When Caroline was certain that Virginia was dead, she went to the front of the store, locked the door, turned out most of the lights and drew the curtain across the display window. Then she returned to the fitting room and dragged her victim’s body to the front of the store. There she removed the mannequin that sat on a park bench in the window, replaced it with Virginia’s body and opened the curtain.
Caroline Lambert, now completely insane, selected a strong leather belt from stock, went into the back room and hanged herself from a sprinkler pipe.
When Gerhart returned home at 9:15 P.M. he wasn’t surprised to find that Virginia was still out. But when 11:00 came and went without her showing up he got worried. He called several of her friends and determined that no one had talked to her or seen her since the previous day. He sat down on the couch and thought about what to do next.
At 12:30 A.M. Gerhart drove to the station. He put out an APB on Virginia’s Volvo, notified the Florida State Patrol and the Taylor County Sheriff’s Department and sat in his office for the rest of the night staring blindly at the darkness outside his window, his thoughts a roiling cloud of fear.
Rachel Kinder normally got to her shop about 9:00 in the morning, which gave her an hour to get ready for the day’s business. But she had some bookkeeping to do in order to fend off the IRS, so she decided to get an early start. Just before 7:30 she stopped in front of the door and reached out to put the key in the lock. But something was wrong.
Caroline must have taken it upon herself to redo the right hand display window, Rachel thought. She stepped over to the window, looked up and blinked. There was something about the mannequin. Its face was purple, its tongue was hanging out (tongue?) and it had an ugly red mark around its neck. Rachel leaned a bit forward and squinted up at the display. The blood in her veins slowed to a crawl and she swallowed noisily. Her left eyelid started to quiver. She dropped her keys and backed slowly and awkwardly away from the window, fumbling in her purse for the cell phone as a silent scream formed in her throat.
Gerhart arrived seven minutes later followed closely by Dee Dee and Brock. He ran into the mall and almost stepped on Rachel Kinder, who now sat on the floor just inside the door. She was hyperventilating and mumbling to herself between breaths.
“Are you Rachel?” Gerhart asked.
She looked up at him, took a deep breath, choked and nodded.
“Where’s your shop?”
Rachel pointed.
“Do you know who it is?”
Rachel shook her head no.
Gerhart reached down and gently lifted the shattered woman to her feet. She hung in his hands like a damp towel.
“Give me the keys,” Gerhart said.
Rachel nodded mutely and pointed a shaking finger at the purse that still lay on the floor. Gerhart released Rachel, dumped the purse over and rummaged hastily through the contents. Finding no keys, he set out at a dead run.
Brock glanced at Rachel who had sunk once more to her knees.
“You better get an ambulance for her,” he said to Dee Dee. “She doesn’t look too good,” he yelled over his shoulder as he went after his boss.
When Brock got to Chateau de Rachelle he found Gerhart sitting on the floor in front of the display window. He was staring up at his wife, clenching and unclenching his hands and rocking back and forth as tears streamed down his cheeks. Brock squatted next to him and gently took the keys that Gerhart had picked up from the floor before looking at the window. Gerhart slowly turned his head to stare at the patrolman.
“It’s my fault, Brock. I should have made her understand. I should have made her stay away. I killed her, Brock. I killed Virginia.” Then he dropped his head into his hands and sobbed uncontrollably.
What began as a mystery with the discovery of Virginia’s body became clear when the police found Caroline Lambert hanging from the sprinkler pipe in the stockroom. There were enough fingerprint partials on the necklace to connect it to Caroline and there was enough of Caroline beneath Virginia’s fingernails to close the loop. As the shop was locked from the inside, the case was made. What no one could understand, however, was the reason for the tragedy. As far as anybody could remember, other than the occasional encounter, the paths of the two women had never crossed.
That was little comfort for Gerhart, who continued to blame himself, unreasonable though it was, for Virginia’s death. There had been no great love between Gerhart and Virginia for a number of years, but that only made it worse. Finding his spouse dead under such horrible conditions weighed on him like nothing he had ever experienced. He cried for their lost love and her lost life. He cried for the good times they spent with each other, and for the bad times he felt were wasted. He cried for the children they never had and, therefore, for the nonexistent grandchildren. Then he exerted a mighty effort and pulled himself together. Although he had to constantly push thoughts of her to the back of his mind, he forced the grieving to end.
Virginia’s funeral took place on one of the brightest days Trinidad had experienced in several weeks. Virginia’s mother attended, as did Gerhart’s parents, Esmond and Waltraut Kable. Of course Caroline’s husband, Raymond, was there. At first he rejected the notion that Caroline had killed Virginia. He couldn’t understand how his wife could kill anyone. But ultimately he believed the findings of the police and the coroner and was truly sorry for Gerhart and his family.
There was a large turnout at the funeral. Most of Trinidad’s citizens liked their Chief of Police and knew that Virginia had done a lot for the community, even if she had been a bit overbearing at times.
When the service was over, Gerhart stayed for a few minutes to say a last farewell before they filled in the grave. As he walked back toward the limousine he noticed a large wreath standing above one of the newer graves in the cemetery and was startled to realize that the wreath was made entirely of black flowers. A policeman’s curiosity took over and he wandered to the grave for a closer look. There was a blood-red ribbon across the wreath with the words “Von Hexenbrut” stamped on it in gold letters. Gerhart came to an abrupt halt when he saw the headstone.
The wreath stood above the grave of Joseph Lucas.
Chapter Fourteen
October 19, 2004
During the week that followed Virginia’s funeral, Gerhart alternated between fits of boundless energy and bouts of total listlessness. Although he was certain that the mood swings were related to his feelings of guilt about her murder, he seemed powerless to control or suppress them. It was during one of these fits of energy that he thought about the wreath that stood above the grave of Joseph Lucas. After considering the problem from several angles he picked up the phone and called his opposite number in Dunedin, Lt. Orselli. He explained the wreath to Orselli and spelled out the name, Von Hexenbrut, that was printed on the ribbon. Orselli promised to see if he could find reference to any Von Hexenbruts living in the Tampa area. There the matter rested.
Two days later, as Gerhart sat in the Trinidad Lunch Box trying to eat a hamburger without the grease dripping down his chin, somebody tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up into the eyes of Roberta Valentine, who leaned on her crutches as she balanced a tray in one hand.
“Mind if I sit down?” she asked.
He shifted his mouthful of burger, tried to speak, found no room to move his tongue and waved a hand at the bench on the other side of the table. Roberta plunked down the tray, leaned the crutches against the wall and slid into the seat. Gerhart finally managed to choke down the lump of burger and smiled across the table.
“How have you been?” he inquired.
“Fine, Chief, thank you. I’m so sorry about your wife. That must have been a terrible shock.”
Gerhart caught his lower lip between his teeth for a moment. “It was. I don’t think her mother will ever get over it.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes and concentrated on their lunch, neither one knowing what to say next. Roberta polished off her fries, washed them dow
n with the last of her milk and wiped her mouth with a paper napkin. “Has the mayor’s kid gotten into any more trouble since he tried to snatch my purse?”
Gerhart shook his head. “No, he hasn’t. I can’t imagine what possessed him. He never gave us any trouble before.”
“Maybe whatever got into him did it at the mall,” she said.
Gerhart jerked his head up involuntarily. “What makes you say that?”
“Circumstances. I know there’s been a lot of trouble out there. It makes you stop and think. If there’s that much going on that we know about, what do you suppose could be happening that we don’t know about?” she said, echoing his words from a few days earlier.
As he wondered how to respond to her, she stood, retrieved her crutches and picked up the tray that held the remains of her lunch.
“Listen,” she said. “I know what it’s like to work in a vacuum. I’ve lived alone most of my life. If you feel like you want somebody to talk to, well, give me a call. Sometimes it helps just to babble for a while, whether you get an answer or not. See you around.”
She raised her free hand in a quick wave, settled her crutches under her arms and swung off toward the trash containers.
When Gerhart had taken over the department it had been in one hell of a mess. The equipment was in poor condition, the morale was lousy and the duty roster was nonexistent. The retiring Chief, Frederick Thomas DuMore, was married to the sister of the previous mayor, who had been soundly trounced in the election by Manning Richards. Freddie T., as everybody called him, had been the Chief for the better part of thirty years. When he was hired, the police department amounted to Freddie T. and two part-time patrolmen. That was in 1967. As Trinidad grew, so did the police department. The problem was that old Freddie T. had no more idea than a lobotomized ground hog of what to do with it. His Honor, Mayor Manning Richards, being slightly brighter than his predecessor, managed to sweep most of the problems under the rug while searching for a replacement for Freddie T. He knew those problems would come to light when the new Chief took over, but by that time, the new Chief would have to deal with them.
It took Gerhart all of three hours to determine that he had inherited one colossal headache. Then he took a deep breath, rolled up his sleeves and went to work.
At that time, the department consisted of fourteen officers, the Chief and an acting assistant Chief—the ranking sergeant—who took over while Freddie T. enjoyed one of his five weeks of vacation. This provided four men to a shift with two extras. Gerhart was appalled to discover that only six of the men had any formal training in police procedures. The force had four Ford squad cars, each with more than 100,000 miles on the clock. The new Mercury Marquis driven by the Chief was traded on a two-year cycle.
The first thing Gerhart did was to turn the Chief’s Mercury into a patrol car and get the engines and transmissions rebuilt on three of the cruisers. The fourth car had been nearly totaled a year earlier and spent most of its time in the shop. Gerhart junked it.
Within the following three years, Gerhart let seven of the eight untrained men go. Then he hired nine experienced men and three cadets. He talked the city into new radio equipment for the force and bought a radar gun. By the time Gerhart celebrated his tenth anniversary in Trinidad, the city had grown to almost 15,000 citizens and the police department boasted three shift captains, three sergeants, thirty-two patrolmen and eight patrol cars. Gerhart acted as his own detective when the occasion demanded. The effort had cost him a lot of sweat and the city a lot of cash, but he felt the department was as good as it was going to get with the prevailing budget.
But as Roberta Valentine had guessed, Gerhart was alone. The men in his command liked and respected him and would ski across a lake of thawing shit on bed slats if he requested it. Unlike his men, however, Gerhart had no partner. There was no one to bounce ideas off of and he was well aware that with no sounding board it was possible for him to get into a great deal of trouble, both physically and emotionally. Virginia had been of little help in that respect, but at least there was somebody home to talk at, if not with. And so, the day after running into Roberta Valentine, he found himself punching her number into the phone on his desk.
“Panhandle Placement. This is Roberta.”
“I’m looking for someone to fill a position,” Gerhart said.
“What sort of position, sir?”
“The title would probably be professional listener.”
“Would that be someone to listen professionally, or someone to listen to a professional?”
“Yes.”
“I see. Hmmm. I seem to have an opening at eight this evening, if that would suit.”
“It would, indeed.”
“I’ll see you then, Mr. Kable.”
As Gerhart climbed from his car the front door of Roberta’s house opened. She leaned out to wave at him.
“Come on in,” she called. “I’m in the middle of something.”
She pulled back inside and left Gerhart to find his own way. “I’m in the kitchen,” she said when she heard the door close.
He found her taking a pie from the oven. She put it on the counter next to the sink, turned and smiled. “I hope you like cherry.”
“If it’s pie, it’s my favorite kind,” he said. “What prompted you to bake tonight?”
“Bake? Who bakes? This was a solid block of ice a half hour ago. Ms. Valentine’s pies are Mrs. Smith’s. I’ve never baked a pie in my life.”
“So who’s complaining?”
“Coffee?” she asked.
“Sure.”
They sat at the kitchen table and disposed of a fourth of the pie along with quite a bit of coffee. Roberta put a scoop of vanilla ice cream on her pie, but Gerhart declined.
“I take my pie like a real man,” he said with flinty eyes and outthrust jaw. “Straight up.”
Roberta threw her head back and roared with laughter. When both plates were empty she picked up the coffee pot once more and waved it at Gerhart. “More coffee, Chief?”
He put a hand over his cup. “Believe me, I’m stuffed. I think I’ve gained five pounds.” As if to back up the statement he belched silently into his fist. “Sorry. Look, stop with the Chief stuff. Considering all of your food that I’ve just stuffed in my face, don’t you think we should be on a first name basis? Call me Gerhart. How about you? Roberta? Bobbi? Robby?”
She looked up in surprise. “Bobbi? I like that. Nobody ever called me Bobbi.” She thought for a moment. “I wonder why?”
“Beats me. You look more like a Bobbi than a Roberta to me.” He reached across the counter next to the sink and took a clean knife from the drying rack. “I dub thee Bobbi Valentine,” he said and touched her lightly on each shoulder with the tip of the blade.
“Okay by me, unless I have to change my driver’s license,” she replied with a grin.
“Not necessary. You have friends in high places.”
“Come in here, I want to show you something.” Roberta stood and led the way into the living room.
In the corner next to her desk was a cardboard box surrounded with pieces of Styrofoam. “I got a new printer for my computer yesterday,” she explained. “The old one was dying a slow and painful death. Besides, this one’s a laser. But this is what I wanted to show you. It’s a riot.” She reached into the box, pulled out a pamphlet and handed it to Gerhart. “Look at the first page.”
He took the proffered item and dropped into a chair. After a moment, he chuckled, then laughed out loud. “This is great,” he said when he caught his breath. “Whoever translated this should be shot. I like number four. ‘Do not use this products near water, if liquid has been spilled into the board or has been exposed to water may causing the board can not work properly.’” He scanned down the list, chuckling as he read. Then he leaned back in the chair and laughed until the tears rolled down his cheeks. “The last one is hilarious,” he gasped. “Did you read all of these?”
Roberta giggled sympatheti
cally. “No. I didn’t get a chance.”
“‘Do not leave or fall any metal/conductive item (like screw…) on the board, other wise the board will on vacation permanently when power on.’”
They rocked to and fro in their chairs and held their sides as tears rolled down both cheeks.
Roberta coughed and wiped her eyes. “My Lord, it’s a wonder any of this stuff gets installed correctly at all, what with instructions like that.”
Gerhart nodded, then raised an eyebrow and stared at her. “You know, I think you’ve just cleared something up for me.”
“Really? What?”
“Something I saw at the cemetery the other day. I thought I understood it at the time, but now I’m not so sure. I don’t think what I saw is what I thought I saw. That is, I thought what I saw meant something other than what it meant. Uhmm…”
“Never mind,” Roberta said, giggling. “When you get it figured out let me know. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Maybe you’re not,” he said, “but I’d better before the neighbors start a rumor.” He stood and smiled at Roberta. “Thanks for the pie and coffee. I’d like to return the favor.”
“It wasn’t a favor, it was a pleasure. I really enjoyed your visit. Don’t be a stranger.”
Roberta watched from the porch until Gerhart’s taillights disappeared into the darkness.
Three days later Gerhart drove south on Route 19, thinking about the revelation he had experienced at Roberta’s. Gerhart naturally assumed that the inscription on the black ribbon, Von Hexenbrut, was somebody’s name. It was shallow thinking, he thought, for a policeman. Especially for a policeman who spoke German, even if he hadn’t spoken it for quite some time.
Genesis of Evil Page 11