Every Wickedness

by Cathy Vasas-Brown

  She longed to cancel her dinner plans with Ginny but knew there was no way to reach her by phone. Ginny had been giving violin lessons all day, and right now was seated amid the congregation of Saints Peter and Paul attending 5:30 Mass.

  Beth tried to look on the bright side, imagined thirty blissful minutes alone sipping a mineral water in the North Beach, then she remembered Rex’s ceiling fan. Not wanting to face another complaint on Tuesday morning, Beth locked her shop and trudged miserably up the stairs to Rex’s office.

  When she opened the door, she didn’t know whether to scream or throw something. Even in the fading light, Beth knew she had entered Rod Serling territory, a place vaguely familiar yet unshakably surreal. The office, which she’d painstakingly decorated, was a dump.

  In spite of her rising anger, she flicked on the light switch. Overhead, the ceiling fan remained still, though had it whirred on full blast, it wouldn’t have made any difference. Cigar smoke clung to everything. Ashtrays overflowed with stubby butts. The micro blinds Beth had installed were a mess, some of the slats bent, others missing altogether. The hard-wearing wool carpet would need replacing, the blue tweed mottled with stains and burns.

  Bastard, Beth muttered. She was damned if she would replace the carpet only to have Rex burn holes in a new one. His lease was up in nine months, and then she’d kick him out, rip up the carpet, sand the hardwood floors underneath, and turn the office into her sample room. She no longer needed Rex’s rent to stay afloat. And when he showed up for work next week, she’d tell him to buy an oscillating fan. The ceiling fixture would remain broken.

  If he showed up for work. Beth hadn’t seen much of Rex this past week, and the few times he’d passed through their common front entrance, he hadn’t stayed the whole day. No wonder. With the office looking the way it did, it was impossible to imagine even the most loyal client sitting across from Rex, allowing himself to be bamboozled into buying more insurance. Client? Beth hadn’t seen many of those lately either. If new clients weren’t signing on, how long before U.S.S. McKenna sank? Along with the stench of cigars, Beth smelled bankruptcy.

  Nine months. Beth was reminded of women in their final stages of pregnancy — simply wanting the ordeal over with. Nine more months with Rex. Beth contemplated abortion. The sooner she could kick Rex’s polyester ass down the stairs, the better.

  Beth moved to the casement windows, unlatched each, and lifted them open. Fresh air entered the office for what must have been the first time in weeks. Already she planned how she would divide the space when she moved her samples upstairs — fabrics hanging from chrome hooks along the wall to her right, carpet squares to her left, wallpaper books arranged in a divided Arborite counter beneath the windows, a coffee maker on top. In the centre of the room, four comfortable chairs and a large table where her clients could browse through suppliers’ catalogues …

  Her daydream was interrupted by an insistent drip from the adjoining two-piece bathroom. A leaky faucet. Rex would complain about that next, she knew, so Beth moved toward the sound. If the appearance of the front office was a shock, it did little to prepare Beth for the sight in Rex’s bathroom.

  Every square inch of wall, from floor to ceiling, was papered with pictorial layouts of women. All were nude or semi-nude, but the pictures went beyond erotica. The women’s poses were contorted, painful to behold, backs arched, necks twisted. Many were bound — to trees, flagpoles, railway tracks. Several were gagged, mouths held shut with every imaginable ligature. One woman’s scream was silenced by a golf ball wedged between her teeth.

  And there were hundreds of them, on the wall behind the toilet, above and below the sink, covering the tiny window facing the rear parking lot. Rex even had one taped to the shaving mirror. The photograph showed a supine woman, clothing strategically torn. Pressing down on her throat was a man’s steel-toed boot. Was this Rex’s favourite? Did the mirror serve as a changeable display space, like a Baskin-Robbins flavour of the month?

  Sickened, Beth yanked the picture from the mirror, crumpled it, threw it into the garbage can and left, the faucet still dripping.

  11

  Senior Inspector Manuel Fuentes walked into Jim Kearns’s office and closed the door. Kearns recognized when Manny was trying to pussyfoot around, and this was one of those times. There was a cushiony quality to his walk, and a tentativeness when he poked his head into Kearns’s doorway, the caution of a man who’d been shot at too many times. Kearns set a half-eaten salami sandwich on top of his in-basket.

  “Juicy Fruit?” Fuentes asked. “Hey, weren’t you supposed to have today off?”

  Kearns declined the gum offer. “Spiders on the brain,” Kearns replied. “Thought I’d paddle through the quagmire awhile.”

  The truth of it was that Kearns spent every day and quite a few nights at his desk, finding solace in work, which had become his replacement for alcohol. Away from his apartment, he couldn’t notice the infernal silence, the empty echo of his footsteps on the linoleum. Fuentes knew it too, and Kearns appreciated the discretion his trusted friend used in not saying so.

  The surface of Kearns’s desk was invisible, papers strewn everywhere. Files were stacked on the floor, miniature leaning towers of folders that a good sneeze would topple. Fuentes dragged a moulded plastic chair across a clear path and sat down. Kearns waited for him to adopt his usual posture, feet up on Kearns’s desk, but instead Fuentes kept his feet planted on the floor.

  “What’s that?” Kearns asked, pointing to a video cassette in Fuentes’s hand. “Dirty movie for you and the wife?”

  “Yeah, real filth. You making a dent in this stuff?”

  “Uh-uh. Just pushing it around. What’s the film?”

  “I told you. One hot dame on here,” Fuentes said, holding up the video. “Bushy blonde hair, nails scratch your back like a rake —”

  “Say it isn’t so,” Kearns groaned. “Devereaux?”

  “This morning’s broadcast. Wanna watch some TV?”

  “Why not? I’ve got no appetite anyway.” Kearns tossed the remains of his sandwich in the waste-paper basket, then he rose and followed Fuentes to the outer office, a noisy, spiritless space crammed with desks of various sizes, some metal, some wood. Every other desk had a laptop connected to the main computer. A few of the inspectors hadn’t bothered trying to personalize their workspace, but other desks were laden with framed photos of family members and assorted dogs, cats, and ferrets. Small reminders that there was indeed life outside this windowless place.

  In the far corner, a television and VCR rested on a rolling cart. Kearns nudged a “Fabulous at Forty” coffee mug out of the way with his rear end, then he perched on the edge of an unoccupied desk. Fuentes popped the video into the VCR.

  Moments later, the discordant jazz theme to “Devereaux Direct” whined through the speakers of an eighteen-inch TV.

  “Needs a new song, right Jimmy?”

  “New face, more like it.”

  “Save some of that anger for the end of the show. You’re gonna need a hole in your head to let the steam out.”

  Devereaux, on camera now, looked ready for battle. Her eyes, heavy under the weight of eyeliner, still managed to bore into Kearns. “Wimps!” she shrieked, then plunked herself into a tub chair. “A murderer has been running loose in the city for months and women are supposed to play nice, travel in pairs, and treat our loved ones like suspects until this lunatic is caught? The police are twiddling their thumbs while women get carved up.”

  “Shit,” Kearns moaned.

  “Hey, she could have said we’ve got our thumbs up our asses.”

  “I gave that up years ago.”

  “Listen. It gets better.” Fuentes cranked up the volume.

  Devereaux went on to interview three women, each confessing their fear of going out at night.

  “My social life is ruined,” complained one.

  “I’ve gone right off men,” said another.

  “Damn,” Kearns said. “And sh
e was my type too.”

  “Why aren’t the cops patrolling the streets?” ventured the third television guest, a fortyish woman with salon-streaked hair.

  Kearns shook his head. Papering an area blue didn’t work. When uniformed officers walked the beat, the crime simply moved to another location.

  “You’re right, ladies,” Devereaux said. “Give us the streets, walk the beat,” she chanted, pointing a taloned finger. “Don’t be slobs, do your jobs.”

  “Who’s she calling a slob?” Kearns scoffed, patting a firm stomach. “Why doesn’t the Spiderman do us all a favour? The only good Devereaux is a dead Devereaux. We don’t need that overstuffed sausage casing adding more coal to the furnace.”

  “Yeah, who do you want to be? Shadrach, Meshach or Abednego?”

  “Groucho,” Kearns responded. “Oops. Different trio.”

  Fuentes nodded. “Every vigilante will be on her high horse. The gun shops will love this.”

  Devereaux was wound up now. The three women had served their purpose and were thanked perfunctorily for their time, then escorted from the stage. Devereaux would solo.

  “The Spiderman’s victims have all been hardworking, respectable women,” Devereaux stated. “That, at least, should give this manhunt some impetus. This city doesn’t need some religious version of the Zodiac Killer —”

  “What the hell?” Kearns shouted. “Where’d she get that?”

  “Thought that would get you,” Fuentes said.

  The Zodiac Killer had murdered several people in the San Francisco area during the late sixties. He taunted the authorities with cryptic letters and used a cross within a circle as his trademark. After a few months, the murders abruptly ceased, and no one was apprehended. Police, Kearns recalled, suspected the killer had been caught for another unrelated crime and incarcerated, or had been confined to a mental institution. Kearns found neither explanation acceptable. He hoped the bastard had killed himself.

  The public was aware that the Spiderman bled his victims to death. The process had been helped along by massive doses of blood thinners administered to the victims during their captivity. The fact that he performed ritual carvings, though, had been a carefully guarded secret until now. But only Kearns and his task force knew that, like the Zodiac Killer, the Spiderman had adopted his own symbol: a Christogram, an elongated printed P with an X through the stem. The stem, the killer’s first cut, was the fatal one. It ran vertically along the radial artery, sending blood pulsing from the victim’s body with every remaining heartbeat. By the time the mutilation was complete, the killer would have been bathed in blood, the murder scene a scarlet swimming pool.

  Fuentes, a devout Catholic, had explained the Christogram to Kearns after the first victim had been discovered. Christograms, he said, were symbols composed of two or more letters, often interwoven with other symbols like laurel wreaths. They were intended to represent God or the Trinity. The , or Chi Rho monogram, combined the first two letters of the Greek word for Christ; together they resembled a cross. Others interpreted the P and X as a shortened form of the Latin word “pax” meaning “peace.” Whatever the killer intended by carving the Christogram on his victims’ wrists, peace had nothing to do with it. The killer had some knowledge of organized religion, could even be an ex-priest or seminarian.

  And somehow Devereaux knew it too.

  “Wonder who Devereaux slept with to acquire that hot tip?” Kearns said. “Someone’s gonna fry for this.”

  Devereaux went on to say that the people of San Francisco could not afford to wait for some damning piece of lint to show up linking the serial killer to his victims, then mercifully, the jazz theme played, and Fuentes began to rewind tape.

  Right now, Kearns thought, he would be grateful for a piece of lint. Lint, with some incriminating hair and fibre, had been enough to capture Atlanta child killer Wayne Williams. But Kearns and crew had squat. No fingerprints, no saliva, no metal shavings from whatever the women were cut with. His task force swarmed the knife shops; a few keeners researched the history of whaling and told Kearns about the bone knives used by the Inuit. A knife expert from the San Juan Islands was flown in. Now Kearns had information galore about knives, their blades, and which edge produced which cut. All well and good, if only the killer’s hand were at the other end.

  Serial killer, Kearns thought, hating the phrase that had become a cliché. He and his task force had tried in vain to conceal the probability that a serial murderer was what they were dealing with, knowing there was a fine line between caution and panic, but moments after the killer’s second victim had been found, the press flew to their word processors. The Spiderman had left his signature and demanded serial-killer notoriety, which the press gave him. In the years to come, women would mail him their underwear, propose marriage, and the inevitable books would be written. Spiderman history. His brain would be x-rayed, his childhood examined. Schoolmates would be interviewed, teachers probed for their recollections. No one would remember the names of the victims — Carole Van Horne, Monica Turner, Lydia Price, Anne Spalding, Natalie Gorman. Devereaux hadn’t mentioned them once during her television show. No one could compensate the families, understand the torture they endured when journalists invaded the bedrooms where the victims had once played with dolls, written in diaries, dreamed about their futures.

  Kearns knew that the profile they’d put together on the Spiderman applied to every deviant walking. The information he had recited at the Fairmont was nothing more than Serial Killer 101. Anyone who read current crime fiction or watched TV docudramas already knew the profile. Besides, profiles had been wrong before. There’d been that case up in Canada, where the FBI had concluded that the murderer of two teenagers was a manual labourer. Son of a bitch turned out to be an accountant. Couldn’t be more far off than that.

  An astrologist from Mill Valley postulated the Spiderman to be a Capricorn, a hyper-organizer with a strong need for control, a man not crippled by fear; he would lack buoyancy but struggle to project a normal facade. He could be compensating for an absentee father.

  A psychologist specializing in Adlerian birth order professed the killer to be the oldest in a family, dethroned from his favoured position by the birth of siblings, admiring power and striving to regain it.

  They could both be right. Or nuts. Either way, the field was still too broad, and they weren’t even within sniffing range. Neither the press nor the public would let up.

  The click of the VCR brought Kearns back to reality. He turned to Fuentes. “We need a suspect.”

  “We need the Spiderman,” Fuentes emphasized, then realized his slip in using the name.

  “Oh, sure. Be greedy. Until this creature decides to walk in here on cloven hoof, a suspect will do nicely. At least it might keep the bloodhounds off our backs.”

  Back in his office, Kearns retrieved the salami sandwich from his wastebasket, blew some pencil shavings off the kaiser roll, and polished off the remains in three bites.

  12

  The twin spires of Saints Peter and Paul impaled the sky over North Beach. As Beth passed in front of the Romanesque church, she took in the details of the architecture. She had been inside once, nearly a year ago with Ginny, and remembered the ornate altar inlaid with mosaic and framed in white Carrara marble. The peacefulness she had expected from a place of worship had been conspicuously absent as parishioners crammed the pews, greeting each other in Italian or Chinese. Tourists had stood at the back of the church, coming and going as they pleased, according as much reverence to the Mass as an excursion to Disneyland. A visiting missionary delivered a twenty-five-minute homily about the evils of materialistic society, and concluded with a plea for generous donations to his outreach program. Beth hadn’t returned to Saints Peter and Paul or any other church.

  She paused before one of the newsstands on Washington Square, paid for a Chronicle and New York Times, then pushed open the lower half of the Dutch door to Mama’s Girl and went inside. From her table by the
window, she could watch a cluster of Italian men playing bocce in the park across the street as a handful of Asians practised Tai Chi nearby. From this vantage point too, Beth could flag down Ginny coming out of Mass — Saints Peter and Paul was right next door.

  She ordered an Evian and unfolded the Chronicle. Pictures of the Spiderman’s victims were plastered on the front page beneath the headline SPIDERMAN SNARES MODEL. Sardonically, Beth supposed Devereaux ought to be congratulated for her journalist coup. Everyone was using the arachnid metaphor. Everyone except Jim Kearns. Beth understood Kearns’s feelings about Devereaux and shared them. The woman’s job title was tough to pin down — not quite journalist, nor solely a morning-show host but a curious combination of both. Beth supposed Devereaux would be pleased with being labelled a Media Personality. Her television show, “Devereaux Direct,” aired each morning; she wrote a weekly newspaper column bearing the same title, and occasionally, her strident voice could be heard from some local radio station, shrieking about some Important Issue. These days, it didn’t seem to matter what switch you flipped or what page you turned to — there was Devereaux. Beth couldn’t understand why San Franciscans even cared what the woman had to say.

  But they did care. That was the problem. And right now, Devereaux had more credibility than the police.

  Today’s editorial slammed Kearns’s forum, citing it as a feeble attempt to appease frightened citizens while telling them nothing new. By the third paragraph, Beth had the gist of the piece, and she flipped back to the front page.

  With a mixture of fascination and revulsion, Beth read the Chronicle’s latest instalment about the killer and his victims. Natalie Gorman’s photo was, to Beth’s mind, inappropriate and sensationalistic: in it, Natalie wore a black lace bustier, her claim to fame as a Victoria’s Secret lingerie model. The news article included a map of the city, with bright green arrows pointing to the locations where each victim had been found. Anne Spalding, like the others, had been reduced to a jumble of words and a diagram. Beth read and reread the article, hoping to learn more about the woman that she hadn’t taken the time to know.