I also didn’t understand much about the ceremony involved in taking the sacraments. I’m sure there was a lot more going on than there appeared to be on the surface, but Twink seemed peaceful, even serene when she rejoined me afterward. I made a mental note that anytime she started to unravel, I should drag her off to St. Benedict’s and let “Father O” settle her down.
After the service, there was that customary “meet and greet” business at the church door. Twink was glowing as she introduced me to “Father O,” and he gave me a rather curious look. “So this is the big brother Renata speaks of so often,” he said.
“I think somebody’s been telling tales out of school, Father O’Donnell,” I said, as we shook hands.
“Would I do that?” Twink asked with exaggerated innocence.
“I think we should talk, Mr. Austin,” Father O told me. “Soon, if it’s possible.”
That got my attention almost immediately. “I can swing by late tomorrow, Father O’Donnell,” I suggested.
“Fine,” he said. “About three-thirty?”
“Right,” I agreed, as the crowd moved us along toward the open door.
“What was that all about, Markie?” Twink asked, as we strolled back to my car.
“How should I know? I haven’t talked with him yet. Do you want to have brunch in that restaurant up on top of the Space Needle?”
“You’re going to fly me to the moon?”
“Not right away. The man in the moon’s booked solid this year.”
We clowned around as I drove downtown. Twink seemed to be a lot more relaxed than she’d been for a long time now. If a quick trip to church was all it’d take to wind her down, I’d make a standing appointment with Father O and take her to St. Benedict’s twice a day.
On Monday morning our silvery-haired Milton professor recited extensively from Paradise Lost. His voice betrayed a certain stage fright at first, but once he got into it, he shed that, and he sounded like God speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai. Milton does that to people sometimes.
Yes, I thought, Paradise Lost was definitely a barn burner, but my paper would be on more solid ground if I stuck to his prose works.
After class, I went back to the library to continue my investigation of Whitman’s British connections. I found definite proof that Whitman had received a copy of the Poetic Works of William Blake in the early 1870s. Try mixing Milton, Blake, and Whitman all together in a single morning. It definitely stretches your head.
I grabbed a burger about twelve-thirty and hit the door of my freshman class right on the button at one-thirty. Twink was in her seat, so she obviously hadn’t had another one of those bad nights. I returned the papers I’d spent hours grading, and then I assigned another one—“Why Am I Here?”—which brought the usual groans. Freshmen groan a lot, I’ve noticed.
“All right, fun-seekers,” I began, “shall we stop feeling sorry for ourselves and go to work? Your papers revealed a certain flaw that needs correcting. Let’s take a look at the lowly preposition for a while. I know that it’s the ‘in’ thing lately to omit prepositions, despite the fact that it makes the ‘in’ person sound like an idiot. People ‘depart Sea-Tac Airport’ or ‘graduate high school.’ Does the simple word ‘from’ offend you for some reason? It’s a nice little word, good to its mother, and always willing to go to work, if you’ll just give it a chance. Language can be very precise if you use it correctly. Prepositions are the glue that keeps your sentences from flying apart. They indicate the relationships between the other words in your sentence. Use them. That’s why we have them. I’m not impressed by fashionable omissions. It makes me grumpy when you leave them out. Don’t do it anymore, because if you think it makes me unhappy, wait until you hit a full professor. He’ll have you for lunch.”
That got their immediate attention, and they listened intently for the rest of the period.
Twink hung around after I’d dismissed the class. “What’s got you on the prod today, Markie?” she asked.
“Grading papers filled with sloppy language, Twink. That’s the un-fun part of teaching.”
“It’s your own fault. If you wouldn’t assign so many, you wouldn’t have to grade them. I’m supposed to say ‘thank you.’ Aunt Mary was all rested when you dropped me off yesterday. She slept until almost four o’clock.”
“Good. She was looking frazzled when we left for church. She really needed that sleep.”
“As long as it’s ‘let’s all thank Markie’ time, I’d like to add a few of mine to the heap. I really enjoyed our little jaunt to the Space Needle yesterday. I didn’t know that the restaurant up there rotated like that. It gives you a view of the whole city, doesn’t it?”
“Sure, unless there’s a low-lying cloudbank blotting everything out.”
“Say hi to the gang at your boardinghouse for me, OK? I had lots of fun there the other night.”
“I’ll pass that on,” I promised.
“Good,” she said. “I’ve got to run now. See ya.” And then she was gone. It was fairly obvious that we’d done something right lately. Twink seemed almost normal.
Then I checked my watch and headed for the parking garage. I’d almost forgotten my appointment with Father O’Donnell.
He was just coming out of a little booth along the side of the church when I got there, and an elderly lady was near the altar working her way through her rosary beads. Father O nodded to me as I came down the center aisle, and I joined him near a small door to one side of the altar. He led the way along a narrow hallway and into a book-lined office. “Have a seat, Mr. Austin,” he said.
“Just Mark, Father O’Donnell. I clutch up when people call me ‘mister.’ ”
“All right, Mark it is. I asked you to come by today because I’m concerned about Renata Greenleaf, and it seems that you know her better than anybody else.”
“I’m a longtime friend of her family, Father.”
“You are aware that she’s very troubled, aren’t you?”
“If you think she’s bad now, you should have seen her a couple of years ago. Twink—that is, Renata—is a recent graduate of a mental institution.”
“I thought it might be something like that. She was almost incoherent when she came to confession on Saturday, and every now and then she’d say things in a language I couldn’t even recognize, much less understand.”
“Maybe I should fill you in. There are some fairly complicated things about Renata that you probably ought to know.”
“I’d appreciate that, Mark. Right now she has me so baffled that I don’t know which way to turn.”
“I’m not sure this’ll help very much. Twink’s making a career out of baffling people.” I leaned back in my chair and gave him the whole sad, sordid story—right up to the paper Twink had written, and how it made everybody sit up and take notice.
Father O’Donnell seemed shell-shocked when I finished. “I’d like to see that paper, Mark.”
“I’ve got copies, Father. I’ll drop one off for you. Did any of what I just told you help at all? Twink’s a little strange sometimes, but that’s because she’s crazy—not too crazy, but crazy all the same. She’s trying to get well, but she’s having some trouble with it—for fairly obvious reasons. If the cops ever catch the guy who killed her sister, she might get well immediately, but I don’t think that’s too likely. It’s been over two years now, so he probably got away clean.”
“He’ll answer for it, Mark. Believe me, he’ll answer for it.”
“That’s in the next world, Father O. I’d like to get my hands on him in this one.”
“We sort of disapprove of that, Mark. God’s supposed to take care of it.”
“I just want to help out, Father. God can have what’s left after I’m done with him.”
“We might want to talk about that someday. I think I understand Renata a little better now.”
“That’s assuming that Twink really is Renata. If she’s Regina, we might have to start all over from square o
ne.”
“You had to bring that up, didn’t you?” he said ruefully.
“Just trying to brighten up your day, Father O.”
The rest of the week rolled merrily along as we all settled back into harness.
The newspapers and television kept trying hard to ride the “Seattle Slasher” story, but the saddle was starting to slip on that horse. Our local cut-up appeared to have put his knife away, and the media got slightly sulky about that.
Sylvia stayed right on top of me, demanding daily reports on Twink’s behavior. I started to suspect a research paper in progress there, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover the fine hand of Dr. Fallon somewhere in the background.
James, Charlie, and I hit the Green Lantern a couple of times that week to stay in touch with Charlie’s brother. The police investigation of the “Seattle Slasher” case seemed to be at a standstill. Bob more or less admitted that the cops were marking time, waiting for another murder. “We don’t have enough to work with yet,” he told us Thursday evening. “The general opinion is that the killings are gang-related, but there’s always the possibility that we’ve got a homicidal maniac roaming around out there. If the two killings are just part of a turf war, two might be the end of it. If it’s a crazy, though, there’s certain to be more. Crazies kill people for crazy reasons, and they usually keep on killing until they get caught.”
“You’re just chock-full of good news, Bob,” Charlie told his brother. “Are you guys looking into the possibility of a werewolf? Or maybe a vampire?”
“We’re keeping an open mind, kid.”
“You had to ask, didn’t you Charlie?” James rumbled. “Now we’ll have to break out the garlic and the silver bullets.” Then he looked at Bob. “What is the proper procedure when you arrest a vampire?” he asked. “Do you read him his rights before or after you drive the stake through his heart?”
“I’d have to look that up,” Bob replied with a perfectly straight face. “It doesn’t come up very often.”
Mary called me after she and Twink had returned from the weekly visit to Dr. Fallon and invited me to dinner. While we were eating, I told her that we’d been picking Bob West’s brains for information about our local celebrity.
“West’s a good man,” she told me. “He’s solid and very thorough. He’s a long way in front of Burpee, that’s for sure.”
“Who’s Burpee?” Twink asked curiously.
“His real name is Belcher,” Mary explained. “Burpee has a tendency to do things backward. A good cop follows the evidence to the suspect. Burpee picks a suspect at random—possibly by drawing straws or laying out a deck of tarot cards. Then he tries to find evidence that’ll back his theory.”
“He really wants to nail Cheetah for these killings in this part of town, doesn’t he?” I asked.
“Burpee’s a joke,” she snorted. “Cheetah wouldn’t be caught dead out of downtown Seattle. Burpee wants to be a celebrity because he wants a promotion. The cop who catches Cheetah’s a shoo-in for a step up in rank, so Burpee tries to connect Cheetah to any and every crime in the greater Seattle area. Shoplifting, murder, jaywalking—you name it, and Burpee tells everybody that Cheetah’s our prime suspect.”
“What got him so fired up about Cheetah?” I asked.
“Burpee was working out of the downtown precinct a couple of years ago, and an informant gave him a good solid lead on where and when he could put his hands on Cheetah. Burpee blew it by running his mouth when he should have kept quiet. That’s what got him transferred to the north precinct, and he’s desperate to get back to the head office where he can pretend to be a big shot again.”
“Police department politics get kind of murky sometimes, don’t they?”
Mary grinned at me. “Fun though,” she added.
Saturday morning I finished up the bookshelves in James’s room by ten o’clock. Then I took a quick run to the building supply store and checked out one of their sample books. They had quite a library of those—carpeting, floor tiles, wallpaper, imitation wood paneling, and several others. The idea was to let consumers do their shopping at home, I guess.
A word in passing right here. It’s not a good idea to give a group of ladies too many choices in the area of home improvement. Paralysis sets in almost immediately when you put twenty or thirty possibilities in front of them. I think Keats referred to it as “negative capability.”
“Did you really have to do that, Mark?” James growled at me late that afternoon. “If I get much more of that ‘What do you think of this one?’ I’ll go bananas.”
“It was a blunder,” I admitted. “I should have just picked up two of the damn things—one fairly nice and the other awful. That would have simplified things a bit.”
“No day in which you learn something is a complete waste, I guess,” he conceded.
I let that go by. “I’ll see if I can crowd the girls a bit. I do have to get that sample book back by this evening.”
It took a little pushing, but by suppertime the ladies had narrowed the choice down to five different samples. Then I took the book away from them, went back to the supply store, and bought one of each variety for the girls to play with. As an afterthought, I picked up a linoleum knife. I was fairly certain I had one somewhere among my tools, but I wasn’t sure exactly where, and it probably wasn’t in very good shape anyway.
I called Twink later to ask her if she wanted to go to church in the morning, but she didn’t seem too enthusiastic about the idea. That surprised me a bit. But then I remembered how worked up she had been before our trip last weekend, and I decided to let it pass.
The week moved smoothly along. The students had more or less settled down, my own studies advanced nicely, and nothing very remarkable was happening in the real world. Then on Thursday morning, the newspapers and all the hyper television reporters got the break they’d been breathlessly waiting for. Magnusson Park in the Windemere district fronted on Lake Washington, and an early-morning jogger came across the scattered remains of the Seattle Slasher’s third victim.
CHAPTER NINE
We gathered in the kitchen, drank Erika’s coffee, and watched that small TV set as the story—what little there was—unfolded. The latest victim had been another small-timer with a fairly extensive police record. His name was Daniel Garrison, and he’d been in trouble with the law since he’d been about fifteen. He’d served one year in the state reformatory before he’d graduated to the penitentiary at Walla Walla for a couple of terms. He’d never been a master criminal by any stretch of the imagination. He’d taken falls for possession of stolen property, burglary, car theft, assault with a deadly weapon—a screwdriver?—and a couple of attempted rapes. He’d evidently been a scrawny little punk with a taste for big women. On at least one occasion, his arrest for attempted rape had been more in the nature of a rescue, since his intended victim had been more than a match for him. She’d been stomping his face into a bloody pulp when the cops arrived.
“This one’s going to ruin poor Burpee’s day, I’ll bet,” Charlie noted. “I haven’t heard a word about any dope deals yet.”
“Our local cut-up seems hell-bent on deleting minor criminals,” James rumbled. “This one seems to be a carbon copy of the one who got himself scattered around in Woodland Park a few weeks ago.”
“Maybe he’s a conservative who’s taking the butcher knife approach to tax cuts,” Charlie suggested. “It costs a lot of money to keep these small-time punks locked up—about thirty-five thousand bucks a year per head, the last I heard. This guy with a knife has already saved us about a hundred thousand a year, and he’s only getting started.”
“I don’t think that’s likely to put him in the conservative hall of fame, Charlie,” Erika disagreed. “He’ll have to take out several battalions of these minor leaguers before he’ll make much of a dent in the state budget.”
I spent the morning in the library hammering out a tentative bibliography on Milton’s prose works. Then I grabbe
d a quick sandwich and hurried off to teach my freshman class.
Twink missed class again. That was starting to become a habit. I decided that I should have a little talk with her about that. It didn’t make much difference as long as she was just auditing, but if she moved up to taking courses for real, class-cutting was a sure road to flunk city.
That evening, Charlie, James, and I dropped in at the Green Lantern to see if we could pry some more details on the Windermere killing from Charlie’s brother Bob.
“We’re pretty much convinced that the Slasher’s picking his victims at random,” Bob told us. “There doesn’t seem to be any connection between them—except that they’ve all got fairly extensive police records. This Garrison punk wasn’t really into dope dealing. He probably used dope now and then, but we’ve never busted him for selling it. As far as we can tell, the poor bastard just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Serial killing stuff?” Charlie asked.
Bob shook his head. “The so-called serial killer almost always has some kind of sex hang-up, and his victims are either women or children. So far, the victims are all guys, and they seem to have been straight. There’s something else involved, and we haven’t been able to run it down yet. The thing that’s bugging me about these killings is the lack of noise. These guys were carved up like Christmas turkeys, and we haven’t had a single report of any yelling or screaming. Somebody should be hearing all the racket and calling in. These guys are taking a long time to die. The coroner tells us the whole thing takes fifteen or twenty minutes at least. The Slasher’s going out of his way to prolong the business and to make it as unbearable as possible. The locations are sort of secluded, but screams carry a long way, particularly at night, and so far nobody seems to be hearing anything.”
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