Bitter Instinct

by Robert W. Walker

  “DeAngelos and Shockley have been working the case together far longer than we have, Jess. Don't go crazy over this little mix-up. The notion had life breathed back into it by Sturtevante, who, while she's looking at this poet Leare as a possible suspect, does not want to believe her friend is our killer.”

  “I see, and when were you and Sturtevante going to in­form Kim and me of all this?”

  “When we got some evidence; we have DeAngelos looking into the possibility of separating out two kinds of poisons. One of Leare's poems is about someone poi­soned twice, by two separate lovers. What more can I say?”

  “Nothing... not a word.” he interior of the car remained icily silent the rest of the way to Second Street.

  When they entered the bookstore called Darkest Expecta­tions, they weren't prepared for the amount of dust and mildew, or for the prevailing motif—Early Draconian meets the Orgone Box. Fake blood wept from the walls and clotted in the iron maiden in the comer, the same one they'd seen in Maurice Deneau's apartment.

  “Got her for seventy percent off at the Louvre, a furni­ture place around the comer,” said the young man covering the register. “Really brightens up the place, don't you think?”

  Jessica stepped up to the guy, a bald, plump, earringed, postapocalyptic beatnik with a lot of facial hair and beady eyes; his nose had been buried in an Owl Going back hor­ror novel before the jingle of a bell hanging on the entry-way door had disturbed him. When James Parry, standing beside Jessica, flashed his FBI badge, he said, “Hey, cool! Just like Mulder and Scully in The X-Files. Wow, wait till I tell DeWitt.”

  Jessica introduced herself as an ME, which only height­ened the young man's sense of awe. He dropped the Go­ing back book on the counter, his tiny pupils enlarged, and with both of his hands propped on the counter, Jessica thought for a crazy moment that he meant to lean in to her for a kiss. “Wow... freaky, really, how can I help you?”

  “I have a series of names and photos here,” she replied. “I'd like to know if you recognize any of them.”

  “You mean did I know them personally, or as cus­tomers? Cops have already asked me the same—”

  “Regardless, we're not the cops, and we'd like to know.”

  “Sure, any way I can help. This is about those murdered kids, right? The ones the Poet Killer poisoned, right? Parry, reading the man's name tag, said, “Don't concern yourself with that, just look at the photos and names and answer the questions, Marc.” Parry's officious-sounding tone appeared to hit the young man like a blow, if Jessica read his reaction correctly; he seemed to lean back exag­geratedly, straighten, and take a deep breath, as if assess­ing the agents anew.

  “Tamburino,” he said to Parry, “my name's Tamburino to you.”

  As Jessica laid out the photos and names, she asked, “You always on the day shift, Mr. Tamburino?”

  “Day, night, all the time. It's mine,” he said throwing his hands skyward. “Bought out the owner, Nelson DeWitt. Took every penny I had plus a major-assed loan I'll die paying back, but it's a living, sorta.”

  “Do you recognize any of these young people?” she asked again.

  “This one looks familiar,” he said, pointing to Maurice Deneau's picture, “and I remember this guy,” he added, pointing to Pierre Anton's image. “I like guys.” He eye-balled Parry hard now. “Hell, they all look familiar. One time or another, I do believe they've all been in my store... These two for absolute certain.” He again fingered the pic­tures of the two male victims. “And this babe, always in here—browsing and sitting on the floor and reading in-house mostly. Seldom to never purchased. Had the need but not the bread.” He indicated Micellina Petryna with a jab of his left index finger.

  “What about the others?”

  “Not so regular, but yeah, I'd almost swear all of 'em's been in at one time or another, sure. Why? I mean anyone living around here? They're going to be a full-or part-time student somewhere, and students read, and therefore they wind up at my store. I order books for the classes at the community college and at University of Philly, un­dercut their on-campus stores, you see. Everybody knows it, so they come to me for textbooks and they browse and buy other kinds of books while they're here. Doesn't mean 1 had anything to do with their getting themselves killed.”

  “No one is accusing you of anything, Mr. Tamburino,” Jessica soothed.

  “That'd be a switch,” he replied, and winked. “You can call me Marc.”

  “The victims didn't have too far to come for reading ma­terial,” said Parry in her ear.

  “Only decent independent bookseller in the area,” said Tamburino. “Nearest Barnes and Noble is out at the mer­chant mall at the Trump Casino Hotel. If somebody col­lects books, or just has a love affair with the printed word, and he or she lives on Second Street... well, eventually, they come to me. That's the store motto.”

  “What is?” asked Parry. “Expect Darkest Expectations to book your darkest needs,” he said with a self-deprecating smile and shrug. “Made up the motto for DeWitt couple of years ago. Put it in the window. Told him he needed to get wired to the Web, that I'd put it on a Web site for him. But he's... he was re­sistant to change.”

  “I don't see that you've got any computers here,” re­marked Parry.

  'Took all my cash to buy the store. Computers'll have to wait.”

  “How long have you owned it?”

  “DeWitt's just putting the finishing touches onto the sale. He's retiring to a farm he bought in Ontario.”

  “Canada?” asked Parry.

  “No Arizona or Florida for DeWitt. DeWitt's... well... different.”

  “How long did you work for him?” questioned Parry Bout several years now.”

  “You think he's strange?”

  “Different. I didn't say strange.”

  “How do you mean different?” Parry pressed.

  Tamburino shook his head. “Contrary is all. Contrary as hell and with everything. You tell him Florida's warm year-round, and he counters with the body needs cold, not hot, to live a long life. Nonsense like that. You tell him that the moon's in the sky, he tells you it's a fake, created by the U.S. government to delude us into believing it's the moon. Different like that is all.”

  “What can you tell us about these people?” Jessica pointed to the photos on the counter.

  “Not a whole lot; some were heavily into the Romantics—the poets—while others liked Love craft, Poe, Kafka, even Chekhov, early Koontz, vampire novels, you name it. How should I know?”

  “Do you have receipts that might tell us about their pur­chases?”

  “Does this place look like I own the latest in merchan­dising software? Look around. I use an adding machine.”

  “Did any of them, to your recollection, purchase any poems by Garrison Burrwith?”

  “Who's that?”

  “Donatella Leare, then?”

  “Oh, sure, they were into Leare's stuff.”

  “And the poet Lucian Locke?”

  “Yeah, pretty heavily there, too. How'd you know?”

  “Wouldn't Scully on X-Files know?” Yeah, you're good.” He smiled. “But you know I've had both Locke and Leare in the store to sign copies of their latest works, so a lotta people came in just for the wine, cheese, and signature, among them your victims maybe. Kinda undercuts your cool score, heh, Scully?”

  “Then these two authors are big in Philly? Around this area, they're the biggest. Best thing since Byron, Shelley, and Keats in my humble opinion.”

  “Do you have any copies of their books?”

  “Right behind you, follow the poetry section to the Ls.”

  As she and Parry searched for the slim volumes of po­etry, Tamburino shouted, “You gotta love their dark sincer­ity, man. The dark sincerity of their profound words. It's like Poe and Byron all rolled into one.”

  Jessica returned with the books. “Highly recommended, then? Are these signed copies?”

  “Yes, they are.”

  �
��I'll take them both.” To Parry she whispered, “A hand­writing expert like Eriq might be able to do something with the signatures. Might even find match points between the signature of one of the poets and the killer.”

  “Both of these authors have cult followings,” said Tam­burino. “Lot of word of mouth about both. The kids around here love 'em like they love Ginsberg; really can't get enough, like what Burroughs these days is to kids who read novels.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Tamburino, and how much?” she asked, reaching for her purse.

  “I've got it, Jess,” said Parry, placing a twenty on the counter.

  “For the two signed copies, it's forty-nine ninety-nine,” Tamburino informed them. “Signatures make the books more valuable, along with the fact they're first editions.”

  “Forty-nine ninety-nine for two little books of poetry? That's like a dollar a page,” Parry complained. “Awfully expensive paper and ink.”

  “Locke and Leare keep my doors open.”

  Jessica snatched out thirty more dollars while Parry, dig­ging for more bills, muttered, “We'll put it on the company tab.”

  While Tamburino rang up the order, Jessica started to collect the photos of the dead young men and women when she noticed the walls. They had been done up with a gray, wrinkled wallpaper that created the appearance of leather or even stone. A sponge-painted finish picked up the light and reflected it back. Jessica looked about at the self ­consciously creepy, sooty store and realized that even the soot was painted on. So real looking, she thought. The place evoked the interior of a medieval castle down to the fixtures and the frames around the artwork. Wherever one found a break in the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a photograph was displayed, each depicting some dense forest or ideal­ized landscape populated with mythological creatures, winged nymphs and fawns and angels. Stepping closer to one of these, she did a double take, realizing that they were not photographs at all, but paintings, meticulously rendered to resemble photographs, and displaying an ethereal use of light that bordered on uncanny. The term magical realism immediately sprang to her mind to describe the paradoxical mixture of “realistic” and fantastic in the pictures.

  “Cool paintings, huh?” asked Tamburino, seeing her in­terest.

  “Yeah, unusual.”

  “Maxfield Parrish-inspired, I'd say,” replied the store owner. “My full name's Marc Maxfield Tamburino. Close look at the signature, and you'll see the artist's name. She's a friend of mine. I've had her in to sign prints and every­thing.”

  Jessica read the signature—Samtouh Raphael, it looked like. This meant nothing to her, but her eyes locked on one of the more unusual paintings, which depicted a beautiful woman lying at peace in a coffin, her lover holding on to her with one hand, lightly setting a book of poems into the coffin with the other.

  “Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” said Tamburino, a little shake of the head accompanying a large sigh. He lifted himself onto a stool, perching there like a heavy set contemporary gargoyle. “One of the most romantic gestures in all of history. He wrote a book of poetry, every poem inspired by her, his de­ceased lover. You see, when his love died, he had the poems bound and he placed his only copy into the crypt with her.”

  “Big deal,” said someone who suddenly stepped from the stacks, a tall, gangly woman whom Jessica for a mo­ment took to be Leanne Sturtevante until the woman's face came into light. She was athletically thin, her cheek and jawbones protruding sharply. Her movements gave the im­pression of a windup toy at first, but then their oddness meshed with the rest of her and one realized that she moved like a ballerina. Gangly like a giraffe but just as graceful, Jessica thought.

  Marc Tamburino instantly assailed the woman, obvi­ously well known to him. “Big deal? How can you say that? It was from the heart when the man did it. It was pas­sion beyond anything in the modem world.” She instantly showed her teeth in a curling smile, and raised her hand like a menacing claw, showing her long nails, painted green and black, each finger alternating in color. “A few years later, on second thought, Rossetti had the eternal love of his life exhumed to retrieve the poetry. That kind of romantic love is beyond contempt.”

  “Lucky for us the man retrieved the book,” replied Tam­burino. “Else the world would be deprived of those fantas­tic love poems.”

  “All the same, it tells you something about the value of grand dramatic gestures, including those of a poet smitten by love,” replied the book-laden woman, who was staring a hole through Jessica, as if determining what kind of un­derwear she might be wearing. The sexual interest in the stare was unmistakable. Jessica wondered how long the woman had been in the store and how much she had overheard. “That's a grim way to think, Doctor,” replied Tam­burino.

  “I do love a dark statement, indeed,” the woman replied, placing her books onto a nearby cart. Next, she opened her arms with an extravagant flourish and curtsied to Jessica, who noticed that the woman had had the crown of her head shaved and the tattoo of a bat inked on the bare scalp. Since, standing up, she was half a head taller than Jessica, the sight of the flashing bat came as a surprise. As she curt­sied, the woman said, “Detectives, this creature before you is Dr. Donatella Leare, full professor at the University of Philadelphia. A fortuitous coincidence, a kind of Jungian synchronicity, finds us all here at the same moment. I hope it leads to something... fruitful.”

  “Dr. Leare?” Jessica was surprised that this person, dressed in what appeared to be an Indian costume, with strings of beads and crucifixes snaking about her neck and wrists, could be teaching young people at a major univer­sity, but when she flashed on some of the unusual and ec­centric instructors of her own youth, she put the prejudice aside. “This is indeed a fortuitous meeting. We have been wishing to discuss the spate of deaths in the area with ex­perts such as yourself, people who have some connection with dark side poetry. In addition, we understand you may have known some of the victims. Isn't that so, Dr. Leare?”

  Jessica had to pull her hand away, the professor was holding so fast to it, smiling as she did so. Jessica won­dered what sort of relationship existed between Leare and Leanne Sturtevante.

  “We've been anxious to meet you. Missed you at the uni­versity and at your residence,” added Parry, staring.

  “Yes, well, I understand you wanted to speak to me. Dr. Plummer's message made that clear, but coming back to this dreadful, awful business, and the lateness of the hour, I simply did not wish to deal with it tonight, so instead I came to see Marc and purchase some books I'd been want­ing to delve into, and to clarify my thoughts, cleanse my mind of the wretchedness of existence, the human condi­tion, all that, so to speak. Books do that for me. Intoxicat­ing, really. Some people call me a literary junkie.”

  “Sounds like an escape,” replied Jessica, recalling what Vladoc had said about people who had an insatiable need to run away from reality. Did Leare do this through poetry, through teaching, through sex, or a mixture of them all?

  “Yes, all the same... bumping into you like this... well, it's obviously positive karma at work—that is, I hope it's positive. The moment I began overhearing your con­versation with Marc, I realized just who you were. Dr. Plummer told me I should expect a visit from you and an­other woman. You disappoint me, coming with a new part­ner in tow. Plummer told me of your visit to the school.”

  Parry quickly introduced himself, his eyes still unashamedly taking in the strange-looking poet, her dress, makeup, and nails. “What do you make of the dean's claims against Garrison Burrwith?”

  “Silly. She's really an intelligent woman except when it comes to men and managing her emotions. Dreadful what's going on here. It's like a totalitarian state where everyone is encouraged to squeal on his neighbor. As a re­sult of all this, I found even the wasteland of Houston a re­lief.”

  “You knew one or more of the victims?” Parry asked. He'd circled behind her, as if curious to see if there was any tattoo or lines of poetry scribbled on her back.

  “You won't f
ind what you're looking for on me, big boy. As to your questions, yes. I knew several of the victims. At one time or another, three of them were... had taken one or more of my classes. Aside from freshman English, I teach the Romantic poets, Women in Literature, and other classes. So now you have me cornered, what else can 1 an­swer for you? Am I upset over these awful killings? Ab­solutely. Do I know anything pertaining to them? Absolutely not. So, now you tell me, how can I help you? I do wish to be cooperative with you, Dr. Coran.”

  Jessica pointed to the photos still spread out on the counter. 'Tell us what you know about these kids.”

  “They all loved poetry—passionately, I'd say. Not your run-of-the-mill students when it came to beauty. Ironic, isn't it?”

  “What's that?” asked Parry.

  “That they should all die having poetry literally branded on them.”

  “How did you get that information? It hasn't been pub­licly released.”

  “You forget. I know someone close to the investigation, and I think we should leave it at that. Back to my point— perhaps your killer hates poetry lovers? Maybe a geek who failed a literature class miserably and is taking his revenge out on better students. That would certainly satisfy audi­ences of most TV mysteries, wouldn't it?”

  “We'll take that theory into consideration,” said Parry— not meaning it in the least, Jessica surmised, on seeing the glint in his eye as he peeked over the professor's shoulder.

  Stabbing at the photo array with her index finger, she said, “Did any one of the students you knew ever speak to you about the coffeehouse poetry fad going around Second Street?”

  “Ever eat raw meat? Ever sniff glue? Ever do heroin?” Leare shot back, somewhat inappropriately. “The backside writings? Certainly. It became common talk at the univer­sity as just the latest thing to do. No one for a moment thought it would catch on the way it has, and certainly no one could have predicted that it might lead to... to mur­der.” She paused, removing the stack of books from the cart and placing them, one by one, onto the counter. Jessica noticed they were all old paperbacks with lurid covers, mystery and suspense novels by Glenn Hale and Stephen Robertson. “Lot of jokes about the fad.” She continued to talk in a casual, breathy voice. “You know, like how do you do a rewrite, anal alliteration, anal performance, do you show it on a first date, all that.”