she finally said. “What was the first?”
I searched my past: third or fourth grade, running through a meadow with a homemade net, cheesecloth pinned around a wire clothes hanger.
“Butterflies,” I answered.
She smiled. “So many of us do. Start with Lepidoptera, that is. I loved the Monarchs best. When I was a girl I found a chrysalis hanging in a bush. It was like a small ornament, precious and vulnerable. I plucked it from the branch and brought it home. As the days passed I watched how it seemed to sense the events ahead, its tiny heart beating against the green casing. Then, of course, the inevitable, the tearing from confines, wings unfolding. Flight. That very day I decided to preserve that moment forever, collect others. I still have that collection, Mr Ransburg. Would you care to see it?”
“I would be honored.”
She stooped low to open a drawer in the credenza and removed a glass-covered display box. She pursed her lips and blew dust from its surface.
“They took several years to acquire,” she said, handing me the box. “But each one is perfect. It’s the timing, you know.”
I looked down. In three rows of four, a dozen green chrysalides, green-brown wrappers as delicate as parchment, sides rent. From each tear, a butterfly was half emerged, wings beginning to unfold.
“Beautiful,” I murmured.
She looked away to allow me a personal moment with the collection, then returned it to the vault. She again took my arm, walked me back toward the residence.
“I have collected far and wide, Mr Ransburg. I have some beautiful things, some improbable and magical things. I can be your mentor, if you let me.”
I let my mouth drop open, mock-astonished at her generosity. “That would be incredible, Mrs Baines. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“We’ll improve each other - you will learn, and I will enjoy watching you, as though starting the journey again.”
Marcella Baines turned and pressed her lips to mine, her kiss light and chaste. She drew back, looked at her watch and smiled sadly. “We have much time to learn from one another, Mr Ransburg. But now I’m late for my bridge club. Boring old ladies with lives as gray as their hair, but one must keep up appearances. Shall we meet again soon - say Friday?”
“That would be wonderful.”
“There’s so much for you to learn. And this is an incredible time in collecting, a golden age. Have you heard of a man named Marsden Hexcamp?”
“I, uh, just a little. Rumors.”
She smiled a thousand watts in my direction. “Here’s something to add to your rumor chest, Mr Ransburg: Marsden Hexcamp is almost alive again. How about that?”
Chapter 20
There were only two dicks in the detectives’ room, Wally Daller and Burke Madigan. Wally was across the room running a comb through his thinning hair, studying the result. Madigan was on the phone. Harry looked over the gray cubicle wall to the next set of desks, making sure no one was crouching there.
“She what?” he said, eyes wide.
“Believe me, Harry, it wasn’t my idea.”
“You mean like on the mouth? That old woman?”
“Closed mouth. Closed tight.” I jammed my lips tight and pointed to them. “I hit that condo lobby running. I was afraid she was on my heels.”
Madigan hung up. He ate a fistful of antacids, belched into his palm, and walked to the restroom. When the door swung shut, Harry said, “Kissy-face aside, Cars, what’s she know about Hexcamp?”
“That’s all she said; that he was coming alive.”
“You think she’s the type to really know anything? Or is she just trying to sneak a few drinks from the Fountain of Youth?”
“Harry, the back half of her penthouse is like a property room from hell. She even had a box of thumbtacks Tommy Dean Murgatroyd used to -”
“I’ll pass on the details. You go back Friday?”
“That’s when I’ll find out what she knows about Hexcamp. Press her about the work.”
“She’s probably gonna press too, press your ass right down into the mattress, ripping and stripping. You’re gonna get some of that geriaction.”
I took another swig of black coffee, wiped my mouth for about the fiftieth time since leaving Baines’s aerie; the eventuality was too grim to think about. Harry’s cellphone sang from his pocket. Somewhere he’d managed to find the defining melodic pattern from “Spoonful”.
“That spoon…that spoon…that spoon-ful…”
“Nautilus.”
He listened for a moment, frowning, the scowl growing darker every second.
“No. Not at all. Listen to me, ma’am, there’s no way my partner would do that. Right. Especially not with her. You said, ‘No comment,’ right? Good. If she comes back, I suggest locking your door and pulling down the blinds.” He sighed and hung up.