The Poet (1995)

by Michael Connelly

  That was a better reason than any I had come up with for staying in Phoenix. She reached over and touched my beard like she had done once before. And just before I got out of the car she told me to wait. She took a card out of her purse and wrote a number on the back of it, then she gave it to me.

  "That's my pager number in case something happens. It's on the satellite, so you can beep me wherever I am."

  "In the whole world?"

  "The whole world. Until the satellite falls."

  32

  Gladden looked at the words on the screen. They were beautiful, as if written by the unseen hand of God. So right. So knowledgeable. He read them again.

  _________________________

  They know about me now and I am ready. I await them. I am prepared to take my place in the pantheon of faces. I feel as I did as a child when I waited for the closet door to be opened so that I could receive him. The line of light at the bottom. My beacon. I watched the light and the shadows each of his footfalls made. Then I knew he was there and that I would have his love. The apple of his eye.

  We are what they make us and yet they turn from us. We are cast off. We become nomads in the world of the moan. My rejection is my pain and motivation. I carry with me the vengeance of all the children. I am the Eidolon. I am called the predator, the one to watch for in your midst. I am the cucoloris, the blur of light and dark. My story is not one of deprivation and abuse. I welcomed the touch. I can admit it. Can you? I wanted, craved, welcomed the touch. It was only the rejection-when my bones grew too large-that cut me so deeply and forced on me the life of a wanderer. I am the cast off. And the children must stay forever young.

  _________________________

  He looked up when the phone rang. It was on the counter in the kitchen and he stared at it as it rang. It was the first call she had gotten. The machine picked up after three rings and her taped message played. Gladden had written it out on a piece of paper and made her read it three times before it was recorded on the fourth. Stupid woman, he thought as he listened now. She wasn't much of an actress-at least with her clothes on.

  "Hello this is Darlene, I . . . I can't take your call right now. I've had to go out of town because of an emergency. I will be checking messages-uh, messages and will call you as soon as I can."

  She sounded nervous and Gladden worried that because of the repeat of the one word that a caller would know she was reading. He listened as a male voice left an angry message after the beep.

  "Darlene, goddamnit! You better call me as soon as you get this. You left me in a big lurch over here. You shoulda called and just might not have a job to come back to, girl, goddamnit!"

  Gladden thought it had worked. He got up and erased the message. Her boss, he assumed. But he wouldn't be getting a callback from Darlene.

  He noticed the smell as he stood in the kitchen doorway. He grabbed his matches off his cigarettes on the living room coffee table and went into the bedroom. He studied the body for a few moments. The face was a pale green but darker since the last time he had checked. Bloody fluid was draining from the mouth and nose, as the body purged itself of decomposition fluids. He had read about these purges in one of the books he had successfully petitioned to receive before the warden at Raiford. Forensic Pathology. Gladden wished he had the camera so he could document the changes in Darlene.

  He lit four more sticks of jasmine incense, placing them in ashtrays at the four corners of the bed.

  This time, after he had left and closed the bedroom door, he laid a wet towel along the threshold, hoping it would prevent the odor from spreading into the area of the apartment where he was living. He still had two days to go.

  33

  I talked Greg Glenn into letting me write from Phoenix. For the rest of the morning I stayed in my room making calls, gathering comments from players in the story ranging from Wexler in Denver to Bledsoe in Baltimore. I wrote for five straight hours after that and the only disturbances I had all day were calls from Glenn himself, nervously asking how I was doing. An hour before the five o'clock deadline in Denver, I filed two stories to the metro desk.

  My nerves were jangling by the time I shipped the stories and I had a headache that was almost off the scale. I had been through a pot and a half of room service coffee and a full pack of Marlboros-the most I had smoked in one sitting in years. Pacing the room and waiting for Greg Glenn's callback, I made a quick call to room service again, explained that I couldn't leave my room because I was expecting an important call, and ordered a bottle of aspirin from the hotel's lobby shop.

  After it arrived I downed three tablets with mineral water from the minibar and almost immediately started feeling better. Next I called my mother and Riley and alerted them that my stories would be in the next day's paper. I also told them there was a chance that reporters from other media outlets might try to contact them now that the story was out and to be prepared. Both said they didn't want to talk to any reporters and I said that was fine, not missing the irony that I was one myself.

  Lastly, I realized I had forgotten to call Rachel to tell her I was still in town. I called the Phoenix field office of the FBI but was told by the agent who answered that she was gone.

  "What do you mean 'gone'? Is she still in Phoenix?"

  "I'm not at liberty to say."

  "Can I speak with Agent Backus then?"

  "He's gone, too. Who may I ask is calling?"

  I hung up and dialed the hotel's front desk and asked for her room. I was told she had checked out. So had Backus. So had Thorson, Carter and Thompson.

  "Son of a bitch," I said after hanging up.

  There had been a break. Had to be. For all of them to have checked out, there had to have been a major breakthrough in the investigation. And I realized I had been left behind, that my moment on the inside was surely over now. I got up and paced the room some more, wondering where they would have gone and what could have made them move so quickly. Then I remembered the card Rachel had given me. I dug it out of my pocket and punched the paging number into the phone.

  Ten minutes surely seemed enough time to bounce my message off the satellite and then down to her, wherever she was. But ten minutes came and went and the phone didn't ring. Another ten minutes passed and then a half hour. Not even Greg Glenn called. I even picked up the phone to make sure I hadn't broken it.

  Restless, but tired of pacing and waiting, I fired up the laptop and logged into the Rocky again. I called up my messages but there were none of any importance. I switched to my personal basket, scrolled the files and called up the one labeled HYPSTORIES. The file contained several stories on Horace Gomble, one after the other in chronological order. I began to read from the oldest story forward, my memory of the hypnotist coming back as I went.

  It was a colorful history. A physician and researcher for the CIA in the early sixties, Gomble later was a practicing psychiatrist in Beverly Hills who specialized in hypnotherapy. He parlayed his skill and expertise in the hypnotic arts, as he called them, into a nightclub act as Horace the Hypnotist. First it was just appearances on open-mike nights at the clubs in Los Angeles but the act became immensely popular and he started taking it to Las Vegas for weeklong gigs on the strip. Soon Gomble wasn't a practicing shrink anymore. He was a full-time entertainer appearing on the stages of the nicest palaces on the Las Vegas strip. By the mid-seventies his name was on the billing with Sinatra's at Caesar's, albeit in smaller letters. He made four appearances on Carson's show, the last time putting his host in a hypnotic trance and eliciting from him his true thoughts on his other guests that evening. Because of Carson's caustic comments, the studio audience thought it was a gag. But it wasn't. After Carson saw the tape, he canceled the airing of the show and put Horace the Hypnotist on his blacklist. The cancellation made news in the entertainment trade papers and was a knife in the heart of Gomble's career. He never made another network television appearance until his arrest.

  His shot at TV gone, Gomble's shtick got old,
even in Vegas, and his stages moved further and further away from the strip. Soon he was on the road, working comedy clubs and cabarets, then finally it was the strip club and county fair circuit. His fall from fame was complete. His arrest in Orlando at the Orange County Fair was the exclamation mark at the end of that fall.

  According to the trial stories, Gomble was charged with assaulting young girls whom he had chosen as volunteer assistants for matinee performances at the county fair. Prosecutors said he followed a routine of seeking a girl ten to twelve years old from the audience and then taking her backstage to prepare. Once in his private dressing room, he gave the intended victim a Coke laced with codeine and sodium pentothal-a quantity of both was seized during his arrest-and told her he must see if she could be hypnotized before the performance started. With the drugs acting as hypnotic enhancers, the girl was placed in a trance and then assaulted by Gomble. Prosecutors said the molestation primarily involved fellatio and masturbation, actions difficult to prove through physical evidence. Afterward, Gomble repressed memory of the event in the victim's mind with hypnotic suggestion.

  It was unknown how many girls were victimized by Gomble. He was not discovered until a psychologist treating a thirteen-year-old girl with behavioral problems brought out her assault by Gomble during a hypnotherapy session. A police investigation was launched and Gomble was eventually charged with attacks on four girls.

  At trial the defense's contention was that the events as described by the victims and police simply did not happen. Gomble presented no fewer than six highly qualified experts in hypnotism who testified that the human mind, while in a hypnotic trance, could not be persuaded or forced under any circumstances to do or even say anything that would endanger the person or be morally repugnant to them. And Gomble's attorney never missed a chance to remind the jury that there was no physical evidence of molestation.

  But the prosecution won the case with essentially one witness. He was Gomble's former CIA supervisor, who testified that Gomble's research in the early sixties included experimentation with hypnosis and the use of drug combinations to create a "hypnotic override" of the brain's moral and safety inhibitions. It was mind control, and the former CIA supervisor said codeine and sodium pentothal were both among the drugs Gomble had used with positive results in his studies.

  A jury took two days to convict Gomble of four counts of sexual assault of a child. He was sentenced to eighty-five years in prison to be served at the Union Correctional Institute in Raiford. One of the stories in the file said he had appealed the conviction on the basis of incompetent counsel but his plea was rejected all the way up to the Florida supreme court.

  As I reached the bottom of the computer file I noticed the last story was only a few days old. I found this curious because Gomble had been convicted seven years earlier. This story also had come from the L.A. Times instead of the Orlando Sentinel, which all the previous ones had come from.

  Curious, I started reading it and at first believed Laurie Prine had simply made a mistake. It happens often enough. I thought she had shipped me a story unrelated to my request and that somebody else at the Rocky had probably asked for.

  It was a report on a suspect in the murder of a Hollywood motel maid. I was about to stop reading but then I came across Horace Gomble's name. The story said the suspect in the maid's killing had served time at Raiford with Gomble and even helped him with some undescribed jailhouse legal work. I reread the lines as an idea spun in my mind and then finally couldn't be contained.

  Once more I called Rachel's pager after disconnecting the laptop. This time my fingers were shaking as I punched out the number and I could hardly keep still afterward. I paced the room again, staring at the phone. Finally, as if the power of my stare had caused it, the phone rang and I grabbed it up before it had even stopped its first sounding.

  "Rachel, I think I've got something."

  "Just hope it isn't syphilis, Jack."

  It was Greg Glenn.

  "I thought it was somebody else. Listen, I'm waiting on a call. It's very important and when it comes I should take it."

  "Forget it, Jack. We're pushing the envelope. You ready?"

  I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes past the first deadline.

  "Okay, I'm ready. The faster the better."

  "Okay, first off, good work, Jack. This . . . well, it doesn't make up entirely for not being first, but it's a much better read and much better information."

  "Okay, so what needs to be fixed?" I asked quickly.

  I didn't care about his compliment/criticism parlay. I just wanted to be done by the time Rachel answered my page. Because there was only one phone line into the room I couldn't use my laptop to connect with the Rocky and view the actual edited version of the story. Instead I called up the original version on the laptop and Glenn read off the changes he had made.

  "I want to make the lead a little tighter and stronger, go right out with the fax a little harder. I fiddled around with it and this is what I've got. 'A cryptic note from a serial killer who apparently preys on randomly selected children, women and homicide detectives was being analyzed by FBI agents Monday as the latest twist in the investigation of the slayer they have dubbed the "Poet." ' What do you think?"

  "Fine."

  He had changed the word "studied" to "analyzed." It wasn't worth protesting. We spent the next ten minutes fine-tuning the main story, going back and forth on nit-picks. He didn't make too many significant changes and with deadline breathing on his neck he didn't have the time to do a lot, anyway. In the end, I thought some of the changes were good and some were made simply for change's sake, a practice all newspaper editors I've worked with seem to share. The second story was a short, first-person account of how my search for understanding of my brother's suicide uncovered the trail of the Poet. It was an understated tooting of the Rocky's horn. Glenn didn't mess with it. When we were done he had me hold the line while he shipped the stories to the copy desk.

  "I think maybe we should keep this line open in case they come up with something on the rim," Glenn said.

  "Who's got it?"

  "Brown has the main and Bayer has the side. I'll do the back reading myself."

  I was in good hands. Brown and Bayer were two of the best of the rim rats.

  "So, what are you planning for tomorrow?" Glenn asked while we were waiting. "I know it's early but we also have to talk about the weekend."

  "I haven't thought about that stuff yet."

  "You've got to have a follow, Jack. Something. We don't go out front this big with something and then come back flat-footed the next day. There's gotta be a follow. And for this weekend, I'd like a scene setter. You know, inside the FBI hunt for a serial killer, maybe get into the personalities of the people you've been dealing with. We'll need art, too."

  "I know, I know," I said. "I just haven't thought about all of that yet."

  I didn't want to tell him about my latest discovery and the new theory I was brewing. Information like that in an editor's hands was dangerous. The next thing you knew it would be on the daily news budget-practically the same as being written in granite-that I'd have a follow linking the Poet to Horace the Hypnotist. I decided I would wait and talk to Rachel before I told Glenn about that.

  "What about the bureau? They going to let you back inside?"

  "Good question," I said. "I doubt it. I kind of got the sayonara when I left today. In fact, I don't even know where they are. I think they blew town. Something's happened."

  "Shit, Jack. I thought you-"

  "Don't worry, Greg. I'll find out where they went. And when I do, I've still got some leverage with them and there are a few things I didn't have room for in the stories today. One way or the other, I'll have something tomorrow. I just don't know what, yet. After that, I'll do the scene setter. But don't count on any art. These people don't like having their pictures taken."

  After a few more minutes Glenn got an all clear from the copy desk and the story was sh
ipped to composing. Glenn said he was going to baby-sit it to production to make sure nothing went wrong. But I was finished for the night. He told me to have a nice dinner on the company expense account and call him in the morning. I told him I would.

  As I contemplated whether to page Rachel for a third time, the phone rang.

  "Hiya, sport."

  I recognized the sarcasm dripping off the voice.

  "Thorson."

  "You got it."

  "What do you want?"

  "I'm just letting you know that Agent Walling is tied up and she won't be calling you back any time soon. So do us and yourself a favor and stop calling the pager. It gets annoying."

  "Where is she?"

  "That's really none of your business now, is it? You shot your wad, so to speak. You got your story. Now you're on your own."

  "You're in L.A."

  "Message delivered, signing off."