Idyll Hands

by Stephanie Gayle

  “Maybe you and she spent time together,” I said, trying a different tack.

  He grunted. “She might not have been pure, but she was damn close. I liked my women more experienced. Not like some Boy Scouts who weren’t as great as they seemed.”

  Boy Scout? Who was the Boy Scout?

  “She had the baby,” I said.

  He didn’t startle. He gave a slow, reptilian blink and said, “Thought she had it taken care of.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “She did. She crashed here the night before the procedure.”

  “She stayed here, across the street, the night before she was supposed to have her abortion?” I asked. If that were true, why had she gone on that winding walk for all the neighbors to see? Why stop at Bunker Hill? Why stand on a corner near the convenience store? Unless it was all misdirection. But why? She’d been planning an abortion. She had a cover story with her best friend. “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  “Nobody ever does.” His voice was singsongy. “She should’ve come straight over, but I wasn’t home. Running late. So, she took a walk.”

  “And you drove her to the clinic.”

  He wasn’t quick enough with his, “Yeah.” His nod lacked conviction.

  “No, you didn’t.” Why was he lying about this? Where had she stayed?

  “Just like the fuzz never to believe the truth staring you in the face.”

  “You don’t have an altar boy’s record,” I said.

  He slapped the chair’s arms. It squeaked madly as he rocked forward. “Everybody thinks I’m some sort of devil, like they didn’t all buy from me back in the day, as if they thought those stereos actually fell off a truck. Like I didn’t help fix their problems when they needed me. Nope. Now, it’s ‘Don’t go near Mr. McGee’s house. He says and does bad things.’”

  “Look, I only want—”

  “You want what they all want. Information. But when it comes time to pay, you never do. Same as it was, back in the day. Think I trust police?” He coughed, a hard cough that shook his body and wouldn’t stop. His face got red. I stood. He waved me back even as his body shook from the force. He’d rather die than ask for my help. After two minutes, he stopped. Sighed and leaned back into his chair, his face worn.

  “You never got that heart operation.” I looked down at him, at his deep-set eyes. He had long lashes. They made his eyes look more sunken in his ashen face.

  He tapped his chest and said, “They found a lump in my lung.” He hacked up a loogie. Spit it into a tissue. “Said they couldn’t do the surgery until the ‘mass’ was taken care of.”

  “Surgery? Chemo?” I asked.

  He laughed, low. “Probably both. I ain’t going bald and losing pieces of myself, bit by bit. I won’t be dragging one of them IV poles behind me while I puke every five minutes. I’ve seen what cancer looks like. That ain’t for me.” He looked scared as he said it. I wondered if the decision had been solely his. The Mob didn’t offer health insurance, last I knew.

  “Thanks for your time.” I opened the front door. A guy walked his dog past the house.

  Behind me Jack said, “Fucking queers. There’s three of them just in these two blocks.” He pointed ahead. “It’s not like it was.”

  “I bet it isn’t.”

  I left him to his memories of happier days and wondered how many he had left.

  DETECTIVE MICHAEL FINNEGAN

  MONDAY, JUNE 28, 1999

  1015 HOURS

  “What if he never committed another crime?” Billy asked. He’d overheard us grumbling that Daniel Waverly didn’t appear in the NCIC database, nor did Donald Waverly.

  “He’s an abuser,” Lewis said. He tossed a tennis ball overhead and caught it. “They don’t stop.”

  “Does that count as exercise?” Dix asked as he walked past. Lewis had been tossing the ball for a full half hour.

  “Sure does,” Lewis called. “I’m getting ready for the game.”

  “You know we play softball, right?” Dix replied.

  “What if he died?” Billy asked. He was allowed to ask these questions after he led us to the videotape. He’d won the detective’s version of a golden ticket, and he was getting full use of it today.

  “If he’s dead, that would explain why we can’t find him,” I said. “God, I hope he isn’t.”

  “Why?” Billy asked.

  “Because we want him to suffer behind bars,” Lewis said, using his dad voice. “We want him to know we caught him, after all these years, and that what he did to Elizabeth Gardner will not go unpunished.”

  “I think death is a pretty good punishment,” Billy opined. “I mean, if he died young.”

  “He didn’t die as young as she did,” Lewis said.

  “True… . I’m surprised he left the film behind,” Billy said.

  “That’s been bothering me too,” I said.

  Lewis set the tennis ball on his desk. “Why? Stan came into his store, surprised Daniel, yelled at him, and told him to leave. Daniel probably didn’t have time to gather everything.”

  “Yeah, but it’s damn incriminating footage,” I said. “I mean, all he had to do was take the film. What else did he need to grab?”

  “Shit,” Lew and I said, in sync.

  “What?” Billy asked.

  Lew groaned. “We assumed this film was what Daniel was working on that day, but we didn’t ask, not specifically. Maybe this wasn’t the film he was transferring. Maybe that’s why it got left behind.”

  It took him a moment, but Billy got there. “You think he was working on something else. Something worse?”

  Lewis said, “We need to call Stan.”

  “On it,” I said, snatching up the phone.

  Ten minutes later, I reported that Stan wasn’t at all certain about exactly where things were years ago in his back room, but that he thought Daniel had taken the film he was transferring that day, along with the VHS tape. But he wasn’t sure.

  “If he’s remembering right, Daniel wasn’t transferring the video of Elizabeth,” Billy said.

  “What was more important than that video?” Lewis asked. “You don’t think …”

  I shook my head. Daniel had killed another girl and was working on that tape the day Stan interrupted him? Maybe the second tape was more incriminating?

  “It happens,” Lewis said. “Only the caught ones are famous.”

  “We have no evidence,” I said. “And even if it’s true, how does it help us find him?”

  “You assume a pattern,” Lew said. “Patterns repeat.”

  “Young woman. Photographer. Trusting, maybe a little naive. I don’t know.”

  Billy watched us go, back and forth, as if we had picked up rackets and were batting Lew’s ball back and forth. “Are you guys saying he’s a serial killer?”

  “Lower your voice,” Lewis hissed. “Only thing worse than the boy who cried wolf is the cop who cried serial killer. Got it?”

  Billy, cowed, nodded. “Don’t they have profiles for those sorts of killers?”

  Lewis and I made noises. Cops like to argue about the value of psychology, of killer profiles. We’re suspicious about all the psycho-pop babble about childhood traumas and wounded psyches. Because we see people beat down by life every day who don’t murder people. Those people have suffered the same but have chosen to abide by what’s right. And, besides, the profiles always look the same: loner white male who was abused as a child and may have tortured animals as a kid in a lead-up to his becoming the chief monster of his neighborhood. Some of these facts are as accurate as bull’s-eye darts, and others? No evidence of them. And when you ask the psychologist why they were wrong, they say it’s a growing field, an inexact science. And that’s when the cops hear, “I’m making all this up, fellas,” and they swear off relying on these doctors ever again.

  What evidence of the common profile did we have? Daniel Waverly was a white man whose parents died young and who lived on his own. Was he abused as a k
id? His sister seemed like she might’ve worked him over, but was it a sustained pattern of abuse? Was he responsible for maiming or killing animals? One neighbor said he was. Did he fantasize about harming others? We had no idea what went on in his head.

  “If he was a serial killer,” Billy whispered, “How does that help?”

  “We could start looking for dead women,” I said.

  Lewis massaged his brow. Imagining the work that would entail. “Maybe he took arm bones?”

  “But he didn’t keep the arm bone,” Billy pointed out. “Looked like some animal did.”

  “Yes, but he separated it. The animal didn’t remove the arm with a weapon,” I said. “Okay, let’s look. Billy, you want to help?”

  He straightened, his spine a perfect column, his face bright. “Absolutely!”

  Lew smiled, in spite of himself. He shook his head. “At least one of us is excited.”

  DETECTIVE MICHAEL FINNEGAN

  MONDAY, JUNE 28, 1999

  1300 HOURS

  We found eight corpses missing body parts within the past twenty years. Four were men, and one’s missing appendage was something that made us all inhale and cross our legs. Four women. One was missing a foot, but that was an antemortem injury. She’d lost the foot in a childhood accident. Three women. One missing hand. Two missing skulls.

  We reread the reports, which were short. The woman missing a hand, Lisa Fairway, was found in Lake Zoar in 1987. Her co-worker was accused and convicted of the crime in 1988. Apparently, the cutthroat world of real estate was more violent than I suspected.

  “So, you don’t think he’s a serial killer?” Billy said. “Maybe his other victims haven’t been found.”

  “Lower your voice,” Lewis said. We were trying to keep the term “serial killer” on the down low, especially now that it looked as though Daniel Waverly wasn’t one after all.

  “Sorry. What do we do now?”

  “Keep looking for him,” I said. “He didn’t vanish into thin air. People leave traces.” And yet, look at my baby sister. She had disappeared for twenty-seven years. Although now, we knew where she had been for some of that time. We needed to know the rest. I poked my sore tooth with my tongue. “He’ll have done something stupid. We just have to find it.”

  “Billy, why don’t you call Stan back and see if he can recall what Daniel was doing the day he found him in the back of the shop? Maybe we got it wrong. Maybe he wasn’t doing something worse than transferring film that showed him to be a killer,” Lewis said.

  “I’ll revisit the database,” I told Lew. “I’ll focus on domestics.” He had another pregnancy appointment today with his wife. He hadn’t told me more than that, and I hadn’t asked. It was hard to know what to say.

  After an hour, I found a possible match. A man abused his live-in girlfriend. Name? Daniel Waves. Not the same, but awful close. The man listed was three years younger, but that could be faked.

  Lewis grabbed his coat and left, and I pled my case over the phone to a detective in Hartford. He said he’d try to track down the files on that offense, though he sounded less than enthused.

  “Look, my chief is a bear and he’s on a rampage right now,” I said, willing to spin a story to get what I needed.

  “Is that the gay one?” he asked.

  This was not the first time I’d been asked this question. Not since the news broke. “Yup.”

  “That must be weird.”

  “What?” I asked, playing clueless.

  “You know.”

  “No. What?”

  “Having a gay man as your chief. Does he wear makeup?”

  “Not much. Mascara and blush. Very tasteful. Accents his eyes nicely.”

  He hesitated, uncertain. “You’re pulling my leg.”

  “I might be. But I mean it about my chief. He’s big, and he’s mean.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

  That would have to do, for now.

  In the station, men started buzzing. Guys ran out the doors. What gave? Hopkins rushed over and said, “Bank robbery!”

  “What?” No way.

  “Federal Bank on Main just got hit. Call came through twenty seconds ago.”

  Sure enough, more guys were running for the door, shouting. “Robbers inside?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. Wanna ride with me?”

  “Sure.”

  It wasn’t every day the Federal Bank on Main Street got robbed. Last time the alarm sounded was in 1994, and it turned out some rookie teller hit it by accident and didn’t tell anyone, so four squad cars rolled up and officers emerged, armed, for nothing. Scared the crap out of the customers inside the bank.

  Today, the squad cars were staggered on the street, and I saw two dudes in cuffs, sitting on the sidewalk, Dix keeping watch over them.

  “Aw, shit!” Hopkins yelled, hitting the steering wheel. “We missed it!”

  We got out and talked to the guys, who informed us that all the cops had missed it. Turned out our robbers were carrying semi-realistic water pistols that didn’t fool one of the tellers or the security guard. The guard yelled, “Water pistols!” and a high-school football player took down one of the robbers. The second guy fell victim to the security guard, a mustachioed seventy-year-old who looked like he was having the best day of his life.

  Billy clapped a well-built young man on the back. Must be the football player. “Hiya,” I said.

  “Hey, Detective. This here is Dylan Jax. He brought down one of the robbers.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “Wait. Aren’t you the QB for the Marauders?”

  “Sure am.” His young face was tanned, and he stood like a rooster in a coop full of hens.

  “You’re the guy who caused the clamshell mess,” I said.

  His face fell. “That wasn’t my fault. Shanice did that.”

  “Because you told everyone your ex-girlfriend had an STD.”

  “Um, hi, I just tackled a bank robber. I’m a hero.”

  I looked at the guys on the sidewalk, hands cuffed behind them. They were in their late twenties and looked like drugs had driven them to this place and time. Too skinny and pale and shaking.

  “Those guys? They’re sad addicts with water guns. Congratulations.” I made the last word an insult.

  Billy’s face was a mask of surprise. Fuck it. Guys like Dylan Jax thought they ruled the world, and, for now, in this small town, perhaps they did. But that didn’t make it right for them to smear the name of a girl.

  I was hot under the collar. Rumors of Susan’s behavior, innuendos and gossip about her messing around, were swirling around the old ’hood, according to my brother Bobby. As if anyone knew anything back then.

  “I’m going back to the station,” I said. “You don’t need me for this nonsense.”

  Miracle of miracles, when I returned to the station, a hot pile of pages awaited me on the fax machine. The report on the domestic I’d requested. And all the pages, including the cover sheet, came through. The victim had been punched and stabbed with a serrated blade by her live-in boyfriend, Daniel Waves. That’s where the good news ended. The report included a picture of Daniel Waves’s arrest picture. He was short and had light hair. He didn’t have a pox mark near his eye or a cleft chin. He had a tattoo that read “Gangsta” over his left brow. Daniel Waves was not Daniel Waverly.

  “Goddamnit,” I whispered.

  Around me the station was loud, the men buzzy from the bank robbery. Their chatter was white noise to me, nothing more.

  “I leave for an hour and a half, and a bank robbery happens?” Lew said, dropping into his chair.

  “They had water pistols,” I said.

  “I heard.” He watched the guys laughing and cheering. “Chief’s gonna be sorry he missed the excitement.”

  “Will he?” Seemed to me the chief, who’d come from NYPD Homicide, would hardly rate this bank robbery “exciting.”

  “What you got there?” Lewis asked.

  �
�Daniel Wave’s file.”

  “That was fast.”

  “It’s not great.” I passed the sheets to him.

  He scanned the pages. “That tattoo,” he said.

  “Right?”

  “Why would any woman with half a brain date that guy?”

  “Women are optimists.”

  “You think?”

  “I convinced three of ’em to marry me.”

  “Solidly argued,” Lewis said.

  “Hey, detectives,” Billy said. “I heard from Stan. He said he recalls Waverly was inside the darkroom when he caught him in there, after hours.”

  “The darkroom?” I asked. “Doing what?”

  “Processing photos. He said that they were black-and-white, and he thinks they were nature shots.”

  “Huh.” It hardly seemed worth the bother of duplicating a key to get into a camera store to develop artsy nature photos, but what did I know?

  “Oh, and I got a match on the name.”

  “Nah,” I said. “It’s a dead end. The domestic? Doesn’t match.” Lewis showed him the photo.

  “Does that tattoo say ‘Gangsta’? Geez. No, wait. That’s Daniel Waves.” He read the name on the mug shot.

  “Right,” I said.

  “I meant the other name.”

  Lewis strained not to yell. I could see the struggle. “What other name?” he asked, managing to sound only mildly annoyed.

  “Waverly Daniels. You said reverse the names, and I did, but Daniel came up empty, so then I tried Daniels, like Jeff Daniels. Have you guys seen Dumb and Dumber? That’s like my favorite movie. So funny—”

  “You got a match?” I asked, cutting short Billy’s monologue on comedy.

  “Yeah. Waverly Daniels got locked up for hitting his girlfriend. She claimed he threatened to kill her. And guess where they met? A photography club run out of the town’s Continuing Ed program.”

  “When?” Lewis said.

  “1984.”

  “Where’s the file?”

  “I’ve only got the highlights, but I can get the full one—”