“We were lucky,” said Dimitri privately to a few of his men. “It could’ve been a hundred.”
No one disagreed.
In all the horror and confusion Bill Torolla never even thought of a possible tie-up between the infamous maniac and a female prowler whom Henry Field believed he had seen early that morning. By the time Inspector Dimitri finally heard of the incident it was too late to matter.
At the moment, though, Dimitri was happy for another reason. His daughter was safe. She had called home at five o’clock when she learned of the Ashley siege, knowing her parents would worry. Where had she been? She was a bit hazy about that, something to do with working elsewhere for the day. To her father it sounded like she had been with a man, probably at his place. Damn kids today! Hell, she was twentyfive years old. It was her life. But the thought saddened him, he didn’t know why.
Now at 7:30 P.M., he was ready to call it a day. The hotel had been gone over top to bottom. No one was hiding anywhere, the bodies had been removed, most of the police equipment was gone. The TV crews had left after the last of the bodies, when it was obvious that Chess Man was not in the building. Even the day-long drizzle had just about stopped.
The inspector wanted several men stationed in the lobby for the night, just in case. Would give the hotel guests a sense of security and keep away the overly curious. He told the manager they could start returning to their rooms—those who still wished to return. The manager knew what he meant. It would be a miracle if any hotel could survive such a blow.
For his part, Alex Dimitri was discouraged and suddenly resigned to the strong possibility that he would not get Chess Man. He snorted. Probability seemed more like it at the moment. There was something crazy about how the man was able to disappear like that. And he didn’t mean mad crazy, he meant weird. What was that Adam Kenton had said about magic? Dimitri had a feeling this latest trick might cost him his career with the Department. He walked across the now quiet lobby on his way out. Wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it either.
KENTON HAD left earlier, thinking Bishop might call him again at the St. Moritz to gloat over his latest triumph. By nine o’clock there had been no call and now as he sat in his room smoking cigarettes, the Newstime reporter began to think more clearly about the day’s events. Maybe it hadn’t been such a triumph after all. Bishop had obviously intended to go through the entire hotel, killing every woman in sight. An arrogantly impossible concept, too hideous even for contemplation. Yet he could have done it. If left alone, he might have literally committed the homicidal crime of the century. Without any exaggeration or hyperbole, it would have been exactly that. Nothing less than the absolute and irrevocable homicidal crime of the century, and would have assured him of a sinister immortality, far beyond even that of Jack the Ripper.
In that sense, then, Bishop had really failed in his own eyes.
But he was a sly fox.
A fox …
Without warning, as if by magic, Kenton was struck by a thought so bizarre, so hopelessly terrifying, that his whole frame shook in reaction. His eyes broke open in shock, his face tightened in a death mask. Moisture appeared almost instantly above his upper lip and across his brow. He sat there in stunned silence for a lifetime before fumbling for the phone. Two minutes later he was hurrying out of the St. Moritz.
BISHOP’S EUPHORIA had left him. He sat in the darkened theater and absently watched the movie for the third time, his mind elsewhere. Even though he had demonstrated his superiority over all of them, his brilliant planning had largely failed.
He didn’t like failure. His feet hurt from the shoes and his hands tightly gripped the shoulder bag on his lap. All he owned was inside; his knife and what was left of his money.
“ARE YOU serious?”
“Let them all go. It’s the only chance we have.”
The inspector hesitated.
“If he spots them, we’ll never get him,” Kenton urged. “And we’ll probably never get another crack at him.”
“Who says we have one now?”
“He’ll come,” said Kenton with quick conviction.
Dimitri looked at him a long moment before walking across the lobby to the cops on duty, his mind made up. Then the two of them were in the elevator.
“Why the twelfth floor?”
“Bishop’s methodical. He left on twelve and he’ll pick up on twelve.”
“You got the room number too?” asked a skeptical Dimitri.
“Almost,” answered Kenton. “Only two possibilities.” He pulled out the diagram made earlier by the police. “He killed both women on this end over here. Then he got the other just two doors down, meaning he skipped this one.” Pointed. “He’ll either go for that door again or start on the other side of the third victim.”
“You really think you know him that well?”
“I hope so.”
A task force man in the basement would monitor the TV hall scanner, constantly turning to different floors. Anyone getting off at the twelfth floor would be immediately suspect. Other task force personnel would be in the manager’s office waiting for any sign of trouble. The relief elevator operator was also a police officer.
“You sure he’s dressed as a woman?” Dimitri asked when they got upstairs.
“Has to be,” said Kenton. “That’s how he got in and how he got out when he heard your men.”
Dimitri found it hard to believe. “He should’ve been an actor instead of a nut,” he growled.
“Maybe he could have, if things had been different for him.”
It was 9:30 when they entered their respective rooms. Between them was the empty suite of the dead Alice Troop who had started a new life in New York.
BY THE end of the movie the young woman with the bruised feet and clutched bag was no longer in her seat. On the floor were a half dozen candy-bar wrappers and a popcorn container.
AT 11:20 a slim blonde in a green coat bounced up the two steps and through the door of the Ashley. She crossed the dim lobby to the elevators, obviously knowing her way. In the elevator she smiled shyly at the operator and asked for the twelfth floor. Upon leaving she pleasantly bade the man good-night.
In the basement the detective looking at the TV already had her spotted.
She tiptoed down the hall until she came to the right door. She would continue her work as though there had been no interruption.
In her hand now was the passkey taken from the body of Henry Field. She would open all the doors with it. Softly, gently, she would make her visits. There was no hurry, she had all night. And all day.
She had all the time in the world.
Bishop smiled happily.
At last he had all the keys he would ever need. How to think like them and how to talk like them, and now finally how to act like them.
He stuck the key in the lock.
ADAM KENTON heard the door being opened. He knew who it was before he ever turned that way. From the window he stared at the other whom he had sought so very long. His blood suddenly froze, his heart stopped.
Their eyes met in combat.
Not a word was said. Bishop removed his shoulder bag and opened it. His hand came out with the knife as Kenton reached into his jacket pocket. The worn leather strap was rolled tightly and as Kenton unwound it, Bishop’s eyes followed every movement. He drew closer as Kenton raised the strap over his head, and when Bishop was very near, the arm came down and struck Bishop with the strap. Bishop didn’t move but stood there transfixed. Kenton’s arm was raised again and lowered and raised again and the strap stung Bishop fiercely and still he did not move. Now Kenton’s arm raised and lowered the strap again and again across Bishop’s head, his neck and shoulders. There was no escape for the boy.
Down came the strap.
Bang!
In absolute terror now, hideous memory returning, Bishop screamed and dropped the knife. Screamed and ran to the window as Dimitri banged on the locked door. Shrieking in some monstrous private pain, Bi
shop flung his arms through the window and scurried onto the ledge amid the shattering of glass. Trying to escape what only his maddened mind could see. His hands bloody, his sobs those of a wounded animal, he straightened his body on the narrow ledge.
He looked down twelve stories deep into darkness. He was back on the top of Hoover Dam staring down, the dread feeling returned. He was getting sick, his knees buckled, his bladder began to empty. He felt himself slipping.
Kenton raised the broken window and grabbed Bishop by the arm as his legs gave out and he slipped below the window’s edge. Kenton locked his hand into Bishop’s and stopped his fall. He had a good grip and began pulling Bishop’s limp body up just as Dimitri’s men burst into the room, guns drawn.
Now Kenton looked into Bishop’s pleading eyes and saw the incalculable pain and fright and madness and as Thomas Bishop’s bloodied hand meshed with his, Adam Kenton slowly opened his fingers one by one and released the dying boy.
He knew there would be no more screams, and no more pain.
The madness was over.
THAT NEXT morning Amos Finch did not go to his classes. He sat at home in meditative silence for much of those hours to commemorate the passing of a phenomenon, the like of which he did not expect to see again in his lifetime.
Afterward he organized his thoughts for the task ahead. The Complete Thomas Bishop would be written over a two-year period, under contract to his present publishers. He would immerse himself in Bishop’s background; the history, the family, the life itself. He would visit every place Bishop lived or even stopped, see what he saw. He would of course have access to all official Bishop papers, from hospital records to police files. He would interview, talk with, listen to, everybody Bishop knew. He would learn of the man as well as the monster. Finally, he would draw with consummate skill the portrait of a man beset by demons, a man who looked like other men but who was yet apart, a man who killed not in cold blood but by reason of insanity. Bishop had stood hopelessly alone, yet in his towering isolation and megalomaniacal paranoia he had still tried to forge a bond with his fellow creatures. That the bond was one of total destruction was surely as much a reflection of his times as of his own unassailable madness.
Finch was certain that he would eventually acquire many of the artifacts having to do with the life and death of Thomas Bishop. He had already established himself as the scholar of note on the subject. With publication of the book he would be recognized as the authority of record, and would himself become an item in the Bishop canon.
It was now all a matter of persistence and hard work.
Had Amos Finch known what lay ahead of him in his quest for the greatest and most elusive individual mass murderer in American criminal history, a search that would rival that of Adam Kenton, he would not have been so sanguine in his projections on that early December morning.
Nor would he have then begun his initial outline with the words, “In the beginning, Thomas Bishop..
BY LATE afternoon Adam Kenton was reading the preliminary medical examiner’s report on Bishop. He had been killed instantly in the twelve-story fall, of course. A white Caucasian male, approximately age twentyfive, height—. His eyes raced down the page: injuries, marks, body characteristics. He suddenly stopped, his face screwed into a quizzical frown.
The body had not been circumcised.
Not circumcised!
In California moments later John Spanner didn’t believe it. Kenton assured him it was true, he had just made certain.
“Impossible,” said Spanner. “Thomas Bishop was circumcised in Los Angeles County General hospital. The doctor’s name was on the records and the file hadn’t been touched in twentyfive years.”
They immediately checked with Los Angeles. Bishop’s file was again opened. No mistake. He was circumcised at birth. That was definite.
But the body of Thomas Bishop had not been circumcised. And that was definite too. Very definite.
Immediate investigation revealed that on April 30, 1948, forty babies had been born in the hospital. Twenty girls and twenty boys. At that time all the infants were kept in the same room the first few days, with name tags on the baskets and a paper bracelet on the baby’s arm. That was in the days before footprints were recorded on the birth certificate.
“Anything could’ve happened,” said Spanner.
“Something did,” said Kenton.
Both men were shaken. Everything they knew to be substance had suddenly become shadow.
Adam Kenton felt Bishop’s eyes on him, saw the maniacal stare, and he instinctively knew he would never really be rid of the man again. Not in his nightmares or in his memories, or even in the corners of his mind. He had run with the fox too long.
“If he wasn’t Thomas Bishop,” whispered Kenton helplessly, “who was he?”
Epilogue
NOWHERE IN Los Angeles police files is there mention of a woman named Sara Bishop being criminally assaulted on September 3, 1947. Sara Bishop never reported the rape, though she soon came to believe that the rapist was Caryl Chessman. She eventually imparted this belief to her son.
According to the official records of the California Department of Correction, Caryl Chessman was released on parole from Folsom Prison on December 8, 1947.
He was rearrested on January 23, 1948, in Los Angeles and executed on May 2, 1960, at San Quentin.
When the rape occurred, Caryl Chessman was in prison.
Sara Bishop never knew that.
Neither did her son, whoever he was.
By Reason of Insanity Page 64