Diary of a Serial Killer

by Ed Gaffney

  “I used to,” Vera said. “Complete with the badge, the hat, the handcuffs, the works. You should have seen me then.”

  “Wow!” Justin’s eyes were wide. “With fancy shoes and stockings, too?”

  “And suddenly, everybody’s in therapy,” Terry interjected, pulling the piece of paper out of his breast pocket. “Changing the subject to something less NC-17, Justin, do you think you could bring this incredibly important legal document over to your father, and tell him how lucky he is that I am his partner?”

  “Yes, sir!” exclaimed the little boy as he enthusiastically grabbed the paper and whirled around to run to his father, who had stopped to pick up a couple of sweatshirts on his way to meet them. Unfortunately, Terry hadn’t expected Justin to move so fast, and the big man hadn’t let go of the paper in time, and it ripped right down the middle.

  Poor Justin looked like he had just committed the worst crime imaginable, and it was only a matter of time before he burst into tears. Terry was fast, though, and before anyone could say a thing, he had scooped Justin up into his arms, whispered something into his ear, and replaced both pieces of the torn document into his breast pocket.

  Whatever he said had started Justin giggling, and so the little boy was all smiles as he wiped his eyes, slid back down to earth, darted over to his father, and brought him by the hand to say hello.

  “You know what?” Terry told Zack. “I stopped by to give you some work, but let’s deal with this tomorrow, if that’s okay with you. All this talk about handcuffs and hats has suddenly made me very hungry.”

  Zack looked quizzically at Terry, and then his eyes registered understanding. He smiled, scooped up Justin into his arms, and said simply, “Enjoy your evening.”

  “Okay, I know we said we weren’t going to talk about work tonight, but I just have to tell you about the letter. Then we can go back to not talking about work, all right?”

  It really didn’t matter much to Terry what they were talking about, so of course he agreed with Vera. He was having the best dinner of his life.

  The woman was everything he imagined she’d be—well, okay, not everything, because they were in a restaurant and there were other people around, so she had clothes on. But what clothes they were. And she was gorgeous, sexy, fun, smart, and, she really seemed to like him. He could easily see this date leading to another, and another, and then, maybe to something without so many people, or so many clothes…

  On top of that, the dinner was so good he didn’t know what to eat first. The salmon was wild, and fresh, and so delicious—

  “So. Remember when I called you for help?”

  And then again there was Vera. What was he doing eating when he could be looking at her? God almighty. That dress was the luckiest garment in the universe.

  “Yes. Something about a list of words, and how brilliant I was.”

  “Exactly!” Vera exclaimed. “It wasn’t the words, it was that you read them to me.”

  Terry took another bite of salmon. “Do I stop being brilliant if I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about?”

  “Of course not.” Vera cut a little piece of her roast chicken. “You couldn’t know how brilliant you were. But here. I brought this to show you.”

  She took a folded-up piece of paper out of her tiny purse, opened it, and spread it out on the table. It was a copy of the letter from the serial killer. Five of the sentences were highlighted, and in each, a single word had been crossed out and another word written above it.

  “The highlighted sentences are all quotations from Shakespeare,” she told Terry. “But Ellis and I couldn’t get any further than that until we remembered the first message from the serial killer.”

  “The one with the misspellings.”

  “Right. We thought maybe he had intentionally made mistakes in the quotes as clues, and we were right. When you look carefully, the quotations are just slightly off. By one word each. We wrote the correct word over the mistake.”

  Terry looked at the words again. “These are the ones I read to you, right? ‘You. Be. Why. Sea.’ And ‘Are.’”

  Vera was smiling. “Exactly. And do you see this quotation here, in the postscript?”

  “‘All trust, a few love.’”

  “Right,” Vera said. “That’s a jumbled-up Shakespeare quotation. To put it in the right order, all you have to do is take the last word, and put it at the beginning. See? ‘Love all, trust a few.’ And it turned out, that was the first key to the puzzle.”

  “Don’t tell me. So what you had to do was reorder the five words that had been wrongly left out of the quotations the same way you reordered the scrambled postscript. So the five words, in the new order, would be, let’s see. Put the last one first, right?”

  Vera pointed at the words. “Right. So the new order is right here.” She pointed at the words written at the bottom of the page. ARE. YOU. BE. WHY. SEA.

  Terry looked up at her from the paper. He had no idea what the words meant. “So, when exactly do I understand how brilliant I am?”

  Vera grinned. “First you have to do something.”

  “Okay.”

  “Close your eyes.”

  Terry did. “When I open them, am I going to get a surprise?”

  “Maybe.” The grin was still in Vera’s voice. “Now listen while I read these words to you. Are. You. Be. Why. Sea.”

  Terry worked on the puzzle in his mind. Are you be? Why sea? He just couldn’t get it. The questions were nonsense. He opened his eyes. “I’m stumped.”

  “That’s because you’re not listening. You’re looking at the words in your mind’s eye. Close your eyes again. I’m going to read them a little differently this time. And listen. Don’t try to see the words in your mind. Just listen.”

  He closed his eyes again.

  “Ready?” And then, almost as if she were reading quickly through a list of words without any meaning, she said, “Are-you-be-why.” Then after a brief pause, she said, “Sea.”

  “Do it again,” Terry said.

  “Okay, ready?”

  Terry cleared his mind. “Ready.”

  And then Vera said the words again. But this time, Terry heard, “R-U-B-Y. C.”

  Terry’s eyes shot open. “Oh my God. The words aren’t words. They’re letters.”

  Vera nodded. “And I never would have gotten that if you hadn’t read them to me over the phone like you did. Do you have any idea how fast you talk sometimes? The words didn’t make any sense, but as letters, bingo, we got a name. Ruby Cee, of Indian Oaks, Massachusetts. Now do you understand why you were so brilliant?”

  Terry was still talking about dessert as they entered Vera’s living room. The man really liked his chocolate. But apparently it was also very dangerous to dogs. Who knew?

  Vera had kept the date going not because she was reckless, or impetuous, or inclined to sleep with guys on the first date. Although technically, this was their second date. The first one was last year, on her birthday, the night she’d been kidnapped.

  But it wasn’t the amount of time Vera had spent with Terry that led her to invite him up to her apartment after dinner. And it wasn’t how he protected Justin’s feelings when the little boy accidentally tore that important document. It wasn’t even that every time she was with Terry, he made her smile, and laugh, and just feel good about things. That was all true, but there was more.

  Part of it was instinct. An instinct that Vera always trusted, and that rarely let her down. An instinct that told her that Terry Tallach was a good man, and a man that would be excellent to have as a big part of her life.

  The conversation had now turned to the perils of flambé desserts. Apparently, next to choking, being set on fire was the most likely cause of injury to restaurant patrons.

  And with that statistic delivered, Terry excused himself to use the bathroom.

  Vera lit some candles, got out a bottle of wine she had bought on the way home from work, a corkscrew, and a couple of glasses, put
them all on the coffee table, and sat down on the couch, leaving plenty of room for Terry to join her.

  The other reason Vera had asked Terry to come in was what Grandma called Vera’s now attitude. Even as a little girl, Vera was aware that life was extremely fragile, and that tomorrow is not guaranteed for anyone. Her diabetes, her police work, her kidnapping, the loss of so many of her fellow cops on 9-11, all had firmly reinforced her conviction that the only thing that was ensured by waiting before taking a chance was that you might never get the chance again.

  And as if that wasn’t enough, if tomorrow did come for Vera, it was going to be a very risky tomorrow, featuring a wig, old-lady clothes, and a one-on-one confrontation with a monster in the home of Ruby Cee.

  Terry emerged from the bathroom, sat down across from Vera, and launched into a conversation about how champagne corks were much more dangerous than people believed.

  He sounded nervous.

  Men are foolish creatures, Grandma used to say. Sometimes you can give them a message clear as Gabriel’s trumpet, and they still don’t get it. That’s why God made high heels and underwear.

  Vera stood up. Terry had moved on to the risks of burning candles indoors. If anything, he was getting more nervous.

  Tomorrow is not guaranteed for anyone.

  Vera reached behind her, unfastened her dress, and let it fall to the floor.

  And finally, Terry stopped talking.

  Then he got up off his chair, and came to her.

  Thanks, Grandma.

  TWENTY

  September 15

  “Excuse me, but before we begin, would you mind switching seats with each other?” Inmate Alan Lombardo blinked rapidly as he stood in the doorway of MCI–Bridgewater attorney-client meeting room #1 and made his bizarre request to Zack. “The last time you visited me, you sat on my right, and Attorney Tallach sat on my left. Now you are the one sitting on my left, and I’m going to have a hard time concentrating.”

  Zack half-expected to hear Terry come back with something like, “Well I’m going to have a hard time representing you if you don’t stop talking like an idiot,” but instead there was only silence. Zack looked over to his left, and Terry was just sitting there, looking more relaxed than Zack could ever remember seeing him. “Um, do you care where we sit?” he asked.

  Terry let out a small laugh. “Absolutely not.” He picked up the legal pad and the pen that were on the table in front of him, and switched seats with Zack, as Alan sat down across from them.

  Once they were settled, Zack said, “One of the reasons we came to see you was to talk about why you didn’t tell us that you worked for George Heinrich.”

  Lombardo did not respond immediately. The rate of blinking surged, and he reached up to make a microscopic adjustment to the angle of his glasses. “I, um, I was afraid that if you knew that, you might not want to represent me.”

  Under normal circumstances, Zack would have expected to have to restrain Terry from leaping across the table and strangling their client for withholding such important information. But today was far from normal. Terry was in the best mood Zack had ever seen, thanks to an exceptionally successful date with Vera last night. He seemed completely comfortable just sitting there, listening to the irrational thoughts of a convicted mass-murderer.

  “Of course I wanted to tell you,” Lombardo said, the blinking tic still in overdrive, “but I had no idea how you would handle the news that I was part of an organized crime operation.”

  Zack stole another look at Terry, but all was well. A half smile was on his face—he did not look like he was thinking about organized crime operations. He picked up his pen, clicked it only twice, made some notes, and put it down silently. Alan was visibly relieved.

  “Not to be indelicate,” Zack replied, “but whether you were an accountant for a mobster probably wouldn’t have had a big effect on Terry and me. We took this case knowing that you’d been convicted of nine murders.”

  Alan peered at Zack through his black-framed lenses. As always, the severe part in the inmate’s hair was laser-beam straight, the clothes creased, the facial tic going at full blink ahead. “Yes, but I didn’t commit those murders. I was involved in organized crime, though. I’m not proud of it, but if you hold that against me, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  Alan’s attitude shouldn’t have been a surprise. To guys in prison, whether you admitted your crime or denied it was sometimes the difference between whether you lived or died. The self-righteous retribution inflicted by inmates on each other was serious, and sometimes fatal.

  Still, the idea that Alan thought people believed he was innocent merely because he said so was some pretty serious denial.

  “Okay, Alan, let’s not get hung up on that. The reason I wanted to speak to you is because once we learned that my father was on retainer to represent George Heinrich and anyone who worked for him, I had to find out why you decided to pay an additional fee for his services.”

  “An additional fee in the amount of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Terry chimed in. “That’s a lot of chocolate chip ice cream, my man.”

  Lombardo sat mute.

  “You did know that George Heinrich was already paying my father, didn’t you?” Zack asked.

  Alan made a little face, and looked back and forth from Zack to Terry and then back again to Zack. “I knew,” he said. “I just was afraid that he wouldn’t…” His voice trailed off. “I just thought that if I paid him enough money, especially since I didn’t have to, that he’d put in an extra effort when he defended me. I guess I was trying to use the money as an incentive for him to…I don’t know. Treat my case differently than the others.”

  “What do you mean?” Terry asked. “What others?”

  Alan adjusted his glasses again. “The other cases he did for Mr. Heinrich’s people. You know. Like when one of the truck drivers got arrested for drunk driving, or when there was that big fight at the picket line. That kind of thing.”

  On one level, Zack understood. Alan Lombardo had severe control issues. The man rarely left his home, he had no friends or family, he needed his lawyers to sit in the same seats every time they visited him—in fact, it was pretty obvious that Alan Lombardo’s main mission in life was to have complete command of his environment. That way he would never be upset by repeatedly clicking pens, or headache-inducing printer fonts.

  But when you’re indicted for murder, how do you manipulate and control your environment then? Alan had decided to try by paying a good lawyer an outrageous sum of money, in hopes of influencing him to represent Alan more zealously than the lawyer’s other clients.

  And it was precisely because people like Alan Lombardo were vulnerable to this kind of thinking that all lawyers, including Zack’s father, were sworn to follow the Canon of Ethics, and not, for example, charge their clients outrageous sums of money, or a fee for work they had already been paid to do.

  “Okay,” Zack said. “Let’s talk a little bit about why this might matter in your case.”

  Lombardo just sat there, staring at him through the blinks, so Zack continued.

  “Right now, Terry and I are looking into a few different strategies, but one of them, which is very powerful under Massachusetts law, is called ‘conflict of interest.’ I’m not sure whether you’re familiar…”

  “We discussed this when we first met,” the inmate interrupted. “I’m quite familiar with it. But I don’t see how your relationship with my trial lawyer will do me any good in obtaining a new trial.”

  “No,” Terry said, in a startlingly calm voice. “What Zack is talking about is the possibility that Zack’s father was under a conflict of interest when he represented you. In other words, we are looking into whether he was completely loyal to you, or whether something was keeping him from doing his best at your trial.”

  Alan’s eyelids fluttered. He looked back and forth between the lawyers. “I don’t see how that was possible,” he said. “And I also don’t see
why it would matter.”

  “Well, we aren’t sure there’s a conflict ourselves,” Zack said, “but when we found out that my father took money from you for a job that he had already been paid by Mr. Heinrich to do, we became somewhat concerned that there was a violation of some important ethical rules.”

  “Somewhat concerned,” Terry echoed, dryly.

  “And any time there’s an ethical violation by an attorney, there’s a possibility of a conflict of interest,” Zack continued. “If we were to find one, under Massachusetts law, the state has to give you a new trial, no matter what. It doesn’t matter if the case against you was strong, or weak, or in between. If you had a lawyer who had divided loyalties, you are entitled to a new trial.”

  “But what about the theories that I came up with already?” Alan asked. “What about the mistakes in the jury instructions? I should get a new trial because of those errors, too.”

  Terry looked like he was running out of serenity, so Zack kept on going.

  “Any motion for a new trial is going to contain all the claims that we can make,” he told Alan. “So if we find evidence to support an argument that there was a conflict of interest, we’ll use it. But we’ll also use any other mistakes made at the trial, including the ones you were concerned about in the jury instructions.”

  “But aren’t ethical violations the types of things that get lawyers disbarred?” Alan’s blinking was now alarmingly rapid.

  Terry looked as puzzled as Zack felt. The big guy shrugged, and answered the strange question. “It really depends on the violation,” he replied. “But we won’t be focusing on that when we’re working on your motion. We’re just looking for the best argument to make to get you a new trial.”

  Lombardo stared at Terry for a few moments, then he started shaking his head. “No,” he said. “No. I don’t want you to do that. That will not work. That will not work at all.”

  Zack had no idea what the inmate was trying to tell them. “You don’t want us to do what? Work on your motion?”

  Alan continued to shake his head. “No. I want you to work on the motion. I just don’t want you to look for a conflict of interest. That won’t work in my case. It won’t work at all. No.”