by J. A. Kerley
I paid for my purchase, checked my watch, and was ambling toward the agreed-upon entrance when I noticed Waltz by the perfume counter. When I was a couple dozen paces away, I watched him lift a sample, spray his wrist, wave it dry. Sniff.
His shoulders slumped and he continued down the aisle. I picked up speed to catch him but, passing the perfume counter, stopped to lift the bottle Waltz had sampled. I spritzed a shot in the air. Inhaled. Then continued after Waltz, an odd notion in my head, and my heart running a half a per cent faster.
SIXTEEN
Harry Nautilus slipped into the cottage in Gulf Shores, a white box with red hurricane shutters, part of a cottage community on the Intracoastal Waterway. He waved thanks to the Gulf Shores cop who’d overseen the fast access.
It was a typical vacation place, Nautilus noted: Large windows to let in the view, simple furnishings, small, neat kitchen. There were posters for annual Gulf Shores shrimp festivals on the wall, bright and colorful. Outside on the water, a shrimp boat chugged along, its nets hung on outriggers and wafting in the wind.
Nautilus opened a door to the side of the main room and his heart skipped a beat. It was an office, small and spare and simple, but seemingly a place to see patients: Large desk and ergonomic desk chair, an overstuffed armchair in the corner, a couch, all seemingly de rigueur for a shrink. The room was greens and grays, the light through the window giving everything a relaxed and pleasant cast.
“Knock, knock, Vange,” said a voice from the front door. “Permission to come aboard?”
“Come in,” Nautilus said.
The voice was followed by a pair of eyes as green as the sea. The woman wearing the eyes must have been eighty, her hair as white as snow, her leathery, sunbrown face as creased as an antique saddle. She wore blue jeans and a tee-shirt advertising a local seafood restaurant.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
Nautilus ID’d himself. Felt compelled to explain the reason behind his visit.
“Oh, my lord,” the woman said. She looked stunned and Nautilus moved to her side, helped her sit on the floral couch, got her a glass of water.
“Mind if I smoke?” the woman asked, pulling a half-crushed pack of cigarettes from her back pocket. “She keeps me an ashtray in the second drawer by the sink. And bring me a beer instead of water, please. It’s in the fridge.”
Nautilus retrieved a brass ashtray and a Bass Ale, set them beside the woman.
“I take it you knew the Doctor well, miz …?”
“Helena Pappagallos. I’ve been living two cottages over since I retired as a ship’s cook fourteen years back. Vangie’s had this place for eleven years. I’ve seen her every weekend she could get down. I have a boat and sometimes we’d go fishing.”
“Often? I mean her coming down, not the fishing.”
“She tried to come down every weekend – it’s only a three-hour drive – but work kept her visits at two to three weekends a month on the average. Sometimes she’d grab a few extra days, but she was a busy woman. This was her escape, mostly.”
“Mostly?”
Pappagallos crushed out one cigarette, lit another. Took a bubbling suck at the beer bottle. Shook her head.
“She’s consulted with a few patients here. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve seen any. I could tell they were patients because they’d park their cars and skitter to her cottage like scared cats. She’d put a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. I once asked her why she saw patients when it was shrinking or whatever she was getting away from. She said she thought differently down here. I think she just loved what she did.”
Nautilus felt his spirits fall. If Dr Prowse hadn’t seen patients recently, an entire line of pursuit crumbled like a house built of spit and lint.
“So she doesn’t see patients here any more, Miz Pappagallos?”
“I said I don’t see patients here any more.”
“What’s the difference?”
“No one ever came or went that I saw. But every Saturday, from one to three, she put the sign on the door.”
“Do Not Disturb,” Nautilus said. “Her work sign.”
“Like she was analyzing or whatever. Come to think of it, for the past three-four months or so, she’s been here every Saturday. That’s a record or something, first time in years.”
“And each weekend the sign’s been on the door?”
Ms Pappagallos nodded through a haze of blue. “Saturdays from one to three p.m. You could set your clock by it.”
Nautilus walked Ms Pappagallos to the door. Time to head back to Mobile, call Carson and pass on the latest. Not that there was anything solid, just a bag of smoke that grew larger by the day.
He headed back to the office to retrieve his briefcase. He was stepping out the door when he remembered he’d swung the office door open on his entry, hadn’t checked behind it for a calendar, bulletin board, or the like. He re-crossed the living room to the office, stepped inside, closed the door.
On the back side of the door was a photograph enlarged to poster size. Nautilus stared at it in disbelief. He closed his eyes and opened them again.
The photo was still there.
SEVENTEEN
Waltz drove us to lunch at his favorite Indian restaurant, maybe three square feet larger than my living room. The air was perfumed with ginger, cardamom, cumin, cloves, coriander. When I die, I want my body marinated in those spices before I’m cremated, everyone downwind salivating instead of weeping at my demise.
The waiter arrived and I ordered saag paneer, Shelly the lamb vindaloo. We split an order of chapati. The food arrived in minutes, bowls of fragrant magic. We ate in silence to acknowledge the perfection of the selections.
“By the way, Shelly, whatever became of the hair and fiber samples vacuumed from the floors of the scenes?” I asked as the dishes were swept away and we nibbled at golf-ball-sized servings of mango ice. “Forensics run any tests?”
“No need, can’t imagine what they’d prove.”
“Because everyone knows Jeremy Ridgecliff is the perp?”
Waltz frowned. “You think otherwise?”
“No.”
“If we’re not going to get anything solid, then why process –”
“A friend of mine is a pathologist. Clair Peltier heads the Mobile-area office of the Alabama Bureau of Forensics. In her own field she’s as reknowned as Dr Prowse. Her take on testing is that every answer is the answer you want.”
Waltz thought a moment, tapping his chin with his forefinger.
“Because no matter what answer you get, it answers something?”
“Bingo. You think I could put Clair in touch with the NYPD forensics folks? I guarantee you they’ve heard of her. She’s a heavy hitter in the path world.”
Waltz pulled out his notepad and started scribbling. “Hell, couldn’t hurt. Have her call this guy. Meanwhile, I’ll tell him to expect a call.”
I took the number, pocketed it. I doubted Clair could find anything, but she’d worked miracles before. Waltz, meanwhile, settled into a pensive frown.
“Any idea why Ridgecliff’s moving outside his initial target type?”
“All distinctions have become blurred. He’s imploding.”
“Do you think you’re a target?”
“I think anything’s possible, Shelly. I’m just happy Folger’s listening to my input, whether she believes it or not.”
“She’s closer to your side than she’s letting on.”
I rolled my eyes.
“It’s true, Detective. Two days ago I took the liberty of calling your supervisor in Mobile, Lieutenant Mason. I asked if he could fax a couple outlines of your PSIT cases up here. He sent three: A guy beheading men, a cult that followed a dead artist, and one that gave new meaning to the term ‘family secrets’. I gave the outlines to the Lieutenant. She was suitably impressed.”
“That a pair of yokels like me and Harry could find something outside the range of our asses?”
“Your successes were feats of exp
erience and intuition. I think Alice Folger is a convert.”
Shelly’s phone rang. He spoke a few seconds. Snapped the phone closed.
“What?” I asked.
“That was Sarah Wensley at Pelham’s HQ. They just got another doll in the mail, addressed to Pelham. The one that fits inside the doll they got the other day. Like a countdown.”
“No mouth on the doll?”
“Painted over. Plus they have some new and nasty letters for me to look at.” He threw his napkin on the table. “Ridgecliff’s running amok, Pelham’s got the loonies on full-pot boil. Ain’t life grand?”
We were at Pelham’s HQ fifteen minutes later. Ms Wensley hadn’t touched the doll, but had left it in the box. It faced upward, so that whoever opened the box saw the mouthless visage when the box was opened.
“It’s just creepy,” Ms Wensley said, spinning on her heel and returning to her work up front with the phone banks.
Waltz called for a Forensics team to pick up the doll and take it in for vetting. The first doll had returned nothing: no prints, not even smudges. That in itself was a message; whoever sent the doll didn’t want to be discovered. While we waited, Waltz scanned a sheaf of letters mailed to the headquarters.
“Anything real bad?” I asked.
“Once you carve away the invective it’s mainly disagreement on various issues. About fifty per cent carry similarly worded passages, which come verbatim from talk radio and TV commentators. There’s no real threat, just unhappiness with misspellings.”
“Venting. But there’s the stage above that, right?”
He tapped a much smaller stack of letters and phone-call transcripts he’d culled from the stack. “Women as bitches and whores and sluts. These people spend a goodly portion of their day frothing at the mouth.”
I concurred. “I know the type. Guys who need an enemy in order to give them a life.”
Waltz sighed. “What a full and happy life it is, hating gays, blacks, Latinos, environmentalists, Chevrolet owners, whatever.” Waltz laughed without humor. “There’s a bleak element in the anti-women contingent, the kind that fancies hooks and electrodes. Check this one out –”
I saw a poorly centered home-made letterhead proclaiming MEN UNITED! Beneath was a sour mishmash of hate and blame that rambled for seven pages, with particularly strident passages IN ALL CAPS TO MAKE A POINT. The writer had obviously gotten a bargain on exclamation marks.
I handed it back. “Seems them doggone wimmen have done him wrong.”
Shelly tucked the letter into his pocket. “I’ve not heard of this particular group, so I’m going to visit our scribe. Want to come along? Maybe it’ll be feeding time.”
Whereas email correspondents tended to the anonymity of a handle like Ultiman or T’Rone34, J. William Blankley had opted for old-fashioned snailmail on letterhead complete with signature. J. William lived in an apartment building near downtown Brooklyn, a decent but not posh address, according to Shelly. We exited the car to air smelling like impending rain, the clouds a low gray shelf. Thunder shivered in the distance.
Blankley answered the door. He was late twenties or early thirties. Not a bad-looking guy, semi-fit, five-eight or nine, tidy haircut, khakis and blue oxford shirt. Just a guy who might do your taxes or find a book for you at the library, until you noticed the tightness at the corners of his eyes. Scowler’s eyes.
Waltz held up his badge. “Can we come in, Mr Blankley? We just want a few minutes of your time.”
The small apartment was neat to the point of immaculate, resembling a photograph of a living room in an Ethan Allen ad. There was no color or sense of personality. Everything seemed beige, even the TV screen, an all-news channel, muted. A blonde anchorwoman moved her lips as Hispanics tumbled over a border fence superimposed at her back.
The only disarray was in a corner of the dining alcove, a computer desk and files, posters taped above the desk and work area. The word Men was prominent.
Blankley gave Waltz and me about six square feet just inside the door. Waltz held out the letter.
“You send this, Mr Blankley?”
“That’s personal correspondence, you’re not allowed to read it.”
“The other party felt compelled to show it to me. That’s allowed. I counted the word slut or sluts twenty-four times, bitch or bitches came in at thirteen, whore or whores hit the trifecta at seven. Your writing isn’t overly joyful, Mr Blankley.”
Blankley jammed his hands in his pockets and strode away, stopped halfway across the room. “I’m supposed to be happy when men are under attack twenty-four seven?”
“I wasn’t alerted. Have I missed something?”
“The feminist conspiracy to strip men of our gender-ordained rights. We’re physically and intellectually superior, but treated like a disease because we lack the politically correct plumbing.”
“Interesting. The, uh, upshot?”
He jabbed his finger toward a hand-drawn logo above his computer, either an artichoke on a stick or a raised fist, beneath it the legend, MEN UNITED!
“We’re fighting the conspiracy to feminize America. Men are being treated like slaves, broken down, discarded. The insidious feminizing influences are everywhere.”
Waltz said, “You’ve been feminized, Mr Blankley? I can’t really tell.”
“I haven’t been. They’ve tried, but I’ve resisted. Are you here because I exercised my first amendment rights and wrote a damn letter?”
“We’re checking out threats to conference participants. This letter verges on threatening.”
“I’m the one that’s threatened. My gender. My God-given maleness. Tell Pelham and her kind to stop threatening me, then I’ll lay down my sword.”
“How long has your organization been in existence, Mr Blankley?” Waltz asked.
“Almost five months. Our Ten Tenets of Male Awareness are as follows: One, to counter the pro-feminist agenda wherever we find it. Two, to create newsletters reflecting our –”
Waltz held up his hand to cut Blankley off mid-tenet. “You’re the founder of the organization?”
“The Supreme Commander. And treasurer. Our third tenet is …”
I kept quiet as Blankley yapped. I’d seen guys like him before. Most had a pivotal moment or crisis that transformed them into ardent womanhaters, though they were quick to point out it wasn’t all women, just the ones they disagreed with. And, of course, that women did it, too – hating men.
Nyah, nyah, nyah …hated you first.
Some transforming moments could be personal and harsh: the court siding with the ex-wife in a custody battle, stripping a caring father of rights or limiting them. It was ugly and it happened, but it was a problem with a legal system, not a gender. There were women who despised men, it was true, and sometimes for nothing but the need of an enemy. They were female Blankleys, often doomed to strident and unsatisfying lives.
But usually it was a personal failure transformed into someone else’s fault. Sometimes the moments were seismic, others so small you wondered how they registered on the psyche, until one learned that inbred insecurities ripen a psyche for bruising at every turn. Hit me, these folks seemed to say. Once hit, they spent the rest of their lives whining about it and wanting you to pity their bruise. When it began to fade they hammered at it until fresh blood leaked beneath the skin.
I wondered if Blankley had such a transformational moment, and if that moment had registered in the legal system, occasionally the case. And could I use a little psychic jiu-jitsu to pop it out in the open?
I made a deal out of pulling the phone from my pocket, then faked a call. I pursed my lips and frowned, listening to nothing. I aimed the frown at Blankley, still declaiming his tenets. He looked at me looking at him.
“What?” he scowled.
I shrugged. “Nothing.”
“I’m a tax-paying citizen and I’ve got a right to know.”
“Seems you’ve had a problem or two,” I generalized, starting to walk away, givi
ng him rope. He jumped in front of me, his face demanding, accusatory.
“No way. Neither of them filed a formal complaint. How can there be a record?”
“There are two types of records. Official and call reports.”
“It’s ILLEGAL!”
Waltz picked up the thread. “Officers go on a call, they write down where and when and what.”
Blankley’s head snapped toward Waltz. “They lied.”
“The officers lied?”
“The BITCHES lied. I wasn’t harassing them. I was explaining how they could better themselves by listening to me instead of that righteous woman shit! They’re all catty, manipulative, egomaniacal. Then they turn around and accuse me of being self-absorbed. I was trying to recover my manhood.”
Waltz looked at Blankley’s crotch, raised an eyebrow. “They stole it? Maybe you should have filed a theft complaint.”
Blankley’s chin quivered with anger. “You’re trying to humiliate me. I’m filing a complaint with your superior!”
Waltz pulled out his cellphone, flipped it open. “I’ll dial. You can complain. Her name is Lieutenant Alice Folger.”
Blankley turned red and made a noise like a balloon losing air. He opened his mouth to unleash another rant. Shelly waggled his finger, No, like disciplining a puppy.
Rain was falling in earnest when we stepped outside and we ran to the car, jumped inside. Waltz sighed, brushed back damp hair with his palm.
“You ever get the feeling that only about twenty per cent of adults are adults, Detective Ryder?”
“Really, Shelly? I’ve always found it closer to ten.”
We wrote off Blankley as no threat to the conference, just a sad boy with a small life. He’d had a couple of failed relationships and lacked the maturity to puzzle out what went wrong, deal with it, move on. It was easier when the women were at fault, or better, part of a vast conspiracy to de-male him in some way. No one de-males the J. William Blankleys, they do it on their own, almost eagerly.
We got back to the station and I found Harry had called. I went outside to the street, stood in the recessed doorway of an office building and phoned him. He sounded odd, tentative. Maybe it was the connection.