The Devil's Menagerie

by Louis Charbonneau

  Richie’s disappointment was not as sharp as he had expected. There was also an odd relief, a lifting of tension, taking away the nervous edge to his anticipation.

  Crossing the street, he started back along the opposite side, peering at the buildings and what he could see of the subterranean parking areas. There were cars parked all along both sides of the street, but the gated underground parking caught his eye. Although, like many youngsters, he saw gates and barriers as more of a challenge than a deterrent, he recognized the futility of trying to sneak into every one of the garages in the hope of recognizing a dark blue 1993 Buick LeSabre. The multiunit buildings also had many entrances, each with banks of mailboxes. The chance of finding one with Ralph Beringer’s name on it seemed remote.

  Richie had no sooner accepted this depressing conclusion than he saw the car.

  In the middle of the next block, a dark blue car emerged from an underground parking garage and paused before entering the street. It was a late model Buick, immaculately maintained, its glossy paint glittering in the sun. Richie started to run. The Buick suddenly shot out into the street.

  A break in the center island strips allowed the car to cross through and turn left without pausing. Richie shouted and waved. His legs pumped furiously, his heart thudding, the quivery excitement building with each stride. “Dad! Dad! Wait for me!”

  But his father didn’t see him. The Buick pulled smoothly away, slowed at the next corner, then accelerated down the street.

  Richie pulled up on the sidewalk, panting heavily. Tears stung his eyes. He felt a weight as heavy as despair, out of all proportion to what had happened. His dad hadn’t seen him, that’s all. He hadn’t run away.

  Besides, now you know where he lives.

  The realization cut through Richie’s anguish. He blinked back the tears and scrubbed at his eyes with his knuckles. His gaze turned away from the boulevard where the Buick had vanished toward the building it had come out of.

  The apartment complex was called Vista Valencia. Mature evergreen plantings surrounded the walled patios of the front units. Masses of bougainvillea, hyacinth and geraniums lent their colors to the beige stucco buildings. All of the units, Richie noticed, had either small balconies or private patios. The shrubbery next to the patios was tall and thick enough to hide someone in their shadows, especially at night.

  The long row of units had three entrances but only one driveway leading down to the lower level garage, which was secured by a grilled barrier. The entrances had locked gates. Just inside were stacks of brass mailboxes set into a side wall.

  Richie peered through the wrought-iron grille of one of the entries at the narrow name slots above each box. By squinting he could make out most of the names.

  There was no name tag for a Ralph Beringer.

  Richie repeated the process at the remaining two building entries with the same disappointing results. Then he returned to the central entrance, next to the driveway. A car had stopped on the ramp just below Richie—a silver Honda Accord. At that moment, with a heavy rumbling, the barrier at the front of the garage began to lift.

  Instantly Richie realized what was happening. The driver of the Honda had activated the barrier by punching a button on the remote control he carried in his car. As the small car drove through the opening, Richie slid down a short incline, jumped to the pavement, and darted into the gloom of the garage before the slow-moving gate could close.

  Quickly he slipped to the side, away from the entrance. Halfway down a long row of stalls the Honda slid into a parking space. Richie heard a car door slam and the blip of an electronic lock. He crouched between two cars. The footsteps of the Honda’s driver came toward him, echoing hollowly through the garage. But at the last moment the driver turned away toward a back wall. Peering after him, Richie saw lighted signs over a stairway and an elevator. The Honda driver summoned the elevator with the push of a button and stepped inside.

  Richie waited. Silence settled over the vast wilderness of concrete and metal where he crouched. Emboldened by the silence, Richie stepped out of his hiding place and walked along the center aisle he found himself in, looking at the parked cars on either side. He returned along the next aisle. More than half of the parking slots were empty. The people who used them were probably at work, Richie thought, or shopping at the mall.

  The Buick was gone, of course, so Richie didn’t know exactly what he hoped to find. The spaces were identified by numbers, not names. He guessed the numbers would be the same as their owners’ apartment numbers. Richie had no way of knowing the number of the unit where Beringer was staying.

  He stopped next to a gray Ford Taurus, parked in slot 110. His heart gave a little jump, like a blip on a TV screen.

  More than a week ago, the Sunday he went to the beach with his fa—with his stepfather—he had seen a car just like this one. Later, when he spotted the blue Buick near his house and following his school bus, Richie had concluded he was wrong about seeing the Taurus more than once that Sunday. But it had been a Hertz rental car. So was this one.

  Richie didn’t know why, if he had only recently come to San Carlos, Ralph Beringer would need two cars. But he had no doubt whatever that this was where his father was staying.

  Vista Valencia. Apartment 110.

  Twenty-Six

  AT FIRST DAVE Lindstrom thought the detective on the phone wanted to talk to him about the harassment complaint against Ralph Beringer. Then the caller, whose name was Braden, identified himself as a homicide investigator looking into the recent deaths of two San Carlos College coeds.

  “We’re all shocked,” Dave said. “Nothing like this has ever happened here before. As campuses go, ours has had a better record than most. But I don’t see how I can help you.”

  “It’s my understanding you had both of these young women in your classes. I thought maybe you could tell me something about them.”

  “Well, I’ll try.”

  They made an appointment for three o’clock, after Dave’s last class of the day. Waiting for the detective to arrive, Dave thought about the two murdered girls. He recalled Edith Foster more clearly than the Rothleder girl because Foster had made a point of being noticed. It wasn’t the first time Dave had had a student show off her legs or excess cleavage, but he had never had any trouble turning down the invitations, spoken or implied. Foster had been more persistent than most, and her roommate had implied knowledge of something more than flirtation between them. Had she told the detective as much? Was that why he wanted to talk to Dave? The question left him feeling uneasy.

  Detective Braden arrived at precisely three o’clock. Dave waved the cop to the only extra chair in his small office, an oak chair by the window that was usually occupied by a worried student. Every inch of space in the room was taken. One whole wall was filled with bookshelves. Crowded freestanding bookcases stood against two other walls, one of them devoted entirely to videos of movies, sandwiching a four-drawer file cabinet and stacks of cardboard file boxes. Dave’s desk was piled with folders, correspondence trays and heaps of papers and periodicals. The one small open wall space was filled by a poster from the early 1940s of Bette Davis in In This Our Life.

  “Would you like some coffee, Detective? We have a large coffeemaker in our conference room. It’s just down the hall.”

  “Thanks. I’m coffeed out.”

  The detective had a blunt, no-nonsense manner. His face was all hard planes with weary eyes and a tight mouth that reminded Dave of a line in Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native describing the rural peasants as having lips that met like the two halves of a muffin.

  He wasn’t sure exactly what he had expected. His adolescent and adult life had been circumscribed by movies, as fan and scholar. In college he had been an actor and even a neophyte moviemaker; in real life, as he put it, he had ended up as a critic, analyst and teacher of the medium he loved. Over all those years of watching movies he had observed thousands of cops on screen, but he suspected that the reality of
homicide investigation had rarely if ever been captured. The movies preferred lone knights-errant—private eyes, courageous reporters, angry survivors—to the dogged, weary investigators who solved real crimes. He wondered if Braden had ever been involved in a lethal car chase, a confrontation in a dark abandoned warehouse or a silent stalking in the woods.

  “How can I help you?” Breaking the silence, Dave realized that the detective was quite content to let it linger.

  “You don’t mind if I tape this conversation?” Braden produced a small tape recorder and set it on a corner of the desk.

  Dave stared at it, surprised. “No … of course not.”

  “Good. Saves a lot of paperwork.” He pushed the record button and the tape began to wind. “This is an ongoing investigation into the deaths of Edith Foster and Natalie Rothleder …”

  Braden gave the date, time and place of the interview before recording Dave’s name, address, home and office phone numbers and his occupation as an assistant professor of film studies at San Carlos College. Then he said, “You knew the two students whose names I just gave.”

  “Yes … I told you that on the phone.”

  “What can you tell me about them?” Movie cops spoke more harshly and aggressively, Dave thought. Barton MacLane was the prototype in the film noir of the forties.

  Dave reviewed his mental portraits of the two students. “They weren’t kids, Detective. They were young women, mature in different ways.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Edie Foster was … sexually mature. Outgoing, very self-confident, popular. A very attractive young woman, perhaps a bit spoiled, like a pretty girl who’s always had her own way because she was so pretty. Not an especially good student, because she only worked at what interested her.”

  “Did you give her a good grade, Doctor?”

  “A ‘C,’ I believe. Passing grade, average performance. She could have done better.” Dave frowned, wondering about the significance of the question. Wondering what the detective was looking for from him. “Natalie Rothleder was quite different. Brilliant student, hardworking, intense, ambitious—partly, I think, because she had much lower self-esteem than Edith Foster.”

  “Attractive, too, was she?”

  “Yes, very. More than she realized, I think.” Dave paused, watching the slow unreeling of the tape in the small recorder. “What are you getting at, Detective Braden? You know these were both attractive young women, inviting targets for a sexual psychopath.”

  “That who you think killed them?”

  “I’m not a detective,” Dave answered quietly. The detective’s cryptic style was becoming irritating. “I understand both women were raped and brutalized. Sexual psychopathy seems to be a fairly obvious assumption.”

  Braden nodded without apparent interest. “Do you ever go out with your students, Dr. Lindstrom?”

  Dave stiffened, suddenly wary. After a moment he said, “No. Aside from the fact that I’m happily married and it’s against this college’s faculty rules, I wouldn’t put myself into that kind of awkward and compromising situation.”

  “We all have good intentions, Doctor. Sometimes we don’t always live up to them.”

  “I don’t know what you’ve heard, Detective, but I never went out with Edith Foster or Natalie Rothleder. I never met either of them outside the normal college setting.” He flashed again on the Foster girl sitting in the front row, crossing her legs, smiling when the movement caught his eye. “Sometimes students fantasize about their teachers. It’s normal. I’ve never taken advantage of that.”

  “Very commendable,” Braden said dryly. Abruptly changing direction, he asked, “You’re a volunteer firefighter?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You were involved in fighting that fire in the hills a couple weeks ago? Specifically, the Friday night the Foster girl was killed?”

  “Yes, I was. So I couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with her murder, could I?” Dave hated hearing the quiver in his voice, hated even more to have the homicide detective hear it—or the tape machine record it.

  “You were relieved for part of that evening.”

  The recognition that the detective’s questions were more than casual—that he had actually been investigating Dave’s movements that night—chilled him like an icy wind.

  “I went home for a few hours to rest, be with my family. I was back on the lines a little after midnight.”

  “Uh-huh. No one remembers actually seeing you on the lines after midnight Friday, Doctor, or even on Saturday.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Ask one of the fire captains. I know there was a lot of confusion that night, but … our crew boss would remember me. I was working with him late Friday night and all Saturday morning, cleaning up some hot spots.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Jim Roget. He’s a Navajo Indian.”

  Braden glanced at him curiously. “An Indian?”

  “He’s probably gone back to Arizona. There were about a dozen Navajo firefighters came over that week. He’ll confirm what I’ve told you.”

  “That’s fine, Doctor, that’ll help a lot.” Braden smiled for the first time during the interview. It was not a friendly smile, Dave thought. Polite, nothing more. “I guess that’s all for now. Oh, by the way, you were teaching a class this past Friday night? The night the Rothleder girl was hit?”

  Dave’s momentary relief dissolved like steam on a heated windshield. “It was a graduate school seminar in cinematography.”

  “What time was that, Doctor?”

  “From seven to nine.” Dave’s angry defensiveness was gone, replaced by bewilderment. “It was over about a quarter to.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I was told.”

  Braden punched a button, stopping the tape. Both men stared at the recorder for a moment, as if it exercised a special fascination. Then Braden picked it up. “Thanks for your cooperation, Dr. Lindstrom. I’m sure I’ll be talking to you again.”

  “For God’s sake!” Dave burst out. “You can’t really suspect me of doing these things. Whatever gave you that crazy idea?”

  Braden’s skeptical brown eyes didn’t waver. “We have to look at everything, Doctor. It’s routine. We may have a serial killer on this campus of yours. I can’t worry about hurting someone’s feelings.”

  He surveyed the organized chaos of Dave’s small office, as if it might reveal its occupant’s potential as a serial murderer. Then, as if it were an afterthought, he murmured, “Were you in the service, Lindstrom?”

  “No,” Dave said curtly, adding, “I was fifteen when the Vietnam War ended. I was lucky.”

  “Ever been to Europe?”

  Once again the change of direction left Dave bewildered. “No. We hope to go someday.”

  “Yeah,” Braden said, preparing to leave. “Don’t we all?”

  * * *

  “I DON’T BELIEVE it!” Glenda exclaimed.

  “He was serious.”

  “But that’s ridiculous! Where did he get such an idea? Just because you had both of those students in your classes … my God, are they interviewing all of those girls’ teachers?”

  “I don’t know. He said it was just routine.”

  Glenda stared at him. She checked the meat loaf in the oven, turned the temperature down and went to the stove to stir the gravy. For the moment she and Dave were alone in the kitchen. She had sensed that something was troubling him the moment he came home. Although he was a quiet man, there were nuances in his silences. She supposed that sensing such moods was part of what being married meant. “But you didn’t think it was.”

  “No,” Dave frowned. “The Foster girl … she made kind of a play for me.”

  “And did you play?”

  “No,” he answered quietly, meeting the inquiry in her eyes. “Never. Not once. Not Edie Foster or anyone else.”

  “Edie?”

  “That’s what everyone called her.”

  “I’m sorry,” Glenda said, c
ontrite. She shivered. “That’s the way it works, isn’t it? That’s the way the police think. Someone must have told that detective about Foster liking you, and he immediately put the worst possible twist on it.”

  “As long as you don’t,” Dave said. “Once he talks to Jim Roget, the whole question becomes moot.”

  He wasn’t quite sure why that prospect was not as reassuring as it should have been.

  THE KITCHEN WAS the room Dave and Glenda liked best in their early California house. It was large, bright and spacious, with ample space for the antique harvest table Glenda had found at the antique swap meet in Long Beach five years ago. Long before developers came up with the idea of a “family room,” the old-fashioned large kitchen was a gathering place, a debating forum, a place for snacking, doing homework, carrying out projects, playing Hearts or Monopoly, or sitting quietly over a cup of tea. This kitchen was that kind of room.

  On this Thursday night the usual warm family atmosphere was missing. Both parents were preoccupied. Richie ate in silence and picked at his food, even though meat loaf with mashed potatoes and gravy was one of his favorites. Only Elli seemed oblivious of the tension that made the air seem heavy, ready to hum and crackle if someone struck a spark.

  Someone did.

  Toward the end of the meal Richie put down his knife and fork and stared at his half-eaten dinner. He poked at the last of his meat loaf. The gravy on his plate was getting cold, congealing around some uneaten carrot slices, which sat in the gravy like orange lily pads in a muddy pool. Richie looked up at his parents, who sat across from him at the long table.

  “I wanta go see my dad,” he blurted out.

  His parents stared at him, their expressions frozen. He might as well have shouted “Shit!” at the top of his voice, Richie thought. He was nervous about their reaction, but now that the words were out he was stubbornly determined.