Final Notice (10 page)

"Well, if she had a boyfriend that would help."

"I went through that with the police," he said with mild disappointment, as if he were hoping I'd have something more specific to ask of him. He really did want to help. And suddenly I knew exactly how a man with a painter's eye for detail could help me.

"Tell me about her, then. Tell me what she was like."

"You could get that better from her parents."

"Not better," I said. "Just more sentimentalized. I need a clear-eyed portrait of Twyla Belton. Because something about her, something about the way she looked or talked or acted, set this madman off. I'm betting that same something is setting him off again. So tell me about her, Mr. Aamons. And in your own words."

He wiped at his upper lip. "I want to say one thing before we get into this. I liked that girl. And if there's a question of money involved in this.. ." He looked away as if the word itself embarrassed him. "I mean if you need funds to help corner this son-of-a-bitch. . ."

I told him that money wasn't a problem.

"Then I guess I can do as good a job as anybody telling you about Twyla. `Cause she was a good one, and I don't see a lot of her kind of talent around here. Most of my kids come by way of junior colleges or straight out of high school. They just don't have the skills or the time for a career in fine arts. Some of them don't have any skill, at all. Just a longing to.be special: Lord, it's a bitter disappointment to learn that a broken heart don't buy you a thing in this world. A lot of them can't take that lesson and give up on the spot. Spend the rest of their lives nursing a grudge and telling themselves that someday they'll paint their pictures and put the record straight. Art's a paltry enough thing as it is. But, my gosh, it makes a lousy. excuse. More would-be human beings running around pretending to be would-be artists than you could count on both hands and feet. Not her, though. She had half the equipment it takes to make a good artist. She had all the talent in the world."

"And the other half?" I said.

Aamons touched his stomach and frowned. "She didn't have the guts. She didn't have the heart. Why, hell, she wouldn't have been at the school at all if she'd had what it really takes to get on." He laughed bitterly. "You see, she wasn't very pretty. At least, not the kind of pretty she wanted to be. And, man, that can hurt when you're young. Had a sweet round face, like a child's drawing of mother. All cheerful circles, from forehead to chin. And then she was as pudgy as a baby's hand. And just as eager as hell to please. Which made her fair game for just about every snot-nosed bully in the joint."

He got up from his chair and walked over to a closet set in the paneled wall. "Should have thought of this earlier," he said. "It's just been so many years."

He dug into the closet and fished out a black portfolio.

"This is some of her work," he said, wiping the portfolio gently with his right hand. "I haven't looked at it since she died. But if you want to know what kind of girl she was, what and who she liked, just look in here, and let her tell you."

Aamons set the portfolio on the desk in front of me and untied the string fastener. "She was going to be a wildlife illustrator," he said. "At least, that's what she was aiming at. Take a look at these."

He opened the portfolio to a watercolor sketch of feeding giraffes. "She did a whole series of these at the zoo. All sorts of animals. Even when she was drawing people, she was thinking animals, as if the world were a kind of beast fable to her, as if that were her way of taming it."

I stared at the drawing, which was, in fact, exquisitely done. Softened and not just by the medium. Colors blurred but outlines uncannily true-to-life, as if the colors were floating inside the animals or inside her, like vague powers of mind or of mood.

Aamons flipped the page to a drawing of two lions, sitting the way competitive dogs sit, in a T -the dominant one at the top. The tawny colors that floated through them and around them had a wild kind of beauty, as if the colors themselves were on the prowl.

"Can you imagine this sort of thing in the
Geographic
or in
Wild Life
?" he said with a fierce pride. "She was too damn, original for them. She had her own way of seeing things and, if you look close enough, it wasn't a bit sentimental. Not a bit like my own poor stuff. She didn't look like anybody else, taming her beasts that didn't want to be tamed. You see, it's almost like she's incorporated the way we look at them, the animals in a zoo, into the animals themselves. As if they were aware of us watching them and didn't much give a damn. None of that monkey behind the bars malarkey."

He flipped through pages of tigers, deer, antelope. All of them little allegories of perceiver and perceived, of what's wild in us and what's severe and undefinable in them. Then he came to a series of line drawings done in a more realistic, less interesting style.

"Some of her early stuff," he said.

I recognized sketches of Eden Park, the Conservatory, Seasongood Pavillion, and one chilling one of the Overlook, where she'd been killed. I stared at it and Aamons sighed.

"They'd all go up there to draw. It's such a damn pretty place. But she wasn't taken in by mere pretty even then. Not in her drawings she wasn't. Look what she picked to center on.

It was the famous bronze statue of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf, given to the city by some citizens of Rome in honor of the fact that Cincinnati, too, was built on seven green hills above a river. The pretty part was there, in the background. The blue, leaf-strewn ponds. The low stone wall looking out on the Ohio. The Japanese bridge that arcs over the reflecting pool. But it was all thrown out of kilter by the statue, which like the moody coloring of her animals, seemed to float through the sketch like a theme, as if this, too, were another beast fable.

"The rest is miscellaneous stuff," Aamons said. "Snapshots. Figure studies. Things that caught her eye."

He showed me line drawings of arms, hands, legs. No faces. Then he turned to one that made my blood run cold.

"Hold it!" I said and slapped my hand on the page.

Aamons looked startled. "What?" he said nervously.

For a moment I couldn't say anything. I didn't have the breath. It's just a forearm, Harry, I said to myself. Just a man's forearm. Propped, it seemed on a table top beside an open book. Probably on one of the library table tops on the second floor where she'd been sketching one fall afternoon two years before. And, of course, what had caught her eye, that fine eye attuned to the wild and the tame, was what was pictured on the arm. It was what had stopped me, too, and sent me hurtling back one hour in time, to Benson Howell's sanitized office. On the forearm, just as Howell'd said there might be, was a tattoo of a fanged cobra, twisted murderously about a woman's naked body, with the slogan "Evil" printed beneath it, as if it were an emblem in an emblem book. It .vas almost too good to be true.

"My God," I said.

And Aamons said, "For crying out loud, what's going on?"

I looked up at him. "This could be him. This could be the Ripper."

He looked bewildered. "You mean the man who killed Twyla?"

I nodded. "She couldn't have known it," I said, half to myself, in a voice that was probably as stunned sounding as Aamons' own. Then I started to get excited. The detective in me took over and began looking ahead, planning it out. "I'll need this drawing, Mr. Aamons."

"Sure," he said.

"I'll get the police to make copies of it and we'll see if they've got anyone on file with this tattoo on his arm. Then I can check the people on the list."

"What list?" he said in confusion. "What are you talking about?"

"It's too complicated to explain. Let's just say that you've probably given me the next best thing to a photograph of Twyla's killer. And I'm going to nail him with it before he gets the chance to cut up anyone else."

"I did that?" he said with pleasure.

"You and Twyla," I said. "She didn't know it, but she drew his picture for us. Probably in the very place where he'd first seen her and first thought of killing her."

"Son-of-a-bitch," Lon Aamons said. "What a piece of justice."

I took a deep, satisfied breath and said, "Yeah."
 

IT WAS close to one o'clock when I nosed onto the expressway at Taft and headed down the Mt. Adams hillside, past the Baldwin warehouse, to town. An hour or so before, I'd been ready to quit the case or to turn it over to the D.A.'s staff. Now I felt as if there weren't enough hours left in the day to do the job I had to do. And not just had to do, but wanted to do. After hearing about the girl, after hearing the affection in that old man's voice and seeing the touching legacy she'd left behind her, some part of me, almost as old and hardbitten as the Ripper himself, was determined that there weren't going to be any more Twyla Beltons on this case. No more sacrifices to someone's stunted sense of his own importance. Because once you'd demystified him, once you'd gotten over the thrill of horror that freezes you when you come in contact with someone terrible, you see what he's left behind him for what it is -the savaged books and the torn-up girl and those sad, sensitive drawings. And weighing them all in the same balance, you start to see that the Ripper, or anyone like him, just doesn't deserve the tribute that a slightly crazy man always pays a truly crazy one. He'd gotten his measure of pity and fear out of me. Now it was the girl's turn.

I had two stops to make before returning to the library and the first was simple enough. I got off Reading at Central Parkway, drove north through the blue afternoon haze to Station X, parked in the Music Hall lot, and with the sketch tucked under my arm, walked across Ezzard Charles to the police building and Al Foster's tiny office.

He lit a fresh cigarette when I showed him the sketch and almost cracked a smile.

"I knew I could count on that heart of yours, Harry," he said. He tapped the drawing with his forefinger. "You sure that's him?"

"It would be a pretty weird coincidence if it wasn't. The tattoo fits the description I got from the court psychiatrist, and the drawing was made about the time of the murder. I figure she must have spotted him in the library. What happened after that is speculation."

"You'd make a great witness," Al said.

I laughed. "Then try this out. She was a romantic girl with more imagination than experience. When you add loneliness to that combination and a native sympathy for wild animals, you might get someone who would go up to the Overlook with a slightly off-beat stranger, who had a tattoo on his arm like a badge of his own wild nature."

"All right," he said. "I don't know about the scenario. Maybe he just followed her up there. Maybe there wasn't any contact between them at all -I mean, beyond the drawing and the murder itself. That doesn't matter. If this is him, I want him. And I don't care if DeVries and the D.A.'s office goes for it or not." Foster crushed out a smouldering butt with his thumb and said, "I saw that kid's body, Harry. And I'm telling you I want this guy. So I'm going to run this sketch for you. This afternoon. And if we come up with anybody on file with this sort of tattoo on his arm, I'll let you know as soon as possible. You'll be at the library?"

I said, yes.

"One thing, though," Foster said. "If we do get a make on this guy, don't go handling it on your own. You can case him, all right. I'll even deputize you. But when it comes time for a bust, you call me. Understand? If worse comes to worst, I can get a John Doe warrant and pull him in for vagrancy."

"I'm no hero, Al," I said.

He didn't say anything.
 
 

I drove across town to the Court House, which was stop two, and found George DeVries staring out the window again in his second-floor office.

"They really keep you busy, don't they, George?" I said from the doorway.

He turned slowly around in his chair. I could see from the disappointed look on his face that he'd already had his little talk with Walker Parsons and that it hadn't gone the way he'd wanted it to. He tried to explain it to me, in that sour, mechanical tone of voice that hired hands generally adopt when they don't see eye-to-eye with their bosses.

"Wally's got an election coming up," he said and bit his lip. "He thinks the timing's wrong on this thing, and he wants to wait until the end of the month to break it to the papers. You see he's got a close one this time, what with the boy Jackson giving him such a hard time in the second district. And this kind of case could send him right over the top. If the timing's right." He made an embarrassed face and sat back in his chair. "I'm sorry as hell, Harry. He's willing to make you a special deputy, if that's any consolation. And if you had a name, he says it might be different.

"Aw, hell," George said. "Let's face it. Walker hasn't got the guts of an egg-suck dog. If he did, he wouldn't be prosecuting the porno-peddlers all the time and letting the really big-time crooks go scot free. But he does know how to get himself reelected. And come October, that's all he's got on his mind. I'm sorry, Harry, but there's not a thing I can do on my own."

I told him not to worry about it -that I might have a name for him in a couple of days.

"Yeah?" he said eagerly. "That could make a difference."

Only I wasn't so sure. Walker was perfectly capable of sitting on an indictment for a month and letting the Hyde Park Ripper wander around the streets until he needed him to cash in at the polls. As I walked back down the stairway to the lobby, I decided to stick with Al Foster and the P.D., if I did make my man. They would get him off the streets, all right. Maybe permanently, Harry, I said to myself. And wasn't so sure I cared about that, either.