I didn’t actually throw up, but it required force of will and several minutes barricaded in a bathroom stall, cross-legged atop the toilet with a wet paper towel over my eyes, trying to remember breathing stuff from high school gym class yoga.
Desperate measures.
Back at my desk, I wanted to take some action. Use up the nervous energy.
I dialed Mom in Long Island. Just for groundwork, I told myself. Nothing direct until I saw her in person.
She picked up, effervescent as always.
“Hey, it’s me,” I said.
“Well, what’s happening in fashionable Syracuse?”
“I think they’ve finished the butter sculpture for the fair,” I said, and she laughed. “How’s it down in the actual world?”
“Eight women for lunch, so I made my new gazpacho. So easy, holy crow: just a can of V8 and last night’s salad in the blender. A little shake of parsley . . .”
Usually she ate all that slimy black lettuce for breakfast. I pictured it whirling in a glass carafe and had to lean away from the receiver for a second, lips shucked back and tongue sticking out in a Trader Vic’s-fiberglass-vengeful-tiki-gargoyle grimace.
I tuned out until the gazpacho all-clear had sounded, waving the phone back and forth past my ear, making her voice fizzle and surge like the BBC on a short-wave.
“. . . done in petit point, of all things,” she was saying, “and only a couple of burns in one toe. But of course Bonwit’s still in Newport with Rafe—finishing touches on that little steam launch and home Saturday.”
Mom lived with Bonwit. He hadn’t divorced his second wife, merely invited her to move out. Number two groused until he tossed in a bunch of consolation houses and a freaking ginormous allowance.
Mom didn’t care about his money, she was in love with him, had been since practically forever. He was twenty-five years her senior, but she had a thing for older married guys. You could trace it back to when she was in ninth grade at Greenvale, the moment she first necked with a friend of her parents named Dealie Van Couvering.
I met him once. Major asshole, same as Bonwit.
Mom is just wired that way.
“They’ve torn down the Gubelprechts’,” she burbled, “great big Dumpster out back, so I have the most mag-nif-icent curtains for you. Peach moiré. Thought I’d drive them up Friday.”
“Can’t wait,” I said. “What time?”
The reply was a dial tone. Typical.
Mom’s like double-dating with Zelda Fitzgerald.
I wedged a shoulder against the receiver, dialing for Dean. We agreed to meet at the Crown Hotel so I could talk to Kenny, but only after Dean had finished up with his welding.
“Seven o’clock,” he said. “Very earliest.”
I’d have time to run home first, after work. Kick back and think.
I stared at my computer screen, thought about the rest of the shit I should be doing, such as actual work.
Couldn’t stop running through Simon’s collection of images. Something about them bugged me. Not the violence they recorded—awful as all of it was. This was different. A peripheral itch, a detail that wasn’t quite right. A subtle wrongness, but one that mattered all the same.
It cranked up what Judith Goldiner had peevishly called my “photogenic memory” one afternoon in tenth-grade Chemistry. This was part talent, part affliction: I retained gobs of information so well I never took notes in school—maybe because I never remembered to bring a pencil. Poor Judith was thoroughly sick of lending me hers.
I closed my eyes, ran a slide show of the images in Simon’s folder. Close-ups: each girl’s hair, each girl’s garland.
There. Click. Recognition . . . the ill-paired colors: blonde with white, dark with red. An off-kilter choice. One you wouldn’t make without a reason.
And I knew what it was.
CHAPTER 8
Shirley Temple?” asked Kenny, from behind the bar.
The man was thick as a Minotaur through the neck and shoulders, with a profile straight off some Byzantine coin.
I shook my head. “Someday I’m going to say yes to that, and then what the hell’re you gonna do?”
He rolled his eyes and nipped the cap off an Old Vienna for me.
I gave Dean a peck on the cheek and climbed onto a tall stool, after checking the seat’s duct-taped vinyl for anything untoward.
The Crown was a B-movie dump. Kenny tried, but he couldn’t root out the intrinsic bouquet of emphysema, stale cabbage, and vomit. The walls were just varnished too deep with misery, and every dip in the floor brimmed with cigarette bouillon.
A tacked-up sheet of paper read “Hamburg . . . $1, Cheesburg . . . $1.25.”
I figured it was just for show, like the pickled eggs and pig knuckles suspended in their respective gallons of cloudy brine.
This was no place to eat. Most people came to the Crown because a disability check covered the monthly cost of brown liquor down here and a thin mattress upstairs.
Dean had used it as a litmus test for chicks, in his bachelor days. He’d brought me on our second date.
I’d asked for a boilermaker, lit a Camel straight, and stepped up to the jukebox.
Kenny had set our glasses down as the needle dropped on my first-pick 45. Don Helms twanged into “Hey, Good Lookin’” with his Gibson Console Grande, and poor Dean was hooked before Hank Williams sang a word.
Debutante sensibilities my ass.
Later that night, I’d asked Kenny where he’d gone to college.
His answer won my heart: “Vietnam. It was pass-fail.”
The man radiated such heavyweight calm that there were never brawls at the Crown, and yet if he didn’t know you, he’d drop the final s from his last name, to make it sound Italian.
“Lot of people around here,” he confided, “they think the Greeks aren’t actually white.”
Posers acting all buddy-buddy called him Ducatelli. True friends never let on it was really Doukatelis.
I respected his desire for camouflage. He let me get away with mine.
Dean put a hand on my shoulder and brought me back to the present. “So what’s the word on Cousin Lapdog?”
“Saw the crime scene photos and wanted to puke,” I said. “You told Kenny?”
They nodded, and I took a long and welcome sip of my beer before telling them about the colors.
“The blonde girl had white flowers,” I said, “and the dark-haired one had red. It was backwards, aesthetically.”
I expected Kenny to smirk at that, but there wasn’t an iota of humor in his face.
“I figured out why that bugged me, why it felt so familiar,” I continued. “It’s a fairy tale . . . ‘Snow White and Rose Red,’ sisters named after the roses growing around their cottage door, white for blonde and red for brunette. I looked it up at home. It’s one of the Grimm stories, and a lot of the details fit. . . .”
I pulled a piece of paper from my pocket and read aloud, “‘No evil ever befell them; if they tarried late in the wood and night overtook them, they lay down together on the moss and slept till morning,’ and ‘The two children loved each other so dearly that they always walked about hand in hand whenever they went out together.’ It’s almost like whoever killed them was setting up a tableau vivant.”
Dean said, “Which is?” but Kenny got it.
“Kind of elaborate charades they used to do,” he explained. “People dressed up and posed together, some famous scene—classical, something from the Bible. No one moved, no dialogue. Just the image—‘live tableau.’ The audience had to guess what they were supposed to be.”
“Those photographs,” I said. “It all looked like that. Like somebody arranged it for an audience. Kenny, does that make any sense?”
“Officially? Different jurisdiction, and I wasn’t homicide. I don’t know anything you could use for the paper.”
“Dude, come on. If this was about work, I’d be asking you for a souvlaki recipe.”
He glar
ed at me.
I lowered my voice. “Lasagna . . . whatever. I’m sorry. You know what I mean. I don’t write hard news. This is just . . . it’s family.”
His face relaxed and I realized that by floundering accident I’d hit on the magic word.
A guy down the bar called for a couple more beers, but when Kenny came back he leaned in close between the two of us.
“We all talked about it. It was a big deal, that case. Strange. This isn’t the South Bronx, but we’re not fresh off the turnip truck, right? You get your bodies up here. Your nasty shit.”
I waited, didn’t touch my beer.
“Okay, I’m trusting you, Maddie. That fairy story? Maybe it fits. Something was up with this guy. Usually, your killer wants to get away from the scene. I mean, sure, very rarely, you get your necrophiliac for whom the main event is postmortem. This guy, though, he took his time prettying things up. He washed them. He put their clothes back on . . . no blood spatter on the fabric.”
“All that in the dark?” asked Dean.
Kenny shrugged. “Maybe a flashlight. Maybe he waited for the sun to come up.”
Somebody yelled for bourbon, and he poured out shots, still talking. “This gets into what you call ‘staging.’ Parents do it when they’ve killed a child, a lot of times . . . cover the body with a blanket, put a favorite stuffed animal in their arms. An apology, trying to comfort them after the fact. But this guy . . . something else there. More to it.”
“Guilt, or showing off?” asked Dean.
“We had all kinds of theories,” said Kenny. “I thought he was cocky, that it gave him a thrill. This was not a rookie. You can be the sickest bastard in the world, but the first time you kill somebody, it’s sloppy. This guy knew what he was doing. It had the feel of a pattern to it.”
“Ever see anything else like that around here?” I asked.
“Never once,” he said. “Nothing before, nothing after. A lot of people were on the lookout . . . still are. They’d know this guy.”
I thought about that. “Weren’t there two soldiers? How could one guy kill two women?”
“I’m not saying there wasn’t a partner, but a couple things pointed to a single killer. First off, the wounds were nearly identical. Made by somebody left-handed, from behind.”
I shivered. The intimacy of that, the embrace.
“Knife was thrust in from the side and pulled forward,” he said. “Takes a lot of strength, but the vic can’t scream. It’s the kind of thing a pro knows: Special Forces shit . . . wet work. A couple of us were back from ’Nam already. We’d seen that.”
Dean whistled, said, “Must have been some nasty-ass blade.”
“Combat knife. There’s all kinds of specialty stuff, custom. Guys who did that kind of crap, they didn’t depend on military issue, your Kabars . . .”
Kenny paused to chuck me under the chin. “You okay? Looking a little pale.”
“Just those pictures . . .”
He cocked his head, considering me. “Look, all of this? Not an area I ever wanted to study deeply. Anybody talks about killing as something glamorous, gets off on the details, I’m gonna move right on down the bar. Might just be why I’m not a cop anymore.”
I looked at him. “You know I’m not digging into this for the thrill, right?”
He nodded.
I took a deep breath. “Then I’d like to ask you one more question.”
“All righty,” he said.
“You said there were a couple of things pointing to a single killer. The knife, the cut—they’re still pretty much one detail. What else?”
He tilted his head back, looked up. “Main thing was the uniforms. . . . From the witness descriptions, you could tell pretty clear those boys at the fair were cherry, never been ‘in-country.’ Army doesn’t teach all that Soldier of Fortune hooey in basic. . . . Some eighteen-, nineteen-year-old draftee? Lethal as a Cub Scout, if he’s still stateside.”
Lapthorne would have been that young. And they weren’t doing any hand-to-hand combat training at Junior Club, between regattas. Sharing somebody’s mother’s Virginia Slims in the bushes, maybe, or running a weenie kid up the flagpole by his boxers, along with the burgee . . . Please God let this all be the fault of some other guy, some mystery SEAL badass with a chip on his shoulder.
“Maddie,” said Kenny, “all I can tell you is shop talk, rumor. Guy who’d know the whole picture is Jack Schneider. Lives down near the Rez now. Retired, but he was the lead on the case.”
“Schneider? There’s a prick,” said Dean. “Shows up when the Kingsnakes do a show anywhere and gets drunk off his ass. Always looking for a fight.”
Last thing I’d done at work was proof band listings for the events calendar. “Kingsnakes’re playing down in Jamesville a week from Saturday,” I said. “Blues night at STD’s.”
Dean shook his head. “I’ll be in Canada.”
“Still?” I asked, counting off days in my head. “If you’re going Wednesday, isn’t that—”
“Wednesday to Sunday this week,” he said. “Then a couple days home. Back up there Tuesday, I think. That’ll be for a good stretch. Two, maybe three weeks. They’re not sure.”
“I hate this,” I said.
“Work is work. Long as it lasts . . .”
“It’s great,” I said. “You’re great for doing it. Just, you know, life sucks when you’re away.”
He shrugged and then a white-haired little guy who’d been sitting quietly down the bar from us started screaming and waving his canes around.
“Fred!” boomed Kenny, banging a fist on the bar. “Knock it the hell off. How many times I gotta tell ya this ain’t goddamn Inchon.”
Fred gulped air and ducked his head in apology, then limped up the back stairs to his room. It was so hushed you could hear the canes’ rubber tips squeak against the linoleum.
“Goddamn guy thinks it’s Korea in here every goddamn night,” confided Kenny. “I look like a gook to you?”
Back home, we finished off the leftover tabouleh and Dean fell asleep with the fork still in his hand. I propelled him to bed and returned to the porch, sat in a wicker chair and leaned the thing back until it shuddered and creaked.
The neighborhood dogs were doing bad canine barbershop harmonies.
I thought back over what Kenny had said, tried to glean out stray grains of hope. Like maybe Lapthorne’s dog tags were his only link to the dead girls—maybe he pissed someone off at Camp Drum. Had he even been there? They called it Fort Drum now, anyway . . . underscoring how much time had passed, as if I needed any further reminder.
I shut my eyes and tried to picture him again as I’d last seen him that night in Locust Valley—the near-effeminacy of his manners, his evening clothes. You could see how somebody like that might rile a drill sergeant or returning vet—but enough to get him framed for murder?
I mean, to paraphrase the old Fitzgerald saw, the rich are different from you and me. They’re just so damn clueless when you get them out in public. Like Grandaddy Dare having his chauffeur carry a hundred-dollar bill during the Depression, because none of the toll booths could make change so they’d get to drive through for free.
Lapthorne and I differed mainly in that he came from a side of the family that had managed to hang on to money the old-fashioned way, by marrying it. My view of Green Street was more than enough to remind me that my own branch had wedded for love.
Hard-core family wealth almost universally starts with one man. A guy who’s solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. You don’t usually, after all, invent the safety pin or apply rocket science to the bond market if you’re busy dating and having friends.
This guy, Ancestor X, makes his pile, whereupon he lands a very attractive and outgoing woman who’s most often quite stupid. With a small American fortune, three generations gets you biggish blond people who have to strain for the gentleman’s C, but are as calm as a herd of flatulent old Labradors.
Really big money nets you
marriage with at least one rarefied European, and by generation four you get Dobermans with the Hapsburg lip, which is why I’ve never liked Southampton.
In my case, Ancestor X was my great-grandfather Jacob Townsend. He started out by hating farming, the genesis of more than one American fortune. At seventeen he went to “town” for a clerking job with a liner company. They were into freight and passenger ships, and Jake rocketed up through the ranks, becoming powerful enough to acquire sway with the government. I’d heard it mumbled that it was he who made sure the Lusitania blew up, because he thought World War I was a good idea.
At thirty-two he met my great-grandmother, Dodie Lapthorne. She was nineteen and a hot number, liked swimming across the family lake in the Adirondacks each summer and riding fast horses for the rest of the year.
Dodie first saw Jake Townsend across the captain’s table on board his liner Agassiz, traveling with her family to Cuba.
Not much for romance, Jake hollowed out a peach in the Agassiz galley their last night aboard, popped in the hefty engagement ring he’d picked up in Havana, and wrapped the whole thing in a twist of newspaper. At the captain’s table that night, he tossed it into her lap, saying, “Here, a peach for a peach.”
I could never reconcile the great-grandmother I’d known with the woman whose tall portrait hung above the sideboard in her dining room.
This painted Dodie looked back over a perfect white shoulder, as though she’d been turning to walk out of the frame but thought of something amusing to tell the artist at the last possible second, before she’d altogether lifted her hand from the crude stone pillar he’d posed her beside.
She wore a velvet flapper dress, deeply green and backless. An emerald-and-diamond bar pin flashed from the hip still tipped toward the painter, the audience.
Some weekend guest had christened this work “Nice to See Your Back Again.” I always thought there should have been a small brass plaque on the frame, engraved with the word “Before.”
“After” was a silent, gray, and forbidding woman who always confused me with my cousin Skippy.
It wasn’t just that she was so much older by the time I knew her. When she was two weeks pregnant with her last child, Dodie saw Jake blown up on the bridge of Townsend’s newest liner, the Glamis Castle. The next explosion threw her clear.
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