The Sign of the Book

by John Dunning

“God no, not after the first reaction we had.”

  “How’d you learn he could do this?”

  “He was sitting quietly in the counselor’s office and there was a magazine on the table. On the back cover was one of those Draw Me ads for an art school correspondence class. Suddenly he reached over and took up a yellow pad and drew the model. Then he put in the headline, in almost perfect block type, then he started on the text. We got him a sketchpad and some pencils, then an easel, then a lot of pencils and somebody to keep them sharp. He’s been doing it nonstop ever since.”

  “Have you talked to the DA about this?”

  “Not yet. We’ll have to, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “A young woman from the district attorney’s office made a few attempts to talk to him. We haven’t seen much of her lately.”

  I looked at number 54 in the upper corner. “I take it you’ve got more of these.”

  “Dozens.”

  “Could I see them?”

  “They aren’t all here, but sure, at some point. Here’s another one.” She opened her drawer and handed me another sheet, numbered 85.

  “That would be the twins,” I said. “Little Bob and Susan. Damn, their faces are so real.”

  “Notice the loving looks he was able to put on them. You can almost see the affection he has for them. And I understand that’s highly unusual. You don’t often get feelings like this…usually it’s just what he saw.”

  The twins were sitting in a room that I hadn’t seen: probably their bedroom at the house. Behind them were two bunk-style beds, and on the wall a picture, a mountain scene that Jerry had also rendered in detail, a picture within a picture. Beside it was a calendar with its days marked off and a clock showing that it was one o’clock in the afternoon. Light could be seen shining in from some window off to the left.

  “He did another one like that,” she said.

  I stared at the second picture. “It’s not exactly alike.”

  “The clock’s different. It seems to be later the same afternoon. The twins are gone and the light’s not as good.”

  “And the picture’s been moved on the wall.”

  “A little, yes. A foot or so to the right. Maybe he’s correcting something. That might be the whole reason for the second picture. He drew some of you.”

  “Really?”

  “Several, actually. In all of them you’re in a wooded place at night. Maybe you’ll see those at some point. For now—”

  “I know where they came from and I know what I look like.”

  “He seems to like you. Like the twins.”

  “I helped him out of a little problem he was having.”

  I knew she wouldn’t be satisfied with that, so I told her what had happened in the woods that night. I told her about my subsequent run-in with the judge and my night in the Paradise hoosegow, and this was followed by a moment of near total silence. Slowly the sounds of life returned: someone talking in the hall, the ticking of the clock on her wall. We made eye contact again and something had changed between us.

  “Did Jerry put words to any of these?”

  “He can’t write,” she said. “Here, I’ve got a couple more to show you. Do you recognize this man? He looks like a cop.”

  “Lennie Walsh. He was the arresting officer. A real bastard.”

  “Only part of the scene is shown…just that slash down the middle of the page. What do you make of that?”

  Lennie stood in the death room, radiating anger. He had a notepad in his hand and his mouth was open.

  “He looks like he’s screaming at somebody,” she said.

  “Laura, no doubt.”

  “Is he allowed to talk to her like this?”

  “Depends, I guess. He shouldn’t, if he is.”

  “He looks like an ugly man. I don’t mean necessarily in the physical sense.”

  “I know how you mean it, and you’re right.” I looked up at her. “This guy’s a caveman, Rosemary. He shouldn’t be allowed to talk to anybody.”

  “I wonder why there’s only that little slice of picture. Just on this one.”

  “The kid was probably seeing them through a crack in the door. Didn’t want them to see him.” I looked up at her and smiled. “But I think you knew that.”

  “I imagine I could’ve figured it out.”

  I went through all the pictures slowly, trying to burn them into my mind. A full minute later she said, in that same too obvious voice, “So I take it this is important.”

  “Oh, please.” I held my hand over my heart.

  A big piece of another minute passed. “Please,” I said again.

  “I’ve got one more to show you.”

  She had saved the best for last. When she showed it to me, I felt light-headed, almost faint at the implications. Again we were in the murder room. In the seconds after I had looked at it, I looked again and saw all the little things that didn’t matter. I could see on through the front porch to the fierce rain falling on the meadow. I could see, half-lost in that mist, the fence where Laura had been standing when she heard the shot. I could see a hint of the hill across the way, where I had staked out the place and watched the Keeler boys drive up to the front door. None of this mattered as I looked again at what the picture really showed: the broken police tape that Lennie, that incomparable moron, had used to seal the room as a crime scene. I could only read part of it clearly but I knew what it said, I knew the words POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS by heart: I could see that image almost any night in my dreams. This one had been partly crushed and tossed over the table.

  There was blood on the wall, bloody little handprints, fingerprints on the tape, smears everywhere. None of this had been mentioned in the evidence.

  Be still my raging heart. First the stupid bastard had left the kids inside, then he had gone back up there and washed off the walls in an effort to hide what the kids had done. He had committed a crime and a second fatal error trying to cover up the first.

  Rosemary smiled sadly. “Just be careful, Janeway. Let’s do this right.”

  37

  Erin and I finally talked about the case after supper. She listened in stony silence as I told her about my adventure with the Preacher, my burglary of his house, and what I had found there. Gradually her eyes narrowed to slits, she suffered through the account to the sorry end of it, and then, in a masterpiece of brevity, said, “Okay, let’s move on.” This was fine with me: she knew now and if she didn’t want to beat it to death with too much talk, I figured there was a reason for that. She was much more upbeat about my conversation with Rosemary Brenner. The savant discovery was exciting but it had a troubling edge to it. Why had Laura failed to tell us about this? Could she possibly not have known? “I think it’s reasonable that she never associated it with Bobby’s murder,” I said. “She didn’t know Jerry’s abilities would suddenly become important.” Still, Erin said, now we had to ask her these things. The hearing on our motion to suppress was two days away. “I’m going over tomorrow anyway, so I can do that.” She had to tie up some loose ends here in the morning and she should be in Paradise sometime after noon. “I think I’m going on ahead,” I said. “I want to look at the house again.”

  If she suspected anything, she didn’t ask. I hadn’t told her about the picture in the kids’ room. If the picture had in fact been moved, there was probably a reason, and I didn’t want to make that discovery openly on my own. I didn’t want it to come from me at all. We went to bed at eleven; I got three hours of restless sleep and was on the road in the dark early morning. I turned in to Paradise just as the sun was breaking over the mountains. Parley was already up when I arrived at his house. “Just in time for some flapjacks and eggs.”

  We sat at his table, eating a breakfast guaranteed to shorten any life span.

  “I take it Erin called you,” I said.

  He nodded and offered more pancakes, which I waved off with an appreciative gesture. “So where are we in the scheme of th
ings?” he said. “Do I want to ask you what really happened between you and that preacher man?”

  “Probably not.” A strained moment passed. “I think I should stay out of the court’s way as much as possible from here on out. Not be an obvious part of the team, so to speak. Just between you and me, though, I’d sure like to go back up to the house before the world finds out about Jerry.”

  “That’s no problem. The DA turned the house back over to us. I’ve got the keys.”

  He noticed my surprise. “Mainly what they cared about was getting those books out. The house had already been gone over, hadn’t it?”

  “That’s what I understand,” I said. “Miss Bailey did say they were treating it as a whole new crime scene.”

  “I guess Gill overruled her on that. Probably figured there wasn’t much to be gained by doing it all over again, not after Lennie’d been plowing ass-first through it. And they didn’t know what we know. If you still want to go up, leave those dishes and let’s go do it.”

  Twenty minutes later we came up the rise to the meadow. It looked different, peaceful now in the warm sunlight. We stood on the porch for a moment, gazing over the distant mountain range; then Parley unlocked the door and the dark interior pulled us in where death was still part of the air. I stared down at the black bloodstain.

  “What is it you’re lookin’ for?”

  “Just looking. Can I wander a bit?”

  “Sure. Long as you don’t mind me wandering with you.”

  I wandered into the library, where long rows of empty shelves now faced the two doors. “Not much to see here anymore,” Parley said.

  I went on back into a dark hall. I could feel his scrutiny and hear his footsteps just a couple of feet behind my own. At the end of the hallway was a closed door. I got down on my knees and looked at the doorknob.

  “Is it possible to have some light in here?”

  He turned on a dim hall light. “That’s not much, I’m afraid.”

  “I think there’s something here. You got a flashlight in the car?”

  “In the glove compartment.”

  “I’ll come with,” I said before he could ask.

  We retrieved the light together; then, again in the hallway, I lay on my back and lit up the bottom of the doorknob.

  “There is something here,” I said. “It’s black now, but I think it’s old blood.”

  He lay down on the floor beside me.

  “Don’t touch it, Parley. I think it may be a fingerprint.”

  “Damned small one if it is.” He shook his old head.

  “Can I open this door? I’ll be careful.”

  The door opened into the kids’ room. I rolled to my feet and gave Parley a hand, and he got up with a grunt. The room looked exactly as Jerry had pictured it: the calendar frozen on that day, the clock still going, the picture there on the wall where, perhaps, someone had moved it. I walked through the room looking at the walls. I looked out the window.

  “You see something out there?”

  “I don’t know, I thought I did.”

  He went to the window and just that quickly I touched the edge of the picture and tilted it slightly off-center.

  “Nothing out there. You sure get jumpy when you come up here, Janeway. Must be something about the thin air.”

  I laughed politely and waited for him to notice the picture, even though I had no way of knowing what if anything might be there. Parley looked up.

  He sees it, I thought. But he turned away and said, “You finished in here?”

  “I don’t know yet. Let’s look some more.”

  Goddammit, Parley, look at the friggin’ picture!

  He stared out the window, his mind obviously in neutral. To him the case was in good shape and I was spinning my wheels. Annoyed, I said, “It takes you a while to wake up in the morning, doesn’t it?”

  He looked at me curiously. “Why, am I missing something?”

  “Hell, how would we know, you’re in such a helluva hurry to get out of here.”

  “There can’t be much left to it after that mob’s been through here, can it?”

  “I wouldn’t say that. Didn’t we just find a print on the door?”

  “That could be an old Popsicle smear for all you know. What do you want to do, toss the place again?”

  “As a matter of fact, yeah. I sure would like to give it more than just a casual once-over. Look, we know Lennie locked the kids in the house. We’ve already found what may be blood or Popsicle residue on the doorknob. Whatever it is, you should be excited about it, not walking around in some stupefied state.”

  A flash of anger spread across his face, replaced by embarrassment. “Okay, so it takes me a while to get goin’ in the morning. What do you want me to do?”

  “You look on one side of the room, I’ll look on the other.”

  “What’m I looking for, more blood?”

  “Hell, anything. Look under the bunk beds with the flashlight. Let’s be careful, so we don’t contaminate it any more than it already has been.”

  “Hey, I’m awake now, you don’t need to belabor the obvious. What’re you gonna be doing while I’m crawling around over here?”

  “I’ll look in the closet and around the dressers.”

  I tried to forget him then: just let him be, I thought; let him find it in his own way and in his own time. But as time passed I found my patience wearing thin. What the hell are you doing over there? I wanted to shout. Does something have to rise up and bite you between the legs before you—

  Then he said, “Cliff,” and I knew by his tone that whatever was there, he had found it. I leaned out of the closet. He had the picture off the wall and was holding it by its corners. On the wall was a full black palm print with four partial fingers.

  38

  By midafternoon the house was again crowded with people. Erin and Parley had agreed that the DA would have to be informed, noticed-in in legal jargon, and people began arriving just after one o’clock. For the third time there was a full-court press by the prosecution with cameras and lights and people coming in and out. Erin came in at two. Ann Bailey arrived a moment later, looking furious. She and Erin nodded crisply to each other. Meanwhile we began building our record of what we had found there. “We’ll need our own photographer,” Parley said, but the only one in town was Hugh Gilstrap, who would also be our witness. “I don’t think that’ll hurt his credibility,” Erin said. “Let’s hire him if he’ll come up, deal with him like any other professional, and keep our distance otherwise.” Then she stood back and watched the circus, saying nothing in that first hour while the lab man shot his photos of the wall.

  Gilstrap arrived and duplicated the scene for us, and in the late afternoon we conferred with Miss Bailey.

  “We’ll want to send this palm-print over to the CBI in Montrose,” she said.

  “We’d have no objection to that,” Erin said.

  “It does mean we’ll have to cut this piece of wall out. I don’t think we could lift that print off without destroying it.”

  “Ann, it’s pretty clear that one of the kids made that mark,” Parley said.

  “Yeah, well, let’s find out for sure this time.”

  “You’ll at least agree that it’s not Laura’s print.”

  “I’m not agreeing to anything at this point.”

  “Ann,” Parley said patiently. “You’ve gotta know—”

  “What, that our deputy screwed up? Even if that’s so, that’s all we know at the moment. You want me to what, dismiss this case on the basis of that?”

  “This case is bullshit.”

  “Is it? Do I have to remind you that she confessed? She confessed, Mr. McNamara. The first words out of her mouth to your own witness were ‘I shot Bobby.’ She said it at least twice after that, and we have witnesses.”

  “This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Erin said. “We’ll see what happens at the hearing tomorrow.”

  “We’ll see,” Miss Bailey said. She
sounded confident but Erin met her eyes and put on that enigmatic face and Miss Bailey looked away. Was that my imagination or was it the real crack in the wall of ice she showed to the world? She had to be seriously worried about Lennie at this point. What she might not know was how worried she ought to be and why. She spoke to Parley. “Can we agree on taking out that piece of wall? Or does that have to go through an act of God like everything else in this case?”

  Erin nodded and Parley said, “The defendant gives you her blessing to desecrate her house.”

  “Then let’s get it done. I had a dinner date tonight.”

  A technician came in with a drill and a small saw. “Take that whole square, everything the picture was hiding,” Miss Bailey said, and five minutes later the piece of wall was free and bagged. “I want the doorknob too,” Miss Bailey said, and it was carefully removed from the door and bagged.

  Gilstrap shot pictures of the whole process. Miss Bailey said, “We’re going to seal the house again, I’ll need your keys, please,” and Parley turned them over.

  They wrapped up their work in the early evening. Miss Bailey stayed until the end and Erin stood off to the side and watched her. Again the house was locked and sealed with crime tape and we all moved outside to the cars.

  “Tomorrow, then,” Miss Bailey said.

  Erin nodded. “See you then.”

  That night we had a two-hour meeting with our defendant in the jail. Laura’s defense, simple and old as time, would be that she hadn’t done it. If she had confessed to anyone, she had done it under stress, out of fear for her eldest son.

  This was it, then: the murder of Robert Charles Marshall had been the work of some unknown party, for reasons unknown and perhaps ever unknowable. This fit somewhat with the shadowy figure Bobby had become, and the burden of proving otherwise would belong to the state. In death no one could pin him down: there were no files in his cabinet, no letters from the Preacher or anyone else. “He burned a lot of stuff,” Laura said. “He was always burning stuff in the yard. As he got older, he seemed to be slipping deeper into paranoia. He had become obsessed with his privacy.”