by John Philpin
“Wolf killed a friend of mine. He almost got me. But that isn’t all of it.”
“You can’t leave it alone, can you?”
“Could you walk away from politics?”
He laughed. “They’ll carry me away.”
I sighed. “I’m starting to feel the same way. Maybe I can’t quit.”
THE SENATOR’S DRIVER DROPPED ME AT THE Willard.
I sat in my darkened room, smoking a cigarette, running my fingers over the brass phoenix. I had picked up the cigarettes at Jewell’s. I was pissed off. It was that simple. Even after six years, smoking was an easy habit to fall back into, and it was comforting.
I tossed the brass figure of the phoenix onto the foot of the bed. Wolf was inside my head. We were going to play mind games.
As I watched the smoke circle toward the ceiling, I drifted back to that Christmas Day in the seventies, when Ray Bolton arrested Jeremy Stoneham for the murder of Cora Riordan. Late that night I sat in my study and scribbled a note to Ray.
This killer is pure predator, a brilliant one, unlike anyone we have encountered. He is Stoneham’s “wolfman.” He spoke to Jeremy, whispered in his ear. The voice that young man heard is real.
I grabbed the brass phoenix from the bed.
When you want to deliver a message, nobody can stop you, lad, can they? You don’t guess at anything. You reason everything through, then skate around the edges, soften us up, and have one hell of a good time for yourself.
I stubbed out my cigarette, walked to the window, and gazed into the distance.
“Whisper in my ears, lad,” I muttered. “Talk to me. Tell me how you got Dexter Willoughby, an FBI agent, to walk into your arms.”
AFTER LEAVING MY GIFT FOR DR. FRANK, I WENT prowling. I had work to do.
I found a gray van with white magnetic signs stuck to both doors: Valley Carpet. It was parked at the end of an alley off lower Pennsylvania Avenue.
I walked down a short flight of concrete steps illuminated by a blue, overhead light and pulled open a heavy metal door. The interior held its own shades of gray and blue—cigarette smoke, and the unmistakable aroma of marijuana.
A black man my size, perhaps a bit heavier, sat in his coveralls at the bar sipping watered whiskey and chain-smoking Camels. The Valley Carpet emblem decorated his left pocket. A patch on his right pocket advertised that he was Nick.
I slipped onto the stool next to Nick’s, ordered a draft, then turned to watch the black drinkers and smokers watch me.
“You a cop?” the bartender asked.
She was a slender, young woman in a hot pink halter top, sitting in a wheelchair. There was a wooden platform built behind the bar to raise her up, and the shelves of glasses and bottles had been lowered so that she could reach them.
“Nick here can vouch for me,” I said.
“What?” he asked, twisting around to look at me. “I don’t know you.”
“You installed my carpet about six months ago. I guess I shouldn’t expect you to remember that. You lay carpet every day.”
From somewhere inside his alcohol-fogged brain, he studied my face. The desire to agree with what has been presented as friendly and familiar is great. “You look like somebody I seen before. Northwest somewhere?”
“Georgetown.”
Fie avoided calling me by a name that he thought would be wrong. He had no way to know that I would have responded to any name.
“What are you doing down here?” he asked.
“The music,” I said. “I’ve got the ‘Blues Velvet’ CD. Only heard them live a couple of times.”
“You got good taste, my man,” Nick said, nodding toward the trio on the small stage, then turning to the bartender. “I’ll vouch for this guy, Wheels. He ain’t gonna be no trouble.”
“Thanks, Nick,” I said.
He waved me off. “No big deal. Wheels sees a white guy walk in, she figures it’s the law or some other kind of trouble. Can’t blame her.”
I nodded, sipped my beer, listened to the music.
“What kind of carpet did I put down?”
“Pardon?”
“The rug I laid.”
“The wife picked it out,” I said. “It’s beige. That’s all I know. I hate beige.”
Nick laughed. “I laid some shit today, I swear it was the color of pea soup. The lady loved that stuff. Guy looked like he was gonna puke.”
We both laughed.
I left the bar seconds after Nick did. I walked up the three concrete steps outside the door and watched as the big man staggered down the alley to the parking area. As I considered the most efficient way to obtain Nicks van, I could feel a smile curl up at the corner of my mouth. I didn’t have to kill him. I wanted to.
I walked quickly down the slight incline, then started to run, and caught up with him beside the door of his van. He was talking to himself, fumbling with his keys, as I jumped and landed on his back. He grunted, emptied his lungs of air.
I reached from behind and found his throat with a razor-sharp, six-inch Schrade knife that I keep for taking down larger members of the species.
Nick went down.
His blood was purple, almost black, in the soft glow of blue light. I watched the blood spread across Nick’s throat like a Rorschach ink blot, changing shape as it moved.
It altered the color of his brown skin. Purple, almost black in blue light. Symmetry.
I stripped Nick of his coveralls, left him in the alley, and climbed into the van. As I drove slowly away, a fat black woman stepped outside the bar. Her screams shattered the silence in that dismal asphalt corridor.
It’s strange how people react to events like this. They seem driven to emit noise, to touch, to move in a rapid, frantic manner. What animates them tends to calm me.
Scenes like this are what make my work worthwhile, and I wanted to savor it. I wanted to replay the memory over a glass of wine. I drove north on Pennsylvania because I could think of no better place to do this than in the Willard’s bar, the one called The Nest.
THE SUBJECT OF ONE OF MY FORAYS INTO THE night, so long ago, was Cora Riordan. She raised a feeble hand as I approached her, wanting to scream, but not seeming to know how.
Jeremy Stoneham sat mute with his feckless mind and multiple realities as I caressed him with my whispers.
Lucas Frank sniveled to his favorite reporter from one of the Boston newspapers that the findings of the court in the Stoneham case were wrong. Dr. Frank was ahead of his time back then. He used a language that no one understood, a language that became common parlance in the crime-solving business twenty years later.
I’d already had several homicidal experiences when I first read about Lucas Frank. It was at a time when the best that cops or politicians could do was condemn all wet art as heinous, senseless, vicious, evil. Then, along came Dr. Frank to say that there was a logic, a system of thought at work in any apparently random homicide.
“We have to suspend our own biases about what constitutes rational behavior,” Frank told reporter Anthony Michaels, “and seek to understand the killer’s reasoning. His crime meant something to him. What?”
In the Michaels interview, Frank’s example was a case in western Massachusetts. The killer of five young women had injected himself into the investigation with offers of assistance. Police and a university-connected shrink stated flatly that the killer had wanted to be caught, that he had a subconscious need or desire to be apprehended.
Lucas Frank disagreed. “This man seized the opportunity to be at center stage,” he said. “The sense of power afforded him by the murders was enhanced by being among those who sought him.”
He was right, of course. But it was years before that particular insight was routinely applied—first in arson cases, then in child abductions.
In a strange way, it was a comfort for me, a killer, to know there was someone who did not practice the art, but was on intimate terms with it. It was also unbelievable and, after some thought, threatening.
If s
uch a man could think like I did, what was to prevent him from tracking me down? It was then that I decided to learn everything I could about this man. I have always been a believer in the preemptive strike.
The professional community demanded that Dr. Frank’s notion of power as the prime mover of retributive justice be validated. Research psychologists who had never dealt with humans slapped studies together. Rats and rhesus monkeys. Mazes. Pellets of food. Electric shocks.
They had not completed their work when the genius giant, Edmund Kemper, blabbed to his buddies, the cops, listened to their frustrations as they investigated Kemper’s homicides, then entertained the troops from Quantico.
The light began to dawn.
Those of us in the field love to play cops and robbers almost as much as we enjoy the stalking, the anticipation of murder, and the killing. We dismissed the notion of “studies” by textbook experts a long time ago.
There is law, and there is justice. The former is codified and fills large, dusty books. The latter is entirely subjective. I have my justice; Lucas Frank has his.
He never solved the Cora Riordan case. He never knew what he was dealing with.
How could he? She was mine.
The circle remains unbroken.
Symmetry.
I CLIMBED THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE IN THE NEST and found a table by the window, overlooking Fourteenth Street.
They had changed the decor a bit since my last visit. The trees that they bring in are changed every few weeks, and there were other small shifts in the room’s appearance. The carved woodwork, the mirrored walls, and the fine wine are constant.
I prefer consistency. A sense of order. Balance.
A woman with upswept hair and pale skin sat at the piano playing “Blue Moon.” A man at a nearby table sang softly to his companion.
In my mind, I could still hear the commotion in the alley as the blues club emptied and a crowd gathered, waiting for the police and paramedics.
I didn’t look back. I seldom look back. Vermont was one of the exceptions.
I was thinking of that day almost a year ago, of the pain and the exhaustion and the adrenaline, when the waiter came to take my order. “A glass of the house red, please,” I told him.
It is important, even necessary, to have a design in mind, preferably one composed of smaller designs. It has to do with symmetry, but it is more than that. It is the consonance of multiple forms—each within the other, cascading toward infinity. The Mandelbrot set. Fractal curves. Designs that replicate themselves repeatedly, yet are merely hinted at when given too casual a glance.
The perfect design is one that fractures time, that allows free movement between past and present. It is like the screenwriter’s creation, a vision that is complete before the first word is typed.
I sipped my wine, enjoyed the ambience, and absorbed all the dimensions of my perfect design.
Two young women approached my table.
“We always sit here,” the first one said, “because of the window.”
“Do you mind if we join you?” the second one asked.
I expected better of the Willard—a more restrained clientele—but I smiled and nodded. They sat down, plunging instantly into the mindless gabble that characterizes their gender and age. I leaned back, not listening, allowing their chatter to become part of the background din.
Like them, I appreciated the window. I glanced outside just as Dr. Frank was making his way into the hotel. He looked disheveled—his ragged mane and beard synchronous with his faded jeans, and his gait that of a weary man.
One of my self-invited companions tapped my wrist. I looked at her with gentle eyes.
“Do you teach at George Washington?” she asked. “Philosophy, maybe?”
“No, I’m at Harvard,” I said. “Anthropology.”
“Bones.”
“Not all of our remaining frontiers are in the heavens,” I told her.
She shrugged. “You go to digs and stuff?”
“Perhaps you’re thinking of archaeology.”
“Oh. Maybe that. You do bones, though, right?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “I do bones.”
“Like that Russian czar they dug up.”
“Nicholas,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t do his bones, but that is my work. Forensic anthropology.”
“Oh, yuck. Crime victims?”
She turned to her friend before I could respond. Young women seem to swirl their way through life— moving along on the tips of their toes, almost dancing, never glancing to one side or another.
Someone was paying these two vacuous specimens enough money so that they could afford to sit at the Willard and drink frothy, blended concoctions, sine umbrellas. Who paid their salaries? For what? And where, in all the national debris, had they originated? Arkansas? Ohio? Kansas? Vermont?
“What do you do?” I asked Bones.
“What?”
“Your work.”
“Oh,” she said, “I’m an editorial assistant at the Washington Blade. She—Jeannie—is a senatorial aide. I’m Courtney.”
“John,” I said, wondering if Courtney knew the Blades investigative reporter, Darla Michaels, another member of my cast. “What does an editorial assistant do?”
“Oh, like, it’s really complicated. I mean, there are all these different things you have to do. And they don’t tell you everything when they hire you. It’s like, hello, this isn’t what you described. Filing and stuff. I was an English major. I thought I’d be checking punctuation, spelling, grammar—you know?”
I heard a siren in the distance. Could be that they were wasting their time rushing to Nick, or maybe Washington was devouring more of itself.
“What does a senatorial aide do?” I asked Jeannie.
“I’d rather not say,” she said.
I knew that was her canned response, a way of sounding self-important. She probably practiced it in front of a mirror, like DeNiro in Taxi Driver. Her clipped answer was more than just a pose.
Although it didn’t happen often, I had seen this phenomenon before. I meet a woman, and she picks up on something, feels the danger from the outset. I see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice. It had been like that with Terry, Echo’s daughter, in Swanton, Vermont.
I knew that Jeannie would be bounding out of there at any moment.
She looked at my sleeve. “Is that blood?” she asked.
“Did you hear the siren?”
“Yes.”
“There was an automobile accident. It was a few blocks from here. I helped extract the survivors from the wreck—led them away and sat with them. One was just a child. I held her. But she died.”
“Oh, God” Courtney said.
“I wanted to have a glass of wine, try to settle my nerves. I didn’t pay any attention to my appearance. Could I be in shock and not know it?”
Jeannie said, “I want to go.”
The two of them got up.
“Let me take care of the tab,” I said. “It’s the least I can do. I’ve ruined your evening.”
“No,” Jeannie said, pushing past her friend and heading for the door.
Courtney looked at me with moist, sad eyes. “I don’t know what to say. Well just go, I guess. Will you be all right?”
“Without a doubt.”
I watched her sway her way on the tips of her toes toward the door, where Jeannie was waiting—looking as if she didn’t feel safe at the Willard.
Abraham Lincoln had chosen the hotel as his haven when the assassination threats were mounting. He was smuggled in by the famous detective, Pinkerton, to await his inauguration. He lived through that, only to be undone by his faulty decision to attend a performance at Ford’s Theater.
Then and now.
Symmetry.
I left the Willard, and stepped back into the night on Pennsylvania Avenue—watching, listening.
No sirens. The two women were gone, but the sense of the country having b
een culturally razed lingered on.
Life should not be wasted on such ciphers. The experience of being alive is too extraordinary for them. Life is an education, a “trip” without chemical assistance.
In a few days, it will be exactly a year since that brief moment when it seemed that my life might end. When I first emerged from my tunnel, I could smell the smoke from the explosion and fire. I watched the glowing embers blend with the light snow. As I moved away, that faded until there was just snow and the silence of the forest.
On the anniversary of my rebirth, it will not snow in Washington. But there will be a blast from beneath the earth—an explosion and fire—and then there will be the silence of the thousands numbed by my audacity.
“Perfection,” I said into the cool night air.
SUSAN WALKER HAD NOT RETURNED LANE’S CALLS.
“I’m not even sure she’s getting the messages,” Lane said. “They keep transferring my calls to that prick, Landry.”
Early that morning, she had gone to find Walker. After that, she planned to do some follow-up work with the D.C. police. I intended to attack more of Willoughby’s files and Wolf’s journal, but Special Agent Hiram Jackson showed up at my door.
“I have to drive down to Quantico,” he said. “I thought if you weren’t busy, you might want to join me.”
I had no interest in a tour of their underground quarters, but I did want to continue my conversation with Jackson.
As we drove south on 1-95, he said, “I want to apologize for Agent Landry’s behavior yesterday.”
“Accepted.”
“I also feel like I have to defend him. He’s a South Florida veteran. I wonder sometimes if he has one of those post-traumatic stress problems. He spent five years in Miami, most of the time never knowing who was a cop and who wasn’t. He cornered one guy in an alley— both of them had their weapons drawn—and the man turns out to be DEA. That kind of stuff can get to you. We all want the dope off the street, but the agencies don’t always work real well together.”
My own feeling was that the war on drugs was long lost. Tons of cocaine were removed from the trade. Millions of dollars never made their way back to Colombia. But there were always more than enough kilos to go around, and more than enough money to build palaces and establish personal armies in Cali or Medellín. If Miami got too hot, there was Galveston or L.A., and new shipping techniques to foil customs. I was familiar with the pressures that Landry must have experienced working in a situation like that, but the entire enterprise struck me as a waste of time and money.