The Red Scream

by Mary Willis Walker

  “Grady,” she said, surprised by the rawness in her voice, “Molly here.” She cleared her throat. “I just looked at my mail from yesterday. There’s another master poet communication—same cheap white envelope, same handwriting, five more pages from my book, the part about the Greta Huff murder. And a poem.”

  “Another poem? I’m starting to hate these fucking poems. Read it to me.”

  “Okay. I think it’ll mean more to you, Grady, when I tell you that it’s postmarked yesterday.”

  Without touching it again, she read it to him.

  “Well, shi-it,” he said. “God, Molly, do not touch it.”

  She felt a flash of annoyance. “I’m not. Anyway, I’m wearing gloves.”

  “Read it once more,” he demanded.

  “Master poet, my ass,” he said when she finished. “I don’t know much about poetry, but I know what I hate. I’m going to send someone to pick it up right now and take it to the lab. You okay?”

  “I’m fine. Will you let Stan Heffernan know about this or should I?”

  “Let me take care of it, Molly. Now there’s no question you’ve got to stay out of this. What I want you to do is hunker down and stay uninvolved.”

  “Uninvolved? How the hell can I be uninvolved, Grady, when I get letters like this? Christ, he’s saying he’s using my book as a guide to killing people. And that my death is whispering in his ear.” The hand which held her coffee cup was shaking so much the coffee was sloshing over the edge.

  “That’s a good reason for you to keep out of it. What time does your mail come?”

  “Usually around two.”

  “Tell you what—I’m going to send a man in an unmarked car over about one. Let him get the mail when it comes today. You just stay in the house.”

  “I won’t be home. I work for a living, you know.” She softened her voice. “Do you know anything about David Serrano, Grady? I tried to find him last night, but the relatives he’s staying with over on South Fifth don’t know where he is.”

  “Yeah, I know. Listen, I got another call, Molly. But it’s real important that you don’t mention this master poet stuff to anyone. No one. Right now I’m sending a uniform over. Expect him in ten minutes.”

  She didn’t want to let him hang up. “Wait a minute, Grady. It’s our murderer, isn’t it? He mailed this before anyone else knew that Georgia McFarland was dead. When he writes, ‘Now you know it’s no one’s prank,’ he’s talking about that murder, isn’t he?”

  “It’s possible, Molly. Sit tight.”

  “Wait,” she said. “Maybe you should call Greta Huff’s family—there’s a niece. And a brother in a nursing home, I think.”

  “Don’t fret, Molly. We’ll take care of it.” The phone clicked and he was gone.

  Molly sat staring into her coffee, then lifted the cup with both hands to keep it steady and took a long sip. She thought about reading the pages from her book, but decided she couldn’t face it. Instead she went into her office, got a notebook and pencil from her desk, and brought them back to the kitchen. Very carefully she copied the poem into her notebook, trying to duplicate the handwriting as closely as she could. As she was finishing, the doorbell rang, startling her even though she had been expecting it. Lord, this was making her jumpy.

  A very young policeman stood at the door with his hat in one hand and an evidence kit in the other. When she led him into the kitchen, he pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and carefully pushed each page into a separate plastic bag and the envelope into another.

  After he left, Molly stripped off the clothes she’d worn for twenty-four hours straight, took a thirty-second shower, and dressed in her most comfortable old khaki skirt and white T-shirt.

  The last thing in the world she felt like doing now was working on the Abilene Angel piece, but it was due in two hours. She forced herself to sit down at her desk and read it from the computer monitor. When she came to the end, she felt like weeping; she hated every word of it, especially the ending. But she didn’t know why.

  It was the kind of high-interest, off-beat, Texas-flavored crime the magazine favored.

  It was meticulously researched. Yes.

  It was written with careful craft and even had a few nice phrases. Yes.

  It had some colorful characters speaking from the page. Yes.

  But the fact remained—she loathed it.

  She spent the next hour rewriting the ending. Then, without even rereading it, she hit the save key and swiveled around in her chair to switch on the printer. It was finished, not because it felt right or satisfied her, but because she had a deadline in an hour and because she always met her deadlines.

  She sent it over the modem to the office and gave the command to print it out so she’d have a hard copy for her files; she still didn’t trust computers completely.

  While it was printing out, she looked at her Day-Timer. Last week she had scheduled an appointment with Stuart McFarland for today at noon. She wondered if he’d keep the date after what happened to his stepmother yesterday, but she wasn’t about to call and give him the excuse to break it. He had a tight schedule at the hospital and it had been difficult for them to arrange a time to meet. This interview would give her a jump start on the Louie Bronk article—the beginning of the end of Louie Bronk.

  Molly arrived at the Lone Star Monthly offices at eight-thirty to find the usual uproar that accompanied putting the magazine to bed. She talked for a few minutes with Hazel Williams, the fact-checker for the article, and for a few minutes with Jerry Kovac, the attorney who vetted the piece for libel. She fended off a host of inquiries from other staffers, who had all read the morning paper and, under the guise of commiseration, wanted to hear the gruesome details about finding Georgia McFarland’s body.

  The summons from Richard came, as she knew it would, before she’d been there ten minutes. When she entered his big office with the wraparound windows looking out over Town Lake and the Congress Avenue Bridge, he was leaning way back in his desk chair staring up at the ceiling. Slowly he tilted the chair upright, keeping his hands clasped behind his head. “Molly,” he said, “what a thoroughly rotten day you had yesterday—first fighting with a good friend who really has your best interests at heart, then finding a corpse and getting caught up in all that messy police red tape. It must have been so vexsome.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and said, “But when a person’s morbid and death-obsessed, there’s no telling what she’ll do to boost book sales.”

  Just a twitching of a smile quirked the corners of his mouth. “Okay. So I lost my temper. You did, too. But let’s forget that. What happened yesterday changes the entire complexion of the McFarland case, of course. It’ll be months now before any of it comes clear enough to write about. And since you are actually involved, being first on the scene and all, surely the gendarmes won’t let you write anything about it now.” His smile broadened.

  He sat up straight, rested his right ankle on his left knee, and jiggled his foot up and down. “Listen. Don’t start in right away on the Griswold thing, Molly. Take a day or two off in Houston first, stay at the Galleria, go shopping, sleep late—God knows it looks like you could use a little sleep, and”—he looked at the familiar khaki skirt—“why don’t you buy some new clothes?”

  She sat down. “Richard, this has been the best job I’ve ever had.”

  “I know,” he said, his voice steely. “So don’t muck it up.”

  “I’m trying not to, but asking me to stop covering the Bronk story now is like asking a fisherman to stop just as he’s about to pull a seventeen-pound bass into the boat. I need to see this through.”

  “No problem, sweetheart. Go ahead and cover the execution. I saved you three pages.”

  “You know that’s not nearly enough. Especially now, with this new murder. My God, Richard, the man has had two wives murdered in eleven years and he says he’ll talk to me about it. The children are going to the execution and they’ve agreed to talk to me.
I’ll need at least twelve pages.”

  “Molly, let’s not go through this again. You’ve got a blind spot here. Trust me. It’s best to drop this for now. A monthly can’t compete with the newspapers on live cases—you know that. We wait and cover them in depth later if they’re sufficiently interesting.”

  She paused and took in a deep breath. “Listen, Richard. I have a proposition for you: let me do an outline and a few opening paragraphs for the story I have in mind. I can have it ready tomorrow. You read it with an open mind and then decide. Okay? Just give me two days and an open mind.”

  His face darkened. The smile was gone. “Molly, I know you can write the hell out of this. But it would be a waste of time. We’ve got just so much space in the next issue and it’s all spoken for. I can’t give more than two or three pages to Louie Bronk. Just his execution. Period. Finis. You can do capital punishment next year.”

  Molly couldn’t afford to lose this job. But she couldn’t knuckle under here either. “You said for me to take two days off in Houston. Just do this—let me take them off to write this outline.” This was a gamble. “Then if you read it and still don’t want me to do it, I’ll let it go and never mention it again.”

  His long face brightened. “Promise?”

  She nodded.

  “I want to hear you say it.”

  Molly remembered how easy it was when she was a child; just cross your fingers behind your back when you promise something you might not be able to deliver on. Adult morality was trickier. “I promise,” she said.

  Molly looked around the noisy, steamy cafeteria in the basement of Brackenridge hospital. When she’d phoned him last week, Stuart McFarland had agreed to talk to her about Louie Bronk if she could come meet him at the hospital. Since he usually managed a break around noon, they decided to combine the interview with lunch.

  At quarter past twelve she leaned back against the wall and began to doubt he was coming; she should have called to confirm. At twenty past, a group of men in white coats came walking down the corridor talking and laughing. As they approached, she saw that one of them was Stuart McFarland. He was right in the middle of the group, but he was the only one not laughing.

  When he saw Molly, he walked over to her and took her hand. His grip was firm and the fingers felt dry and cool and competent. “I’m late because we had an emergency. Of course.” His eyes were bloodshot and he needed a shave.

  “You look like you need to sit down,” Molly said.

  “Yeah. Let’s get some chow first. It’s not great, but it’s right here and it’s cheap.”

  Molly followed him through the line, amazed by the amount of food he crowded onto his orange tray: chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes, carrots and peas, three rolls, a bowl of beans with sour cream, a dish of fruit and a piece of cherry pie. She got a salad and an apple and followed him to a table against the far wall.

  “Is that all you’re having?” he asked as he unloaded his dishes from the tray.

  “Afraid so,” she said, sitting down. “The real tragedy of middle age is a slowed metabolism.”

  He smiled and began to eat immediately.

  “I don’t know if I got a chance to tell you yesterday, but I’m sorry about your stepmother.”

  “Me too,” he said after swallowing a mouthful of mashed potatoes. “Georgia was a really nice woman and she was making my father happy. She didn’t deserve to end up like that.” He sliced a big piece off his steak. “God knows my father could use a little happiness. He’s had so much misery.”

  “You mean in addition to your mother’s death?”

  “Her death, her life, her memory. I don’t know which was more miserable for him.”

  “Her life?” Molly said. “Her life was miserable for him?”

  “I suppose most marriages are pretty miserable when you look at them up-close. Theirs certainly was. But that’s an old story and I really don’t want to get into it.”

  “Okay.” Molly leaned down and pulled her little tape recorder out of her bag. “Stuart, it helps my accuracy if I record. Is that all right with you?”

  He shrugged. “Sure.”

  “I’d like to know a little more about you, Stuart. Where did you go to medical school?”

  “Baylor. Finished last year. Before I went, I spent a year working in Dad’s business, but it didn’t work out.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was lousy at it. And I hated it. I thought I wanted to go into medicine, but he talked me into trying the construction business first. Big mistake.”

  “Maybe it helped affirm your decision to go into medicine.”

  “I guess. Yeah, it did work that way for me but not for him. Dad doesn’t much like any decision he hasn’t made himself.” He managed a small smile between bites.

  He cut off another big chunk of steak. “I never did hear yesterday what you were meeting him for when you found Georgia.”

  “It had to do with this article I’m writing.”

  Stuart glanced up at her without lifting his head, just flicking his eyes upward. The eyes were full of color: the whites were threaded with thin red lines and the large hazel irises had flecks of gray and yellow mixed with the green. On top of it all floated a contact lens that from Molly’s angle looked like a thin layer of slime. “What about it?” he asked.

  Molly hesitated.

  Stuart opened his eyes wider and said, “Oh, I know. I bet he was trying to buy you off. Right?” He smiled and for the first time Molly could see in his prominent incisors a resemblance to his sister Alison.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He tapped his fork twice against the plate. “What a piece of work the guy is.” He shook his head. “But you’re here interviewing me for the article so it didn’t work. Good.”

  “Stuart, why do you think he’d want to buy me off the story?”

  “Oh, I suppose because he thinks poor little Alison can’t take it.”

  “Is he right?”

  He thought about it for a minute. “Well, that’s a hard question. Al is something of a mess emotionally. I guess I agree with my father on this—not with his trying to bribe you, but I agree that this won’t help her any. A few years ago she had what used to be called a nervous breakdown, but she seems to be functioning now. I’d hate to see you upset her equilibrium, such as it is.”

  “She lives with Mark Redinger?” Molly asked, though she knew the answer; she hoped he’d elaborate.

  “Yeah, for almost two years. She moved out of the house when Dad and Georgia got married, but she didn’t much like living alone. Al’s never been much for being alone. She wanted to come live with me, but I declined. She only lasted a few weeks on her own before she moved in with Mark. There’s no accounting for taste.”

  “You aren’t fond of your cousin?”

  “No. He’s a jerk.”

  “Your father seems to feel the same,” Molly said.

  “Yeah. It gives Dad fits.”

  “Because Mark’s her cousin?”

  “Among other things,” Stuart said. “Lots of other things.”

  “For example?”

  “Oh, Dad always thought Mark was a bad example for us when we were kids. And I suppose he was, but Alison and I both had crushes on him, especially Alison, didn’t know any better. Mark’s three years older than me and he knew about all the neat stuff—sex, poaching rabbits, evading parents, smoking pot.…”

  He lathered some butter on his roll and took a bite of it. “He’s kind of a sex maniac. It’s all he thinks about, or talks about. Let’s not talk about him anymore.”

  It was time to get down to the real business of the interview. “I hear you’re coming to the execution, Stuart.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah. How about that? I had to get my schedule here changed so I could go watch my mother’s murderer be put to death. My supervisor said that was the first time in thirty years he’d ever heard that particular excuse.”

  “I bet. But as a physician, Stuart, you are co
mmitted to saving lives. I was wondering if that makes it more difficult to contemplate the death penalty.”

  He pushed back slightly from the table and gently massaged his closed eyelids with his index fingers. When he opened his eyes they looked even redder and he had the confused look of someone who wasn’t quite sure how he had come to be where he was.

  “I know this is going to sound pretty bloodthirsty and unhealerlike,” he said, “but I agree with the Bubba majority on this. I think we need the death penalty. Not for deterrence; it doesn’t deter shit. But for retribution. I think certain terrible crimes demand that we respond with a terrible anger. It preserves the moral order.” He looked at her with a half smile. “Come on. You see some pretty heinous crimes in your work. Don’t you think that some people are so evil and dangerous that we need to get rid of them, just cut them right out of the society?”

  “People like Louie Bronk?”

  He nodded, picked up his fork again, and went after the little bit of remaining mashed potatoes on his plate.

  “What do you think it’s going to be like Monday watching him being executed?” she asked.

  “Well, probably easier for me than you. I witness death pretty frequently, you know. I doubt this will be much different.”

  “But the deaths you witness are not inflicted coldly and deliberately by the state.”

  “True. But I think death by sodium thiopental is one of the easiest ways to go. Some of the deaths we see here are messy and painful.”

  “Do you think it would be better if Louie’s were like that? Messy and painful?”

  He looked down at his empty plate for a long time before saying, “Do you?”

  “Sometimes,” she admitted. “When I think of the pain and fear he’s caused. But, then, I’m afraid I have a vengeful nature. What about you?”

  “Sometimes I feel very angry when I think about my mother. It really affected Al more than me. So I get angry on her behalf.”

  “I was wondering, Stuart, if your mother’s murder had anything to do with your choice of medicine—and emergency medicine in particular.”