I sat alone, drinking a coke, in a room at the local police station for an hour before the two detectives came in and pulled up chairs across from me. Renkins laid out the stack of alley photographs alongside Betsy’s letter on the table in front of him, then placed a manila folder nearby.
After informing me he had made copies of the correspondence and the Polaroids, Renkins asked a lot of questions relating to my background, home town, and what I did for a living. At one point he examined my arms. When the detective switched over to interviewing me about Betsy, I thought he was trying to corroborate information he already knew, but then he asked me where I had been last Thursday, five days ago. Every muscle in my body spasmed at that moment. I’d seen enough cop shows on television to know what that meant—he suspected I might be involved in the brutal attack on Betsy.
“Oh man, let me see. I’ve been holed up in my apartment for about two weeks, working and sleeping. All the days are a blur. I think that was the day I went and took those pictures, then spent the rest of the time drawing.”
As Renkins continued his questions for the next few hours, an uncomfortable thought kept bubbling up into my consciousness. When the detective finally asked me if there was anyone I knew who would have a reason to attack her, the disconcerting thought painfully slithered out past my guard. I hung my head, feeling wretched, knowing I had reached the lowest point of my life as my vocal chords rasped drily, “Richard. Maybe my cousin Richard should be talked to.”
“Richard Parker, yes. Tell me about him.”
“He’s been Betsy’s boyfriend for over a year. Well, she’s pretty and very fun-loving and outgoing. From one argument I sort of witnessed, it sounded like he was really furious with her for being flirtatious with other guys.”
“Go on.”
Oh Christ, what was I doing? I had no proof, no right—but then I pictured beautiful, intelligent, giggling Betsy with her head bashed in by some psychopath who had tried to kill her and saw Richard pointing that air rifle at me so many years ago, and the images resonated as connected. “When Betsy took my oddball photos to some genius physicist, I can’t remember his name, he wouldn’t tell her what they meant unless she stripped. So she unbuttoned her blouse. She sent me a letter about it back before Christmas.”
“Do you still have that letter?”
“Hmm, no.”
“Okay, what else?”
“Well I just think similar situations were a recurring problem in their relationship, but I don’t know details.”
“Did she strip for you? Were you intimate sexually?”
“No, she mooned me once.”
“Okay, tell me about your cousin.”
“He’s a law student at Boston College.”
Renkins asked me a few factual questions about Richard and his background. Each answer I gave felt like betrayal and sickened me with guilt and doubt, but Betsy’s gay laughter led me on.
“Just about done, Parker.”
Renkins removed a shiny sheet of paper from the manila folder and placed it in front of me. My nerves felt close to frizzling as I stared at a glossy photograph of the envelope I had sent Betsy. A splatter of blood stretched from the lower left hand corner of the mailer to the upper right corner, where the largest blot had landed, covering most of three stamps.
“Holy Christ,” I whispered, remembering my red-splotched doodle lying in the trash back at my apartment.
“Is this the envelope you sent Miss Polczewski? Is that your handwriting?”
“Yes, that’s my handwriting.”
“Thank you very much, Parker. You’ve been very helpful.”
“How do I find out how Betsy’s doing?”
“You can call Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. And call me anytime if you think of anything else.”
“Okay. I hope I’m wrong about my cousin.”
Renkins grunted. “Tell me, in all your years of knowing him, did you ever see any hint of violent behavior.”
“No, uh... uh no, no I...” I stuttered in my lie, searching for some loyalty to my blood cousin. I had shattered a life-long link on pure speculation and tried hard not to believe I was still reacting to our old childhood argument, which I thought had finally been put to rest at Thanksgiving. “No, just typical nonsense and fights when we were kids.”
“Okay, all right. You’re free to go.”
“I’ve got a question.”
“Shoot.”
“Did the attacker leave her for dead or what happened?”
“Some girls heard her screaming, then some loud growling and barking. They thought she was being attacked by a dog, but they all witnessed a man climbing out her window when they got to her room. The way we put it together, we think the dog saved her. It had a piece of cloth stuck to one tooth. Probably torn from the perpetrator’s shirt sleeve.”
“A dog in her room?”
“Black, retriever-type mutt. No one knows where it came from, or for that matter, where it went afterwards.”
Chapter 30
When I finally walked out of that interrogation room, no one offered me a ride home. I was glad of it, even though a couple of the blocks on my route weren’t well-lit and always creeped me out. But I’d had enough of police.
I can’t believe this. Do they actually suspect me? And man, what’s with my head coming up with another spooky drawing pertaining to an act of violence I knew nothing about?
Tossing the crime-tainted photos and letter on my table, I headed for the shower to wash the sweat of police-interview tension off me.
Getting dressed, I glanced at the bedroom clock. Nine o’clock. There was a good chance Teresa might be wondering where I was or thinking I had stood her up. I rolled and smoked a quick joint, threw on my new purple jacket, and remembered to breathe for the first time since being dropped off by Teresa that morning.
Arriving at Rolly’s, I worried she had tired of waiting for me and left or tossed me aside to be with someone else.
I opened the apartment door to a room of about twenty people, all crushed together, laughing and talking. The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” blasted through the scratchiness of a well-used record.
Making out Teresa’s blonde curls, I nodded and smiled my way past vaguely familiar faces towards her. She was sitting on the couch with her back to the door, talking with some guy in a Nehru jacket and Beatle boots. When I was about five feet behind her, Nehru paused to light a cigarette.
The Kinks groaned about never wanting to be set free, screamed each refrain of the song’s title.
Raising her inner antennae, Teresa cocked her head slightly, then turned around with a smile just for me.
“Where have you been? I was really worried.”
Nehru looked up at me, fiddled with his cigarette, peeved that his move on Teresa was being thwarted.
I leaned down, whispered in her ear, “Wait until I tell you what happened after you dropped me off. Probably best to talk later when we’re alone. Don’t worry, I’m all right, but, man, what a nightmare.”
“I’ve been here for hours so anytime you want to split, let me know. Are you sure you’re okay? You look frazzled.”
“Yeah, let me grab a beer and say goodbye to Rolly.”
When the crowd thinned out, Rolly stuck a guitar in my hand and lit a joint. He sat next to me and started a simple strum.
“Deets, one more time. Our song, man.” His hands flicked through the progression I had played two months back. “Maybe I can get to England on trans-levitation airways.”
I got the strum down, and I felt like I was soaring and melting simultaneously as he tore through a few minutes of free-form leads. Scott joined in with his guitar, and the two of them danced their fingers around my droning repetitive chords. Nehru came out of the back room with another guitar and started plucking out a variation of my rhythm.
The three of them interweaved improvisations for a few minutes before the song started to transform into patterns that I couldn’t keep up with.
Rolly smiled at me as I put the guitar down. “Next time we meet, man, we’ll play it on the moon. Keep practicing.”
“Good luck in England, man. See you later. I’m cutting out of here.”
Teresa and I drove over to my apartment for the night.
“I didn’t know you could play guitar.”
“I can’t, really. I just goof around with a few chords.”
“Sounded good. So what happened to you today?”
“This sounds weird, but the fuzz questioned me for about four hours about a crime up in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”
She settled back on the couch, drew her legs up beneath her, and, crossing her arms, tucked her hands under her armpits. “That’s an awfully long time. Tell me everything, Deets.”
So I did, without hesitation. Retelling the story backwards, sideways, and circling around again, I told her I had sent some photos for Betsy to interpret, and the envelope with my name on it had shown up blood-stained at the crime scene. Gathering together my pictures of the equation and the recent letter, I showed them to Teresa, then recovered the balled-up drawing from the wastebasket as I talked. Teresa sat perfectly still as I jumped back in time to my first acid trip when the purple pigeon, the white feather, and Santa had become so significant in my life. I related my encounters with Doctor Steel, Amelia and Jenny, the explorations of Monster Alley, and the feather sculpted on the third floor of the beautifully decorated mansion.
Teresa listened with an analytical silence, expressing neither sympathy or disbelief. As I recounted how I had watched Steel and Pigeon disappear amid flashings and rumblings within the alley, I worried she would assume I was crazy. She listened to details intently, but I knew she was also determining just who she had become involved with. I pressed on—a confession—her demeanor dragging secrets from me.
Tell her. Tell her. Trust her.
“The whole bizarre turn my life had taken was driving me nuts. I had to take some steps to understand, so I snapped the pictures, thinking the equation might hold a clue.”
When I finished, Teresa knew as much as I did about my exploits leading up to the police interrogation, except for the nipple-tickle fight and my hungering for Betsy when she dropped her pants. I embraced the relief I felt at telling her about Monster Alley and the confusing reality I lived in.
“Synchronicity.” The protective positioning of her arms melted away, and she locked her fingers into mine. “It’s called synchronicity when you have those meaningful coincidences that border on the miraculous or inexplicable, like with the feather of your LSD vision above Greg’s heart being the same as the one the pigeon later found in the park and then your seeing it again on Mister Pigeon’s door.” She sighed and leaned her head on my shoulder. “Were you on LSD when you saw the creepy guy and Mister Pigeon disappear into the alley?”
“No. I don’t know if it was an hallucination or what.”
“I wonder how you can tell.”
We sat quietly holding each other, letting the silence sort through new revelations of who we were together. I was sure I heard her mind whisper, “You’re not crazy.”
Squeezing her hand, I said a silent thank you for believing in me.
She patted my heart lightly and said, “Of course I do.”
Baffled, I said, “What?”
She lifted her face and smiled, speckles of light in her eyes. “Every word.”
“You heard me?”
She laid her head back against my chest. “Of course I did.”
But I was looking at the softness of her hair and didn’t know if she had spoken the words or thought them.
“My depiction of the blood splatter on the envelope, y’know, being almost identical to the actual evidence, isn’t the first time something like that happened while I drew.” I told her about the connections between the fiery anti-war suicides and my flag-burning illustrations.
“I feel these moments of synchronicity are just a small part of something else going on,” she said determinedly.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the drawings could be psychic impressions.” She paused, adjusted her hand in mine and probed my eyes tenderly. “But some of your experiences—let’s say they’re not just drug-high nuttiness—are really intense. They remind me of incidents you’d associate with mythic tales, schizophrenia, or comic book science fiction. I sensed as you told the story that Amelia, Mister Pigeon, and Jenny seem to be very protective of you. Doctor Steel is scary, but he hasn’t done any harm directly. What if he’s trying to?”
“The thought shakes me up. The guy’s tongue is, like demonic. And he’s cold, man, like deadly or something. But yet, he’s never threatened me. Our interaction seems like a game to him. He’s always so calm, scoping me out for some weird reason. But that battle with Santa Pigeon in the alley was violent. Unreal.”
“You mentioned the first time you heard Steel’s voice, he said you had finally come out to play with us, meaning a group. Who are they, I wonder?”
“I don’t know, but my life feels out of my control, like I’m a puppet.”
“Whatever is happening, I’m glad you were steered to me. Let’s forget all the unanswered questions for now, go to bed, and really lose control.”
Chapter 31
Despite the erotic ecstasies of the night, I awoke before dawn, my mind scratched apart by nightmares of Betsy. I lit a cigarette and sat staring at the Monster Alley Polaroids, letting them haunt me as I speculated the violence against my giggling physicist friend was directly linked to the strange symbols.
Over the last few weeks, I had finally wrestled the alley’s disarming curiosities into a manageable place with my art and for the two nights in Teresa’s arms, forgotten entirely about its existence. But the news from Cambridge threatened that truce. The mysterious coincidences, along with the odd disruptions to my perception, had just been amplified by the murder attempt.
I felt I was being toyed with, called out. The monster beckoned. Why?
The thought struck me that there was no hiding from synchronicity’s reach when I felt a light touch to my shoulder. Teresa kissed the top of my head.
I turned around to her, placing a hand on her hip. “I’m worrying about everything—the violence, the alley, the cops, no alibi.”
She ran her fingers through my hair. “I have a feeling you’re capable of dealing with it all, but, right now, I’m concerned about you blaming yourself for telling the cops about Richard. You had to reveal all relevant information. They already knew about him anyway, probably even knew you were his cousin. They would’ve asked you about him sooner or later.”
“Yeah, I suppose. Hey, y’know, how weird is it about that dog rescuing Betsy? It reminds me of my dream the other night.”
“I wondered about a dog being in the dorm, but I’m glad it was there.”
We stared into each other’s eyes, happy with the realization we had faith in each other. We’d taken an important step towards feeling safe together.
“Are you wondering what kind of nut I must be? You’ve only known me two days.”
“I’ve never known anybody so open about who they are as you.”
“You must be an angel.”
“After last night, you can say that?”
And again, I forgot my troubles as she lowered herself onto my lap.
Chapter 32
After moving Teresa’s belongings into Rolly’s old apartment, we established a somewhat regular routine over the next month, sharing every day with each other. She attended her art classes, then opened the store around noon. I worked back at my apartment on the pieces for my show, now only a few months away.
Spending every night together, we continued to
learn more secrets about each other. But one thought pattern that had secured itself into my interpretation of recent events, she had to pry from me. I revealed to her that I suspected Monster Alley had struck at Betsy, maybe in the form of Richard or another disturbed soul. And it did it to get my attention. I worried the formula scratched into the alley wall held the key to a dangerous and violent power that might affect anyone I knew, including Teresa. Feeling helpless, I watched for signs, waiting for clear insight on how to proceed, sensing a gauntlet had been purposefully thrown across my path.
Teresa would catch me brooding, staring into empty space.
“I think you should stay away from that alley.”
“Okay.” But I didn’t know if I could.
I called the hospital in Boston regularly. Betsy was no longer unconscious, but she wasn’t responding positively to any stimuli or tests by the medical staff. The nurse I spoke with mentioned Betsy didn’t recognize her parents when they visited.
“Maybe you should go see her,” Teresa offered, upset for Betsy, worried for me.
“She wouldn’t know who I was.”
“You never know. Besides, maybe you need to go for yourself, just to acknowledge how you feel.”
“I couldn’t, not now. I wish Renkins had some news about catching someone.”
“He’s a cop. Why would he call you? For all you know, maybe he hasn’t cleared you of suspicion.”
I threw my energy into my work, pressing on with the drawings inspired by the alley, attempting with every pen or pencil stroke to make sense of the mysteries that hid not only in me, but in Cambridge, on the streets of the Village, in every bird and dog I saw, in little girls playing, and in my memory of cold steel eyes. Eyes that threatened to interrupt my life again at any moment.
Reptile tongues slithered across my pages. Memories of harsh, rasping laughter mocked every completed piece.
“Deets, that drawing is amazing, but you’re never going to sell it. It’ll creep people out,” Teresa said as she stood next to me naked, eating an apple.
Mayhem (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker Book 1) Page 15