“There’s one way to find out,” Jerry said. Taking the tape labeled “Lily I,” he turned on the television, inserted the tape into the videocassette recorder, and pushed the “Play” button.
Then they sat down on the couch to await the show.
As it turned out, the tape wasn’t a record of the operations, but of the postsurgical “Lily lessons,” in which, in the case of Kimberly Ferguson, a poor, uneducated girl from backwoods Arkansas was transformed into the pampered wife of a rich cosmetic surgeon.
The tape started off with several close-ups of Lily, then cut to Kimberly sitting at a dressing table in a bedroom that, judging from the massive hand-carved furniture, was the master bedroom at Archfield Hall. She was wearing a white terry cloth bathrobe and applying makeup. Though they had seen Lister’s “after” reconstruction of Kimberly’s face, it was nevertheless remarkable to see that face reflected in the mirror of the dressing table, and to see how closely it resembled the original. The only difference was the hair, which was straight and blond and of medium length. Obviously, Kimberly had yet to dye it red.
The date on the videotape said August 15, 1991, which would have been shortly before Kimberly disappeared. It was gruesome to think that the face of this pretty young woman would be nothing but an eyeless skull in only a matter of weeks. The voice of Dr. Louria, with its hint of a Portuguese accent, was giving Kimberly instructions: “After you put on the eyeliner, take the Q-tip and rub it down into the base of the eyelashes. That’s how she always did it. First the eyeliner, then the mascara.”
With the video camera recording her every move, the Lily look-alike applied the makeup, removed it, and reapplied it under Dr. Louria’s watchful eye until she got it right.
“Weird,” said Jerry after Dr. Louria had pronounced the job perfect.
“I’ll say,” Charlotte agreed.
“Now the perfume,” Dr. Louria said.
Kimberly looked down at the array of bottles on the dressing table. “Which one?” she asked with a drawl that would have made Henry Higgins wince.
“The Muguet,” said Dr. Louria. “That’s what she always wore. She ordered it from Grasse, France.”
Searching among the bottles, Kimberly picked one out and applied it to the skin behind her ears and on the insides of her wrists.
“Now the jewelry,” Dr. Louria said. As he gave a voice-over discourse on what type of jewelry Lily had worn (she had been particularly fond of bangle bracelets), Kimberly proceeded to put on the gold hoop earrings and heavy gold bangle bracelets that the doctor had laid out for her on a tray. After she had finished putting on the jewelry, Dr. Louria asked her to put on the dress that he had laid out on the bed. “It was one of Lily’s favorites,” he said as Kimberly slipped the dress on over her head.
It was a long, snug-fitting sheath of a dark green wool jersey, which was worn with a wide green snakeskin belt and high-heeled green suede boots. Even on Kimberly, with her thin, straight, blond hair, the outfit was stunning; it must have been all the more so on Lily, with her mane of vivid red.
As they might have expected, Dr. Louria then asked her to walk around the room, but it was how he asked her to walk that surprised Charlotte. It wasn’t with the phony grace of a make-believe princess or the mincing prance of the runway model, but with her chest stuck out and her rear end swaying as if she were a Playboy bunny. Poor Kimberly, who had the lunging stride of the country girl, was obviously finding it rough going, and complained that the high-heeled boots hurt her feet. But Dr. Louria mercilessly made her repeat her circumambulation of the room over and over until he was satisfied.
Charlotte wondered if Lily had really walked like that. The stride struck her as so unnatural and so stereotypically provocative that she wondered if Dr. Louria might be taking liberties with the truth in order to satisfy the demands of his own sexual fantasies.
Throughout it all, the girl had been cooperative, and quick. She had talent, Charlotte thought. She would have made a good actress, though her Arkansas twang would have taken some work.
They were about to look at the tape labeled “Lily II” when they were interrupted by a knock on the door.
A policeman stuck his head through the door opening. “I think we’ve got something, Chief,” he said.
The policeman didn’t say what they had found, and Jerry didn’t ask. He would see for himself soon enough. With the policeman in the lead, they passed through the house and across the lawn to a patio that was cantilevered out over the railroad embankment. Though it seemed odd to build a recreational structure so close to the railroad tracks, there was no getting away from the tracks if you wanted to take advantage of the view. Charlotte had seen mansions on the Hudson that had the railroad tracks running right past the front door. From the patio, they headed down a path that traversed the embankment. Though it was now overgrown, it was clear that the path had once been beautifully landscaped. The green shoots of garden perennials—Charlotte recognized those of daylilies and Oriental poppies—peeked up through the weeds in the terraced beds, and colonies of lilies of the valley grew among the pachysandra, their buds still only tiny dots on the stems. The path had probably been used for access to the river when it had still been clean enough to swim in. An old canoe lay in the weeds next to railroad tracks below, leading Charlotte to wonder if people still canoed on the Hudson.
At the end of the path, about twenty yards up the embankment from the tracks, was the type of structure that Charlotte had known in her youth as a summer house: a pavilion-like building made of wood, with half-open sides. It was painted dark green. Though it must once have been charming, it had fallen into disrepair: the roof had caved in on one side, and it was overgrown with a tangle of old wisteria vines.
As they approached, they could see a small cluster of policemen inside. The group looked up expectantly as Jerry entered.
“What have we got?” he asked.
The policemen stood aside to reveal a workbench piled with stacks of old clay flowerpots. Charlotte’s first thought was that the summer house must have been put to later use as a potting shed, and the workbench as a potting table. But then she noticed the stench that permeated the spring air, and saw that the surface of the workbench had a greasy sheen, and was stained with dark blotches, and that the rough wood bore fresh scars from the blade of a cutting instrument.
His question was answered by Captain Crosby, who nodded at the workbench. “We’ve found where the doctor cut up the bodies, Chief,” he said. Then he nodded at a heap of old burlap bags on the cement floor, which were also stained with dried blood. “We think these are the burlap bags he used to carry the bodies down to the river. We haven’t found the cleaver. I figure he probably kept it, or threw it in the river. But Bert’s looking for it with the metal detector, anyway.”
Jerry nodded and went over to the workbench.
Seeing the gashes in the wood, Charlotte conjured up a mental image of the corpse cutter at work on his grisly task. It must have been hard work carrying the bodies down the path, and then carving them up. Suddenly, she felt her knees begin to buckle. She realized that it was nearly two, and she was hungry. The smell would have been hard to take in any case, but it was even more so on an empty stomach.
Stepping forward, she tapped Jerry on the shoulder. “Jerry,” she said, “I’m going to take a little walk down to the river. It’s the smell,” she explained, and remembered what Jerry had said about wool absorbing the corpse reek. Damn! She had worn a wool jacket.
He nodded. “It takes some getting used to,” he said with a grimace. “Some people never get used to it,” he added. “Like me, for example.”
Leaving the summer house, Charlotte continued on down to the railroad bed, where a policeman was scanning the weeds at the side of the tracks with a metal detector. Crossing the tracks, she stood on the riverbank, and took a deep breath; the air smelled refreshingly of the sea.
Captain Crosby had been quick to jump to the conclusion that Dr. Louria was
the murderer, but Charlotte was skeptical. One of Jerry’s favorite sayings was that the crime scene was the mirror of the perpetrator. But the summer house hardly struck her as the crime scene of an eminent plastic surgeon. For one thing, why would he have used a summer house that was virtually in his own backyard when he had an operating room at his disposal? If he had arranged to perform cosmetic surgery on the young women in private, surely he could have arranged to cut them up in private, as well.
But even if one conceded that there was a reason behind his use of the summer house—perhaps to mislead the police by making them think that he was too obvious a suspect—it was still difficult for Charlotte to believe that a surgeon would have left the crime scene such a mess. In fact, she guessed it would have been constitutionally impossible. Neatness would have been as intrinsic to his methods as precision for an engineer, or logic for a mathematician. No, she concluded, if Dr. Louria were to have planned a murder, she was sure he was capable of a more elegant, and less incriminating, job.
A far more likely scenario was that the murderer was someone who had wanted to incriminate Dr. Louria. She wondered if the murderer had taken the path down the embankment. If so, he would have had to park on River Road and then carry the body across the Archfield Hall property, a scenario that struck her as unlikely, given the risk of being observed. Which meant that he had probably come from some other direction. She looked up and down the tracks: to the south, there was nothing; to the north was the railroad station.
Since Jerry was still busy, she decided to take a walk. As she headed north, she heard snatches of sound from a distant loudspeaker, and wondered where they were coming from. As a compound on the river shore came into view, however, she realized from the guard towers and the sodium vapor lamps that shone even in the sunshine that the source was the Ossining Correctional Facility, otherwise known as Sing Sing, and, next to Alcatraz, probably the most famous prison in America.
She hoped that its overcrowded cell blocks would soon be accommodating another inmate: one who would be there for the rest of his life.
Six minutes later, she found herself at the south end of the railroad station parking lot, which sat at the foot of a cliff. The station building was located at the other end of the parking lot, a hundred yards away. Moreover, there were no other buildings, and the access road came in from the opposite end. Though there wasn’t an empty parking spot in the lot, the station was devoid of people, and she guessed that no one other than an occasional teenager would come here in the middle of the night.
The murderer could easily have parked his car at this end of the lot, removed a body from his trunk, and carried it along the tracks to the summer house.
A few minutes later, she hooked up again with Jerry back on the riverbank by the summer house. For a few minutes, they stood looking out at the gray-green water. Then Charlotte said: “It was probably right at this spot that the murderer dumped the bodies into the river.”
“Two of them anyway,” Jerry concurred. “I think he probably chopped up Kimberly’s body somewhere else.”
“Why?” Charlotte asked.
“Because the smell would have alerted somebody. The smell isn’t bad now because it’s only just started to warm up. But it would have been terrible in early September. We always used to get bodies in August and early September that would have gone undiscovered at any other time of year.”
“That would also explain why Kimberly’s body parts washed up in Manhattan, while the body parts of the others washed up here,” Charlotte said. “He probably cut the body up somewhere else, and threw it in there. I wouldn’t imagine that the parts turn up very far from where they’re thrown in.”
“I think you’re probably right, Graham,” Jerry said. He smiled. “I’m glad we’re paying you the big bucks.” Then he turned serious: “We’re going to have to bring Dr. Louria in for questioning,” he said.
The next day was overcast, with intermittent drizzle. But only the worst weather deterred Charlotte from her daily pre-breakfast walk. She was turning the corner onto First Avenue when she noticed the screaming headline on a copy of the New York Post displayed in a news kiosk: “WESTCHESTER PLASTIC, SURGEON QUESTIONED IN LOOK-ALIKE MURDERS.” The headlines in the other newspapers were similar. She immediately bought a copy of the Post, and then copies of the Daily News, the New York Times, and Newsday, all of which also contained stories on the murders, although the Times, with its typical disdain for any story that smacked of sensationalism, had buried theirs on the fifth page of the metropolitan section. All the stories included photographs of Dr. Louria and descriptions of his career as a cosmetic surgeon and his volunteer work with the World Health Organization. Several also included photographs of the summer house, or, as the Post called it, the “Hudson River charnel house.” The combination of the fact that the photographs had been taken from some distance (it must have been cordoned off), and that the newspaper reproduction made it look almost black, gave the charming little building a decidedly sinister look—an impression that was enhanced by its sheathing of leafless vines. The Post also featured an article on Jerry’s career with Manhattan Homicide, which was entitled “One Smart Cop.” The photograph must have been an old one from their files: it pictured him with a thinner face and a fuller hairline than Charlotte had ever known him to have, and she had known him for ten years.
As she drank her morning coffee and ate her customary bagel, Charlotte read every last word of every story. It was clear from Jerry’s statements that he had gone to great lengths to make the point that Dr. Louria was only being questioned, not accused. She readily understood why he had done so. Dr. Louria as the murderer simply didn’t make sense. It was also clear that the questioning of Dr. Louria had been fruitless, as had that of his housekeeper, who hadn’t even admitted to knowledge of the Lily look-alikes, though Dr. Louria himself had said that she knew about them.
As she sat there pondering the case, her housekeeper, Julie, came in. Julie and her husband Jim were a Chinese couple who had worked for Charlotte for over thirty years. Her highbrow friends referred to them as Jules and Jim after the French art movie of that title.
“Why so many newspapers?” asked the ever-inquisitive Julie, nodding at the newspapers that were spread out on the counter. “Aha,” she said, reading the stories over Charlotte’s shoulder. “Westchester. That’s why you’ve been spending so much time up in Westchester lately.”
Charlotte looked up at Julie over the tops of her reading glasses—half glasses with tortoiseshell frames. There wasn’t much that Julie didn’t catch, and what she didn’t, Jim did.
“What do you think?” Julie asked. “Did the doctor do it?”
Julie was a great follower of tabloid crime. She also watched the live broadcasts of criminal trials on court television. She had been following the Yonkers murder case for weeks with the avidity that sports fans reserve for the National Football League play-offs.
“I don’t think so,” Charlotte said.
The phone rang, and Julie answered it. “For you,” she said, holding out the phone. “It’s Chief D’Angelo,” she added. “It must be a new development in the look-alike murder case,” she whispered as Charlotte took the phone.
“I thought you might want to come up,” Jerry said. “We just got a call from the pastor at Zion Hill Church. Peter De Vries found a skull in the undercroft this morning. The county crime scene guys are coming over here, and then we’re all heading up to the church.”
“In the undercroft,” she repeated. It was a place where bodies were traditionally buried, but it wasn’t a cemetery. Very clever of him, she thought. “He outwitted you, didn’t he?” she said. The look-alike murderer was beginning to take on his own personality.
“Yeah,” Jerry said unhappily. “We had every cemetery in town staked out, and he goes and deposits the skull in the basement of the church.”
“It will take me an hour or so to get there,” Charlotte said.
“That’s okay. We ex
pect to be there for a while.”
Though it was still rush hour, Charlotte was going against traffic, and it took her only twenty-five minutes to get to the outskirts of Zion Hill, in spite of the wet weather. At the light at the Zion Hill Road intersection, she turned right and followed the road up the hill to the turnoff for the church parking lot, where she pulled into an empty space at the end of a row of police cars. Then she climbed the stairs to the church lawn. At the top of the stairs, she paused again to take in the view. Though it was only misting in Zion Hill, she could see storm clouds hanging over the Hudson Highlands, and she could feel the wind picking up. The water was already getting choppy: it was only a matter of time before the storm came whipping down the river.
Continuing on to the church, she asked a policeman posted outside the entrance how to get to the undercroft, and was directed to the door at the base of the crenelated bell tower. As a result of their discussion with Peter, she took notice of the door, which was hand-carved of the same rich wood she’d seen at Archfield Hall, and fitted with ornamental hardware that had been wrought of monel in an intricate medieval design.
She opened the door, and was greeted by another policeman, who was sitting on a Gothic-style side chair in what appeared to be the vestibule of the church. Racks for hanging up coats lined the walls.
He stood up. “Mrs. Lundstrom?” he said.
She nodded.
“The chief’s in the undercroft,” he said. Crossing the vestibule, he opened yet another hand-carved door for her.
She noted that this door was of a different design—another way to God. A spiral stone staircase led downward to the undercroft, and upward, she presumed, to the belfry. From below, she could hear the murmur of men’s voices. She followed the steep, narrow stairs around until she came to yet another door, which opened into the undercroft. It was a large room—it presumably ran the length of the church—with a low, vaulted ceiling supported by twisted columns topped by early Gothic capitals.
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