Jonathan Kellerman_Petra Connor 02 (30 page)

“Thanks,” said Isaac.

“Thank me with a kiss.”

He complied.

She said, “Yum. You've got serious potential, but first things first. The
main
reason I've been trying to reach you isn't Lucido. It's because I finally came up with something on those June murders.”

“What?”

She pressed herself against him, positioned his hands on her rear. Pressed down and made him squeeze. When she spoke, they were so close her lips grazed his.

“I do think I may have solved your mystery, Isaac.”

CHAPTER

45

K
lara left first, exiting the building to make sure Lucido was gone. Isaac waited in the hallway and moments later she stuck her head in and gave him the thumbs-up sign. Enjoying the adventure.

They walked back to Doheny, blending with student traffic. A girl in shorts and bikini top lay on the lawn of the five-story building reading philosophy. A couple of male students hurried by wearing sweatshirts that read “LSU Sucks, Tenn. Swallows.”

Klara wore a beatific smile.

Once they were inside, instead of descending to the subbasement, they climbed two floors.

The Rare Book Room. A series of locked chambers and brief, hushed corridors. Klara had all the right keys.

Inside, the central reception area was cozy, hushed, paneled in new, beautiful oak stained oxblood, discreetly lit by milk-glass lamps and chandeliers that hung from a white, coffered ceiling bordered with turquoise. Green leather chairs, oak tables. Off to the left side, a few administrative offices.

No one in sight. Lunch hour?

Klara led him to a room marked “Reading.” Inside was a medium-sized conference table, a photocopy machine, a small desk sided by an armchair.

“That's for the student monitor,” she explained. “Someone sits and watches when you read the really rare material. I told her to take an early lunch.”

“I spent some time here,” said Isaac. “Researching Lewis Carroll for an English class. Pencils, no pens, white linen gloves when necessary.”

“We have a
wonderful
Carroll collection. Sit. We've got an hour.”

He pulled up to the table, expecting her to leave and return with something. Instead, she settled next to him. Unclasped her purse.

Out came a book—a booklet—brown-paper cover printed in rough black lettering. Wrapped in a zip-sealed plastic bag.

She said, “I was a very bad girl, taking it out of here. I did it just in case that Lucido person was still skulking around and we were unable to return.”

He took her hand and kissed it.

She laughed, smoothed out the plastic, removed the booklet carefully. “Talk about esoteric. I found it in the Graham Collection. It wasn't even cataloged in the main collection. It was in one of the appendices.”

Out of her purse came a pair of soft, white gloves. “Speaking of which,” she said, rotating the booklet so the title faced Isaac.

He gloved up. Read.

THE SINS OF THE MAD ARTIST
AN ACCOUNT OF THE HORRIBLE DEEDS
OF
OTTO RETZAK
R
ECOUNTED BY
T. W. JOSEPH TELLER, ESQ.
F
ORMER
S
UPERINTENDENT OF THE
M
ISSOURI
S
TATE
P
ENITENTIARY
A
ND
P
UBLISHED BY
H
IM IN
S
T
. L
OUIS
A.D. MCMX

The brown cover was cardboard, acid-burned brown at the borders, brittle. Isaac lifted it gingerly, flipped, began reading.

After covering a single paragraph, he turned to Klara. “You're brilliant.”

She beamed. “So I've been told.”

Otto Retzak was the son of Bavarian immigrant farmers who'd come to America in 1888 and ended up on a scratchy patch of rock-strewn land in the southern Illinois region known as Little Egypt. The sixth of nine children and the youngest son, Otto had been born on American soil.

Born June 28, 1897.

One hundred years to the day, before Marta Doebbler's murder.

Isaac's hands started to shake. He steadied them and hunched over the crudely printed text.

Retzak was eight when his drunkard father abandoned the family. Considered extremely bright but uneducable due to “a frightfully overactive and heated temperament,” Otto displayed a precocious ability to “wield charcoal stubs in a way that created faithful images.” His artistic talent went unappreciated by Otto's drunkard mother, who routinely beat him with switches and kitchen implements and left him to the mercies of his older brothers. With great enthusiasm and teamwork, the elder siblings sexually abused the boy.

At age nine, the illiterate Otto burgled a neighboring farm of twenty-nine cents hidden in a flour jar and a “plump laying hen.” The money was traded to another farm boy for a rusty clasp knife. The bird was found off the pitted dirt path that led to the decrepit Retzak homestead, gutted, its eyes scooped out, its head yanked off manually.

When confronted, Otto admitted his guilt “with no sense of childish shame, on the contrary, he boasted.” Beaten by his mother with special severity, he was turned over to the neighbors, who added their own lash-work to his tender back and worked him as a barn-hand for a month of fourteen-hour days.

The day after returning home, Otto stabbed his younger sister in the face without apparent provocation. As Superintendent T. W. Joseph Teller recounted: “A cold eye, even a sly smile, he did present to all those in attendance as the girl shrieked and wept and bled.”

The local sheriff was called in and Otto was locked in a cell with adult miscreants. Two months later, the boy, bruised and limping, was brought before an itinerant magistrate who warned him about “substantial characterological degeneracy” and sentenced him to five years in a state reform school. There, Otto claimed to have learned that
“mankind is not glorious nor good nor fashioned in God's image. Rather it is a dung-heap of stink and sin and hypocrisy. The hatred that was to drive me for the entirety of my accursed life took hold and was fed in that dark place. The outrages that were done to my person and mind in the name of spiritual cure were of benefit to me in a manner that could not be predicted. They turned my belly to iron and my mind toward revenge.”

Bound over for two extra years because of chronic disciplinary problems, sixteen-year-old Otto, now strapping and hard-muscled, was released. “Of a surprising pleasant countenance when not enraged, Retzak presented the thoughtful mien and demeanor of a man in his twenties. Yet all that could change in a trice.”

During his stay in the reformatory, the boy had been befriended by the wife of one of the guards, a woman named Bessie Arbogast. Impressed by Otto's drawings, she brought him paper and charcoal sticks and it was to her house that he headed on his initial day of freedom.

“Once free of his bonds, the incorrigible repaid Mrs. Arbogast's kindnesses by entering her bedroom through an open window.”

What commenced was described in Retzak's alleged words, though the flowery language made Isaac wonder if Teller had taken substantial literary liberties.

“In the chamber of her common little snuggery, enriched by the pleasure of violating her worm of a husband, as well as her flabby person and dewy-eyed soul, I used a wooden hairbrush in plain sight to bash him energetically about the head. Feeling quite fond of myself, then had my way with her in manners all the more pleasurable to me for their unspeakability.”

William Arbogast survived the beating as a cripple. His wife's trauma rendered her “virtually mute.”

Retzak escaped on foot and avoided capture. Traveling the country by hopping freight trains, he survived by eating pilfered domestic animals and produce, and meals donated by kindhearted housewives. Often, he repaid them by doing odd jobs before moving on. Sometimes he left them drawings that were “universally appreciated. The young man was capable of capturing garden scenes and furniture with utmost accuracy. It was only the portrayal of the human figure that posed technical problems for him.”

“Interestingly,” Teller went on, “during this period, Retzak did not choose to inflict similar punishments upon these altruistic women as he had upon Mrs. Arbogast. When I inquired as to the cause of this discrepancy, Retzak seemed genuinely puzzled.

“I do not know why I do what I do. Sometimes I have the urge and other times I don't. Sometimes my brain remains cool and other times it boils like a cauldron of lard. I am not controlled in my impulses as are most men and I do not regret the lack of restraint in my soul. I have been anointed by Satan or howsoever you recognize The Dark Angel to behave in the way that I do and I have obeyed my Master with the same mechanic idiocy as the fools and worms who squander their wretched little lives kneeling before the altar of some blabbering lying Diety.”

It was, Teller concluded, “a great puzzle of medicine and characterology, in that Retzak's entire anatomy, including his brain, has been examined by learned physicians and found unremarkable. This has included detailed measurement of his cranium by practitioners of the discipline called phrenology, now considered of questionable scientific merit by some, but employed in the hope of ascertaining basic truths about the fiend. That analysis deciphered nothing out of the ordinary, as did all other analyses. One can only hope that exposure to the twisted workings of this monster's soul as put forth by this humble tract will benefit mankind. That is, in fact, the purpose of The Author.”

At the age of eighteen, Retzak made his way to San Francisco, where he was hired as a deckhand aboard the steamer
Grand Tripoli
bound for the Orient. The ship made a stop in Hawaii, where Retzak took shore leave and abandoned his post.

“In Honolulu, Retzak embarked on a course of drunkenness and debauchery with numerous women of ill repute. Soon, he was living in common law with a prostitute, a fallen Alsatian girl named Ilette Flam, spectral and pasty as such types tend to be, and an opium addict. Retzak appointed himself Ilette's procurer and for a period of nearly one year, sustained himself with her ill-gotten earnings.”

On Retzak's nineteenth birthday, Ilette threw a party for him at a waterfront dive. During that celebration, she made an offhand remark that annoyed Retzak and when the two of them returned to their flat, an argument ensued. Retzak claimed not to recall the precise manner in which Ilette Flam had offended his sensibilities. However, when challenged by myself on this point, he owned up that
“it was something about my being lazy. The sow was hazy with dope and booze and believed my intake of rum would dull my thinking and allow her to insult me with no consequence. Just the opposite! My senses were heightened and every stupid remark from her flapping sow lips served to inflame me further! When she uttered another taunt—perhaps it was something that challenged my intelligence—a definite thought crossed my field of vision like a beacon: your sow brain is that of a mindless animal.”

Waiting until Ilette had fallen into a drugged stupor
“because she'd earned me a fair bit of money and for the most part she wasn't all-bad,”
Retzak put her to bed, turned her on her stomach, picked up an iron pry bar and bashed the back of her head.

“The skull cracked like an egg and gobbets of brains seeped out, accompanied by a clearish liquid, then some blood. The sight of it thrilled me as nothing had thrilled me before. New feelings took hold of my mind and I maintained a focused wielding of bar against bone. Specks of the tissue sprayed out like the finest mist and adhered to the walls. When a large brainy clot slipped down the back of her dress, I stared at it, amazed that this ugly grayish pink gelatin might very well house what Christian fools considered the seat of the soul. Could there be anything more hideous? Just one look at the cloudy mucus would inform any logical man that religion is rot. Suddenly, I was awash in calm and sat gazing at my handiwork with rapture. It was a new feeling and I quite liked it. I fetched my tablet of drawing paper and some pens I'd stolen from Berringer's Department Store in Waikiki. As the sow lay there, leaking and seeping and Demonstrably Dead, I drew her. For the first time I was able to capture the human form with a degree of accuracy.”

It was, Retzak concluded,
“a fine birthday present.”

Isaac's throat had gone dry. His hairline ached. Swallowing and gulping, he tried to stimulate saliva.

Klara said, “This has to be it.” Her voice was thick.

He nodded. But he was thinking something else:

June 28 had been a double anniversary for Otto Retzak. Commemoration of his birth and the date of his first murder.

His first victim, a common-law wife.

The L.A. killer had begun in 1997. Commemorating the centenary of Retzak's birth.

His first victim, a wife.

Marta's friends were sure Kurt Doebbler had killed her. Sometimes things were just as they seemed.

Isaac turned the page.

Upon finishing the drawing of Ilette Flam's mangled corpse, Retzak wrapped it in a bloody sheeting, packed a duffle, walked to Honolulu Harbor, and got himself a job on an oil tanker bound for Venezuela.

“All the way there, the memory of what I'd done to the sow burned in my brain like a sacrament. The ability to extinguish the flame, the power. As I swabbed decks and emptied slop buckets, I barely thought of anything else. I was much more than a deckhand. I had danced a dance few men can hope to know. At night, as I lay in a bunk surrounded by snoring swine, it was all I could do not to bash them all. But cunning prevented me from such rashness for the ship was a prison at sea, with no chance of escape. It was on shore in Caracas, months later, that I allowed myself the next delicious indulgence. The proprietor of a beer-house, a foul-mouthed old Mestizo, got on my wrong side and I decided he'd be the one. Waiting until he'd closed for the night and retired upstairs to his personal lodgings, I snapped the latch on the rear door of his establishment and surprised myself to find him awake and eating a late supper of pork and rice and some such swill. As he started to curse, I picked up a frypan resting atop the stove. A lovely cast-iron implement it was, with agreeable heft and a stout handle. Within seconds, gray half-breed gelatin had leaked into that Hispanical dinner. No different did it look from the sow's and as I sketched the scene, I got to thinking that all persons are but pathetic sacks of flesh and gristle and disgusting fluids. Our delusions of cleanliness and nobility are the basest of lies, the world teems with hypocrisy and falsehood and loosing the pitcocks of humanity in order to free the fluids is the greatest honesty of all. It was my destiny, I decided, to bring about Truth.”