The Always Anonymous Beast

by Lauren Wright Douglas

  “Yes, I do,” she replied in amazement. “They’re my colleagues.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. “All of them?”

  “Yes. I only know a dozen of them personally, but the other seven I recognize. Did you take these pictures?”

  I decided to level with her. “No. I found them in a file in the house on Redfern Street.”

  “Redfern? You mean the house you...”

  “Broke into,” I supplied, a little impatient with her squeamishness. “Two days ago. But I didn’t find these in our friend Harrington’s belongings. They were in the closet of a kid named Lester Baines. He’s a journalism student.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand. Maybe he took the photos for a journalism assignment.”

  “Possibly. But I don’t think so.”

  “Oh?” she demanded. “Are you sure you’re not just, well, letting your imagination run away with you?”

  I pulled Sandy’s computerized hot sheet out of the envelope and scanned it quickly. Then I passed it to Tonia. “Here’s a list of people who reported burglaries in the last six months, along with a list of property stolen. How many of your friends there,” I gestured to the pile of photos, “are on the list?”

  She read it quickly, then handed it back to me. “All of them. Every one.” She raked her hair quickly. “Caitlin, what’s going on here?”

  I took a swig of beer and launched into my theory. “James Harrington, Lester Baines, and Mark Jerome are students at U Vic. To help finance their education they’ve taken up burglary. I don’t know how the victims are selected, but Baines takes photos of them at their homes and studies their patterns of living. When they come and go, that sort of thing. Then, when they know the victims won’t be at home, the kids break in and help themselves. The house on Redfern Street looks like an electronics warehouse.”

  “Then they’re the ones who took the letters!”

  “I think so.”

  “And they’re the ones doing the blackmailing.”

  I shrugged. “The evidence points in that direction, but my guess is that they’re not behind it.”

  “Why not? Who else could it be?”

  “Why not? Because the crimes don’t usually go together. Blackmailers are a slimy lot. Burglars are usually a whole different kettle of fish. And it feels odd to me that these college kids would climb into that kind of sewer.” I took a bite of sandwich, chewed, and swallowed. “As for who else it could be, I don’t know. But there are only two possibilities. Either Harrington and company are the blackmailers, or they aren’t. If they aren’t, then they passed the letters to someone else.”

  “But who? And how will you find out?”

  I finished the last of my sandwich and beer. “The easy way. I’ll ask them.”

  Tonia gaped. “Just like that?”

  “Well, not quite. I’m going to cut one of them out of the herd. Run him to ground. Apply a little pressure. Then we’ll see what happens.”

  “What do you think will happen?”

  I considered this. “They’re just kids. My guess is whoever I lean on will panic. If I’m lucky, he’ll give me the blackmailer.”

  “And if there is no one else? If the boys are doing the blackmailing?”

  I smiled. “Then I’ve got them. I’m sure they’ll be willing to forget all about the letters in exchange for my forgetting that they have a house full of stolen merchandise.”

  Tonia looked at me incredulously. “What? You won’t report them to the police?”

  “Certainly not,” I told her. “I want the job done properly. Besides,” I reminded her, “I thought Val was eager to keep the police out of this.”

  Tonia nodded. “Yes. She was adamant. She figured it would be sure to leak out.”

  “All right then,” I told her, getting up to take my dishes to the kitchen. “Let me do this my way.” My shoulder was twinging; I gobbled six aspirin and went back into the living room.

  Tonia came to meet me in the entrance foyer. “Your shoulder seems much better today,” she said softly.

  I nodded, momentarily tongue-tied.

  “Caitlin, about last night,” she said, beating me to it.

  I shook my head. “This really isn’t the best time to talk about it,” I told her. She gave me one scorching, unmistakable look, and I just gave in. Finally, I did what I had been wanting to do for days. I reached out and ran my hand down that glossy wing of hair, my fingers registering that it felt as silky as I had fantasized it would. She put her hand over mine and we stood like that, one foot apart. What rotten timing. “I have to go,” I said. “I really do. I’m not sure when I’ll be back. But we can talk then. All right?”

  “All right,” she said quietly.

  “Thanks for being there last night,” I said.

  “You’re quite welcome,” she replied, giving me a megawatt smile.

  “I really do have to go,” I said, aware that I was repeating myself.

  She took her hand away from mine. “I know.”

  I took a deep breath and turned my back on her. Walking to my MG was one of the least appealing things I had done recently. I slammed the door in frustration and backed out onto Monterey. Now I had another reason for wanting to wrap this up. Saturday was only two days away—surely I could wait until then, I told myself. Maybe not, I answered, gunning the motor. Maybe not.

  Chapter Ten

  I found him in the Journalism Department’s drafting lab, sitting on a high stool working with an Exacto knife, laying out columns of print. A tall, thin young man with aviator glasses, a head of tousled sandy hair, and a worried frown. I recognized him as one of the two boys I’d seen in the Buick wagon Monday night. The department’s secretary had been extremely helpful when I told her I was Baines’ sister, trying to find Lester to bring him to the bedside of our gravely ill mother. Sometimes a little lie is necessary to serve a greater truth. A sleazy rationalization, but mine own.

  “Lester,” I said as I came up beside him.

  “Yes?” he said, looking up with a vaguely apprehensive expression.

  I held up the photo of Tonia he had taken, and as soon as he saw it he turned the color of putty.

  “Where...how...who are you?”

  “Someone who isn’t going to roll over and play dead.” I assumed my most menacing expression. “You’re in big trouble, Lester.”

  “What do you want?” he whispered, gripping the edges of the drafting table.

  “The truth.”

  He looked down at the neatly cut columns of print as if for inspiration. Finding none, he nodded weakly.

  I walked him to the cafeteria, bought us both some coffee, and found a table in the corner. He looked unhappy and nervous. I couldn’t say I blamed him.

  “I don’t know the right questions to ask,” I told him, “so why don’t you just talk.”

  He nodded. “I knew this would happen someday,” he said, his lower lip trembling. “I’m glad it has. I don’t want to do it any more.” He closed his eyes. “At first it was just a joke. I took a bunch of pictures of my professors—it’s easy to find out where they live. It was fun taking candid shots. But then things got... out of hand.”

  “Out of hand? How?”

  “It was Harrington,” he said with hatred in his voice. “Him and Farkas. They thought up the whole thing. My job was to take pictures of the profs—the ones Victor lined up for us to hit—and get their routines down pat. Then, when we knew they’d be away, Harrington and Jerome would go in and strip the places.” He swallowed half his coffee in a single gulp. “I wanted to stop. I begged them to stop. Or at least to let me out of it. But Farkas kept telling me I was in too deep.”

  So far, his story matched my suppositions. Except for one item. “Farkas who?” I asked him.

  “Farkas. Victor Farkas.” Ah, the Victor of the photo file. “Who is he? Another student?”

  Lester shook his head, eager for me to get it all straight, clearly relieved to be getting this off his
chest. “No, he’s not a student.” He looked around fearfully, as if the dreaded Farkas might materialize like an evil genie. “He’s Chief of Maintenance.”

  Chief of Maintenance. Wonderful. Presumably, he had access to all the faculty offices. And in between repairing the professors’ air conditioners and replacing light bulbs, he could—what? Ask them when they were taking holidays? Doubtful.

  “So how did that help him pick out the houses to burgle?”

  Lester looked embarrassed and adjust his glasses. “He just looked around. Usually the profs had out-of-town appointments written in their calendars.”

  “I see. Enterprising fellow. But then how did you—pardon me, they—get into the houses?”

  “Keys,” Lester told me. “Victor made impressions of any keys he could find. Harrington and Jerome never had to break in...”

  “Nice,” I said. “So when did your business turn into blackmail?”

  He looked as if he was about to cry. “With the last burglary. Dr. Konig. Harrington found the letters just by accident. He gave them to Victor, and he was real excited. He carried them around with him for days. That was pretty weird, I can tell you. Then out of the blue he announced that we were going to help him blackmail her.”

  “So why is he trying to scare her to death first?”

  Lester swallowed, the sharp bulge of his Adam’s apple clearly visible in his throat. I tried not to feel sorry for him. “Because he’s like that,” Lester told me, almost whispering. “He’s ... mean. And ... he’s got this thing about women. He just hates them. Calls them the worst names you can imagine. Says they just ruin good men.”

  There was something wrong here, and I wondered if Lester had picked up on it. Tonia certainly wasn’t ruining any men. And from what I had gathered, most of the campus knew it.

  “Does he know Dr. Konig?” I asked him.

  Lester shook his head. “Not personally. He’d done work for her, though.”

  “Of course. But as far as you know he doesn’t have any particular grudge against her?” I decided to be tactful. “Her philosophy? Her lifestyle?”

  “Oh,” he said. “You mean because she’s a lesbian?”

  Good boy. I owed it to Tonia that he be the one to say it. “Right.”

  Another head shake. “Hell, everyone knows that,” he informed me, shrugging. “She’s such a good teacher, no one cares.”

  I let that one go by, glad, however, to see such reasonableness in the young. Valerie needed supporters like this kid, too. “I’m glad you think that, Lester,” I told him, “but what about friend Victor? Isn’t it a little illogical that he should hate lesbians—they’re not ruining any good men.”

  Lester looked up, surprised by the question. “Yeah, I thought about that, too. It doesn’t make sense, does it?” He shrugged. “He hasn’t ever said anything about lesbians that I recall. Not specifically. I don’t think he makes a distinction. They’re all women to him so they’re all rotten.”

  What? That was ridiculous. Well, maybe we’d come back to that point later.

  “Who shot at Tonia, Lester?”

  I thought the kid was going to run for it, and I poised myself to grab him. His lower lip began to tremble again, and he moaned. “Harrington.”

  “Busy boy, isn’t he?”

  Lester nodded miserably. “Farkas said to shoot out her window, shake her up good.”

  I sat back, thinking. So the intention hadn’t been to wound Tonia; Harrington had just been a bad shot. My shoulder suddenly throbbed, as if in its own anger. “How did you guys get mixed up with Victor, anyhow?”

  Lester laughed bitterly. “He’s our landlord. He lives in the house right next to us on Redfern, so he’s always hanging around. He’s a real creep. And since you brought the subject up, I’ll tell you what I think. I think he’s sick.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Sick how?”

  “Well,” Lester said, blushing, “I mean, no one cares about people’s sexual preferences anymore, right? We’re all entitled to do our own thing.”

  I smiled. A little naive, but well meant nonetheless. I was getting a little tired of this beating around the bush, though. “Lester, are you trying to say that Victor is gay?”

  He squirmed. “Not exactly.”

  I sighed. This was like pulling teeth. “So what is he then? Not a heterosexual, surely.”

  “God, no.”

  “Come on, Lester! What?”

  Lester looked embarrassed. “I think he’d like to be gay. You know, do something about the way he feels about men.”

  So he was a latent homosexual. Very interesting. Thoughts of blackmail began to dance in my head. “What makes you think that?” I asked Lester.

  “Well,” Lester said, lowering his voice, “sometimes we all watch TV together, and he just can’t seem to keep his mouth shut. Every woman is awful, but every man is terrific. And when it comes to married men whose wives are cheating on them—” he shook his head. “It’s too weird. He gets so caught up in these programs—he seems to think they’re real. Yeah, cheating wives drive him a little crazy.” He seemed to remember the thrust of my question and changed course a little. “Him and Harrington hang out a lot together. They go to the gym, go over to Vancouver for the weekend, rent a boat, go fishing together — like that. I think he likes Harrington a whole lot.” He shrugged. “That’s all. Well, except for one other thing. He bores us to death with his war stories—I almost forgot about them.”

  “War stories?”

  “Yeah. He can sit for hours telling us about the good old days.” Lester shrugged “He was in some bomber squadron, and he remembers every mission they flew. They were finally shot down over France somewhere, close to the end of the war, and Victor saved the pilot’s life. The rest of the crew burned to death. That pilot was Victor’s hero, I guess. The perfect man.”

  Interesting. But I failed to see how this information could be useful. I sat back, frowning. If cheating wives drove him crazy, why wasn’t he going after Val, then? Why was it Tonia who was pushing his crazy button?

  “You said Victor carried the letters around with him for a while. Do you know where they are now?”

  Lester shook his head. “I have no idea.”

  It was too much to hope for. Well, time to go. But before I did, I’d have to make sure that Lester kept his mouth shut.

  “Lester, you’ve told me enough to get yourself put in jail for years. Victor’s right, you know—you are in just as deep as the rest of them.”

  He nodded miserably.

  “But I may be able to help you.”

  He looked at me skeptically, not wanting to hope. “How? And why should you, anyhow?”

  “Why? To have an ally in the enemy camp,” I told him honestly. “As for how, well, you’ll just have to trust me.”

  He continued to look at me, and now I saw something else in his eyes. Fear. And regret. He was already sorry he’d talked to me. After all, what could I do for him?

  “Listen, Lester,” I told him. “Victor Farkas, James Harrington, and Mark Jerome are all going down for the count. Make no mistake about that. I will personally see to it. I haven’t decided yet whether to turn them over to the police, or...” I began to give vent to my imagination, “ ... to take them for a boat ride. Or maybe they’ll have a car accident. Tonia and Val are my friends. Are you following me?”

  He nodded. “Who are you?” he asked again.

  I bared my teeth in a feral grin. “Just someone who doesn’t like to see other people victimized.” I wrote my phone number on a piece of paper and held it out to him. When he reached for it, I crumpled it in my fist. He looked up at me fearfully. “I want to know we have an understanding, Lester,” I told him. “In return for letting you walk away from this, I want you to try your best to find out for me why Victor has it in for Dr. Konig, and where the letters are. And I need to know this by Saturday morning. Oh, and I expect you to let me know if he has any other nasty surprises planned. Agreed?”

&nbs
p; He opened his mouth to protest, saw the look on my face, and thought better of it. “I can let you know about anything weird he might have planned. But what if I can’t find out the other things?” he asked me weakly.

  I shrugged. “Then I don’t owe you anything, do I?” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “No.”

  “So try hard, Lester. You wouldn’t like it in prison. You’re too pretty.”

  He looked at me in horror and I hated myself. I opened my fist and let him take the piece of paper. “Saturday, Lester.”

  “All right,” he said. “I promise. I’ll do my best.”

  I believed he would. I also believed his best wouldn’t be good enough. I would still have to do this on my own.

  I walked him back to class, noting the location of a bank of pay phones on the first floor of the Journalism building. But although I sat across the student lounge from the phones, lurking behind a paper for the better part of half an hour, Lester did not show up to use them. That heartened me. It meant that he was more afraid of me than of Victor. Maybe he would be useful after all. But the kid was a nervous wreck. I only hoped he wouldn’t come apart at the seams before Saturday.

  I drove home feeling a bit panicked. Time’s winged chariot, as the poet said, was hurrying near. And my thoughts had described one enormous circle—a zero. The concept might be fascinating to mathematicians, but it was a big fat nothing to me. I was right back where I had been Monday night. Well, maybe not quite. I now knew who the blackmailer was, but I didn’t quite know how to stop him in time. I could always turn Francis the ferret loose on him, but not before Saturday. Damn. The prospect of being able to blackmail Farkas was a sweet one. I was tempted to content myself with just getting the letters back. With them, Farkas held all the cards in this game. Without them, well, we might be able to negotiate. However, the question of Farkas’ motive was bothering me. A lot.

  I shuddered, recalling what Lester had said about him, an iron pumper, was he? So I could forget about any ideas of trying to intimidate him. And a woman hater, too. I groaned. That was going to make him a tough nut to crack. And I wasn’t feeling especially tough myself these days.