A Hopeless Case

by K. K. Beck

  “So you know who the Flamemaster is? And you got your money back!” said Jane.

  “That’s right.” Claire looked smug. “And Ben was one of my tenants. That’s my husband. He’s an engineer at Boeing. Anyway, then it was the eighties and everyone was finally getting around to getting married. And now, I’m finally getting around to having a baby.” She sighed happily.

  “We’re both so excited about the baby. I can’t wait to see a perfect little pink-and-white baby with golden curls tottering around the house.”

  Jane glanced nervously through the french doors into the living room. She’d seen how even reasonable children could systematically trash a house. She imagined a little child knocking over the ceramic geese, grinding sandbox sand into the white carpets, and rubbing half-chewed graham crackers into the white lace cloths that hung like Victorian lingerie from all the tables.

  Claire seemed to be reading her thoughts. “I know,” she said, somewhat defensively. “Everyone says we’ll have to childproof in there a little.”

  “But how did you get your money back?” said Jane. “I mean, you’d signed it all over perfectly legally, hadn’t you?”

  “Sure, but Bucky just wailed on him. Part of the settlement was that I couldn’t reveal his name, or his past.” Claire paused and looked sly. “And of course Bucky couldn’t either. I mean, he was the attorney of record and all that, and if it got out, well, Bucky’s basically a chicken anyway. That’s why he asked me to talk to you.”

  “But you can’t tell me?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Can you give me a hint?”

  Claire giggled. “Well, let’s just say he’s up to his old tricks. Like me, he updated his act for the times.”

  “Where should I start looking for him?” said Jane.

  “Forget looking for him in any records. He never used his true name on the deed. He’s using his true name now. Part of it, anyway. The whole thing is too dorky to be believed. I saw it on his driver’s license once.”

  “Is he still around? In the area?”

  “Why don’t you start by asking at my grandmother’s farm? It’s called the One-Ten Institute now. The Flame-master gave me cash. He kept the farm and sold it to them.”

  “I will,” said Jane, puzzled.

  Before she could probe further, Claire bounced back in her chair and folded her arms. “So let me tell you about Bucky,” she said. “I think he’s ready to get married and settle down. I really do. And he thinks you’d be perfect for him.”

  “He does?”

  “Yes. And now that I’ve met you, I can see why. Bucky’s a terrible snob. You look sort of elegant and you’ve lived abroad. He likes that. He said you were sophisticated.”

  And, Jane thought, he thinks I’m coming into a great deal of money. He’s even trying to get Claire to help me do it.

  “Of course he’d die if he knew I was telling you,” Claire continued, “but what the heck. All this middle-aged courtship is a real drag. People don’t have time anymore. Besides, I believe in love at first sight. That’s the way it was with Ben and me.”

  “I hardly know what to say,” said Jane.

  Claire laughed heartily. “I know. Bucky does seem like a sleaze. He is, really. But he can’t help it. He’s a very good lawyer. And he’d probably make a perfectly good husband. And he thinks marriage would be good for him. Help him be responsible.”

  Jane nodded thoughtfully, resisting the temptation to say that maybe a puppy or a paper route would do the trick as well as a wife.

  “How old a man is the Flamemaster now?”

  “Let’s see, I’m thirty-nine.” She patted her stomach. “Just getting in under the wire with this kid. And he was about ten years older. So he’s pushing fifty.” This seemed to startle her. “God, it’s hard to believe.

  “Anyway, I’ve said enough. I did say I’d keep it confidential, and I’d just as soon not cross him. He was a jerk, but he’s kind of a psychopath too. He’s always been out for himself, and I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

  “Do you think he could kill someone?”

  Claire thought for a second. “He’d never do it himself. He’d get someone to do it for him.”

  Chapter 22

  Jane drove back down Queen Anne Hill, and stopped at a gas station in the business district at the bottom of the residential neighborhood. She was delighted to find it was full service. She hated pumping her own gas, and there seemed to be practically nowhere in town that would do it for you. While the tank was being filled, she went to a phone booth and called Calvin Mason.

  “What have you been up to?” he said. “I tried to call you. A Detective Cameron was here and he asked for the diary. I’d already made the copy, so I gave it to him and got a receipt. He didn’t have a warrant, but he could have got one easy enough.”

  “Fine,” said Jane. “I was calling to tell you he’d probably be by. Also, I just finished talking to someone who knew Linda back in the old days. The Flamemaster’s still around, but she won’t tell me who he is. Anyway, he sold that Vashon land to the One-Ten Institute a few years back, so I thought I’d check with them and see if they know who he is or where he is or both.”

  “The One-Ten Institute, eh?”

  “Yes. Who are they?”

  “It stands for a hundred and ten percent. They sell high-priced seminars to businesses. Sales motivation stuff. Goal setting. It’s a lot of crap. A friend of mine who works for the phone company had to take one of their courses. They have retreats over on Vashon, where you have to sit in the hot tub with your boss and tell him where you want to be in ten years. They really pile in the bucks with that stuff.”

  “Sounds hideous,” said Jane. “I’ll call them after I go see Gail English. Richard English’s wife.”

  “Not an easy call to make,” said Calvin Mason sympathetically.

  • • •

  Gail English was about forty, a tall, angular woman with heavy dark hair streaked with gray and cut short and chic. Her face was tawny and blotched with recent tears. Her greenish eyes searched Jane’s face greedily.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said at the door to her apartment. “You’ve got to tell me what happened to you. I have to know what you were doing there and who you are. I can’t make any sense out of any of this.”

  They sat on two rattan-and-stainless-steel chairs in a vast apartment with a view of the sound, an apartment as austere and spartan as Claire’s house was cluttered.

  Jane told her as succinctly as possible about her search for some background about Linda, about Leonora, and about how she’d come across her husband’s name in a conversation with Judy Van Horne.

  Gail English hugged herself with her thin arms and seemed to be rocking back and forth a little as she listened. Then Jane told her about the struggle in the dark and ended by telling how she had found Richard English’s body.

  Gail sighed. “I suppose I didn’t really know him,” she said. “None of this makes any sense. I’ve never heard of Linda Donnelly or the Fellowship of the Flame—although it rings a bell from the sixties. But I know Dick never mentioned them.”

  She turned to Jane. “We were married for seven years. And I never heard any of this. There must be some horrible mistake.”

  “Was your husband ever in group therapy?”

  “Yes. Briefly. Before I met him. He had been unhappy. I knew that. But he always told me that after he met me he didn’t worry about being happy anymore.”

  “I hope that can be a comfort to you,” said Jane. “That you made him happy.”

  “This girl died? This Linda?”

  “That’s right. She drowned. In 1974. What was Richard— Dick—doing then?”

  “That was the year he started his production business. Up until that time he’d been free-lancing around. Doing special effects. Renting equipment, scrambling around for crews, renting a crummy space on a pier that rocked every time a boat went by. Doing events and trying to get into film and
into video, which was all brand new.

  “He’d dropped out of film school and he’d done light shows in the sixties. Remember them? Little slides of colored water. It was supposed to look psychedelic. Projected images that went with the music. Crude stuff, but Dick was incorporating film and other techniques, and making it more sophisticated.

  “When he started his business he got into computer graphics, and suddenly he was doing commercial work and postproduction. He had the best facility in town.” She smiled. “He won some money on the exacta at Longacres and put it all into the best stuff around.”

  “Did he ever mention a woman named Robin?” Jane asked. “She was a friend of Linda’s. Near the end of her life.”

  “Robin? I never heard of her.”

  “I told your husband that Linda had a diary,” said Jane, skirting around the lie she’d told. “She did, but he wasn’t mentioned in it. Did he say anything about that?”

  “He was very nervous the day he died,” said Gail. “Very hyper. He told me he’d be home late, but he never told me about his appointment with you. Why didn’t he tell me? I just thought he would be working late. He did that a lot. He was working on a claymation project.”

  “Dinosaurs with pizzas,” said Jane.

  “Yes. It sounds trivial. I know it does, but Dick made everything into art. He loved the processes, the detail, all the hard work to get the perfect effect. He loved his work. It gave meaning to his life, even if it was some stupid pizza commercial. He didn’t care about that, he just wanted it to be perfect. And it always was.”

  “He was never involved with any cult?”

  “Absolutely not. He’d been raised a Catholic and he turned against the whole thing when he was a kid. He didn’t like any form of organized religion.”

  Gail sighed. “He still had the guilt, though. Sometimes he seemed to think he was a bad person. He told me so once. That I was too good for him, and that it was a good thing he didn’t believe in sin because he was in a state of sin.” She shuddered. “It frightened me.”

  “Did he tell you why? What he’d done?”

  “He hadn’t done anything,” she snapped. “But he said a couple of times that if he was dying, he might ask for a priest and that I should get him one.”

  She began to weep softly.

  “I’m sorry,” Jane said rather helplessly, her own eyes beginning to sting with tears. Gail had said “if,” not “when.” She hadn’t expected he would ever die. No one seemed ever to expect anyone to die.

  Gail raised her voice, gagging on tears. “Why did you call him? Why did you? Everything was all right until you called him. What did you want from him?”

  The sick feeling of guilt that had been welling up inside Jane now threatened to engulf her entirely. “I wanted to see what he knew about Linda,” she whispered.

  “I never expected to be alone so soon. I never expected him to die at all. And then to have him just go off one day and not come back. If I’d just been able to say good-bye.” She rubbed her eyes with her fists and sniffed, then pushed her hair back from her face. “Do you have a husband? Be kind to him.”

  “My husband died in an accident. Ten years ago this summer.”

  Gail looked at her with a brief interest and her tears stopped. “Oh.” She was silent for a moment before she said, “The police wouldn’t tell me anything about you. They won’t tell me anything at all. But someone came before you came. Someone came and killed him. Who would do such a thing? I have to know.”

  “I hope you will.”

  “Your lip is swollen,” she said. “Did he do that to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t see him. Couldn’t you see him at all?”

  “No. It was dark,” Jane said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Dick was a wonderful artist. He was always quiet, working behind the scenes. He never talked much. No one knew about his mind, about the visions he had. Why couldn’t he tell me? About his demons? I loved him.”

  “Sometimes artists can’t talk,” said Jane. “That’s why they’re artists, maybe. Or maybe they can’t talk because they’re artists.” She hesitated, wondering if she was saying too much, then she plunged on. “It can be hard on people who love them.”

  “Sometimes he had nightmares,” she said. “He said he didn’t remember them.” Jane sensed that Gail didn’t believe that.

  “Is there someone staying with you?” said Jane. “I don’t think you should be alone right now.”

  “My sister’s coming out from Chicago. Dick’s parents want me to stay with them. They want him to have a Catholic funeral. I don’t know what to do.”

  “It might mean a lot to them,” said Jane.

  There was a strident buzz all of a sudden, and Gail walked wearily over to an intercom. “It’s Wendy,” said a crackling voice.

  “She’s been very sweet,” said Gail, hitting the buzzer. “Just a kid, really. She’s been handling all the clients for me. They all loved Dick.”

  Jane was relieved Wendy was coming. She hated to leave Gail English alone, yet she knew she couldn’t help her. Her swollen lip was just a reminder that Jane had lived and her husband had died. And died, perhaps, because Jane had stirred up something from the past.

  She was also glad Gail lived in such a secure building. If Jane’s suspicions were correct, and the killer had wanted a look at the diaries, he might want to search here for them. Gail was easy to find.

  Gail went and opened the door to the apartment, and Jane rose too, planning to leave as soon as Wendy arrived. After a moment, they heard the elevator chime. A second later, Wendy came up the hall, struggling with a huge flat parcel wrapped in brown paper. She looked dwarfed by it.

  “Hello,” she said, nodding at Jane. “I found one more matte,” she told Gail. “I thought you’d like it. I’ve never seen it before.”

  “My husband did beautiful work,” Gail said to Jane. “You know what a matte is? It’s the background, then you put live figures or animation in front of it. His were beautiful.”

  She pulled off the brown wrapping paper. “I’ve never seen this one,” she said.

  “I found it behind that long counter on the side of the wall,” said Wendy. “It’s really more than a background, because the figures are painted in. I never saw it before myself.”

  Jane hadn’t either. But in a way, she had. There was a tangerine sky, all streaked with silver clouds. Winging its way across the canvas was a flock of unicorns. Just as in Linda’s diary, the unicorns were laughing.

  Chapter 23

  There was a connection now, a connection between Richard English and Linda Donnelly. A second one, really, because a guilt-ridden Richard English had already acknowledged the connection years ago in group therapy. But now there was a link between her mind and his art.

  She twisted that concept around in her mind as she drove back to Uncle Harold’s house. Had Linda seen that picture and written about it? Had he read her description and then painted the scene? How could he have read her notebooks?

  She had more pieces to the puzzle now, but she felt more frustrated. The only solution, she believed, was to keep going, to pursue every lead.

  Back at home, she called Judy Van Horne.

  Judy answered the phone on the fourth ring. “Hello,” she said in her rather dejected voice. There was a din of yapping dogs in the background.

  “This is Jane da Silva. We talked about Linda Donnelly a few days ago,” she said. Had it really only been a few days ago?

  “I read about Richard English in the paper,” said Judy. “Was it the same guy?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I didn’t get a chance to talk to him,” said Jane. “I wanted to ask him about Linda.”

  “I know.”

  “I wondered if you remembered anything more. Did he say how well he knew Linda?”

  “No. That was the whole point. He wanted to know about her. Of course, I had just told the gr
oup”—here she broke off to scream at the dogs. “Shut up, goddammit!” Then she continued, “I’d just told the group all about Linda’s rejection of me. And he listened really carefully, and he asked if it was a girl who drowned, and I said it was.

  “Anyway, he said he just met her once, but he’d always felt bad about her, and he wanted to know more about her.”

  “He’d met her just once?”

  “That’s right. I remember thinking he was a really sensitive guy to have cared so much about someone he barely knew.”

  “I see.”

  “But people get like that in group. They act more caring than they are, because the shrink makes you feel cold if you don’t listen to everyone else. You know? No matter how much you’re hurting yourself. I think individual therapy is better, but my insurance didn’t cover it.

  “Does his murder . . . does it have anything to do with Linda?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jane.

  After she thanked Judy and hung up, she looked for the One-Ten Institute in the phone book. They had a downtown phone number—“corporate offices,” and one on Vashon Island—“retreat complex.” It sounded like a psychological term.

  She called the corporate offices. An exuberantly friendly and sincere female voice answered. “You’ve reached the One-Ten Institute,” it said. “This is Cheryl. How may I help you today?”

  “I have a question about some real estate,” began Jane.

  “Just a moment and I’ll connect you with our account representative who works in that area,” said the voice. “Have a terrific day.”

  Jane cringed, and a moment later a male voice, equally cheery, came on the line. “This is Bob,” it said. “How are you today?”