The Book of Mirrors

by E. O. Chirovici

  One of the addresses looked familiar and caught my attention, but the name didn’t ring a bell: Jesse E. Banks. The call had lasted for fifteen minutes and forty-one seconds. Then I remembered what the address was, so I checked a few other things. It was obvious that back then, in 1983, this name and number hadn’t been relevant to the investigators, though to me they were very important. But in December 1987, when I’d begun investigating Wieder’s death, it hadn’t even entered my head to connect one case to the other, since one had happened four years earlier.

  Then it hit me. I remembered the expression used by Derek Simmons the other day when he’d stopped our conversation; it had intrigued me at the time. I checked some details on Wikipedia and realized that I was right.

  I spent the next two hours tying together all the details of the two cases, the Simmons case and the Wieder case, and everything began to fit. I called an assistant with the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office and we met for a long talk, with all my papers on the table. He phoned Chief Brocato, saw to all the details, and then I went home.

  I had a Beretta Tomcat .32, which I kept in the closet downstairs. I took it out of the box, checked the safety and trigger, and inserted the clip, which held seven rounds. I’d gotten it as a going-away present from the department when I retired, and I’d never used it. I wiped the oil off with a rag and put the gun in my jacket.

  I parked near the police station and waited behind the wheel for ten minutes, telling myself that I still had time to change my mind, to turn back, to forget about the whole thing. Diana would be arriving in a couple of hours, and I’d already made a reservation at a Korean restaurant in Palisades Park.

  But I couldn’t let it lie. I got out of the car and set off toward the house at the bottom of the road. An old Percy Sledge song was going round and round in my head: “The Dark End of the Street.” The gun in my pocket banged against my hip at every step, giving me the feeling that something bad was going to happen.

  I climbed the wooden steps and rang the bell. Derek Simmons opened the door a few moments later and didn’t look at all surprised to see me.

  “Well, you again . . . Come on in.”

  He turned on his heel and vanished down the hall, leaving the door open.

  I followed him, and when I reached the living room, I noticed two large suitcases and a duffel bag next to the couch.

  “Going somewhere, Derek?”

  “Louisiana. Leonora’s mom died yesterday, and she has to stay there for the funeral and to sell the house. Said she didn’t want to be there alone, so I thought a change wouldn’t do me any harm. Coffee?”

  “Thanks.”

  He went into the kitchen, poured the coffee, and returned with two large mugs, one of which he set in front of me. Then he lit another cigarette and studied me with the blank expression of a poker player trying to guess the other guy’s cards.

  “What do you want from me this time?” he asked. “Got a warrant in your pocket or just glad to see me?”

  “Told you I retired years ago, Derek.”

  “You never know, man.”

  “When did you get your memory back, Derek, in ’87? Sooner? Or did you never lose it and just faked the whole thing?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “ ‘Now it’s time to play ball; thank you for your cooperation.’ You said you were in the stadium when the announcer said that, after that eight-minute standing ovation in honor of Thurman Lee Munson, who’d died in a plane accident in Ohio. But that was in ’79, Derek. How did you know that in ’79 you’d been in the Bronx, in the stadium, and that you’d heard it with your own ears?”

  “Told you that after the accident I’d tried to learn everything about myself and—”

  “Bullshit, Derek. You can’t learn something like that, you can only remember it. Did you keep a diary in ’79, did you write it down? Don’t think so. And another thing: Why did you call Joseph Wieder on the morning you’d allegedly found your wife’s body? When did you first meet him, in fact? When and how did you arrange with him to get an expert’s opinion in your favor?”

  For a while he just sat there smoking and watching me carefully, without saying anything. He was calm, but the wrinkles on his face looked slightly deeper than I remembered.

  Then he asked, “Are you wearing a wire, man?”

  “No.”

  “Mind if I check?”

  “Let me show you I’m clean.”

  I stood up, turned back the lapels of my jacket, then slowly unbuttoned my shirt and turned around.

  “See, Derek? No wires.”

  “Okay.”

  I sat back down on the couch and waited for him to start talking. I was sure that he’d been waiting a long time to tell somebody the whole story. And I was also sure that once he left town, he was never coming back. I’d come across plenty of guys like him. There comes a moment when you know that the man in front of you is ready to tell the truth, and at that moment it’s as if you hear a click, like when you dial the right combination to open a safe. But you can’t rush things. You’ve got to let them take their own course.

  “You’re one hell of a cop . . .” He paused. “How did you find out that I talked to Wieder on the phone that morning?”

  “I looked at the list of calls. Wieder had only just bought the house, and the phone number hadn’t been transferred to his name yet. The former owner, a guy by the name of Jesse E. Banks, had passed away, and the house had been sold through a real estate agency. The police who checked the calls reached a dead end, so they dropped the lead. Even if they’d found Wieder’s name, it didn’t have any relevance to the case at the time. All the same, you were reckless. Why did you phone Wieder from your home number, Derek? Weren’t there any phone booths nearby?”

  “I didn’t want to leave the house,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette, which he’d smoked down to the filter. “I was afraid of being seen. And I had to talk to the guy quick. I didn’t know whether they’d arrest me on the spot, when the cops got there.”

  “You killed her, didn’t you? Your wife, I mean.”

  He shook his head.

  “No, I didn’t, even though she’d have deserved it. It was exactly like I said—I found her there in a pool of blood. But I knew she’d been cheating on me . . .”

  Over the next half hour, he told me the following story:

  He’d been admitted to a mental hospital during his last year of high school, and his life fell apart. Everybody thought he was crazy, and when he got out, his schoolmates avoided him. He gave up on the idea of going to college and took a menial job. His father picked up and left. Since his mother had died when he was very young, he was completely alone, and for about ten years he lived like a robot, working and continuing his medical treatment. They told him he’d have to stay on medication for the rest of his life, but there were nasty side effects. In the end, he stopped taking the pills.

  Then he met Anne, nine years after he finished high school, and everything changed, at least in the beginning. He fell in love with her, and she seemed to be in love with him. Anne, he said, had grown up in an orphanage in Rhode Island and had left at the age of eighteen. She’d slept rough on the streets, had gotten mixed up with some gangs, and by the age of nineteen she’d become a hooker in Atlantic City. She’d hit rock bottom shortly before she met Derek, in the parking lot of a motel in Princeton, where he was repairing the heating system.

  Anne moved in with him, and they became lovers. About two weeks later, two armed tough guys turned up at the door and told him the girl owed them money. Derek didn’t say anything. He went to the bank, withdrew five thousand bucks, everything he’d saved, and gave it to them. The guys took it and said they’d leave her alone after that. About two months later, before Christmas, Derek proposed to Anne, and she accepted.

  For a while, Derek said, things seemed to be going well, but two years later everything started to go to hell. Anne got drunk and cheated on him whenever she got the chance. She didn’t ha
ve relationships; rather, it was just a string of casual sexual encounters with strangers, and she didn’t seem to care whether Derek found out or not. She kept up appearances in public, but when they were alone together she changed her tune—she insulted him and humiliated him, calling him a crazy person and a failure, and chiding him for their cheap existence and for his not being able to earn more money. She accused him of not giving her a more interesting life and constantly threatened to leave him.

  “She was a real bitch, man. When I told her I wanted us to have kids, do you know what she said? That she didn’t want some retards like me. That’s what she told the guy who’d picked her up in a parking lot and married her. Why did I put up with it all? Because I had no choice—I was crazy about her. She could have done anything, but I still wouldn’t have left her. In fact, I was always worried that she might leave me for some moron. When I walked down the street, I got the feeling that everybody was laughing at me. When I met guys around town, I’d always wonder whether they’d screwed her. But I still couldn’t kick her out.”

  After a while, however, her behavior changed, and Derek realized that something had happened to her. Anne was dressing better, putting on makeup. She’d stopped drinking and seemed happier than ever. She started ignoring Derek completely. She’d come home late and go out early in the morning, so they barely saw each other and rarely talked. She couldn’t even be bothered to argue with him.

  It wasn’t long before he found out what was going on.

  “I’ll cut the shit,” he said. “I followed her and saw her going into a hotel room with an older guy. Believe it or not, I didn’t say anything to her about it. I just prayed he’d dump her and that it’d all be over. I remembered how horrible it’d been when I was alone, before I met her.”

  “Who was the guy?”

  “Joseph Wieder. He was rich, powerful, and famous. And he didn’t have anything better to do than to get mixed up with my wife, a woman about thirty years younger than him. I never found out for sure how the hell they’d gotten together. A lot of professors and students from the university used to hang around that coffee shop where she was working, so probably that’s how they’d met. I was a bit crazy, that’s true, but not an idiot—I knew that Wieder would do everything he could to avoid getting involved in a scandal.”

  So on that morning when his wife was killed, Derek called the professor, whose home number he’d found previously rummaging through Anne’s stuff. He told him about the murder and that the police would probably try to make him the scapegoat, given the circumstances. He said he’d drag Wieder into the mess, because he knew they’d been lovers. He also said that he’d been admitted to a mental hospital long ago, so it would be a piece of cake for Wieder to arrange for him to be found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a forensic psychiatric hospital.

  Finally Simmons got busted, accused of murdering his wife. Being declared legally insane, he was committed to Trenton Psychiatric Hospital. Wieder visited him many times, under the pretext that he had a particular professional interest in his case. He promised that within three months Simmons would be transferred to the Marlboro hospital, where the conditions would be much better. But before that could happen, Simmons was attacked in Trenton by one of the other patients.

  “When I came out of the coma, I didn’t recognize anybody, and I didn’t even know how I’d ended up in the hospital. I couldn’t even remember my own name. They did all kinds of tests on me, and they concluded that I wasn’t faking my amnesia. I really couldn’t remember anything. To me, Wieder became a friendly, caring doctor, touched by the terrible situation I was in. He told me that he was going to treat me free of charge and have me moved to Marlboro. I was overwhelmed by his kindness.

  “I stayed at Marlboro for a few months without recovering my memory. Sure, I began to find out things: who I was, who my parents were, what high school I went to—stuff like that. None of it was good: mom’s death, the mental hospital, a wretched job, a cheating wife, and an accusation of murder. I gave up on trying to find out. The guy I’d been was a loser. I decided to start over when I got out.

  “It was Wieder who was in charge of the panel that agreed to my release. I didn’t even have anywhere to go, so he found me a place to stay, not far from his house, and he gave me a job as a handyman. The house looked good, but it was old, and things always needed repairing. I don’t know whether you’re aware of this, but with retrograde amnesia you only forget about stuff connected with your identity but not the rest, the skills you have. You don’t forget how to ride a bike, but you can’t remember when you learned, if you know what I mean. So, I knew how to repair things, but I didn’t have a clue when the hell I’d learned how.”

  To him, Derek went on, Joseph Wieder was a saint. He made sure Derek followed his treatment plan, he paid him a tidy wage every month for the repairs he did, he took him fishing, and they spent the evening together at least once a week. Once, he brought him to the university and hypnotized him, but he didn’t tell Derek the result of the session.

  One evening in the middle of March 1987, Derek was at home, flicking through the channels, looking for a movie to watch. After a while he came across a news item on NY1, about a guy from Bergen County who’d killed himself. Hey, that’s Stan Marini, he said to himself when he saw the guy’s photo on the screen. He was about to change the channel when he realized that Stan had been one of the maintenance crew guys when he worked for Siemens. Stan had gotten married around the same time he had and had moved to New York.

  He also realized what this meant. He was remembering something that nobody else had told him about and that he hadn’t read about.

  “It was just like down there in Texas when they strike oil and it shoots up out of the ground. A lid had been lifted off of all that stuff buried in my mind, and now bang!, it was all coming to the surface. I can’t even describe the feeling, man. It was like watching a movie at a hundred times the normal speed.”

  He wanted to call the man he regarded as his benefactor right away, but then he decided that it was too late in the evening to bother him. He was afraid he’d forget everything again, so he found a notebook and started to write down everything that came into his mind.

  Derek stood up and asked me whether I wanted to go out into the backyard. I’d have preferred to stay where I was, because I didn’t know whether he had a gun hidden somewhere, but I didn’t want to upset him, so I followed. He was almost as tall as me and much stronger. In the event of a struggle, I wouldn’t have stood a chance, unless I used the gun in my pocket. I wondered if he’d noticed it.

  I followed him out into an untidy backyard, with tufts of grass sprouting from the patches of bare earth and between fragments of paving stones, with a rusty swing in the middle. He took a deep breath of the warm afternoon air, lit another cigarette, and then continued his story, without looking into my eyes.

  “I remembered everything as if it were yesterday: how I met Anne, how it’d been good at first, but that then she’d started cheating on me, about how I’d found out she was having an affair with that damn college professor, about the way she made a fool of me, and then what had happened that morning, the talk with Wieder, my arrest, my hard time in the hospital.

  “I studied the labels of the pills Wieder had prescribed for me; then I went to a drugstore and asked the guy there whether they were for amnesia. He told me they were for flu and indigestion. The guy I’d thought of as my pal and benefactor for years was in fact just a guardian frightened that one day I’d remember what had really happened. He’d kept me close by so that he could keep an eye on me, na’mean? Man, I felt like my head was exploding . . .

  “For a few days I didn’t even leave the house, and when Wieder came over, I told him I had a headache and just wanted to sleep. I almost felt sorry that I’d gotten over the fucking amnesia.”

  “Did Wieder sense anything?”

  “Don’t think so. He had his mind on his own business. I was just a piece of old
furniture to him. In fact, I think I’d become invisible to him, I guess. He wasn’t scared anymore that I might say or do something. He wanted to go to Europe.”

  “And then you killed him.”

  “I’d always thought of doing it, after I got my memory back, but I didn’t want to go to jail or back to the nuthouse. That day I’d forgotten my toolbox at his house. I’d fixed the downstairs toilet earlier, and we’d eaten lunch together. I had a job early the next morning, near where I lived, and I decided to go to Wieder’s to get the toolbox. Before I rang the bell, I went around the house to the backyard and saw that the lights in the living room were on. He was sitting at the table with that student, Flynn.”

  “Did you see that guy I told you about, Frank Spoel?”

  “No, but from what you told me, I was probably just one step from bumping into him. I came back around the front of the house, unlocked the door, and saw the toolbox by the coat rack; Wieder had probably found it in the bathroom and then put it there for me. I took it and left. He didn’t even realize I’d been there. They were both talking in the living room.

  “On the way home, I said to myself, If anything happens to the professor, that guy will be the prime suspect. He’s head over heels in love with that girl the old man is after, so that would be the motive.

  “I went to the bar at around eleven, just so I could be seen there, as an alibi. I chatted with the owner, who knew me. He was getting ready to close. I knew that he never wore a watch, and he didn’t have a clock on the wall. Before I left, I said, ‘Hey, Sid, it’s midnight, I’d better get going.’ When he testified, he said it was midnight, never remembering it was me who told him that, na’mean?

  “I still didn’t know what I was going to do; it was like in a dream—I don’t know how to describe it. I wasn’t sure the student had left, the weather was still bad, it was snowing heavily, and I thought that maybe Wieder would invite him to stay overnight. I had a leather sap, which I’d found a few months earlier in the glove box of a car I’d been repairing. Don’t know whether you’ve ever handled one, but it’s a damn good weapon.”