Murder Among the Angels (30 page)

“We think so,” said Jerry.

“Why would he have rented apartments for the others and not for her?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

“Maybe he didn’t need to set her up in an apartment,” he speculated. “Maybe she already lived somewhere in the area.”

It turned out that Peter was exactly right. As Charlotte had already noted, he may have been crazy, but he wasn’t stupid. Melinda had lived by herself in an apartment house in Tarry-town. Tracking her down had been a breeze. They had simply checked Dr. Louria’s appointment book for the date of Charlotte’s first appointment and found Melinda’s last name, which Charlotte had forgotten. Then they had looked her up in the Westchester telephone book. Melinda Myer had shared her height, weight, and general age with the other victims, but that was where the resemblance ended. Unlike the others, she had been a legitimate patient of Dr. Louria’s, which is why he hadn’t mentioned her when he’d admitted to making the other young women over in the image of his dead wife. Her extensive cosmetic surgery was needed to correct scars from cuts sustained in an automobile accident. The fact that she was a legitimate patient also explained why her appointments had been recorded in Dr. Louria’s appointment book, why he had referred to her in front of his other patients by name (which he wouldn’t have done in the case of a Lily look-alike), and why she had been so willing to chat about her surgery, in contrast to the other victims, who had been under orders to keep quiet. The reason Dr. Louria had seen her in Zion Hill, rather than at his office in New York, was not that he wanted to keep her existence a secret, but because she lived in neighboring Tarrytown. But the murderer probably hadn’t known any of that. To him, she had probably been another young woman who fit the profile, and therefore another one of Dr. Louria’s make-overs.

At several points during the investigation, Jerry had talked about the psychological characteristics of the type of person who would commit such a heinous crime. One of them was blood lust: a drive to kill that was so intense that it propelled the killer to kill with ever greater frequency and ever greater audacity. With such a killer, the importance of reenacting the ritual of the murder according to his carefully scripted plan eventually came to supersede the importance of whatever the motive for murder had been to begin with. Therefore, it was possible that the killer had known that Melinda was a legitimate patient, but didn’t care. She had fit the role that was called for in his sadistic fantasy, and that was enough for him.

It turned out that Melinda had worked for a Westchester party planner, doing theme parties for children in which she dressed up as Snow White, Princess Jasmine, Wonder Woman, or whoever was the favorite female children’s character of the moment. Her employer reported that she liked the job because it allowed her to conceal her facial disfigurement behind the masks that she wore. He also reported that she had a wonderful way with children. He said she hadn’t shown up for work in two weeks. He was glad that the police had called. He’d been getting worried, but hadn’t known what action to take, if any. She was a reliable young woman for whom it was out of character not to show up for work without calling in.

After speaking with Melinda’s employer, they then checked the bulletins on unidentified bodies that had come in on the Teletype from other police departments. They didn’t have to look far: Jerry handed Charlotte the third one in his pile. It was for body parts belonging to an unidentified Caucasian woman of between twenty-five and thirty years of age and standing about five feet six inches tall. The body parts had washed ashore three days before on the west bank of the Hudson in Alpine, New Jersey.

“I guess we know what happened to Melinda,” Jerry said as Charlotte read the Teletype bulletin. Then he leaned back in his chair, let out a deep sigh, and raised a hand over his lowered brow.

14

If the murderer held true to form, he would be depositing the skull within the next twenty-four hours. In every case, the skull had been found within twenty-four hours of the purchase of the flowers. This time, the police would be better prepared. In the case of Doreen Mileski, they had staked out only the cemeteries in the immediate area, and had been outwitted by a murderer who had deposited the skull in the undercroft instead. This time, they planned to stake out every cemetery and religious institution on the east bank of the Hudson from Yonkers to Peekskill, with the exception of family plots and small churchyard cemeteries. The category of religious institutions was bigger than one would have thought: many of the old mansions along the Hudson were now used for religious retreats, or as residences for the Catholic orders. Though many of these former monasteries had been turned into condos as the number of men taking the tonsure diminished, there was still an order of Benedictine monks in the area, as well as two Catholic colleges with their respective chapels. Any of these institutions might have ended up as the repository for Melinda Myer’s skull.

Given the murderer’s penchant for cemeteries, however, their main efforts would be concentrated on the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery and the adjoining Old Dutch Burying Ground, two miles to the south on the Albany Post Road, which was the only cemetery in the immediate area that the murderer hadn’t yet hit. As the cemetery that had been immortalized in Washington Irving’s famous story of the headless horseman, the Old Dutch Burying Ground also seemed a particularly apt place to deposit a skull. Nearly fifty police officers from the Zion Hill and county police departments would be posted at nineteen different sites.

Charlotte had stayed around for the initial discussions of the stakeout operation, but had finally decided to go home; she was only getting in the way. Jerry filled her in by telephone later that evening, after he had returned from a canvass of the cemeteries. He also regaled her with the names of fellow celebrities whose final resting places were in Westchester County. There was Jimmy Cagney and Babe Ruth at Gate of Heaven; Tommy Dorsey and Lou Gehrig at Kensington; and Judy Garland, Basil Rathbone, Joan Crawford, and Ed Sullivan at Ferncliff Mausoleum. There were even celebrity pets buried in the pet cemetery in Hartsdale, including John Barrymore’s cat and Kate Smith’s dog.

All of which made Charlotte wonder where it was that she would eventually end up, a thought that she put immediately out of her mind.

That night, she dreamed of Chinese vases. There were vases with white glazes, vases with yellow glazes, vases with burgundy glazes. There were vases with handles, and vases without handles. There were vases with round shapes and cylindrical shapes, and the double gourd shape that was the Daoist symbol of wishes that were magically fulfilled. There were simple celadon vases from the ancient Sung Dynasty and there were ornate polychrome vases from the nineteenth-century Manchu Dynasty. Except that instead of being displayed two or three at a time according to their dynastic period in the display cases on the balcony of the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the vases in her dream were evenly aligned on shelves, each with an identifying marker. There were hundreds of them, displayed on long tiers of shelves. It was odd how these shelves were arranged: not in a straight line, but in angled sections. Nor were the vases large and small, but rather all about a foot high. Then, the dream took a peculiar turn: the vases started sprouting teeth, and developing eye sockets and mandibles and chins. Which was to say, the vases turned into skulls. Row upon row of eerie, grinning skulls.

Disturbed by the dream, Charlotte found herself sitting upright in bed. As she stared out at the streetlight whose yellow glow illuminated her bedroom, she realized where the dream had taken place. It wasn’t at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but at another museum altogether. Then she realized who the murderer was! She checked the clock on her bedside table. It was almost three. She picked up the phone and dialed Jerry.

The phone rang four or five times before he picked it up. “It’s Charlotte,” she said.

“Jesus, Graham,” he said. His voice was husky, probably from all the talking he had done to his troops. “It’s the middle of the night,” he said. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Three o’clock,” she said. “I’m sorry to wake you up. But it’s important.”

“I only just went to bed. What is it?”

“Describe to me again the psychological characteristics of the type of person who would commit a series of murders like this: a person who would kill and dismember his victims.”

“A white male,” he replied. “Of above average intelligence. Middle-class to upper middle-class background. Comes from a dysfunctional family, although it may very well be an intact family.”

“That describes a lot of people,” she said.

“Sexually backward,” he continued. “Usually, they’ve never had a normal consensual relationship with a woman.” He went on with his recitation: “Heavily into fantasy: they get off on fantasizing about the murder.”

“They might, for instance, become obsessive about a body part?”

“More than that, but I don’t want to get graphic. It’s called fetishism. Often they take a body part as a souvenir, such as a skull, for instance.” He went on: “They have the ability to compartmentalize.”

“Compartmentalize?”

“Yeah. To keep their criminal activity separate from their day-to-day life. What’s this about?” he asked grumpily. “I want to go back to bed.”

“Wait,” she said. “You mentioned something else before. About hanging around on the fringes of the investigation.”

“That’s not always true. But it often is. Like the firebug who turns up to watch the fire. We had a guy once who wanted to help pass out flyers about the missing murder victims. He turned out to be the murderer.”

“Do you realize who you could be describing?”

“What do you mean?”

“A white male with an obsession for a particular body part, namely the skull. A man who clearly derives pleasure from feeling a skull: the smoothness of the bone, the contours of the shape.” She remembered the way his fingers had caressed the bone, almost as if it were flesh.

“Jack Lister,” he said

Charlotte continued: “A man who isn’t just close to the investigation, but at the very heart of it. Remember how interested he was in whether or not you had made an arrest?”

Jerry picked up the ball and ran with it: “Also, a man who lives right down the road from the summer house and immediately adjacent to the Zion Hill Cemetery. But how would he have known about the Lily look-alikes?”

“I don’t know. That’s one piece I’m missing. But I do have another piece: if he was working on the angel statues, he would have been a familiar figure around the church, and might even have had his own set of keys.”

“At the least, he would have known that he could find a key to the undercroft in the key cabinet,” Jerry said.

“He wouldn’t have had access to the meat cleaver, but maybe we’re placing too much emphasis on that,” she said. “Isn’t it the kind of implement that can readily be purchased anywhere?”

“Yeah, it is,” Jerry agreed.

“I had written him off as a harmless eccentric with a skull fetish, but I should have known better,” Charlotte said. “The only groups I know of that share his obsession with skulls are the Hell’s Angels and the Nazis.”

“And phrenologists,” Jerry added. “And deadheads.”

“Deadheads?” Charlotte asked.

“Followers of the Grateful Dead,” he explained, naming the well-known rock group. “One of my daughters happens to be one.” Then he continued: “But what would his motive have been?”

“He wasn’t just obsessed with skulls, he was obsessed with a particular skull. He said it himself: two generations of Listers have been obsessed with the same face, and by extension, the skull.”

“‘All my life I have dreamt one dream alone,’” Jerry said, quoting Lister, who had in turn been quoting Rossetti.

“Exactly,” she said. “He’s been sculpting that face his entire life. By killing the Lily look-alikes, he could add four skulls of the face he prized above all others to his collection.”

“Numbers 503 through 506 in his Phrenological Cabinet,” Jerry said. “And he would have had the added thrill of doing the soft tissue reconstructions. The recomposer of the decomposed.”

“Decomposed by him,” Charlotte said.

“But if the skulls of Lily’s look-alikes were the prizes of his collection, why dispose of them in the cemeteries?”

“To show off,” she said. “To taunt the police. Look what I’ve done. Nah nah. Besides, he didn’t need to hoard the skulls. He knew you’d be bringing them back, and that he’d be making casts of them.”

“I always thought he was out there.”

“Out there is right. Like on Alpha Centauri. What about his fascination with the skull of the doctor who dismembered his wife? Besides, he looks the part,” she said, remembering what he had said about anatomy being destiny.

“Aren’t you pushing it a bit?” Jerry said. “If all murderers looked like murderers, I wouldn’t be in business.”

“Okay,” she conceded. “But what about all the vases of lilies of the valley in his living room? Another taunt. Isn’t it typical that they become emboldened the longer they go without getting caught?”

For a moment there was silence on the phone as Jerry considered what Charlotte was telling him.

“Has he ever had a normal consensual relationship with a woman?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen him with a woman, or heard him speak about a woman.” Then he said: “I don’t think we can arrest him. We’ve made that mistake already. But we can keep a close eye on him.”

“I think that would be a good idea,” Charlotte said. Then she wished him a good night’s sleep and said goodbye.

After breakfast the next morning, Charlotte got ready to head back up the Saw Mill River Parkway to Zion Hill. She was like a theatergoer at a Shakespearian tragedy who has sat patiently through the first four acts: she was damned if she was going to miss out on the climax now, even if it did mean spending a day hanging around the police station. Maybe Jerry could post her at a little graveyard somewhere to keep her busy. As she got dressed, she wondered if anything had happened since her middle-of-the-night telephone call to Jerry. She thought of giving him a call, and then decided against it. She would find out soon enough. Besides, he would have called her if they had caught the perpetrator in the act of depositing the skull.