Final Notice

by Jonathan Valin

  “How would he behave in a real fight?”

  “Just as he speaks,” Benson Howell said. “As if he were invulnerable. Are you planning to do any research on your suspects?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I'll work up case histories on each one. Or, at least, on the promising ones.”

  “Then let me give you a typical history. A profile of what your man is like. Understand, there may be individual differences. But, in the main, your Ripper's personality should fit this description.” He walked back to his chair, flicked a spot of ash off the cushion, and sat down again. “To begin, he will undoubtedly come from a broken home. He may have been abused as a child. Perhaps by a sadistic father or an overweening, brutal mother. He will most certainly have a marked ambivalence toward his family, and it will extend into every aspect of his emotional life. His sexual experiences will have been short-lived and unsatisfactory. His own sense of sexual identity is likely to be diffuse. He may, in fact, have had homosexual experiences, although he wouldn't recognize them as such. At this point in his life, he is a loner, incapable of sustaining a relationship with anyone outside the love-hate relationship he's formed with his parents and siblings. You will probably discover that he has a history of violent behavior. And if he doesn't,” Howell said, “his schoolmates and his teachers—look especially to his teachers and counselors in high school—will remember him as giving the impression of violence, as if human sympathy were dead inside him from the start. He may be working at a distasteful job. As a gravedigger, say, or a garbage man. Or he may have no job at all. And this is important: he is likely to be a religious fanatic. Extremes, again. A man of this type, with his strong ambivalence toward authority figures, has no internal checks on his behavior. No conscience, as we call it. Instead he depends on God, or what he imagines to be God, to regulate his actions personally. It is a grandiose delusion. But your Ripper will share with a narcissist the idea that he is at the center of the universe. One of God's elect. And he will try to act that role. Since sexual feelings are incompatible with such a delusion, he will tend to project his libido onto the women who excite him. In this way, they seem to be the libidinous ones, the evil-doers. And thus, your Ripper maintains his purity and strength.”

  “How might he have acquired these delusions?”

  “From his parents,” Howell said. “Especially if he had a father or mother who was held up to him as a model of perfection. And whom he tried to emulate—unsuccessfully. You have to remember, Mr. Stoner, that you'll be dealing with one of life's losers. A man who has failed at everything he's ever tried. All he has going for him are his delusions of grandeur. And he will fight with incredible fury to keep them intact. It goes without saying that this man is likely to be clever. He would have to be clever in order to shore up his defenses in the face of overwhelming realities. He may also be quite charming and intelligent.”

  Howell tapped his teeth and said, “I have known several charming killers.”

  “I don't suppose you could help me with a physical description?” I said.

  “Yes, I think I might,” he said suavely. “He is most likely to be a man of average to below-average size. Not large, like yourself, Mr. Stoner. Large men generally give an impression of power without having to assert themselves. They need not act violently to prove their strength. He may also be tattooed. There is a marked tendency among psychopathic individuals to have themselves tattooed. And, of course, the nature of the tattoo is a key to the nature of the psychosis. It may sound old-hat, but if your man has good and evil or the like tattooed on opposite arms, be very careful, indeed. Since he has repressed almost all of his aggressive feelings, he is more likely to be a quiet individual than a talkative one. He is saving his anger up, you see, for one violent act. You might also look at his pupils. The narrower they are, the greater the rage he's suppressing.”

  Howell stared off into space again. And I took a deep breath. His casual way of delivering the brutal truth had unsettled me a little. And then it's always chilling to hear what can happen to a human mind, a mind like your own.

  I took another deep breath and said, “Do you think he'll try again? Do you think he'll kill a second time?”

  “Oh, most certainly,” Benson Howell said. “Unless his life has miraculously turned about, he will have built up an incredible rage over two years. Enormous, Mr. Stoner. Like the power of suns. Well, imagine trying to suppress your sexual instincts for two years. Then add to that the grossest indignities that loneliness, guilt, fear, and impotence can cost a man. Oh, yes, Mr. Stoner, he'll try again with all his might. He'll select another victim as he did the first time—for some vague resemblance she might bear to his mother or to a sister or to some girlfriend, real or imagined. Or he may choose her for the simple reason that she excites him greatly and, therefore, terrifies and infuriates him greatly. He will try to repress his desire and when he fails, he'll project his own sexual longing onto his victim. That may be the moment when he begins to cut up the pictures. Or he may do that for a period of time before the transference occurs. Working off steam, as it were, before blowing up. But he will blow up. And when he attacks, he will feel as if God Himself is propelling him onward, as if he is cutting out evil—not human flesh. He'll kill again, unless you stop him. But understand what you're up against. This man has no realistic fear of injury. He is filled with murderous rage and with an indignant sense of his own injured righteousness. He will be clever, ruthless, and as merciless as God meting out punishment to sinners.”

  “And there's no way to shut him down?” I said. “No way short of violence.”

  “That depends on the situation, of course,” Howell said. “He does have an Achilles heel. The very source of his power—his grandiose delusions—can be his worst weakness. You see, he hungers for the acclamation that life has denied him. He lives for notoriety. If you catch him offguard or simply at the right moment, he may confess on the spot. They love to confess their powers. It is, in fact, the reason why they send notes and leave clues for the police. Indeed, those pictures he's cut up are just such a clue. A warning, if you will. Or a cry for help. You see most psychopaths want to be caught.” “Let's hope the Ripper is one of them,” I said.

  10

  I WALKED back through Benson Howell's office up those three stone steps into a blue noon, full of sunlight, and stood where I had stood an hour before, looking out across Wellington at the high stone wall of the schoolyard. I listened for the sound of the basketball. But the kid had gone in. Even the wind had died down. And it was as still and listless as a high summer day along the street. Which no longer seemed so genial to me, so placid and suburban. Not after my encounter with the doctor.

  I found the Pinto parked in a bed of maples leaves, cracked open the door, jabbed my key into the ignition and flipped on the radio to a local talk show. I needed to hear some mindless chatter, just to wash the sound of Howell's voice out of my head and, I guess, to sober me up.

  I once heard a psychiatrist say that when we lie down to sleep, we're lying down beside a horse and an alligator, beside an old mammalian brain and an even older reptilian one, to go along with our modern cerebral cortex. Well, there's enough reptile sleeping inside me to recognize the real thing when I come across it. And I’d just heard a description of a brute who made my blood run cold. Of course, shock was Howell's game. Maybe because he was used to speaking from a witness stand, where subtlety pays no dividend. But even taking his manner into account, I was left with one very dangerous psychopath. And at that moment, I didn't feel like facing up to the responsibility.

  So I listened to the radio, to a gravel-voiced man who was passing out advice to the lovelorn with the easy hand of a backyard gossip, and told myself that there was a good chance that the District Attorney's office would take the Hyde Park Ripper off my back. I even flirted with the notion of calling DeVries from a booth at the top of the street—to find out whether he'd talked his boss, Walker Parsons, into reopening the Belton case. But George
had only had an hour to work, and it would take a morning at least to get Walker Parsons interested, if he got interested at all. Which was not the sure thing I wanted to believe it was.

  Like Leon Ringold, Parsons was essentially a bookkeeper, a ledger-man with a shrewd sense of his own limitations. He was not a very bright man and he knew it. He wasn't even a good lawyer. What he was was a mediocre politician with a knack for making his own mediocrity palatable. Walker had a schoolboy's notion of good and a Baptist's notion of evil, and for better than ten years he'd ridden through administration changes and police scandals on the back of a simple wish—to make things better for the decent folks. The decent folks understood and kept right on electing him. They knew they'd have to go a long way to find a man as safely innocent of thought as Walker Parsons.

  Under normal circumstances, a psychopathic killer would be certain to get Walker's juices flowing. A sure-fire headline and a sure-fire conviction were the sorts of things that registered in his head like dollar signs in a thought balloon. Only this wasn't a sure-fire case—not like the smut-peddling cases that were his forte. And Parsons had already spent a good deal of the taxpayer's money on Twyla's killer two years before. He might just sit back and wait for the Ripper to strike again, wait for the newspaper headlines to build, before going before the grand jury. I made it a fifty-fifty proposition, which meant that there was an even chance that I'd still be on the case at the end of the day.

  Not a pretty prospect, Harry. But neither was another homicide on what I’d begun to think of rather fondly as my own turf. And then there was that girl.

  So get going, brother, I said to myself. Slip the Pinto into gear and drive over to East Walnut Hills, to Lon Aamons' art school, and start earning your pay. Start acting like a detective instead of like a scared little boy.

  And the scared little boy said, “Ha!”

  ******

  Lon Aamons was a tall, silver-haired old man with a tanned, weathered face as gnarled and fleshless as nut meat. He dressed like a westerner in a plain white shirt, bolla tie, peg-leg slacks and glossy rattlesnake boots. And he spoke with the dry good humor of a man who's used to talking before an audience—a storyteller's slow, flat drawl. He had the look of a good storyteller, flint-eyed and acerb and as spare as bone. The paneled study in which we were sitting was decked with western art and artifacts. Navajo rugs, a collection of Kachina dolls in a huge glass breakfront, silver bracelets flecked with turquoise in a small case and, on the walls, paintings of cowboy scenes done in the romantic style of Remington. It was a man's man of a study, right down to the brace of pistols in a presentation box on his desk and the smells of stale cigar smoke and old leather in the air. But as I sat there listening to him talk, I began to catch the other smells, like the odor of another life, lived down the hall in the big open-air studios where Aamons held classes. The chalky smell of oil paints and of the tarry-black inks they used on the offset presses. Turpentine smell, acrid as fresh onion. And the strong scent of the etching acids. I also got a happy sense of what it was like to be a student in one of those studios, in a school that was like a big, stone ranch house, run by a humorous old man sitting behind his desk in a room filled with his own paintings and with antiques set out like stick candy in big glass jars.

  “It's not a first-class school,” Lon Aamons admitted to me and managed to sound almost proud. “But I wasn't a first-class artist.” He pointed with a cigar stub at the sentimental pictures on the walls. “Those are all tall tales. But then most art is like a lie.” He put his chin on his hand and said, “Don't tell nobody I said that.”

  I told him I wouldn't.

  “You being a detective,” he said, “I thought I'd better get your word of honor. Don't want people saying that Lon talks down the art business. It'll kill my trade. What brings you here, anyway? One of my kids get in trouble?”

  “Two years ago,” I said. “Her name was Twyla Belton.”

  Aamons dropped one hand to his desk and sat back heavily in his armchair. He wasn't the kind of man who showed his feelings readily. That would be bad manners, like using your knife to eat peas. Instead, he teased them out like narratives, in the sour disappointed voice of the born storyteller. Only Twyla's name got to him, right through the crust, and made him squint and pull at the cigar stub as if it were a plug. “They find out who did it, did they?” he said after a moment.

  “No. That's what I'm working on now.”

  “Her parents hire you?”

  I shook my head. “I have reason to believe that the boy who killed Twyla may be planning to kill another girl.”

  “Dear God,” Lon Aamons said softly and sat upright in his chair. “How can I help?”

  “Well, if she had a boyfriend that would help.”

  “I went through that with the police,” he said with mild disappointment, as if he were hoping I'd have something more specific to ask of him. He really did want to help. And suddenly I knew exactly how a man with a painter's eye for detail could help me.

  “Tell me about her, then. Tell me what she was like.”

  “You could get that better from her parents.”

  “Not better,” I said. “Just more sentimentalized. I need a clear-eyed portrait of Twyla Belton. Because something about her, something about the way she looked or talked or acted, set this madman off. I'm betting that same something is setting him off again. So tell me about her, Mr. Aamons. And in your own words.”

  He wiped at his upper lip. “I want to say one thing before we get into this. I liked that girl. And if there's a question of money involved in this...” He looked away as if the word itself embarrassed him. “I mean if you need funds to help corner this son-of-a-bitch...”

  I told him that money wasn't a problem.

  “Then I guess I can do as good a job as anybody telling you about Twyla. ‘Cause she was a good one, and I don't see a lot of her kind of talent around here. Most of my kids come by way of junior colleges or straight out of high school. They just don't have the skills or the time for a career in fine arts. Some of them don't have any skill, at all. Just a longing to be special. Lord, it's a bitter disappointment to learn that a broken heart don't buy you a thing in this world. A lot of them can't take that lesson and give up on the spot. Spend the rest of their lives nursing a grudge and telling themselves that someday they'll paint their pictures and put the record straight. Art's a paltry enough thing as it is. But, my gosh, it makes a lousy excuse. More would-be human beings running around pretending to be would-be artists than you could count on both hands and feet. Not her, though. She had half the equipment it takes to make a good artist; She had all the talent in the world.”

  “And the other half?” I said.

  Aamons touched his stomach and frowned. “She didn't have the guts. She didn't have the heart. Why, hell, she wouldn't have been at the school at all if she'd had what it really takes to get on.” He laughed bitterly. “You see, she wasn't very pretty. At least, not the kind of pretty she wanted to be. And, man, that can hurt when you're young. Had a sweet round face, like a child's drawing of mother. All cheerful circles, from forehead to chin. And then she was as pudgy as a baby's hand. And just as eager as hell to please. Which made her fair game for just about every snot-nosed bully in the joint.”

  He got up from his chair and walked over to a closet set in the paneled wall. “Should have thought of this earlier,” he said. “It's just been so many years.”

  He dug into the closet and fished out a black portfolio.

  “This is some of her work,” he said, wiping the portfolio gently with his right hand. “I haven't looked at it since she died. But if you want to know what kind of girl she was, what and who she liked, just look in here, and let her tell you.”

  Aamons set the portfolio on the desk in front of me and untied the string fastener. “She was going to be a wildlife illustrator,” he said. “At least, that's what she was aiming at. Take a look at these.”

  He opened the portfolio to a waterco
lor sketch of feeding giraffes. “She did a whole series of these at the zoo. All sorts of animals. Even when she was drawing people, she was thinking animals, as if the world were a kind of beast fable to her, as if that were her way of taming it.”

  I stared at the drawing, which was, in fact, exquisitely done. Softened and not just by the medium. Colors blurred but outlines uncannily true-to-life, as if the colors were floating inside the animals or inside her, like vague powers of mind or of mood.

  Aamons flipped the page to a drawing of two lions, sitting the way competitive dogs sit, in a T—the dominant one at the top. The tawny colors that floated through them and around them had a wild kind of beauty, as if the colors themselves were on the prowl.

  “Can you imagine this sort of thing in the Geographic or in Wild Life?” he said with a fierce pride. “She was too damn original for them. She had her own way of seeing things and, if you look close enough, it wasn't a bit sentimental. Not a bit like my own poor stuff. She didn't look like anybody else, taming her beasts that didn't want to be tamed. You see, it's almost like she's incorporated the way we look at them, the animals in a zoo, into the animals themselves. As if they were aware of us watching them and didn't much give a damn. None of that monkey behind the bars malarkey.”

  He flipped through pages of tigers, deer, antelope. All of them little allegories of perceiver and perceived, of what's wild in us and what's severe and undefinable in them. Then he came to a series of line drawings done in a more realistic, less interesting style.

  “Some of her early stuff,” he said.

  I recognized sketches of Eden Park, the Conservatory, Seasongood Pavillion, and one chilling one of the Overlook, where she'd been killed. I stared at it and Aamons sighed.

  “They'd all go up there to draw. It's such a damn pretty place. But she wasn't taken in by mere pretty even then. Not in her drawings she wasn't. Look what she picked to center on.”