Emperor Norton's Ghost

by Dianne Day

  “What are you waiting for?” I asked, slightly exasperated. “This is where I need your assistance, you know. Van Zant is much bigger than I am, and if I’m right about what he’s done—”

  “I don’t think you should go in there, Fremont!” The words burst from Wish’s lips explosively, and almost in the same instant he clapped his hand over his mouth, as if horrified that he’d uttered them. Well, of course he would be; he knew how I felt about anyone, even Michael, giving me orders. Especially in the last stages of solving a case.

  “Nonsense,” I replied, “come on in, if you please. And keep that Colt of yours within easy reach at all times. You may need to draw on Van Zant before this morning is out. In fact, I expect you will.”

  Such foot-dragging I had never seen from Wish. He came up the steps one at a time; and even then I had to open the front door myself, for the both of us. I practically had to drag him by the hand to the door of Van Zant’s apartment.

  The self-styled psychologist was a long time in answering his door. I rang three times; then put my ear to the solid wood and listened. I couldn’t hear a sound from within, but that could have been because the door was of good-quality, thick wood.

  I glanced back over my shoulder at Wish. “Do you think we might pick this lock? I suppose we could find some evidence inside. It’s possible. Of course it isn’t exactly legal, but it would give us something to do until the doctor returns.”

  Wish rubbed at his ear. He appeared distressed. “N-no. I, uh, I think I know where he is. I-I-I’ll take us there. We should have kept the taxi. Now we’ll have to find another, or else it will take too long, and it’s likely to be too late.…”

  “Too late for what?” I asked, baffled, as Wish grabbed my hand and hustled me out into the blue-draped vestibule, out the door, down the steps.

  “I’ll take you to him. That will be best. The best thing. The right thing to do,” Wish said again. He walked fast, and as his legs were long I had difficulty keeping up with him. We went up Larkin to California Street, where there was more traffic, and a couple of hotels that drew taxis to them like flies. We had no difficulty finding another auto-taxi then.

  Wish gave the address this time, and I recognized it. I suppose I might not have, if it had not been that my mind was in that state of heightened clarity that I have learned comes with a certain amount of perceived danger. The address was a piece of unfinished, and temporarily forgotten, business that related directly to Dr. William Van Zant. It was indeed the very address the doctor himself had given me for Ngaio Swann, Ingrid’s supposed brother.

  “How do you know that address?” I asked Wish.

  “It’s in the Richmond,” he said.

  “So? Do you know who lives there?”

  “No, not really, at least I don’t think so. But it’s in the Richmond, that’s—well, that’s how I, I guess I just … found it.”

  “Honestly, Wish, you say that as if the house were just sitting there, lost, out on the street, and you happened to stumble across it. Really! You’re not being at all clear, you know.”

  He shot me a quick, worried glance and then returned to looking avidly out the taxi window. At least he’d regained some animation. He said: “I’ve gotten to know the Richmond in the past few weeks. Spent a lot of time there, seen and heard a lot of things. Things I haven’t been able to tell anybody yet. And now I—” Wish passed his hand across his forehead, in a gesture that gave me a chill, because it was so reminiscent of one I’d seen Patrick use on Frances when he was putting her into her somnambulistic trance. “—I want to tell you … but at the same time … I think I’d better not. Not … yet.”

  “That must create a dilemma,” I remarked acerbically.

  “Yes, I guess it does,” Wish said in his old agreeable way.

  His dilemma seemed to have put him in charge, though; for without hesitation he reached into the pocket of his trousers and paid the driver when we reached our destination.

  This area had been countryside until not too many years ago, and its development was still uneven. We left the taxi in front of a row of attached townhouses that looked fairly new, modern, and in good condition though painted a boring beige; yet just a block or so away there were houses that looked like little more than tumbledown shacks.

  I was unpleasantly reminded of the day we had come out here to look for the graves that were not there. The very air felt the same; there was the same sense of desolation and dislocation. I wanted to ask how far we were from that cemetery, but the question most likely would have set Wish off into the obsession that had deranged his mind—or so I privately thought—in the first place.

  “It happened here, too, you know,” Wish volunteered, looking down earnestly at me. “And she saw it, she knew, she came and told me.”

  “She …?”

  “In—uh, Indigo. The woman who lives there. Dr. Van Zant’s friend.”

  “Not Indigo, Wish, that’s not what you mean. Her name is Ngaio.”

  “No,” he shook his head vigorously, “Indigo. Like the color. It means blue. She told me herself. That other name, it was a stage name. She was supposed to be a man, it was supposed to look better that way. You know, because a woman is supposed to be escorted, there were places she couldn’t go without a man and so Indigo became a man. She’s very tall. She told me all about it.”

  We were standing out on an expanse of packed dirt that I presumed would one day become a sidewalk, having this bizarrely significant conversation, yet all I could think was that Wish’s mind was not working right. Something was wrong with him, and I didn’t know quite what it was, or how to get at it, or how much help he was going to be to me now. If the answer to the last question were, as I began to fear, not much—well, I was in trouble.

  On the other hand, I was learning a lot, and we hadn’t even found Van Zant yet. I decided to stop worrying, take my time, and go fishing in Wish Stephenson’s mind.

  “Who?” I asked forcefully. “Who was Indigo taking care of in this unusual fashion?”

  “Her sister. But her sister’s gone away now. Indigo is waiting for her to come back.”

  “The name, Wish, the sister’s name!”

  “I don’t know. She never told me. She just …” To my great surprise my seemingly innocent young policeman friend’s face flushed a mottled red, but only briefly, as if by an act of will he could turn it on and off. “She was lonely. But she couldn’t leave in case her sister came back, and she walked the neighborhood all the time for something to do, so she knew what was going on. She’s my source, Fremont. Only now he’s got her.”

  “He got both of them, didn’t he?” I muttered under my breath. I did not mean Ngaio and Ingrid, I meant both mediums. Van Zant’s connection with Abigail Locke was in those letters: “Willie” was none other than William Van Zant. I was sure of it, and I intended to make him admit it. He had fallen in love with Abigail, courted her up and down the Eastern seaboard some five and six years ago, only to have her ultimately reject him. I surmised William Van Zant’s debunking activities, his presumed so pure interest in science had begun then, in reaction to his ego’s having been dealt the blow of rejection by this tiny girl-woman in white. Abigail had kept those letters as evidence, or perhaps she had tried to use them to insure that he would leave her alone. Those letters were at first amorous but later they turned ugly, threatening. Had he killed her to get them back, and simply been unable to find them? Or had it been a crime of passion, a once lost love rediscovered, only to experience rejection again, and he’d snapped? Could I make him tell?

  How the man had connected with Ingrid Swann was harder to say, though he had admitted that he’d come west precisely in order to do his own kind of debunking on her. But why kill her? What had she done? Did she reject him, too?

  Wish and I had stood there in front of that house for perhaps five whole minutes, each of us quiet, preoccupied for different reasons. Just as I was about to suggest we leave and return with police backup, my friend a
nd colleague drew his Colt revolver.

  “Good!” I said approvingly but in a low voice. “We may have need of that, but not yet, I think. I propose we get out of here and come back with some of your friends from the police. Some of the more honest ones, not open to, shall we say, influence.”

  To my absolute horror, my friend and colleague, Mr. Straight Arrow, the only innocent policeman in a morass of corruption (or such had been his reputation), turned his gun on me!

  “Hey!” I protested. “Wish? That’s not funny.”

  “Not meant to be,” he said grimly. “We’re not going anywhere. You’re coming inside that house with me, right now. You wanted to see Dr. Van Zant, and he told me to watch you, not to let you out of my sight, and to shoot you if I had to, to keep you from doing anything foolish.”

  Wish had walked right up to me as he spoke, and now we stood only about a foot apart, with the long barrel of that Colt grazing my breasts. I looked him in the eyes. “My friend, what has he done to you? Did he hypnotize you, is that it? Against your will? But I heard that can’t be done, you can’t hypnotize someone against their will.”

  A cultured voice came from somewhere in the vicinity of my right shoulder, saying, “That is not so. I can hypnotize anybody. Even you, Fremont Jones.”

  Turning my head, I saw Van Zant at the top of the porch steps before one of the beige houses. Wish had a desperate, trapped expression on his face. “Indigo?” he said in a pathetic voice.

  Van Zant sniggered. “Your precious Indigo is in here. Bring Miss Jones with you and come on inside. We must offer her the same hospitality we have given Indigo, mustn’t we?”

  “Go, Fremont, move. He means it,” Wish said under his breath, and for a moment I thought he was only pretending to be under the influence of William Van Zant. I fancied that Wish would suddenly gather himself together and become a hero of legendary proportions. This was because I couldn’t quite see what I was going to do, how I was going to get out of this alone.

  But then I got a good look at Wish Stephenson’s eyes, and it was like looking in at somebody else, a non-Wish, looking out from inside his head. Decidedly an eerie sensation. “I’m going, I’m going,” I croaked, my voice breaking with strain.

  “Where is she?” Wish demanded as soon as we’d crossed the threshold into the modest house. “I must see her!”

  “In a moment,” said Van Zant. “First we should talk to your friend Fremont and find out what she knows.”

  “I know a good deal more than you probably think I do,” I said, on the theory that the best defense is a good offense. One learns these things playing field hockey at Wellesley; field hockey is much more of a blood sport than one might think, especially as played by women when there are no men around to interfere. But I digress. Returning to the point, I went on: “For example, I suggest that you not consider doing anything rash to my person, because I have in my possession—though not on my aforementioned person—certain letters you wrote to Abigail Locke.”

  “You have them? I don’t believe it. Move, go on down the hall, back that way, to the kitchen. Mr. Stephenson, for God’s sake do try not to be so clumsy!”

  Wish had tripped over a clothes tree and sent it crashing to the floor. He did not, however, lose control of his gun—not even for a minute; and the gun was still trained on me, not on William Van Zant. I had no choice but to keep moving in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Yes, indeed, I do have your letters,” I said, deliberately provocative. “You must not have looked very hard. You gave up too soon. What happened, was killing Abigail more difficult than you’d thought it would be? Did you lose heart? Or is it just that your physical condition is poor and so you ran out of energy? Which is it, Dr. Van Zant?”

  “There is nothing wrong with my physical condition,” he said defensively, “and furthermore I think you’re lying. There was nothing resembling a packet of letters in that whole house. I looked, I virtually combed through every inch of it, and I didn’t have to rush. She was dead, she couldn’t bother me, could she? And that dandy of hers, that hanger-on, Mr. Charming and Debonair Rule—well, he was off somewhere, wasn’t he?”

  “So,” I said, pausing in the doorway to the kitchen and turning around, “you admit you killed Abigail Locke.”

  “Of course I admit it. She was a fraud, a charlatan, and a whore, who didn’t deserve to live.”

  “Ah,” I said, as if in agreement. And then I went into the kitchen, which was a mistake. A big mistake. A little cry escaped me when I saw what must once have been Indigo Swann, and that cry brought Wish Stephenson, and then all hell broke loose.

  He had tortured her. She was indeed a female, tall, apparently accustomed to wear men’s clothes. That she was female was evident from her bare and mutilated breasts, and the clothes she partially wore were trousers, undone; a shirt hanging open, with the buttons all ripped off; a jacket that matched the trousers … except for the patches that were soaked in blood. He had tortured her. She was seated in a contraption like a very high-backed chair, with a vise arrangement to hold one’s head in place. I quickly surmised that this was so that the person in the chair would be forced to look into Van Zant’s eyes.

  Poor Indigo Swann had no eyes anymore. They had been burnt out. And her nipples had been burnt off, and her navel; and then she had been strangled with a four-in-hand tie, probably the very tie she had been wearing with that very nicely cut man’s suit. As I looked at her I knew I would never, myself, dress as a man again. I’d never be able to, because from now ever after, when I saw a woman dressed in male clothing, I would think of Indigo.

  “She had to be punished,” Van Zant said to Wish Stephenson. “She would not tell me what I wanted to know, even under hypnosis. She was stubborn, wicked, disobedient.”

  Poor Wish had turned white as a ghost. His eyes, which, as I previously mentioned, were bloodshot, burned hot as the real coals that had put out the eyes of Indigo Swann.

  “So,” Van Zant said, in that ever so superior voice of his, “you, Mr. Stephenson, will have to tell me everything she knew. Because she did tell you everything, I know she did. You will cooperate because you were a much better hypnotic subject than she was. You will go into trance, deeper and deeper, until you tell me everything I need to know.”

  As Van Zant said this, Wish began to sway on his feet. In spite of his anger, which I could feel from many feet away, Wish’s eyelids drooped until they were half closed.

  “Deeper and deeper,” Van Zant said. “Now, you will give me the gun. That’s right.…”

  But Wish did not give Van Zant the gun. He was not in deep trance, as anyone who knew him well could have told you. He was instead almost paralyzed by grief and rage, unable to move and scarcely able to speak.

  Van Zant had no weapon; I still had my walking stick in my right hand. Like many a man of science and intellect, William Van Zant was arrogant—and I intended to exploit that weakness to my advantage. In one quick, practiced motion I unsheathed my blade, and I used it to keep the villain at a distance while I walked over to Wish and simply said quietly, “Wish, give me the gun.” He did.

  I ordered Van Zant, “Sit down at this table and stay there, or I’ll blow your sleek, mean little head off with this revolver, and when I’ve done that I’ll slash you to ribbons to make up for what you did to my mattress and pillows. That was you, I presume?”

  Van Zant, obediently taking a chair, nodded yes. Like all persons of his type, if you took away his cherished but superficial trappings of power, he crumpled. Such men are not built to stand and fight, they are essentially cowards.

  I asked Wish if he were up to going after the police and he said he was, that the shock of seeing what Van Zant had done to Indigo had broken through the hypnotic suggestions the psychologist had planted in his mind. “I’m sorry, Fremont,” he said miserably.

  “Don’t be sorry, just go for help,” I said.

  “Let me cover her first,” Wish said miserably, nodding toward the mut
ilated body of Indigo.

  “Were you very fond of her, Wish?” I whispered.

  He nodded. “I loved her. I never loved a woman until Indigo, not really. I only knew her for”—he hung his head abjectly—“less than three weeks.”

  I made a decision. “Cover her, then, even though the police won’t like it. I’ll say I told you to, I’ll take the blame.”

  Wish covered Indigo, or Ngaio, I never did know which was her real name, with a bedspread he brought from upstairs. Then he left, and while he was bringing back the police, I got to ask my own questions of William Van Zant.

  “You were in love with Abigail Locke, and she rejected you,” I began.

  Van Zant just sneered and preened a bit. He could see his image in the glass of the back door.

  “You vowed to have revenge on her. But why kill her?”

  “Because, as I keep telling you, she deserved to die. All those women do. Eventually I’d have killed them all. Next question.”

  “And you don’t mind if everybody knows you killed Abigail Locke and Ingrid Swann.”

  “I’ll deny it in court, mind you.”

  I ignored that. “But poor Indigo—what did she ever do to you?”

  “She knew about my business dealings, which your friend and colleague Mr. Stephenson also found out. A very persistent fellow, Mr. Stephenson. He dogged me for weeks, always just a step behind me, before I was able to find out who he was. All these little intertwined relationships—ha-ha”—he laughed in a most unpleasant manner—“it’s positively incestuous! You work with Stephenson, Indigo is the sister of another medium who had to die, and the two of them—Stephenson and Indigo—between them could destroy everything I’ve done to make myself a wealthy man so that I could leave this psychologist sham behind me forever.”

  “These things you’ve done to make yourself wealthy—they’d be illegal, one presumes.”