A Cruel Season for Dying

by Harker Moore

  Sakura looked back through the glass to the interrogation room, where Shelton had sat coughing up smoke between answers. He thought of the grappling marks that had been found on the support beam of the church, and tried to imagine the comic swinging a metal hook thirty feet against gravity, then climbing the rope with the added drag of Lucia Mancuso’s body.

  “What do you think, Pat?” He turned the question on the veteran.

  Kelly made a noise. “The commissioner’s up McCauley’s ass for any kind of arrest. I think that sleaze was smart to lawyer up.”

  “This is Lieutenant James Sakura, shield number sixty ninety-eight.” Sakura looked directly into the eye of the video camera. “Also present are …”

  “Detective Walter Talbot, shield number seventy thirty-two.”

  “Present is video technician Herb Dietz. Subject is Antonio Paladino.” Sakura nodded for Talbot to begin.

  “Mr. Paladino, we want you to understand that you are under no obligation to answer any question. You are not accused of any crime. We asked you to come today to determine if you have any information that could help us in our investigation of Lucia Mancuso’s death.”

  “I understand.”

  “Did you come here of your own free will?”

  “Yes.” He coughed, clearing his throat. For a handsome guy, Paladino looked terrible.

  “Where are you presently employed?”

  “Odyssey Lincoln Mercury. I’m a salesman…. I also do a little photography on the side. Mostly weddings.”

  Talbot made a notation in his file folder. “Mr. Paladino, what was your relationship to Lucia Mancuso?”

  “She is … was my niece.” He stared into the camera as if it weren’t there.

  “How was she your niece?”

  “I’m married to Barbara”—he looked back at Talbot—“Dominick’s sister.”

  “Dominick Mancuso, Lucia’s father?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you have children?”

  “Two. A boy and a girl.”

  “Would you say you were a close family?”

  Paladino shrugged. “We got our troubles, like anyone else.”

  “What kind of troubles, Mr. Paladino?”

  “I like to work out. I come home from the gym and the wife thinks I been out with some chick.”

  “Have you?”

  “That’s none of your fucking business.”

  “You’re right, Mr. Paladino, it isn’t.” Talbot made another note. “Any other problems … between you and your wife?”

  “What does any of this have to do with Lucia?”

  Sakura stood. “Mr. Mancuso spoke of some trouble between you and his sister over a neighbor’s child.”

  “Dominick is an asshole.”

  Sakura moved in closer. “Mr. Paladino, I know this is difficult, and I remind you that you do not have to answer any of our questions. But I have to believe you want to help us find Lucia’s killer.”

  “Yes …” He struggled with the word.

  “Will you tell me about the neighbor’s little girl?”

  He ran one of his hands over his eyes, a gesture that seemed to say he was willing to make a fresh start. “It was nothing. I never touched that kid. Her and her mother were crazy.”

  “Why do you think Mrs. Griffin lied about what happened?”

  He squirmed in his seat, a man who had something bad to say, but didn’t know how. “I slept with the broad. One time, that’s all. She was all over me after that. I told her I loved Barbara.”

  “So you believe she made up the story to get back at you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does your wife know that you slept with Mrs. Griffin?”

  Paladino shook his head.

  Sakura moved away from the table, faced the one-way window. “Mr. Paladino, where were you Saturday afternoon?”

  “At work.”

  “What time did you arrive?”

  Paladino hesitated, as if sensing some trap. “I was pretty late, if that’s what you’re asking?”

  “Why was that?”

  “I had a flat.”

  Sakura had turned back, watching Paladino’s reactions. “And it took you almost two hours to fix it?”

  “It was raining.” The man’s eyes shifted farther away.

  “And Saturday night? Where were you then?”

  “At a bar. Nick’s. Having a few beers—” He stopped. “Wait a minute … all these damn questions. You think I had something to do with Lucia’s death? You think I killed her? Because of what that bitch said?”

  “Mr. Paladino,” said Talbot, “we have to ask the question.”

  “Well, I didn’t kill Lucia. I loved Lucia. Like my own. I … I wished it would have been me instead of her.” He dropped his head into his hands, his thick fingers spread over his face like a mask, trying to muffle his sobs.

  Sakura watched Willie chew on her pencil as she checked the scrawl of notes on her legal pad.

  She looked up. “Don’t give me that damn inscrutable stare, Sakura.”

  “Was I?”

  She laughed, standing now, walking toward the one-way window through which she’d witnessed the interrogations. She ran her fingers on the ledge, examining the fine layer of dust she’d picked up. She turned. “Okay, let’s take them one by one.”

  “Graff first,” he said.

  “Looks real good on paper. Fits the profile. A priest. That certainly jibes with the religious elements. And the last two murders take place in his own backyard.”

  “I hear a but.”

  “These pictures …” She looked down at the spread of Graff’s photographs that had just come in under warrant. “I don’t think that the man who took these photos is the same one who posed those murder victims in their beds.”

  Sakura raised his brows. “Why?”

  She shrugged. “These photographs are so depersonalized. There are no head shots. Just body parts. And the genitals, they’re exploited in Graff’s photographs. At the crime scenes the killer hides the sex of the victims.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “There’s an incompleteness in the photos. An unfinished aspect.” She picked up one of the shots. “They’re fragmented as though he’s not done. But in the crime scenes there’s a kind of wholeness. As if the killer had finally achieved resolution.”

  He removed his jacket, placed it over the back of a chair. “Maybe the photographs are the first stage in the evolution of Graff’s fantasy.”

  “Okay …” She waited.

  “Graff starts small, takes photographs, pornographic fodder for his fantasy. Then he graduates to the stage where he’s actually killing,” he said.

  “But there’s a problem.” She was chewing on the pencil again. “The dates on these photographs. There are too many pictures taken after the Carrera murder. I can’t see a serial going back.”

  “Unless we can match any of these body parts to a victim, the best we can do with these pictures is circumstantial evidence against Graff.”

  “You witnessed the autopsies, Jimmy. Any one of the victims have six toes?” She dropped the photograph she’d been holding. The blond pubic hair was startling against the dusky flesh of phallus and testicles. “Every one of the subjects in these shots has some kind of deformity. None of the victims had any kind of anomaly. Not even a noticeable birthmark among them.”

  “Milne had arthritis.”

  She shook her head. “That’s different. That happened after years of living. These subjects came into the world … Damaged is what I think Graff thinks they are.”

  “And our killer …?”

  “Resurrected … his victims are resurrected. To a higher plane. Perfected. That’s why we get angel wings.”

  “Wings of fallen angels.”

  “Shit, do we have to keep coming back to that.” She bit into the pencil. “Forget that for a moment. If it is Graff, and he is so hell-bent on photographing everything, where are the pictures of winged bodies on beds?
Serials like trophies.”

  “I suppose Graff could have hidden them. We’re still searching his rooms, and we’ll extend the warrant to the whole rectory if necessary,” he said. “I wish we could find a grappling hook and some LSD. Or work boots to match those prints Michael found in the warehouse.”

  “How about some child pornography?”

  “That would be nice.”

  “Because the eight-year-old girl is where we lose Graff,” she said, “and pick up Shelton and Paladino.”

  “Shelton gets high marks, except he’s out of shape.”

  “A bisexual pedophile,” she said. “That certainly covers all the bases.”

  “But …?”

  “I don’t see Shelton placing wings on bodies,” she said. “It’s too metaphorical. His mind isn’t that elegant.”

  “We could disqualify Paladino on the same grounds,” he said.

  “Maybe. But he did take those wonderful Halloween photographs of Lucia. I think there’s more to Tony Paladino than meets the eye.”

  “Both men have a similar scenario with a woman,” he said.

  “In Shelton’s case I think Sheila Davis is telling the truth about her daughter. In Paladino’s case I’m not so sure.”

  “I keep remembering that Lucia was sedated,” he said. “Linsky said she’d be conscious but compliant. Was she treated differently from the other victims because she was a child? Or because of a more personal relationship with the killer…. But what were you saying about there being more to Paladino?”

  She pulled back her wavy hair, fastened it with a band. “I think Tony Paladino is searching for the Holy Grail. The perfect woman. Hence, the screwing around. But he always falls short. Even his wife, whom I believe he loves, doesn’t measure up. But Lucia did. I think he was able to project his ideal onto Lucia.”

  “Lucia was eight years old.”

  “I know. But Lucia was less than real to him, more a symbol of what could be. In the meantime he played the doting uncle. I don’t think he ever touched her. That would have ruined it for him. His sexualization of Lucia was unconscious and specific to her. Besides, I think even if we could convince ourselves that he could have killed Lucia, there’s no way he murdered the men.”

  He stared at her, nodding, wishing more of the puzzle pieces fit.

  For a reporter who’d just scored big time, Zoe Kahn was not in a very good mood. Ordinarily, she would have killed to get inside Sakura’s office, but her mind kept wandering to the possibility of running into Johnny—the anticipated confrontation vying with her memories of the crime scene in the church, impressions much more indelible than the never developed film.

  And hadn’t that been a piece of monumental stupidity, or something much worse? She hadn’t guessed she had such impulses in her. And that was scary, not knowing herself half as well as she’d believed. Thankfully, Garvey had taken it in stride, a minor fuckup compared to the overall jazz of an exclusive. NO ONE SAFE! The page-wide banner screaming from the front page. GAYS TO LITTLE GIRLS! Complete with tableau of the winged child suspended over the crèche.

  Garvey had called in the artist, who’d mocked-up the whole scene from her description. And that had been good. Talking about it in precise and objective detail had actually helped a little.

  But where the hell was Sakura? Was this some cop trick to make her nervous? Well, he could forget it. One thing she knew, she wasn’t scared of cops. She was here because she wanted to be, not because the great Sakura had summoned her. She was here because she hoped to get something out of him, especially with rumblings in the pipeline that they’d finally come up with some suspects.

  “Good afternoon, Ms. Kahn.” He appeared at the door and walked to his seat behind the desk. “Thank you for coming.”

  He looked awful. Worse than she felt. She nodded, letting him go on.

  “I assume you know why I asked you here.”

  “My story?”

  “Yes. And though I understand the argument against a reporter revealing her source, there is one thing I have to know.”

  “And that is?”

  “Are you in any contact with the killer?”

  She controlled her expression. It was not the question she’d expected him to ask. Shit, she could only wish the killer would get in touch, like Berkowitz writing to Breslin.

  “No, Lieutenant,” she said finally.

  “I see.”

  There was a wealth of information in those two words. He knew the leak was close. The question about the killer had been his last hope against part of what was eating him from inside.

  “Your source … ,” he began.

  “Don’t go there.” A command that had sounded like a plea. She said nothing else, and waited.

  He waited too.

  “Why the little girl, Lieutenant?”

  He seemed to sense that this was her question, not the Post’s. “I don’t know, Ms. Kahn. I don’t know why he killed any of them.” He used the words against himself, like a knife.

  Sakura stood inside the genkan, reaching out to trace the pattern of gold thread slipping through the heavy white silk of Hanae’s wedding kimono. It had been a joint decision that it was to be this garment that would hold the honored place in the small entrance hall. The kimono defined what was most essential in life—their bond to each other.

  “Jimmy?” Hanae’s voice from the living room.

  “I am here, Hanae.”

  She had drawn up the sudare and stood in profile against the naked window, one of her hands resting on the ledge, the other near her throat. The floral-patterned kimono she wore looked bright against the canvas of black sky.

  “You must be very tired,” she said quietly when he’d kissed her.

  “Yes.”

  “Then I shall be the good wife and give you a bath.”

  He undressed while Hanae made her preparations. He was spoiled by hinoki tubs. Cold porcelain was a poor substitute for the fragrant cypress, but Hanae at least had the soap he favored. In Japan he would have soaped and rinsed before soaking.

  “Not too hot,” he said, walking into the bathroom through gathering clouds of steam.

  “Stop telling me how to draw a bath.”

  He stepped into the tub and sank into the water. Releasing a long breath, he closed his eyes, letting Hanae knead the muscles of his neck.

  She lifted her hands. “You wish to be alone?”

  He reached for her. “No, stay with me.”

  She rose from her knees and felt for the small stool behind her.

  “She was only eight years old,” he said after a moment, glancing over at her. Her eyes closed as he spoke, and he knew she had begun focusing inward, creating from his words her own images. “With the white wings,” he continued, “she did look like an angel. Except she was dead.”

  “What does this mean, Jimmy?” she asked, opening her eyes. “Before he was not taking the lives of children. What is there that is the same between a small girl and the men who died?”

  “You have asked the right question.”

  “And do you know the answer?”

  “No, Hanae, I do not.”

  In the living room Hanae waited for her husband, standing again before the exposed pane of glass. The birds slept inside their covered cages. Taiko curled at her feet. She waited for her husband, attempting to empty her mind. For her, there was no day and no night. She lived according to her own cycles of time. It was night because Jimmy was home.

  A headache had caused her to miss sculpting class this afternoon, something she did not like to do. But there was no help for it. She placed her fingers to her temples, still troubled by a remnant of pain pressing against her forehead. If she massaged and breathed in the correct rhythms, she could perhaps ease the tension. This unaccustomed discomfort, she hoped, had no real physical origin but resulted from the anxiety about keeping her pregnancy so long a secret from Jimmy.

  She reached for the pins that held her chignon and shook her hair loose.
Against her will the unformed image of the murdered child hanging in the church forced its way behind her eyes. She thought of her cousin’s dream, the sound of her voice from the tape. Was the form, if not the substance, of Nori’s nightmare a mirror of this death— a prophetic screen upon which the murder of this little girl was to be projected?

  She heard the muffled clopping of Jimmy’s geta against the tatami as he approached her. The scent of his soap settled in her throat as he moved her hair and pressed his lips against her neck. She could feel her pulse against his mouth. He turned her in his arms. Her fingers found his still damp hair as she pulled his face to hers. She had learned long ago that she could not remove her husband’s pain. But tonight she would offer him whatever comfort she could.

  Michael’s apartment building was not what Willie had expected. She had known it was old, the top floor occupied by some member of the Llewellyn family since Michael’s great-grandfather had had the building put up nearly a century ago, according to what Hanae had told her. What she had expected was a renovation. This lobby with its dead fire-places looked as though it hadn’t been touched by a designer’s hand in at least the last six decades. It wasn’t dilapidated or dirty. Its oddity was that it looked well kept and deserted in equal proportions. An abandoned movie set that might, at any moment, be put into operation.

  She’d been waiting for over an hour when he came into the lobby. She had never seen him dressed as he was, in tight faded jeans, with a denim jacket lined in shearling, half opened over a flannel work shirt. Thrown over his shoulder was a kind of duffel bag she imagined held his carpenter’s tools. In the mellow lighting he seemed to move toward her in a kind of halftime rhythm. As he came closer, she saw he needed a shave.

  She stood up as he approached. “I thought you might want to take a look at these.” She held out the three VCR cassettes.

  “Come up,” he said. He hadn’t asked her what the tapes were or taken them from her hand.

  “I’m exhausted.” She shook her head.

  Michael ignored her excuse, guiding her with a proprietary touch to the small of her back toward a narrow marble hallway. He worked the keypad of a private elevator. Then his hand found her waist again, directing her inside.