Regina's Song (10 page)

I began to wish I’d kept my mouth shut. Twink was
my
problem, but now I’d opened a door that maybe I should have left closed. My housemates all seemed very interested in Renata’s behavior, and I wasn’t sure I wanted them to start muddying things up.

On the other hand, I didn’t really have any idea of what was going on in Twink’s mind, and maybe one of the inmates here could come up with a clue. At this point, I’d take all the help I could get.

CHAPTER SIX

I didn’t sleep very well that night, and when I finally drifted off, I had some peculiar dreams involving Milton, Whitman, and Twinkie. For some reason, they were all ganging up on me, and the green chain kept turning up to complicate things all the more.

Anyway, I was a little foggy when I stumbled downstairs the next morning. James, Charlie, and the bathrobe brigade were clustered around the small television set on the kitchen counter, watching and listening intently.

“What’s up?” I asked, homing in on the coffeemaker.

“A small-time hood got himself wasted last night,” Charlie replied. “The TV reporters say it’s a rerun of the Muñoz killing a couple weeks ago.”

“Another one of those carve-up jobs?” I asked, pouring myself a cup of Erika’s coffee.

“Was it ever,” Charlie said. “Some of the reporters looked green around the gills. I guess there were body parts and guts all over the place.”

Trish made a gagging sound. “Do you
mind
?” she snapped at Charlie.

“Sorry, babe,” he apologized. “Anyway, this one was even closer to home than the Muñoz killing. They found the carcass along the shore of Green Lake in Woodland Park, only about a mile from here.”

“Evidently the killing was close enough to the zoo to upset the animals,” James added. “A couple of reporters mentioned that earlier. I guess everybody who lives in the vicinity heard lions roaring, elephants trumpeting, and the wolves howling up a storm. Somebody put in an emergency call to the zookeepers, and it was one of them who found the body and called the police.”

“Anyway,” Charlie continued, “the cops and the reporters are all sagely stroking their beards and announcing that there might just possibly be some connection between this murder and that one two weeks ago down on campus. Isn’t that astounding? Two guys get gutted out in the same part of town within a couple of weeks, and the cops suggest that there
might
be a connection? Well, goll-
lee
gee!”

“Quit trying to be such a clown, Charlie,” Sylvia scolded.

“People who announce the obvious with a straight face always bring out the worst in me,” Charlie replied. “These reporters are all trying to look grim and serious while they go on and on about a ‘serial killer,’ but there’s nothing like a few messy murders to fill up the blanks in the day’s news.”

“They’ve already come up with a name that I’m sure we’ll have to listen to over and over for the next month or two,” Trish told me. “They’re talking about ‘the Seattle Slasher’ as if it’s something of international significance instead of a turf war between a couple of rival gangs. You know how reporters can be.”

“Oh, yes,” I agreed. “I’m waiting for the day when one of the weather guys has a grand mal seizure—on camera—because there’s a fifty percent chance of rain tomorrow. Was this latest dead guy another Chicano dope dealer?”

“Not with a name like Lloyd Andrews, he wasn’t,” she replied. “He seems to have had a fairly extensive police record, though, and drugs were involved in a few of his arrests—along with the usual low crimes and misdemeanors.”

“He was a small-timer,” Charlie added. “He might have sold a bag of crack once in a while, but he bought more than he sold. It looks to me as if he was one of those poor bastards who never did anything right. If he tried to steal a car, the tires would all go flat. If he thought some chickie had the hots for him, he’d get busted for attempted rape. If he planned a burglary, he’d pick the one house on the block with an alarm system. He was the sort of guy who gives crime a bad name. He definitely wasn’t in the same class with Muñoz—which pretty much shoots old Lieutenant Burpee’s theory full of holes. Cheetah doesn’t dirty his hands on small-timers. He goes after the big boys.”

Trish glanced over at the kitchen clock. “Oops,” she said, “we’re starting to run behind, girls. We’d better whip up some breakfast, or our boys will start wasting away.”

The three of them bustled around, getting things ready. “Go watch the set in the living room,” Erika commanded, pointing toward the front of the house. “Get out from underfoot while we’re working.”

“Yes, ma’am,” James rumbled. “Shall we adjourn to the parlor, gentlemen?”

The three of us went through the dining room to the silent front of the house. James turned on the smeary old television set, and we all sat down to watch.

“—murders are only the latest in a long string of serial killings here in the Northwest,” a reporter was sententiously reminding us. “The authorities are still searching for clues to the identity of the Green River killer, and this region was Ted Bundy’s starting place. The Seattle Slasher, however, appears to be seeking male victims—at least so far.”

“We might want to keep waving that in front of the ladies,” James suggested. “They’re a little nervous about murders in our own backyard—understandably, since there’s somebody out there with a sharp knife.”

“We might want to give some thought to the convoy principle,” I added. “Maybe tack on a new house rule: ‘Nobody goes out alone after dark,’ or something along those lines—at least until this quiets down, or the Slasher wastes somebody in Olympia or Bellingham.”

“Makes sense,” Charlie agreed. “I don’t think they’re in any real danger—those two killings seem to be gang stuff—but maybe we ought to get real protective until the TV guys find something else to babble about. Maybe they can go back to blubbering over Princess Diana. ‘Pavane for a Dead Princess’ is a nice piece of music, but it gets old after you’ve heard it forty or fifty times. The funny thing about that story is that the ‘media’ keeps trying to gloss over its own responsibility for that car crash. If they hadn’t declared open season on Princess Di, the vultures with cheap cameras wouldn’t have been chasing her.”

“How did your emergency meeting turn out last night, Charlie?” I asked him. “James told us some half-wit got inches and centimeters mixed up?”

“He sure did. Engineering’s in the clear, though. The drawings clearly specified centimeters. It was a buyer who dropped the ball, not us. Dear old Boing-Boing just spent a million bucks of taxpayer money on a component that won’t fit because some lamebrain in purchasing never heard of the metric system. We’ll hand it off to accounting, and they’ll juggle the books for us and smooth it over. Their jaws were a little tight about it, though. The balanced budget crowd’s tightening the screws on the Defense Department, so we don’t have the keys to Fort Knox the way we used to.”

“Aw,” I said in mock sympathy, “poor babies.”

“Come on, Mark. Look at all the wonderful things the defense industry’s given us—the H-bomb, the neutron bomb, nerve gas, smart bombs, laser sights, and all those cute little bacteria that give people diseases nobody’s ever heard of before—’bubonic leprosy,’ ‘tuberculanthrax,’ and ‘the seven-century itch.’ How could we possibly get along without stuff like that?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “It might be nice to try it and find out, though.”

After breakfast, we scattered to the winds again. We hadn’t yet encountered each other down on the campus, since the various disciplines were pretty well segregated. I don’t think an antisegregation policy would ever float on a university campus. The races and sexes may be desegregated, but the disciplines? Never happen.

I fought with Milton all morning, concentrating on his “Areopagitica.” Milton was a Puritan down to his toenails, and censorship lies at the soul of the Puritan ethic. So why does Johnny Milton tell us to print any damn thing we want to, and let it stand or fall all by itself?

Then Twink didn’t show up for my one-thirty class, and I got concerned. Maybe she was having second thoughts about all her blustering and show-offery following the Monday class. That promise to blow me away
had
been a bit on the arrogant side; maybe now she was too embarrassed to look me in the face.

That option wasn’t really open to her, though. Whether she liked it or not, Twink and I
were
going to spend this quarter in lockstep. I’d made promises, and I was going to keep them. When it became obvious that she wasn’t just late for class, I decided that I’d thrash this out with her. If she didn’t like it, well, tough noogies.

My class of freshmen was seriously diminished now. My canned speech on opening day had significantly thinned out the herd. Now it was time for the second canned speech, which had to do with reading critically, rather than accepting everything that shows up in print as if Moses had handed it down from Mount Sinai. I dove into my variation of “It ain’t necessarily so,” which might have gone over a little better if anybody in the class had ever heard of
Porgy and Bess
. Then I opened the door to formal logic. They got a bit wild-eyed when I mentioned the
“Post hoc, ergo propter hoc”
fallacy. There
were
a couple in the class who showed a few faint glimmers of grasping my point, and that’s always encouraging. Trying to teach a classroom of wall-to-wall dum-dums can be terribly depressing.

Before we adjourned, I pointedly reminded them that their “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” papers were due the next day. I was fairly sure
that
would clear away the rest of the goof-offs and only leave the good ones. That was the whole idea behind my “Professor Grouchy” act.

Mary was still in her bathrobe when she answered my knock, and she was looking a little frazzled.

“Where’s Renata?” I asked. “She didn’t make it to class today.”

“She had another bad night, Mark,” Mary replied. “These nightmares of hers are starting to worry me. She was shaking like a leaf in a windstorm when I came home from work. If this doesn’t clear up, she might have to go back to Lake Stevens for a bit.”

“It can’t be
that
bad!”

“It’s not good. I zonked her out with another sleeping pill, but I don’t want to make a habit of that.”

“Maybe I’d better call Doc Fallon,” I said. “I’ve been trying to keep the pressure off Twink, but I might be doing something wrong. If nothing else, maybe he can prescribe a tranquilizer to unwind her spring a little.”

“Tranks are only about one step away from heroin, Mark,” she cautioned. “Let’s not go down
that
road if we don’t have to.”

“Let’s see what Fallon has to say. We can
hope
that this is just something temporary that’ll pass once Twink gets used to the university. Guess I’d better stay here tonight when you go to work at the cop shop.”

“That won’t be necessary, Mark,” she told me. “This is my day off, remember?”

“That’s right, isn’t it? I must have spaced it out.” I looked at her a little more carefully. “You look awful, Mary,” I told her bluntly.

“Up yours!” she flared at me.

“What I meant was that you’re looking almost dead on your feet. You haven’t been to bed yet, have you?”

“I dozed on the couch a bit. It’s a good thing that I don’t have to go to work tonight. Sleeping on the job’s an official no-no.”

“Was Twink doing anything unusual before you went to work last night?”

“She said she was writing a paper for your class—though I don’t know how she could concentrate. She had the volume on her tape player turned way up.”

“Kiddie music?”

“Not unless the kids have changed a lot here lately. It sounded like some woman singing to a pack of wolves.”

“Oh,
that
tape. She’s hooked on that one. It was mixed in with that box of tapes and discs I brought down from Everett.”

“What’s it called?”

“Who knows? One of the twins taped it off another tape—or maybe a CD—and forgot to label it. Twink gets kind of spacey when she listens to it.” Then I snapped my fingers. “Now that I think back, she was listening to it on the evening before her
last
visit to nightmare alley.”

“Maybe we ought to root around and find it—and then accidentally lose it or something. If that’s what’s causing these nightmares of hers, she doesn’t need to have it floating around where she can get her hands on it.”

“I’ll take it up with Fallon when I talk with him. There are all sorts of possibilities kicking around. Both times happened on a Monday, so maybe it’s Monday that sends her up the wall—or something else. Let’s see what Fallon has to say before we lock anything in cement.”

“That might be best,” she agreed.

“Try to get some sleep, huh?”

“Sure, kid.”

When I got home I dug out Dr. Fallon’s phone number and punched it into the phone in the living room.

“Hey, Doc,” I said when he came on the line, “this is Mark Austin. Renata’s been having some problems with nightmares. They must be moderately awful, because they’ve pretty much put her out of action.”

“It’s not uncommon, Mark. Outpatients are frequently troubled with nightmares.”

“Could you write her a prescription for some kind of tranquilizer? Her aunt’s been zonking her with sleeping pills, but I wanted to check with you before it went much further.”

“What kind of sleeping pills?” His voice was a bit sharp.

“Hell, I don’t know, Doc.”

“Over-the-counter, or prescription?”

“Prescription, I think.”

He started to swear.

“I take it you don’t care for the idea.”

“Sleeping pills are the
last
thing Renata needs right now, Mark. The basic ingredient in prescription sleeping pills is a barbiturate, and nightmares are one of the symptoms of a withdrawal from barbiturates.”

“They’re addictive?”

“Obviously. We have to use them on inpatients here sometimes, but we control the dosage, and we always bring the patient down very slowly. A short siege of withdrawal from barbiturates can throw years of therapy out the window. You’re not supposed to be passing the damn things around like popcorn.”

A cold certainty suddenly came over me. “You had Twink all spaced out on sleeping pills as soon as she arrived there, didn’t you, Doc?”

“It’s routine. A psychotic patient has to be stabilized before we can start any kind of therapy.
We
control the dosage, though, and we keep barbiturates locked up as tightly as opiates. If Renata’s aunt leaves them lying around the house, God knows how many Renata’s been popping on the sly.”