The Devil's Menagerie

by Louis Charbonneau

  He made it to the San Carlos College campus in ten minutes.

  The roommate, whose name was Sheri Kuttner, was waiting for him at the security office. She was Edith Foster’s age, give or take a few months. She had long dark hair, perfectly straight, and sharp features. Her huge brown eyes were frightened. She was not as pretty as her former roommate, but about the same size. They could have shared petite wardrobes, Braden thought.

  When he showed her a copy of the murder victim’s face, cropped from a photo taken by the police photographer Saturday morning, Sheri Kuttner burst into tears.

  After the girl had recovered sufficiently, she identified the murdered girl as Edith Foster, a third-year student at San Carlos College, Sheri’s roommate for two years.

  Sheri Kuttner was too distraught that night to drive to the morgue for a formal identification or to be interviewed at length. That didn’t lessen Braden’s elation. Kuttner was able to reveal that Edie had been going to a poetry reading Friday night at The Pelican, a favorite coffeehouse of hers in downtown San Carlos … and that she might have been meeting someone there.

  The rest would come later.

  At least he had more than a Jane Doe lying in the morgue.

  Now he had a trail to follow, witnesses to find and interview, a personal background to explore. He had a case.

  Ten

  MONDAY MORNING, AFTER less than two hours sleep, Braden left his beach area apartment and drove to the San Carlos police station. The morning was cool, overcast as usual, but this was one Monday morning when the gloom did not match Braden’s mood. On the contrary, he felt eager and alert in a way he hadn’t felt for a long time. He didn’t question the reason.

  Deputy Pritkin was already at the station. Braden found the eager young deputy desk space with a computer terminal and dumped the weekend’s accumulation of crime scene, witness and preliminary autopsy reports relating to the Edith Foster case onto the desk. Pritkin had brought along the lengthy VICAP questionnaire through which Foster’s murder would enter the FBI’s databank. The deputy acted as if Braden were doing him a favor, like a rookie pitcher being sent out to pitch in the big game.

  Then the phone rang. Edith Foster’s car had been found.

  A checker working the graveyard shift at an Alpha Beta supermarket had recognized Foster’s picture in the morning paper. She had alerted the store manager, who called the police. The responding officer had spotted a red 280Z in the parking lot and had run a make on the personalized license plate.

  By the time Braden arrived at the scene the techs were already there and the 280Z was being examined, powdered, photographed and vacuumed for any possible trace evidence. Braden looked inside. The interior was undisturbed. There was no sign of anything amiss, at least to the naked eye.

  The checker who had recognized Foster’s picture was waiting for him in the market manager’s office. Her name was Sylvia Stern. She was a plump, middle-aged woman with blue eye shadow and short hair dyed a bright orange. She remembered Edith Foster coming into the Alpha Beta around midnight Friday and purchasing a few items. The store, which was open all night on weekends, had not been busy.

  “How come you remember her?” Braden asked.

  “Well, you couldn’t help noticing her. Such a pretty thing. I’d seen her before, too. She’d shop here sometimes.”

  “Do you remember what she bought that night?”

  “No … I’m sorry, Detective. I just ring ’em up, I don’t take much notice of what customers buy. Oh, wait—I do remember one thing she bought. It was a package of Dove bars. I remember because we kidded about how she could eat a whole package of Dove bars and stay as skinny as a model like she was, when all I got to do is look at a Dove bar and my dress size changes.” Sylvia Stern paused, her eyes suddenly moist. “She seemed a nice girl. Such a terrible thing to happen to her.”

  “Yes,” Braden agreed. “If you think of anything else …”

  He left another of his cards and made arrangements to interview other market employees who had been working Friday night at or near midnight. When he went back outside the techs were finishing up their preliminary tests before having the sports car towed away for more exhaustive examination. Braden studied the area, trying to visualize how the killer had worked it. He must have been waiting for her when she came out of the market, he thought. Unless they were together.

  Even though the car had been parked at the side of the market, there was a good chance someone might have seen the victim and the killer together. Other stores in the shopping strip would have to be canvassed, along with employees and patrons of The Pelican, the coffeehouse downtown. The manager of the latter had agreed to supply Braden with a list of customers who had used credit cards Friday night. It always amazed Braden how many people used credit cards to charge the smallest purchases—even a cup of coffee.

  He walked back into the market and found the redheaded checker. “Do you remember how Edith Foster paid?” he asked.

  “Well, I’m not sure, but … that’s a funny thing, now you mention it. I believe she used an ATM card.”

  Ten minutes later Braden had a copy of the transaction, including the last items Edith Foster had purchased in her brief life. Neither the magazine, the orange juice, the frozen waffles nor the package of Dove bars had been found in her car or on the ground nearby. The girl’s killer had taken them.

  THE NEWS OF Edie Foster’s murder raced across the San Carlos College campus like the recent fire sweeping through the dry hills of San Carlos Canyon. Students clustered on the steps of buildings and in the hallways, talking of little else. Dave Lindstrom felt the excitement and the undercurrent of fear pervading his Contemporary Film Studies II class that met at eleven o’clock that Monday morning. The buzz was audible in whispers and low-voiced asides, visible in youthful faces more alert and anxious than usual.

  Even violent films like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, which the class had recently studied on assignment, could not compete with the emotional impact of real violence striking close to home, Dave reflected. Many of the students in his class had known the murdered girl, if only casually. Dave had known her himself. It had taken him a while to place her among the two hundred or so students who enrolled in his classes each year, but he remembered her now through association with the girl sitting in the front row to the right of his lectern, Sheri Kuttner. Kuttner and Edith Foster had both taken one of his courses in the last spring semester. They had sat together in the front row.

  The Edith Foster Dave Lindstrom remembered had been a strikingly beautiful girl, very aware of herself, supremely confident. Bold glances and warm smiles, always a lot of leg showing. Frequent excuses to linger after class asking questions she already knew the answer to, or stopping by his office …

  He would never have cast her as a victim, Dave thought.

  He shook off the distraction, not liking the direction of his thoughts, which seemed to him uncharitable.

  “So,” he said, “is Pulp Fiction too violent?”

  His question caught their attention. Mention of the title of Quentin Tarantino’s film was the motion picture equivalent of a buzz word.

  “Heck no!” one student said firmly.

  “Why not? There’s casual violence, gratuitous blood all over the place.”

  “No there isn’t. Everything in that movie is appropriate to the situation and the characters. Hey, it’s not like Natural Born Killers or one of those.”

  “That picture was gross,” a girl said.

  Playing devil’s advocate to stimulate the discussion, Dave said, “Isn’t that a little like the female leads who are always saying that baring their breasts and having sex on the kitchen counter are essential to the revelation of the character they’re playing? Isn’t that what Tarantino is doing with violence?”

  There was laughter, followed by instant protests. “It’s not the same.” “No way.”

  “What’s wrong with bare breasts?” another student asked.

  �
��When was the last time you saw a guy’s dong on the big screen in living color?” a coed retorted.

  Dave let the discussion run a minute, until it threatened to digress completely. Pulling it back on track, he said, “In England the script for Pulp Fiction is the best-selling script ever published in that country. How do you account for that?”

  “That’s what I mean,” one of the movie’s defenders argued. “It’s the language that makes it great. I mean, you have to pay attention. You read it, the violence isn’t bad at all. What you have on the page is the dialogue, quirky characters, the humor.”

  “But isn’t that the problem?” Dave persisted. “The impact of visual violence on the big screen? Isn’t that simply too easy a way to grab your audience’s attention? Dole out a little violence to make them squirm?”

  “Tarantino’s sending it up—that’s the point!”

  “He doesn’t give us that Peckinpah slow-mo business,” another student said.

  Dave listened as the debate took hold. The students—a generation younger than he was—had a different reaction to film violence than he did. The way Dave saw it, younger filmgoers had become desensitized to violence, inured to a steady diet of severed limbs, flying heads, blood-soaked sheets and spattered walls. The graphic images no longer meant as much to them as they had to an older generation.

  They no longer meant as much as they should. Violence had become a matter of indifference.

  He thought of Glenda’s accusation—that he didn’t want to face the evil, ugliness and violence of the real world. Not true, he insisted to himself—he didn’t want to glorify or exploit it.

  Or was he hiding his head in the sand? America was a violent society.

  “It’s always against women,” one of the students was saying.

  Dave glanced at her. Sheri Kuttner. An intense girl, thin, long dark hair, attractive in her own way. He had seen her more than once on campus with Edith Foster, he remembered now.

  “That’s a good point,” he suggested. “I’d like all of you to take another look at the films we’ve studied so far, from Hitchcock’s Psycho to Pulp Fiction, and ask yourself what impact they have on the way we look at women and the violence that’s done to women in our society.”

  “That’s that old argument,” a serious film student objected. “People don’t kill people because they see someone doing it in a movie.”

  “What about you, Professor?” one student challenged. “What do you think is all right for us to see?”

  Dave hesitated. He was saved by the bell.

  SHERI KUTTNER LINGERED at the side of the room as it emptied out, approaching Dave’s table as he was gathering up his lecture notes.

  “Good morning … Sheri, isn’t it?”

  The girl nodded. Hugged her books against her chest. She seemed to be waiting for him to say something else.

  “You were a close friend of Edith Foster, weren’t you? I’m very sorry … it must be hard for you to lose a friend like that.”

  “A detective questioned me.”

  “Really?” How many crime films had he viewed, studied, dissected over the past fifteen years? Movie detectives were like old friends, but Dave reflected that in real life he had never actually spoken to one. “Oh … because you were close to Edith.”

  “Yes … I had to identify her. Last night from a photograph, and this morning …”

  “You had to go to the morgue?” Dave asked, appalled. “That must have been awful.”

  “Yes.” Sheri Kuttner looked at him solemnly. There were dark shadows under her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept. “We were roommates. But you knew that. Edie would’ve told you.”

  “Edith would have … I don’t understand, Sheri.”

  “I knew about you and Edie. Last semester, I mean, when you … well, you know. I didn’t say anything to the detective yet, but …”

  The unfinished sentence hovered ominously between them. Dave felt a chill of alarm. “What are you talking about? What didn’t you tell the detective?”

  Sheri Kuttner’s body language changed subtly. She hugged her books tighter, took a small step backward, avoided Dave’s eyes. “I knew how she felt. We talked a lot. Then when she started going out again this semester, I figured …”

  “What—that it was me?” Dave exclaimed. “You have to be joking.”

  “You think it’s funny?” Sheri burst out. “She was so … so beautiful. She had so much to give, and all you people do is take, take, take. Oh, I don’t know if you were the one who … who did that to her. But I know all about you! I know …”

  Abruptly she turned and ran to the door.

  “Miss Kuttner—Sheri! Wait!”

  But the student fled into the corridor. Dave started after her, then stopped. He couldn’t chase her down the hallway. Not today of all days, with the whole campus on edge.

  Sheri Kuttner was overwrought. The trauma of having to identify her friend’s dead body must have been almost too much to bear. She wasn’t thinking clearly.

  Roommates, Dave thought. Girls of that age would have been very close. Close enough for long, whispered confidences in the small hours of the morning. Edie Foster revealing her feelings for someone, talking out her fantasies. But surely she hadn’t actually named him! Why would she do that?

  Dave flashed again to the sometimes provocative approaches the coed had made to him. Her open invitations took on more significance. Such situations were not uncommon for many college instructors, and Dave thought he had always handled them as well as possible, principally by acting as if nothing were wrong, as if long slim legs and vibrant bosoms were outside the range of his tunnel vision, and sexual invitations from girls scarcely out of their teens were incomprehensible to him. You couldn’t respond to what you didn’t see. No one’s feelings had to be hurt.

  He had acted that way with Edith Foster.

  Dave stopped in his tracks in the corridor.

  Had he angered the girl? Had his seeming indifference been translated in her mind into rejection, turning her hostile? He could no longer remember whether the girl’s demeanor had changed toward the end of the spring semester, and since she had not signed up for any of his classes this fall, he couldn’t recall even seeing her.

  But what had she told Sheri Kuttner?

  PREOCCUPIED, DAVE LINDSTROM stopped briefly at his office to leave his notes and gather up some student papers that had to be graded. Rarely did a teacher’s work end with the last class of the day, and today was no exception. He usually took home a couple hours work or more, not counting the reading and research that were part of his ongoing absorption in the subject of films and their impact on twentieth-century society. Even going to a movie—a passion since early childhood—was both business and pleasure. “Like Siskel and Ebert,” he would joke with Glenda, “only they get paid more.”

  He walked to his car in the faculty parking lot behind the Liberal Arts building, thinking about Sheri Kuttner and the implications of her brief visit. Could he also expect a visit from Shed’s detective? The possibility was both intriguing and a little intimidating.

  He unlocked the driver’s door of the Nissan Sentra, tossed his armload of books and papers onto the passenger seat and paused, not immediately knowing why. Something in his peripheral vision … but the parking lot was empty except for a few cars. No one else nearby. In the distance, students strolled across the campus, absorbed in animated discussions. About St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle? Wordsworth and Shelley? Radio isotopes? Girls and boys? The Raiders and the 49ers next Sunday? Or was everyone talking about Edie Foster, wondering, speculating?

  Nothing out there to alert him. It was something he had seen when he opened the car, then. No, he suddenly realized. Something he didn’t see.

  His yellow fireproof slicker. He had been assaulted that morning by the strong smell of stale smoke and ashes permeating the interior of the Sentra. Had he tossed the offending gear into the trunk? No, he would have remembered. But just to make sure, Dave o
pened the trunk to look. He found the spare tire, tools in a greasy pouch, his Ping Pal 2 putter and some golf balls. No fire equipment or clothing.

  Walking back around the vehicle, frowning, he spotted deep scratches beside the lock on the passenger side door. The metal was actually indented slightly where someone had pried at the door.

  Popped it open, Dave thought angrily. Stole his Nomex coat.

  He drove straight to the campus security office, where he railed to Ed Willhite, the white-haired chief of security, about the stupidity of breaking into a car to steal something the thief couldn’t possible have any use for. “Hell, if he wants to fight fires, all he has to do is volunteer and the fire department will give him his own gear.”

  “Prob’ly figured there might be somethin’ else more valuable when he broke in,” Whillhite said. He was a big, slow-moving man, a retired LAPD cop, with a garland of white hair surrounding a pink scalp. This afternoon, less than twenty-four hours after discovering that a girl from the college was the subject of a murder investigation, Willhite found it hard to get excited about a stolen slicker.

  “And right in the faculty lot—in broad daylight!” Dave fumed. “What the hell are we coming to?”

  “Tell me about it,” the security man said as he filled in the complaint form. “You sure nothin’ else was stolen?”

  “There was nothing there to steal.”

  “Prob’ly vandals. They’ll just dump the coat somewheres. If it turns up I’ll let you know. You wanta sign this right here by the X?”

  Walking back to his car, Dave looked out across the campus, which appeared tranquil and peaceful in the long shadows of the late autumn afternoon. It was beautiful, he thought, but no longer as innocent as he had always viewed it. Strange how the loss of the coat, the invasion of his privacy, affected him so strongly, although the incident seemed trivial in comparison to the murder of one of his former students. Glenda thought him naive, always reluctant to see the worst side of things. Maybe she was right.