The Bubble Gum Thief

by Jeff Miller

  “You think that it’s clearly one person? Even with the geography?”

  “Can I see the security footage?” he asked.

  Dagny placed her computer in front of the Professor and inserted the DVD. The Professor occasionally nodded, but remained silent until the end of the recording. “Either this person had some help or is very talented with makeup—maybe even a background in theatrical arts.” He paused. “Or he just did his research.” The Professor scrolled back through the footage and stopped on the culprit’s face. The man’s cheeks were uneven and seemed to sag. One of the brows extended a little farther forward than the other. “The prosthetics on his face make him appear much heavier than he actually is.”

  He walked to his desk, picked up the phone, and mumbled something. “Getting a snack,” the Professor explained. A short while later, a striking grey-haired woman walked into the room carrying a tray with an assortment of cheeses and grapes. She set the tray down on the coffee table and offered her hand to Dagny.

  “I’m Martha McDougal. You must be Dagny?”

  “Yes. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Is he being nice to you?”

  Dagny looked over at the Professor, who pretended not to be paying attention. “Very much so.”

  “Well, that’s unusual.” She smiled at Dagny and then turned to her husband. “You keep playing nice.”

  The Professor shrugged off the admonition. “I’ll be however I damn well want.” It came out meeker than he must have hoped.

  “If he acts up, Dagny, let me know,” she said, before leaving them to their work.

  “Eat something,” the Professor ordered.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Today of all days, you’ll eat it. You’re of no use to me on medical leave.”

  He professed only self-interest, but she sensed some underlying affection. Dagny grabbed a handful of grapes. “Professor, what do we do now? He’s probably going to commit another crime sometime in the next couple of days, maybe even today. It may be a murder. That doesn’t give us much time to—”

  “We wait, Dagny. We have to wait.”

  “Wait? Until someone dies? Shouldn’t we try to do something?”

  “I’ll send a fax to field offices suggesting that a crime is expected, and asking them to report it to me. You should send a similar e-mail to the local police you contacted the other day. But there’s nothing else we can do. It’s not our case. And no one is going to take us seriously until someone is dead.”

  The man was friends with the president; surely he could pull some strings. “Can’t you use your sway with—”

  “Even if we were given the authority to move forward with an actual investigation, we don’t have the time. Sometimes you have to wait.”

  “But—”

  He held up his hand. She nodded, then composed her e-mail and sent it off. “Done.”

  “Take the afternoon off. We’ll reconvene tomorrow morning. I’ll call you if something happens before then.”

  Dagny slipped into the auditorium and scuttled across the back row to an empty seat. The lights were dim so the students could study the Giuseppe Arcimboldo painting projected onto the large screen at the front of the room. It was a portrait of a nobleman—except the man’s face was composed of various vegetables, fruits, and flowers. His eyebrows were peapods; his ears were, appropriately enough, ears of corn. Dagny guessed that his nose was a pear, but it was hard to tell.

  “He didn’t just paint this one painting. He painted hundreds like it,” Mike said, flashing a few more examples of Arcimboldo’s work on the screen. Upon first glance, the portraits looked like inverted bodies, as if the organs were on the outside. Only when they came into focus were the fruits and vegetables evident. “Born in Milan in 1527. Died in 1593. Spent most of his early years rendering window designs and tapestries. And then in 1562, he moved to the imperial court in Prague and began painting like this,” he said, gesturing toward the screen.

  “You might think he was mocking the elites of the day,” he continued. “Maybe he was, but the privileged lined up for the honor, paying Giuseppe handsomely to depict them like this. His work became so popular that it spawned a number of imitators, and to this day, it’s hard to tell whether some paintings were done by Giuseppe or one of his contemporary forgers.” Mike turned up the lights and raised the screen.

  He lectured with a smooth, lulling cadence, and Dagny forgot about the bank-robbing dog-killer and his calling cards. When they were together, he made her forget everything else. It sounded simple, but it was what she needed, and no one else had done it.

  Dagny studied the faces of the girls around her, with their forlorn glances and bobbing heads and longing sighs. Who wouldn’t love him? Strong, rugged, smart, talented. Kind, gentle. Tender.

  Hers.

  After class, Dagny swam against the tide of departing students to Mike. “My other professor let me out early,” she explained.

  He kissed her, prompting a couple of mock swoons from the few students left in the room. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “Your surprise is ready.”

  “My surprise?”

  They walked to his house, then upstairs to his studio and the curtain that tempted her each night.

  A painting, she guessed. A portrait of me. Even if you don’t like it, pretend, she told herself, but she knew she’d like it. “Of everything I’ve ever done, this is my favorite,” he said, slowly tugging the curtain away.

  It was a bronze sculpture of a woman—a goddess—who stood, not on a pedestal, but on the floor. “She’s beautiful.” The woman was Dagny’s height. She wore an evening gown. Dagny touched the shoulder straps of the dress, then traced the seams of the fabric. It was her dress—the one she was wearing when she first met Mike. The zipper in the back bent slightly left just like hers. Even the stitching was precise. Dagny dropped to the floor and looked at the shoes—her shoes—the sneakers she had worn when they met.

  “She’s wearing my clothes.”

  “Of course,” Mike laughed. “She’s you, Dagny.”

  But that didn’t make sense, because this woman was gorgeous. “Is this how you see me?” Dagny asked.

  “This is how you are. It’s how you are right now.” Mike grabbed Dagny’s left hand and placed it on the top of the statue’s bronze nose, then placed her right hand on her own. He slowly slid both hands down to the ends. “Do you see?”

  They were the same.

  He moved her hands, and Dagny compared her forehead, her ears, her chin. They were all the same. Her elbows and fingers and knees—the same. Her waist—the same.

  “How do you like it?”

  “I love it.” For the first time in her life, Dagny felt beautiful.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  Finally, it was said. They embraced for a while. After a minute, he broke the silence. “I made a lasagna.”

  She laughed. “Thank you.”

  CHAPTER 17

  March 15—Washington, DC

  “This is my sixth time,” the woman said. She carried three books and a rolled poster in her left hand, and pushed a stroller with her right. There was a bounce in her step when the line moved forward. He tried to ignore her, but she continued. “Seeing her, I mean. And each time it’s bigger.”

  The line to meet Candice Whitman snaked through the bookstore’s shelves and twisted between the tables in the café before continuing out the door. He’d waited for nearly an hour, and now stood just twenty feet away. He was trying to concentrate on Whitman’s purse—a large black leather bag, slightly open at the top—but the woman behind him kept talking. “The first one I went to, ten people showed up. Now look at it.”

  He looked up at the round convex mirror above the magazine racks. It took a few seconds to pick himself out from the crowd. The wig, the mustache—if he couldn’t recognize himself, Candice didn’t stand a chance. Even without the disguise, he’d changed a lot since they’d know
n each other. She’d changed, too. The Botox and dye job couldn’t hide that the softness in her eyes had grown cold. He noticed that her fingers were all bone; her cheeks, too. Maybe she looked good on camera, but in person, she appeared sickly and frail. Her right hand wrapped around a pen, clutching it as an asthmatic holds his inhaler. He thought about the damage it had done. Just words, but words had consequence. People suffered because of the way she spilled her ink. He’d suffered from it. But she’d hurt him in other ways as well.

  Eight people—that’s all. Just eight people stood between them. She wore a white blouse with an olive jacket and a little pink flowered handkerchief poking up from the pocket. Gold earrings dangled from her ears; a large diamond pendant hung from her neck. Booty from her crusades. Booty like the apartment on the Upper West Side, and the place out in the country with the pool and the stables and the Venezuelan man who tended the gardens. Booty—that’s what she would have called it if she were writing a column about someone else, anyone else.

  And yet they loved her.

  If you’re going to lead a lynch mob and not get lynched, you have to keep it moving. Candice did it better than anyone. From Ken Lay to Duke lacrosse to the runaway bride—guilty, innocent, or just plain confused—it didn’t matter, as long as they filled the hour and brought home the viewers. And if she was wrong, as with the Duke lacrosse team, then she just moved on to the next villain-of-the-day. No one held her accountable. But he would.

  And then there were three between him and Candice. He closed his eyes and slowed his breathing, relaxed his grip on her book, and told himself that this was just.

  And then there was just one, a frazzled young woman who spoke with a nervous quiver. “Your work has really meant a lot to me, Ms. Whitman. My nephew was Andrew Higgins.” Whitman didn’t seem to know who that was. “You know, the little boy who was kidnapped in McLean? Kidnapped, and then—”

  “Oh, yes,” Candice responded, mustering indignation. “An absolute monster.”

  “I just want you to know that your work helped get us through that, and I don’t think they would have given him the sentence they did if you didn’t keep everyone’s attention on it.”

  Whitman smiled and signed the woman’s book. “The cases I cover are so heartbreaking that I sometimes think I can’t keep going, but then I meet people like you and it reminds me why I do.” Whitman clasped the woman’s hands in hers and nodded.

  It was his turn. He slid his book across the table. “I’m a big fan of yours,” he lied, making no effort to disguise his voice.

  “Thank you.” She smiled, though had she recognized him, she wouldn’t have.

  “Can you make it out to Brutus?”

  She paused for a moment. “Brutus?”

  He shrugged. “It’s a little joke for an old friend.”

  When she opened the book, he leaned down to tie his shoe. As she scribbled away, he thrust his arm quickly into her purse and dropped the card. In less than a second, it was over. He rose. She handed him the book. He thanked her. No one noticed anything. He paid for his book at the third register, the one where the camera captured only the back of the customer’s head, and walked out the door.

  There was a taxi parked at the curb. The driver leaned against the passenger door with the Post and a cigarette. He wore a plaid ivy cap and a red-checked scarf. “Need a ride?” he asked the man.

  He thought about saying yes and ending it all right there. Instead, he ignored the cabbie and walked around the building, taking his place in the bushes across from the store’s loading dock. Whitman’s Mercedes SL Roadster convertible was parked by the back exit. When the signing was over, she’d descend the back steps. Would his old friend be with her? He hoped so, though he hadn’t seen him in the bookstore. Still, there was plenty of time for him to come, and it didn’t really matter that much anyway. There just had to be two to keep the math right, and someone would be with Candice. She had her signs and banners, and she’d never carry them herself. Someone would carry them for her.

  The next hour moved slowly. He crouched in his hiding spot and rolled the handle of an eight-inch dagger in his palm, growing comfortable with its weight and shape, until it felt like a natural extension of his arm. The first time the back door opened, it was just a stocky teenage boy carrying out the trash; the second, a middle-aged woman who stood at the top of the steps, leaning against the rail for a smoke. He watched that cigarette burn down to the stub and then watched the embers die after she’d tossed it to the ground.

  An hour is a long time when you’re waiting to kill.

  It had taken all of the past year to plan the crimes—to develop the sequence, to visit the scenes, to choose the victims. But it had taken every one of the ten years before it to muster the strength to commit the crimes, to understand that he could be violent and vulgar, even cruel and savage, and still not be evil. Indeed, he was fighting evil—exposing it. Judging it, as it should be judged.

  And then she was there, pushing through the door, carrying only her purse, as a crisp breeze blew through her hair. From the distance, she looked like her younger self, before the Botox and the collagen. She leaned against the rail, arching her back, smiling. Their old friend was there, too, following behind, carrying two boxes as if they were nothing. He looked the same—just as young, just as fit.

  The friend leaned the stacked boxes against the rail and chuckled at something Candice said, and the laugh carried across the lot to the bushes as if it had carried across twenty years. His grip on the dagger grew a little soft when he heard the laughter. He almost dropped it altogether—the dagger, of course, but also the murder and his contempt for her and all the others. It was funny that something as simple as a laugh could change the course of everything. It could have, but it didn’t.

  He hid the knife under his jacket and walked toward them. They didn’t even notice his approach—indifferent to him even at the end. She started down the steps toward the parking lot. When her left foot hit the second step, he raced toward her, withdrew the knife, and stabbed her quickly in the chest, right through her pink handkerchief. The first jab hit bone, but the second slid between her ribs and into her heart.

  She fell to the ground.

  Her friend dropped the boxes and lunged at him, but he shoved the bloody knife into the man’s chest and tore it toward his heart. And though he should have run right then, he lingered to watch the life drain from his old friend’s eyes. Before it did, there was one last look of recognition. You?

  The man nodded. “This is my sixth crime. My next will be bigger.”

  CHAPTER 18

  March 15—Quantico, Virginia

  At 9:30 a.m., Dagny stood for the final time on the Detecto 448. Dr. Malloy slid the weights back and forth, then managed to flash a rare, quick smile. “One twenty-six.” She’d made it, with a pound to spare. It was probably the lasagna.

  She called Mike from the car on the drive back. When he didn’t pick up, she left a message in which she rambled more than she would have liked. “One twenty-six. I made it, and it’s thanks to you, Mike. I couldn’t have done it without you. I mean that. I love you so much. I do. I really do. Let’s celebrate tonight, if I don’t get caught up with work. Love you.” She hoped there would be no crime this day—it would give them two reasons to celebrate.

  After Dagny arrived at the Professor’s house, they worked on his memoirs; she took dictation while the Professor paced around the room and recounted tedious and inconsequential details from his childhood. While they worked, a muted CNN played in the background on a sixty-inch plasma TV that descended from the ceiling at the push of a button. Every few minutes Dagny looked up at the screen, waiting for news of the sixth crime. There was nothing. And so the Professor dictated and Dagny typed.

  The sixth crime had already occurred when Mrs. McDougal brought them lunch—a spinach-and-ham quiche with a strawberry-and-walnut salad. If she had known about the crime, Dagny wouldn’t have touched her lunch. But Dagny didn’t know
and it tasted good, so she finished every bite.

  If she had known what had happened, she wouldn’t have joked with the Professor, trying to get him to confirm the rumors about his undercover work with the CIA. He brushed aside her inquiries, insisting that they proceed chronologically. “We must finish with the third grade,” he insisted, which made her laugh. They had already spent an hour on the third grade. Not one single noteworthy thing had happened to the Professor in the third grade.

  If she had known what had happened, she wouldn’t have been fixating on the letter C. The third and fifth crimes had occurred in Chula Vista and Cincinnati, and she wondered if Charlotte, Columbia, or Cambridge could be next. She also wondered about the number ten. Chula Vista and Cincinnati each had ten letters, just like Kansas City, Alexandria, and Chevy Chase, and she could have added Washington and Georgetown, but she didn’t know. When she told the Professor all of these thoughts, he dismissed them. “You can tell very little from two data points and an awful lot from three.”

  The bodies weren’t discovered for twenty minutes, and even then, it took another ten for the cops to arrive. Forty more minutes passed before one of the detectives found the card in the woman’s purse. A half hour later, someone called the FBI, just in case the card meant something to the Bureau. The agent who took the call fired off an e-mail that sat in someone’s in-box for another forty minutes. When the e-mail was finally read, three phone calls were placed, the third of which rang the phone in the Professor’s study. A few seconds into the call, the Professor grabbed the remote and flipped to Channel 9. An aerial shot showed police barricading the crime scene, and the yellow type at the bottom of the screen read “Murder of Two in Georgetown,” before giving way to a slow crawl: “Candice Whitman and a companion were stabbed to death behind a Georgetown bookstore this morning. Whitman had just finished signing copies of her latest book, The Ides of March. The acerbic legal commentator was forty-five.” It scrolled past seven times before “UPDATE” flashed in bold, bright letters at the bottom of the screen, and then a new crawl began: “Police have identified the second victim as Michael Brodsky. He was professor of art history at Georgetown and a respected artist. He was forty-three.”