Kiss Them Goodbye

by Joseph Eastburn

Fowler’s eyelids kept closing despite his efforts to keep them open. “First we have a laceration here. See how the wound has irregular, undermined margins that show bridging of the skin and subcutaneous tissues between the sides of the wound?”

  “Yes.”

  “It also has a slightly different coloration.”

  “Two different wounds?”

  “Exactly.” Koenig picked up a magnifying glass. “But here, just below, you have an incised wound, much deeper with an absence of marginal abrasion.”

  Fowler looked in the magnifying glass. “What do you think?”

  “The first wound was made earlier.”

  “How long?”

  “It’s hard to say, Lieutenant. Less than an hour.”

  “Was the victim alive for that time?”

  “Here again, a gray area. But, calculating the development of rigor mortis, the amount of potassium in the ocular fluid, and what we’ve been able to discover about the state of the digestion, we place the time of death somewhere between midnight and five A.M. Tuesday morning.”

  “Can’t narrow it down more than that?”

  Dr. Koenig suddenly stiffened. “This isn’t Kojak, Mr. Fowler. We’re lucky to calculate to a twelve-hour period. Anything else is conjecture.”

  Fowler paused. “I’m just wondering if he was bleeding from his neck while still alive.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Was he alive when he was nailed to the board?”

  “An analysis of the hands yielded sequestered blood clots in the area of trauma. I really can’t be sure. He may have been alive, but I doubt he was conscious.” The doctor raised his eyebrows. “What’s intriguing is that this victim was dumped in running water which washed away a great deal of the actual evidence—if you recall, no traces of lipstick here, like on the first victim’s mouth, or saliva on the face and neck, etc. However, in protected areas of this victim, the tip of the penis for instance, we still found traces of mucus.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Vaginal activity.”

  “Again.”

  “When we combed the pubic area, we found any excess hair had washed away, but we found one plucked hair, a hair with roots, lodged in the elastic of a stretch sock. If the specimen belongs to the assailant, it will yield a genetic fingerprint.”

  “He’s taking chances now.”

  Koenig paused and looked over the frames of his glasses at Fowler. “He?”

  “Or she.”

  “Let’s say, the more violent this killer becomes, the more an identity will be revealed to us.”

  “Is there anything else I should know, Doctor?”

  “Only this.” Koenig’s delicate hands flew toward the furrows in Finkelstein’s thighs. His elastic gloves fluttered down to a suck mark that appeared very faintly on the surface of the skin. “This obviously is the bite your print man tried to lift. If he can’t get a dental imprint, I suggest we have a cast made.”

  Fowler stared down. “Right. I also have a forensic dentist I can call in. He’s good.”

  “The lab, as you know, has given this its highest priority.”

  The formality between Fowler and Koenig had relaxed somewhat. Nick thought they had forged a strange bond, staring at dead boys under fluorescent lights. He simply nodded at the doctor, smiled sadly, and closed the door to the examining room.

  Out in the night air, he took a breath. Fowler thought each of the dead boys held a mystery that the two men experienced as a part of themselves. He wondered if it was the part each felt they had lost.

  23

  WATCHING. BLOND MAN out of the funeral home. Stops on the street corner, returns to a lit window—staring at the drawn shade.

  Like the way I sculpt flesh? . . . give you a scenario out of limbs, a maze into which your mind collapses each time it enters.

  You cross the street, climb the stairs into the campus. Veins jump in my arms. Impulses roaring. Cries have taken over my head. Each time I free one, a chorus of sounds, waves of voices, rising, timpani.

  Do it NOW.

  At the bridge over the spillway, your hands in pockets. My gloves on wet grass, soles jackknifing, silent. Slip under the bridge. Veins lunge to the skin. Quiet the blood. Just slip out the knife. Move behind you, one sweep, take off your head. NOW.

  Your footsteps off the bridge. Climbing the hill.

  I killed a man in the flowers. Came up behind him and just grabbed his neck. Rode him down into the petals, the pollen streaking his hair. Blossoms howling, stamens like tongues.

  You’re stopping at the graveyard. Perfect. Rasp of a hinge—the gate in the distance. Stepping inside, over several tombstones.

  I move up on the bank. Up the hill to a tree. Just cut off his air. No marks on the neck. The police said it was a heart attack.

  You’re walking from stone to stone. Utterances. Voices coming from—? At the black fence now. I see graves looming. Through the broken place in the bars, I move quietly, behind the mausoleum—there you are. Closer now. Ever so silent. It’s out now. Moonlight on the blade.

  Three gravestones away. Rain and snow have worn the names from those stones. What is that?—moans on the air. Chorus of voices in my head, or—tears? That you, Fowler?

  I hunch down—you’re looking over here. Music now, voices clamoring, ringing my skull like a chime. Can’t stand it. Need silence. One thrust, quiet the swarm. Along the hedge now, closer, my eyes on you. Veins in my forehead, going tap—tap—tap. You’re not looking. Do it NOW. Knife to the gullet. But you’re crying over an unmarked grave?

  Kill you later. You’re too surprising.

  24

  A PALL HAD fallen over the campus. Word had gotten around that locks of Finkelstein’s hair had been pulled out. His collection of pennants from schools around the league had been taken, his yearbook missing, a picture of the boy on his grandfather’s knee—stolen. Underwear, socks, assorted articles of clothing unaccountably missing.

  The students walked around edgy, cranky, startled from several nights without sleep. Circles hung under everyone’s eyes. There were reports of terrified boys huddled together through the night hours, telling ghost stories, tales of murder and horror. Often they were so giddy and scared they just fell asleep in their clothes wherever they were sitting.

  The next evening, after another loathsome memorial service, the students filed anxiously out of the front of the chapel. Standing at a distance, Dr. Brandon Hickey watched the groups of boys meander under the arch, up onto the porch of Ardsley and through the door toward the dining room. He watched how some of the boys held the door for those following behind. He was touched by this display of civility. He felt the urge to hug certain students and wished he could comfort the boys more openly without people thinking it was unnatural. He realized his fists were clutched at his sides. His face was ashen, drawn tight around a distracted mouth. Which one of these young boys would be the next to fall? Which young body, full of the rush of life, would be cut down? The headmaster turned and looked toward town. He raised his clenched hands. They were shaking.

  Five minutes later, he walked quietly into his assistant’s office. Mr. Allington was working at his desk. “What do you think I have in my hand?” the headmaster said quietly as he leaned over one of the secretary’s desks.

  Allington looked up from the stacks of student progress reports. “Oh, Brandon, I’m sorry, I didn’t even see you standing there.”

  Dr. Hickey dumped two handfuls of chewing gum wrappers, pine needles, dirt, tree leaves, and cobwebs, one with the spider still wriggling near a strip of tinfoil, right into the center of the secretary’s blotter. He studied the spider trying to extricate itself from a crease in the tinfoil. His own predicament, he thought. Without looking up, he muttered “Go ahead, say it.”

  Allington was staring at him. “Say what?”

  “You know.”

  “Look, Brandon, talk to Dr. Clarence, go fishing, do something to get yourself together. I can carry on�
��”

  “You have such contempt for me.”

  “I don’t have—”

  “You think I’m incompetent, don’t you?”

  “No, I—”

  “You don’t need to pretend. I know. I can see it.”

  Allington paused. “All right, yes.”

  “Thank you.” The headmaster’s knobby finger was raised to his lip; his mustache was trembling. “You don’t think I’m qualified to run this school, do you?”

  Allington leaned back. “I never said that.”

  “It’s written all over your face.”

  “Well, your priorities are skewed, Brandon. Parents are withdrawing their students every day, our funding is collapsing, we’re all walking around terrified, and all you can think about is—”

  “Don’t you dare defile my efforts at keeping this school beautiful. If it wasn’t for me, we would all be up to our ears in filth.” He swept the gum wrappers and refuse into the wastebasket.

  “Brandon, sit down, you’re—”

  “Beauty itself is at stake.”

  Allington stood up and reached out an arm to help the older man. “Just take it easy.”

  Hickey pulled away, staring at him coldly. “How dare you.”

  “What?”

  Dr. Hickey’s brown eyes filled. “You want my chair, and don’t deny—”

  “I most certainly—”

  “Let’s stop kidding each other, Elliot. I’ve known for a long time.”

  “What do you mean? I always support you. I—”

  “You undermine me.” Dr. Hickey raised his watery eyes to the ceiling. “You want it, all right.” He finally turned, ambling toward the door, as the last students filed into the dining room. He turned back to look at Allington. “More than breath itself,” he said almost to himself, then disappeared.

  ALLINGTON WAS SHOWING the strain as he walked to the dining room a few minutes later. Table after table of students found themselves talking in hushed tones about the murders. Their voices seemed to reflect a pervading fear, a paranoia that no one was immune to.

  The fact that Finkelstein had become idealized, however, brought ballast to the fears sweeping the school. He had arisen to the level of myth. When teachers spoke of him, he was extolled for his sense of humor, his direct, if candid personality, his participation in sports and school clubs. Finally Finkelstein was eulogized for his long-standing devotion to God. Now the customary sick jokes began to seep through the cracks.

  When the students sat down at Mr. Allington’s table, they were very quiet. After the pea soup, somewhere during a main course of thin scallops of beef floating in a watery au jus, Allington heard someone, he wasn’t sure who, tell one of these jokes. Several boys had hunched over at the foot of the table, when one voice said, “Why didn’t Finkelstein ask the Saint Ann’s girl to the spring prom?” There was a pause. “He was already pinned.”

  Allington was incensed. He stood up at the table, threw his linen napkin down as if it were a gauntlet. “Any student caught telling another reprehensible joke will be expelled.” He stood there daring them, his face flushed.

  The boys at his table stopped chewing, went silent, and stared up at his immense frame towering above them. They noticed how the master’s handsome face had changed; in outrage, it seemed to dissolve into weakness. His graying head of kinky hair combed flat across his head, his bushy black eyebrows, and his slightly hooked nose—made somewhat more severe by a pair of thin but sensual lips—all seemed to betray him. He sat down.

  He took a more controlled tone of voice. “How would you like it if people made tasteless jokes about you before you were even in the ground?” He stared at no one in particular.

  “Sir?” A fat but articulate finger wagged the air.

  “Yes, Quigley,” Allington said impatiently, as an overwrought, bespectacled boy stopped dumping pepper on his beef long enough to compose his hands devoutly in front of him.

  “Sir, I truly believe we are celebrating Finkelstein’s unique sardonic sense of self by telling these . . . these stories.”

  Allington stared down at Quigley’s hands as if they were sausages. “I don’t care what you’re celebrating, I won’t have it.”

  “But, sir”—Quigley’s hands flew into the air—“if you think of it, we are marking his place in the universe. Engraving his memory on our minds so that we too may—”

  “Be quiet, Quigley. I’m in no mood for your crackpot moralizing.” The temperature at the table seemed to rise, but Quigley, editor in chief of the student newspaper, had already examined his lofty view of the situation.

  “It’s obviously a form of folk heroism, and I personally—”

  “You personally may leave the table!” Allington’s voice trumpeted across the room, enough to raise heads fifteen tables over. The dining room went silent for a moment, then slowly a ground swell of talk reignited the tables.

  Quigley looked down at his uneaten strips of beef, shaking his head tragically. “Yes, sir,” he whispered. He stood up, pushed his chair in without scraping it, and walked from the dining hall with his head lowered.

  Allington never recovered. An unusually popular master, especially with the boys at his table, he became flustered now. The students were just sitting there, not looking at him, staring instead down at their thick, white plates in silence.

  He picked up his napkin, dabbed his lips, and mumbled. “I apologize to the rest of you boys. I guess I’ve gone too far.”

  He left the dining room as well.

  Dr. Hickey couldn’t help but notice this display. A fragment of a smile flew across his features. He reached out and touched Allington’s sleeve as the tall man brushed by the head table on his way out. Dr. Hickey then turned to someone at his table, mentioning how much pressure the assistant headmaster must be under.

  He smiled when it occurred to him to apply some more pressure now. He would send a memo to Allington tomorrow, saying he should personally update the faculty on the status of the investigation. Then he would know what headmasters go through every day. Then he would know pressure.

  One of the waiters brought Dr. Hickey his tapioca pudding and coffee. He felt more relaxed now.

  25

  THE NEXT MORNING Fowler overslept. He was awakened by the phone clanging next to his ear. His hand reached over, knocking the phone off the end table onto the green shag carpet.

  He launched his body half out the bed and stretched his arm out toward the receiver.

  “Hello?” he said, groggy with sleep.

  On the other end he heard Bill Rodney’s whiskey voice. “Well, must be nice. Wish I could sleep in.”

  Fowler was balanced on one arm, his other arm clamped with the phone to his ear. He groaned and stared at the clock. “Oh shit,” he said.

  “Stop and get the Tribune on your way over to the van, Lieutenant. It might interest you.”

  Fowler heard the insinuation in Bill Rodney’s voice. It was without judgment; nevertheless, it was there.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Wish I was.”

  Fowler hung up the phone, decided to forgo a shower, shaved too fast, cutting his chin, and found he was already cursing before he had even driven over to get the morning paper.

  By the time he pulled the Tribune out of the machine in the vestibule of the diner, his nerves were frayed. He had been talking to himself on the way over in the car; he was expecting the worst. That way, if by chance he was treated more favorably, he would have already absorbed some of the shock.

  But this was worse.

  The headline read ARTHUR MURRAY FOX-TROTS AROUND INVESTIGATORS AS SECOND BOY IS CRUCIFIED. COUNTY IN TERROR OF SEX KILLER. There was a picture of the bloodstains on the grass. Next to it, was a diagram of the basic L-shaped Fox-trot step. The article again was by Maureen McCauley.

  It contained a great deal of information from the autopsy report, which Fowler knew had to be from the locked report he had personally put in the captain’s safe; it
had lab evidence that only someone who had access to his reports could have gotten. There was a subtle implication, again, that he was not doing his job.

  But what troubled him was the fact that the reporter had stolen his dance theory, turned it around, and used it against him. She implied that Captain Weathers might be stonewalling the “dance aspect” of the investigation, which was true, but it portrayed Fowler as a weak man who had thrown up his hands, in effect, giving up his own angle on the case. It openly chastised him for lacking the courage of his convictions.

  How had she gotten that photograph? An analysis by a local dance instructor, a Mr. Pullen, was printed in the next column; it detailed the history of the Fox-trot, with its variations: the Park Avenue, the Conversation, the Arch Turn, the Forward Basic, etc. It even attempted a profile of a person who might have been deeply influenced by this dance—and at what ages the steps might have been learned.

  Fowler’s hand was shaking as he lifted the coffee to his lips. Here he was again, out in the diner parking lot, reading lies and distortions about himself, and again, there was nothing he could do about it. He had to take it. Nick Fowler hadn’t had breakfast and was not really awake when he did something uncharacteristic. He decided he was not going to take it.

  He drove over to the offices of the Ravenstown Tribune, got out of his car, and stalked into the building. The receptionist at the front desk tried not to look alarmed at the angry man who had pushed his badge into her face, demanding to see Ms. McCauley right away. She was new.

  She rang back and found that the reporter was away from her desk. She was wondering how she could tell the man in such a way that it would not get him any more upset. When she looked up, though, he was gone.

  Nick had marched past the front desk, down the hallway, and was directed to Maureen’s area by two mailroom attendants, who stared at each other when they heard his tone of voice and saw the expression on his face. Finally Nick Fowler got to a small newsroom area, where feature reporters were scattered around, standing behind cluttered desks that hoisted up rows of computer screens.