Tunnel of Night

by John Philpin

  What is meant to be, will be.

  I TURNED THE TAP IN THE SHOWER AND WAITED for the hot water. Wildlife scattered for shelter in their cracks in the grout. The place was disgusting—even worse than Echo’s trailer, which was at least clean. But the apartment was serving its purpose. There was one more act to be played out here. The rest of the show was set for other stages.

  As water splashed into my face, I thought about my plan, my design—its exquisite detail, the way it repeated itself in multiple forms, like a kaleidoscope. The first time I saw an Escher print, I was fascinated by the figures—monks taking their measured steps for eternity, but achieving only a finite depth and height. No more, no less. Forever.

  I toweled off, slipped into my Valley Carpet coveralls, and doffed my ball cap. I grabbed the keys to the van, took the freight elevator to the basement, and slipped into the alley.

  I had emerged from beneath the earth, but I still had far greater heights to achieve.

  AS I DROVE SOUTH ON 1-95, I REMEMBERED reading a case report that Lucas Frank had written for a professional journal fifteen years ago. His subject was Norman Elgar, a man I knew well. Despite the enormous risk, I had visited Elgar at the Massachusetts State Prison in Walpole, the same facility that had housed Albert DeSalvo, but failed to protect him. DeSalvo had been stabbed to death.

  My conversation with Elgar had been far more revealing and informative than the bullshit that Lucas Frank, M.D., had sold to his peers.

  The short, wiry, blond killer and I sat at a table in the prison cafeteria, the rattle and chatter of other voices a constant annoyance. The diminutive but proud man grasped my hand and looked into my eyes. He saw a kindred soul.

  “Dreams are better than the real world,” he said. “When I understand a dream, its meaning, I never forget it. It’s like a taste that stays in my mouth, something that can be savored for a long time. Sometimes the real world blinks out on me, fades, even disappears. Dreams never do that.”

  I remember that I nodded, and continued to allow him to grasp my hand. “Just like a murder done well,” I said.

  Elgar smiled.

  In Lucas Frank’s article, Elgar had greeted the doctor in much the same manner. Lucas Frank had broken the hand grasp, and the words he had attributed to this man were quite different.

  I had not visited Norman Elgar because his artwork was good. It was not. He raped, sliced, and tossed. I went to see him because all the gurus of the criminal mind had been there. The FBI, with their cameras and questionnaires, had completed their work when Lucas Frank arrived.

  “When I die,” Elgar said, “they’re going to cut into my brain. They want to examine the limbic area. They seem to think I might have a lesion or some other abnormality. They have to explain me. They can’t diagnose those things until after you’re dead. They did the same thing to the aliens who landed in New Mexico in the 1950s. Maybe they think I’m from Mars. It’s strange. They harnessed the energy in an atom and blew up thousands of people, but they say they don’t understand the drive to destroy.”

  He stared into my eyes, and then told me about the most triumphant experience in his long career. “Her name was filled with hard sounds. Cutting sounds. Biting sounds. It was like her face in profile—the sharp features. She had a piercing nose. She had a snotty attitude to go with it.”

  Elgar giggled.

  “She walked stiff-legged in tight skirts so that her buttocks hiked up and down like the pistons in a big Dodge. I liked that. The way she clipped off her words, snapped them out into the air—I didn’t like that. I never spoke to her. I was always there, and I listened. I watched her. I followed her. If she rode a bicycle, I stole one so that I could keep up with her. I looked at her through her windows. She never knew how close I was. She had blue eyes and poise. Confidence. When she smiled, she hesitated—just a fraction of a second before the smile—like she was teasing her audience with the mystery of whether there would be a smile. She was so clever. She made everyone wait and guess and want her. God, she was perfect.”

  He leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his neck. “She was always on display. It was her own fault.”

  “She invited you.”

  “What else would you call it?”

  This man was disgusting, transparent, reactive. But he had information that I wanted. “Lucas Frank described you as arrogant,” I said, remembering the psychiatrist’s comments to his favorite reporter.

  Frank remarked about how devious and elaborate a psychopath’s self-analysis was, how polished, sincere, and reasonable his “excuses” for his violence seemed. “Human predators succeed,” Frank said, “because they are so believable. Norman Elgar is persuasive, especially when he talks about his own pain.”

  Frank cited the case of Jack Henry Abbott, the convict-author whose “maundering volume of self-pity” over a life lived in prisons convinced the New York literary world’s heavy hitters to publish Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast, and to support his release from prison. “Jack Abbott made his audience feel compassion and guilt,” Frank said. “They wanted to believe that they could succeed where others had failed. They were going to rescue him, change him. Abbott didn’t last two months on the street before he killed again.”

  I had enjoyed the book. Lucas Frank spoiled it for me. His attack on Abbott was an attack on me.

  “I’ve never seen the article that he wrote about me,” Elgar said, “or any of the interviews that he gave to Anthony Michaels. I’m not arrogant. I trust myself. I know that I’ll make the right choices at the right times. I’m content with who I am, and I don’t regret anything. I cherish all eighteen of my special women.”

  I knew that the concept of trusting one’s own mind was something that the famous psychiatrist would understand, but never report in any article for other shrinks, or discuss in any interview with a newspaper reporter. How could he expect anyone to seriously think he was just like us? They would laugh him out of his profession.

  I do not operate on impulse. It is a matter of design, patience, intelligence, and self-trust. I would never react to provocation, which is a method that Frank has used with success.

  Frank had wanted to tip Norman Elgar over, to see his rage, to see him in “the mind that allowed him to rip into human flesh,” as he described it to the press. The interview was a move in the psychiatrist’s game. He wanted Elgar’s final stats, the details, so family members could be informed that their missing loved ones weren’t missing anymore. I wanted to know about the doctor and his technique.

  “Lucas Frank saw me as a smug sonofabitch,” Elgar said. “He was pissed because I wouldn’t give him details. He wanted me to crumble. I can still hear his words. He said, ‘You achieved notoriety for a compulsion. It’s like someone who can’t stop washing his hands.’ Is that a provocation, or what? Washing my hands, my ass. I reacted.”

  In his interview with Anthony Michaels, Frank described the reaction. Elgar didn’t move, but his eyes were different. “He stared at me in disbelief,” Frank told his favorite reporter.

  Why wouldn’t he? The egocentric shrink had made a diagnosis, then acted as if there could be no doubt about its veracity. The aspect of all of this that irked me the most was that Dr. Frank had been right. He knew exactly what to say to Norman and how to say it. How could he know? How could he understand? I had gone in search of answers to those question.

  “The fantasy never gave me life,” Norman told me. “I gave life to the fantasy. It was a matter of genuine superiority. I nurtured it.”

  The mental health industry does not understand the etiology of this system of thought, although they try to sound as if they do. I don’t care what Lucas Frank says. You can look at a painting by Bosch or Magritte for as long as you want, but don’t expect to read the artist’s thoughts in his brush strokes.

  Elgar told me that Frank had shrugged, looked down, leaned forward on the table, then snapped his eyes up to lock with Elgar’s. “Did the others swallow that bullshi
t?” he asked.

  Elgar’s palms were flat on the table, his arms tense. He breathed heavily, but his eyes never wavered. “Police from eight states have been here,” Norman told the psychiatrist. “FBI agents have been here four times. They know who I am.”

  Lucas Frank shook his head. “They don’t know shit,” he said. “Never have. Never will. You’re obviously of average intelligence, and your wits served you well for a while. But you were coming unraveled, Normie.”

  That was what Elgar’s mother had called him, and it had brought Elgar up out of his chair, backing away from the table, spittle on his chin, his eyes rolling around in their sockets like billiard balls after a split. He was yelling, and guards charged in from every direction.

  The only thing that Frank had not done was to plunge a knife down through Elgar’s hand, pinning him to the table. The range of behavior available to the doctor did not include the technique that I had used when dealing with Oliver. Apparently, he recognized some constraints.

  Frank had elicited exactly what he was after.

  “That just wasn’t fair,” Elgar told me.

  Lucas Frank had slipped into his jacket, straightened his tie. “Totally unraveled,” he said. “Psychotic.”

  And Elgar, all five and a half feet and 135 pounds of him, threw the guards aside.

  “I’ll get out of this fucking place,” he screamed. “I’ll do it all over again.”

  They Maced him, and he waded through it. “Rip you to fuckin pieces,” he told Lucas Frank as one of the guards nailed him with a stun gun.

  Now, as I guided my car south on the interstate, I thought about symmetry, and about all the years that I have been close to Lucas Frank.

  I have followed his career. I have read everything he has written. I have pursued the same people he has talked with, conducted my own intimate interviews. I have learned more from them than he or the feds ever will.

  Balance. Order, Justice.

  Symmetry.

  I know more about Lucas Frank than he will ever know about himself.

  A PSYCHOTIC PATIENT OF MINE FROM YEARS AGO would not use the phone. He both feared and detested the phone, and he adamantly refused to tell people his name.

  “I don’t want anyone to know that I haven’t been murdered,” he said.

  I doubt that I’m psychotic, but I do hate phones. I don’t like people much, either, especially when I have to observe complicated rules of etiquette like those that the phone requires.

  “What if they remember that they didn’t kill me?” my patient asked.

  His logic was internal, and unassailable.

  He complained about the noises in his head. “Can’t hear myself think. Mostly because of the elevators whizzing up and down, and the doors that whoosh open and click shut.”

  “What about voices?” I asked him.

  “Just Winston Churchill. He resembles J. Edgar Hoover, and he recites T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral Have you ever noticed how the past and present have a way of converging? I think it’s a warning.”

  He had been a successful accountant in Boston. One day, he returned home from work and entered the lobby of his apartment building just as a man threw himself off the top of the stairs with a rope around his neck. The snap of the man’s neck as it broke—“like a bomb going off”—was a sound he could not forget.

  His first symptoms were blinding migraines. His family doctor prescribed painkillers. All he had to do was step on a cockroach, and the migraines would start again. It was the cracking sound that did it. Every time he heard it, he saw the man hanging in the stairwell.

  He responded to psychotropic medication— Thorazine, I think—and made sufficient progress to be released from the hospital. Within two weeks, he stopped taking his medication. A month later he was dead. A priest found him hanging in the vestry of a nearby cathedral, a copy of Eliot’s play in his pocket. He had been true to his voices.

  While I did not share most of my patient’s aversions, I remained a staunch opponent of the telephone and all the demands it placed on me. But a call to Vermont was necessary.

  Wolf had survived the explosion, and had moved on somewhere to recuperate. If I could track him—discover where he had been, what he had done, who he had talked to, what he had said—I should be able to determine what payoff he had in mind for himself, and that might help me to find him. I figured that the first step was to inquire about homicides, Wolf’s favorite activity. I had spoken to a Vermont police captain when I was checking to see if any cars had been stolen in Saxtons River on the day of the explosion. I phoned the same man.

  “You don’t have that many murders up there,” I began.

  “More than we’d like,” he said. “Six, maybe seven a year.”

  “What about the past year?”

  “Well, there was the double murder up in Swanton.”

  “I don’t know about it. What happened?”

  “I can’t give you a whole lot of details. Just that a woman and her brother were shot to death in her trailer. Two bodies, killed with different guns, but only one of the weapons was found at the scene. We didn’t get great cooperation on that one because they’re Indians. The woman’s daughter can’t talk, and even if she could, she probably wouldn’t tell us anything. A neighbor said there’d been a guy staying with them, but he was long gone by the time we got there.”

  “In his forties. Hair going gray. Maybe a mustache. Six feet tall. Medium build.”

  “That describes a lot of people, but yeah. That’s basically what we got. He’d been injured somehow, and the woman was taking care of him. Look, Dr. Frank, if you can help us with this one …”

  “John Wolf,” I said.

  “The guy who died in the explosion?”

  “He didn’t die.”

  “I don’t know how anybody could have walked away from that. Of course, the feds locked us right out of there. We didn’t get a real close look.”

  “Wolf was brought up by his stepfather. His biological father was a man named Pease, a logger who lived in Bellows Falls.”

  “I think there’s still a few of that clan around. They’re Abenakis.”

  “There was a tunnel,” I began, then lost the rest of whatever it was I had intended to say

  The captain asked me questions, and I answered— but my mind was drifting far from the conversation. When I put down the phone, I stared straight ahead, thinking about Wolf.

  The man’s tenacity and cunning fascinated me. So did his tunnel, and what it represented. It demonstrated his ability to see into the future, and to plan for any eventuality. For me to have any hope of catching up with him, I had to backtrack. I had to know as much about his life after death as I could.

  Again, I grabbed the phone and dialed—this time a familiar number in Lake Albert.

  “Thought you never used these things,” Buck Semple said.

  I was amused, but wished that my eccentricities were not such common knowledge. “It’s giving me hives,” I told him, “but I think I’ll be okay”

  The chief laughed. “Where the hell are you?”

  “Still in D.C”

  “Don’t know why you’d want to hang out in a place like that. What about the holes in your hide?”

  “Good as new. I just wanted to touch base with you on that Charles Weathers ID. How far did you go checking that out?”

  “Far as I could. The address in Lincoln was a fake. Driver’s license is still valid. He paid cash for the gun, even though he had a MasterCard and a checking account in Boston. I’ve got an eighteen-month history so far.”

  “What about dates on the charge card, bank deposits, checks cashed? Is there any way to track him?”

  “The card is what goes back the eighteen months,” Buck said. “He opened the bank account early last September, then closed it about two months ago.”

  Wolf had closed his account on the day that Alan Chadwick was murdered. These was also a charge on his MasterCard that day—a one-way ticket to
Fort Lauderdale.

  “The police down there have been real helpful,” Buck said. “Weathers rented a car from Avis. It was a month’s lease, so they had a local address on him—a waterfront condo.”

  The sonofabitch heals, gets his cash together, knocks off Chadwick, then goes on vacation. Jesus.

  “They’re still checking for anyone who had dealings with him while he was in Fort Lauderdale,” Buck said. “I don’t have the paperwork yet, but he had a rental while he was here, too. Picked it up in Detroit and returned it at the airport there the day he took his shots at you.”

  “I’m going to need passenger lists for flights from Detroit to D.C.”

  “The feds could get those for you faster than I could.”

  I thanked Buck, said that I would keep in touch, and warned him to stay away from my largemouth bass. For years, we had been chasing that same fish.

  “I’ll make a deal with you,” Buck said. “I’ll leave your fish alone. You leave Mr. Weathers alone. That’s the one I want to reel in.”

  We made the pact, both of us lying.

  • • •

  AS I WORKED TO UNDERSTAND WOLF’S THINKING, I knew that he would be doing the same—working to get inside my head. He was the only man on earth who could pull it off.

  The knock on my door was Hiram Jackson. I had been expecting him to return, but not so soon. I was glad to see him.

  “I should have them put a cot in here for you,” I told him.

  Jackson smiled, settled into a chair, and leaned forward. “Maybe I’m too old and too tired for all this.”

  I could see that he meant it. His tan suit was rumpled, his brown tie loosened at the neck. The dark bags under his eyes attested to a lack of sleep.

  I sat opposite him.

  “Tell me more about this guy,” Jackson said.

  “Which one? Wolf, or his fan?”

  “The lupine fellow.”

  “He is the thoroughbred of human predators. Until last year, most of us had never encountered anything like him. What do you want to know that I can sum up in five minutes? What do you need to know?”

  “We’ve learned that Willoughby was called out,” Jackson said, sighing. “We know why. We don’t know by whom. He took ten thousand dollars in cash with him when he left his office. He was going out to buy information. The money was still in its envelope in his pocket when we found him.”