Regina's Song (13 page)

That got their immediate attention, and they listened intently for the rest of the period.

Twink hung around after I’d dismissed the class. “What’s got you on the prod today, Markie?” she asked.

“Grading papers filled with sloppy language, Twink. That’s the un-fun part of teaching.”

“It’s your own fault. If you wouldn’t assign so many, you wouldn’t have to grade them. I’m supposed to say ‘thank you.’ Aunt Mary was all rested when you dropped me off yesterday. She slept until almost four o’clock.”

“Good. She was looking frazzled when we left for church. She really needed that sleep.”

“As long as it’s ‘let’s all thank Markie’ time, I’d like to add a few of mine to the heap. I really enjoyed our little jaunt to the Space Needle yesterday. I didn’t know that the restaurant up there rotated like that. It gives you a view of the whole city, doesn’t it?”

“Sure, unless there’s a low-lying cloudbank blotting everything out.”

“Say hi to the gang at your boardinghouse for me, OK? I had lots of fun there the other night.”

“I’ll pass that on,” I promised.

“Good,” she said. “I’ve got to run now. See ya.” And then she was gone. It was fairly obvious that we’d done
something
right lately. Twink seemed almost normal.

Then I checked my watch and headed for the parking garage. I’d almost forgotten my appointment with Father O’Donnell.

He was just coming out of a little booth along the side of the church when I got there, and an elderly lady was near the altar working her way through her rosary beads. Father O nodded to me as I came down the center aisle, and I joined him near a small door to one side of the altar. He led the way along a narrow hallway and into a book-lined office. “Have a seat, Mr. Austin,” he said.

“Just Mark, Father O’Donnell. I clutch up when people call me ‘mister.’ ”

“All right, Mark it is. I asked you to come by today because I’m concerned about Renata Greenleaf, and it seems that you know her better than anybody else.”

“I’m a longtime friend of her family, Father.”

“You
are
aware that she’s very troubled, aren’t you?”

“If you think she’s bad now, you should have seen her a couple of years ago. Twink—that is, Renata—is a recent graduate of a mental institution.”

“I thought it might be something like that. She was almost incoherent when she came to confession on Saturday, and every now and then she’d say things in a language I couldn’t even recognize, much less understand.”

“Maybe I should fill you in. There are some fairly complicated things about Renata that you probably ought to know.”

“I’d appreciate that, Mark. Right now she has me so baffled that I don’t know which way to turn.”

“I’m not sure this’ll help very much. Twink’s making a career out of baffling people.” I leaned back in my chair and gave him the whole sad, sordid story—right up to the paper Twink had written, and how it made everybody sit up and take notice.

Father O’Donnell seemed shell-shocked when I finished. “I’d like to see that paper, Mark.”

“I’ve got copies, Father. I’ll drop one off for you. Did any of what I just told you help at all? Twink’s a little strange sometimes, but that’s because she’s crazy—not too crazy, but crazy all the same. She’s
trying
to get well, but she’s having some trouble with it—for fairly obvious reasons. If the cops ever catch the guy who killed her sister, she might get well immediately, but I don’t think that’s too likely. It’s been over two years now, so he probably got away clean.”

“He’ll answer for it, Mark. Believe me, he’ll answer for it.”

“That’s in the next world, Father O. I’d like to get my hands on him in
this
one.”

“We sort of disapprove of that, Mark. God’s supposed to take care of it.”

“I just want to help out, Father. God can have what’s left after I’m done with him.”

“We might want to talk about that someday. I think I understand Renata a little better now.”

“That’s assuming that Twink really
is
Renata. If she’s Regina, we might have to start all over from square one.”

“You
had
to bring that up, didn’t you?” he said ruefully.

“Just trying to brighten up your day, Father O.”

The rest of the week rolled merrily along as we all settled back into harness.

The newspapers and television kept trying hard to ride the “Seattle Slasher” story, but the saddle was starting to slip on that horse. Our local cut-up appeared to have put his knife away, and the media got slightly sulky about that.

Sylvia stayed right on top of me, demanding daily reports on Twink’s behavior. I started to suspect a research paper in progress there, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover the fine hand of Dr. Fallon somewhere in the background.

James, Charlie, and I hit the Green Lantern a couple of times that week to stay in touch with Charlie’s brother. The police investigation of the “Seattle Slasher” case seemed to be at a standstill. Bob more or less admitted that the cops were marking time, waiting for another murder. “We don’t have enough to work with yet,” he told us Thursday evening. “The general opinion is that the killings are gang-related, but there’s always the possibility that we’ve got a homicidal maniac roaming around out there. If the two killings are just part of a turf war, two might be the end of it. If it’s a crazy, though, there’s certain to be more. Crazies kill people for crazy reasons, and they usually keep on killing until they get caught.”

“You’re just chock-full of good news, Bob,” Charlie told his brother. “Are you guys looking into the possibility of a werewolf? Or maybe a vampire?”

“We’re keeping an open mind, kid.”

“You had to ask, didn’t you Charlie?” James rumbled. “Now we’ll have to break out the garlic and the silver bullets.” Then he looked at Bob. “What
is
the proper procedure when you arrest a vampire?” he asked. “Do you read him his rights before or after you drive the stake through his heart?”

“I’d have to look that up,” Bob replied with a perfectly straight face. “It doesn’t come up very often.”

Mary called me after she and Twink had returned from the weekly visit to Dr. Fallon and invited me to dinner. While we were eating, I told her that we’d been picking Bob West’s brains for information about our local celebrity.

“West’s a good man,” she told me. “He’s solid and very thorough. He’s a long way in front of Burpee, that’s for sure.”

“Who’s Burpee?” Twink asked curiously.

“His real name is Belcher,” Mary explained. “Burpee has a tendency to do things backward. A good cop follows the evidence to the suspect. Burpee picks a suspect at random—possibly by drawing straws or laying out a deck of tarot cards. Then he tries to find evidence that’ll back his theory.”

“He
really
wants to nail Cheetah for these killings in this part of town, doesn’t he?” I asked.

“Burpee’s a joke,” she snorted. “Cheetah wouldn’t be caught dead out of downtown Seattle. Burpee wants to be a celebrity because he wants a promotion. The cop who catches Cheetah’s a shoo-in for a step up in rank, so Burpee tries to connect Cheetah to any and every crime in the greater Seattle area. Shoplifting, murder, jaywalking—you name it, and Burpee tells everybody that Cheetah’s our prime suspect.”

“What got him so fired up about Cheetah?” I asked.

“Burpee was working out of the downtown precinct a couple of years ago, and an informant gave him a good solid lead on where and when he could put his hands on Cheetah. Burpee blew it by running his mouth when he should have kept quiet. That’s what got him transferred to the north precinct, and he’s desperate to get back to the head office where he can pretend to be a big shot again.”

“Police department politics get kind of murky sometimes, don’t they?”

Mary grinned at me. “Fun though,” she added.

Saturday morning I finished up the bookshelves in James’s room by ten o’clock. Then I took a quick run to the building supply store and checked out one of their sample books. They had quite a library of those—carpeting, floor tiles, wallpaper, imitation wood paneling, and several others. The idea was to let consumers do their shopping at home, I guess.

A word in passing right here. It’s not a good idea to give a group of ladies
too
many choices in the area of home improvement. Paralysis sets in almost immediately when you put twenty or thirty possibilities in front of them. I think Keats referred to it as “negative capability.”

“Did you really
have
to do that, Mark?” James growled at me late that afternoon. “If I get much more of that ‘What do you think of this one?’ I’ll go bananas.”

“It was a blunder,” I admitted. “I should have just picked up two of the damn things—one fairly nice and the other awful. That would have simplified things a bit.”

“No day in which you learn something is a complete waste, I guess,” he conceded.

I let that go by. “I’ll see if I can crowd the girls a bit. I
do
have to get that sample book back by this evening.”

It took a little pushing, but by suppertime the ladies had narrowed the choice down to five different samples. Then I took the book away from them, went back to the supply store, and bought one of each variety for the girls to play with. As an afterthought, I picked up a linoleum knife. I was fairly certain I had one somewhere among my tools, but I wasn’t sure exactly where, and it probably wasn’t in very good shape anyway.

I called Twink later to ask her if she wanted to go to church in the morning, but she didn’t seem too enthusiastic about the idea. That surprised me a bit. But then I remembered how worked up she had been
before
our trip last weekend, and I decided to let it pass.

The week moved smoothly along. The students had more or less settled down, my own studies advanced nicely, and nothing very remarkable was happening in the real world. Then on Thursday morning, the newspapers and all the hyper television reporters got the break they’d been breathlessly waiting for. Magnusson Park in the Windemere district fronted on Lake Washington, and an early-morning jogger came across the scattered remains of the Seattle Slasher’s third victim.

CHAPTER NINE

We gathered in the kitchen, drank Erika’s coffee, and watched that small TV set as the story—what little there was—unfolded. The latest victim had been another small-timer with a fairly extensive police record. His name was Daniel Garrison, and he’d been in trouble with the law since he’d been about fifteen. He’d served one year in the state reformatory before he’d graduated to the penitentiary at Walla Walla for a couple of terms. He’d never been a master criminal by any stretch of the imagination. He’d taken falls for possession of stolen property, burglary, car theft, assault with a deadly weapon—a screwdriver?—and a couple of attempted rapes. He’d evidently been a scrawny little punk with a taste for big women. On at least one occasion, his arrest for attempted rape had been more in the nature of a rescue, since his intended victim had been more than a match for him. She’d been stomping his face into a bloody pulp when the cops arrived.

“This one’s going to ruin poor Burpee’s day, I’ll bet,” Charlie noted. “I haven’t heard a word about any dope deals yet.”

“Our local cut-up seems hell-bent on deleting minor criminals,” James rumbled. “This one seems to be a carbon copy of the one who got himself scattered around in Woodland Park a few weeks ago.”

“Maybe he’s a conservative who’s taking the butcher knife approach to tax cuts,” Charlie suggested. “It costs a lot of money to keep these small-time punks locked up—about thirty-five thousand bucks a year per head, the last I heard. This guy with a knife has already saved us about a hundred thousand a year, and he’s only getting started.”

“I don’t think that’s likely to put him in the conservative hall of fame, Charlie,” Erika disagreed. “He’ll have to take out several battalions of these minor leaguers before he’ll make much of a dent in the state budget.”

I spent the morning in the library hammering out a tentative bibliography on Milton’s prose works. Then I grabbed a quick sandwich and hurried off to teach my freshman class.

Twink missed class again. That was starting to become a habit. I decided that I should have a little talk with her about that. It didn’t make much difference as long as she was just auditing, but if she moved up to taking courses for real, class-cutting was a sure road to flunk city.

That evening, Charlie, James, and I dropped in at the Green Lantern to see if we could pry some more details on the Windermere killing from Charlie’s brother Bob.

“We’re pretty much convinced that the Slasher’s picking his victims at random,” Bob told us. “There doesn’t seem to be any connection between them—except that they’ve all got fairly extensive police records. This Garrison punk wasn’t really into dope dealing. He probably
used
dope now and then, but we’ve never busted him for selling it. As far as we can tell, the poor bastard just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Serial killing stuff?” Charlie asked.

Bob shook his head. “The so-called serial killer almost always has some kind of sex hang-up, and his victims are either women or children. So far, the victims are all guys, and they seem to have been straight. There’s something else involved, and we haven’t been able to run it down yet. The thing that’s bugging
me
about these killings is the lack of noise. These guys were carved up like Christmas turkeys, and we haven’t had a single report of any yelling or screaming. Somebody
should
be hearing all the racket and calling in. These guys are taking a long time to die. The coroner tells us the whole thing takes fifteen or twenty minutes at least. The Slasher’s going out of his way to prolong the business and to make it as unbearable as possible. The locations are sort of secluded, but screams carry a long way, particularly at night, and so far nobody seems to be hearing anything.”

“Maybe people
have
heard the noise, but they just don’t want to get involved,” I suggested.

“Don’t kid yourself, Mark,” he told me. “If a dog barks more than twice, we start getting nine-one-one calls almost immediately.”

“I thought that number was strictly for emergencies,” James said.

“It is,” Bob said, “but different people have different definitions of the word, ’emergency.’ A boom box two blocks away after ten o’clock is an emergency in some people’s minds. The neighborhood around a park is a quiet one, and screaming isn’t the sort of thing people are going to shrug off. There has to be some explanation, but I’m damned if I can pin it down.” He laughed then. “Old Burpee’s trying to sell the notion of ‘a vast, unsuspected dope cartel’ engaged in open warfare with Cheetah’s gang, but that won’t float. An operation like that would involve some very sophisticated professionals, and with the possible exception of Muñoz, these guys were third-rate street punks who probably weren’t smart enough to tie their own shoes.”

“I was talking with Mary Greenleaf the other day, and she told me that poor old Burpee got himself kicked out of the downtown precinct because of a major screwup,” I said.

“You know Mary?” Bob asked, sounding surprised.

“Yeah. My dad and her brother were army buddies in ‘Nam. She sort of agrees that Burpee’s a joke. She told me that he blew a chance to nail Cheetah by running his mouth at the wrong time.”

“He did that, all right,” Bob agreed, laughing. “He got a tip from one of his informants, and he had a clear shot at Cheetah. But Burpee’s always been desperate to be the center of attention, and this time he started bragging
before
he went to pick Cheetah up. The only trouble there is that Cheetah’s got more informants than the entire Seattle Police Department’s got, and word got back to him pronto. Burpee took a whole platoon of uniforms and surrounded a third-rate hotel in downtown Seattle, but by then, Cheetah was long gone. Big-mouth Burpee damn near got himself kicked off the force for
that
—or at the very least, demoted back to wearing a uniform and driving around in a patrol car. He managed to wiggle out of it, but he got transferred to the north end, so now
we
have to listen to him and all his screwball ideas.”

“That
would
explain his obsession with Cheetah, though,” James suggested. “I guess he has to make amends for that blunder.”

“Does he ever,” Bob agreed.

“Since dear old ‘cut and run’ has been concentrating on butchering guys, would that suggest that the ladies in our house are probably safe?” Charlie asked his brother.

“I wouldn’t take any chances,” Bob told him. “I don’t think we know enough about this guy yet to know what sets him off. He’s been killing people in parks after midnight, and you don’t see too many girls strolling in the park at that time of night. For all we know, this guy will kill anything that moves when he’s out hunting. I’d suggest that you travel in packs until we nail him.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ve gotta run,” he told us.

“That pretty much takes us back to square one, doesn’t it?” Charlie suggested. “The girls are carrying that pepper spray, but I still think we’d better ride shotgun on them anytime they go out after dark.”

“Look on the bright side, Charlie,” I told him. “Here’s your chance to be chivalrous—knightly duty, and all like that there.”

“Whose knight night is it tonight?” he asked me.

“Somehow I knew that was coming,” James said, as we all stood up to leave.

I hit my Milton Seminar on Friday morning, then dropped by Dr. Conrad’s office to fill him in on the Blake-Whitman connection. “It all fits together, boss. Whitman wasn’t a painter—or engraver—the way Blake was, so his poetry wasn’t quite as visual as Blake’s, but even Swinburne spotted the similarities. Of course, that was before Swinburne sobered up, so his perceptions might have come swimming up out of the bottom of a bottle. Over the centuries, we’ve lost a lot of great poetry because of booze and dope, haven’t we?”

“It tends to get overemphasized, Mr. Austin. I’m not sure that ‘Kubla Khan’ would have gone much further even if Coleridge hadn’t been nipping at laudanum. Are you thinking about taking another ride on the derivative horse? People have been comparing Whitman to Blake for over a hundred years now.”

“It
is
a possibility, boss. Whitman kept revising
Leaves of Grass
until the day before he died. If the Brits got him all fired up about Blake, isn’t it possible that hints of Blake’s stuff might have crept into some of those later revisions?”

“You’re staring a variorum edition of
Leaves of Grass
full in the face, Mr. Austin,” he told me.

“I know,” I replied glumly, “though Whitman’s always irritated me, for some reason. I think Blake was a better poet. He looked out at the rest of the world, but Whitman was too stuck on himself to look beyond the end of his own nose. Anyway, I’m in the right place if I want to do a variorum of
Leaves of Grass
. The main library has copies of all the first editions of the damn thing, so I wouldn’t have to go roaming around in computer land looking for texts. Working with a guard standing over me wouldn’t be
too
thrilling, but what the hell?”

“Those first editions are valuable, Mr. Austin. What are you aiming for? Did you want to indict poor old Walt for plagiarism?”

“I wouldn’t go
that
far, boss—I just want to find out if Blake’s stuff had any influence on the later editions of
Leaves of Grass
. We get hung up on compartmentalization in the English Department. Chaucer scholars don’t speak to Faulkner specialists, and everybody sneers at the Victorians. It’s all the same language, and good poetry—or prose—can come from almost anyplace.”

“Even from a lunatic asylum. How’s that girl coming along, by the way?”

“She went to church a couple of weeks ago, and she confused hell out of the priest when she confessed in twin-speak. That’s something to ponder, isn’t it? Is a confession valid if the priest hasn’t the faintest idea of what you’re saying to him?”

“I don’t do theology, Mr. Austin,” he said dryly. “I don’t do windows, either. Keep me posted on your protégée’s progress, all right? If she happens to come up with any new variations of ‘The Bughouse Blues,’ I’d like to see them.”

“I’ll mention it to her—boost her self-confidence. Give me a little more time, and I’ll have the whole campus in her cheering section. Of course, if she finally
does
get well, she’ll probably stop writing the good stuff. How’s that for a moral dilemma on a gloomy Friday? If Twink stays bonkers, she’ll keep on writing great stuff; if she gets well, she might start writing the usual freshman junk.”

“Go away, Mr. Austin,” he told me wearily.

“Yes, boss,” I replied obediently. I had a briefcase full of papers to grade anyway, so I went back up the hill to the boardinghouse to dig into them.

When I got there, though, Renata’s bike was chained to the front porch. That seemed a little odd.

Inside I found Twink and Sylvia deep in a discussion in the living room. “Did you get lost in the library again, Markie?” Renata asked me when I looked in on them.

“No, Twink. I was just checking in with Dr. Conrad. Aren’t you supposed to go see Fallon today?”

“His secretary called this morning,” she replied. “There’s some emergency at the bughouse, and Dockie-poo didn’t have time for me today. That made me feel all lonesome and unwanted, so I tried to call you. Sylvia answered the phone, and she told me to come on over. I love Aunt Mary dearly, but all she talks about is the cop shop. I’m not that interested, really—so I’ve been telling Sylvia stories about the bughouse instead.”

“She’s opened up a whole new world for me, Mark,” Sylvia said. “There’s a lot more going on in mental institutions than I’d ever imagined.”

“She didn’t know about the lonely part,” Twink told me. “Buggies get fed and watered, and they get clean sheets on their beds, but nobody’s got the time to just sit and talk with us—without taking notes. Lonely sets in when that notepad comes out.” She stood up then and came across the room. “I need a hug,” she told me, holding out her arms.

“Oh,” I said, “right.” I set my briefcase down and wrapped my arms around her.

“Markie hugs good,” Twink told Sylvia. “You ought to try him sometime.”

“Boy-girl stuff is sort of a no-no here, Renata,” Sylvia said. “We’re not supposed to get that close to each other.”

“Hugging doesn’t have anything to do with that,” Twink replied. “Every house should have an official hugger—no questions, no comments, just hugs. A few good hugs can take away acres of lonesome. The people with the notepads don’t understand that. They talk and talk and talk, and it doesn’t do any good at all. What we really need is hugs.” She sighed then. “Nobody in the world of normies is ever going to understand the world of buggies, but you don’t have to understand. A hug lets us know that it’s not really important to you that we’re crazy, and that you like us all the same. That’s all we want.”

“You could call it ‘hug therapy,’ Sylvia,” I suggested, “and then you could get yourself into all the textbooks on the same page with Freud and Jung.”

“Quit trying to be funny, Mark,” she snapped. “Oh, Renata’s staying for supper, by the way—we cleared it with her aunt Mary.”

“Good. Now if you ladies will excuse me, I’ve got papers to grade.”

Erika was in a sour humor at supper. Her computer had been misbehaving, and she was right on the verge of pitching it out the window.

“Remain tranquil, baby sister,” James told her. “Charlie probably knows more about computers than Bill Gates does.”

“I don’t know if I’d go
that
far,” Charlie said. “Old Bill can make a computer sit up and beg, roll over and play dead, and shake paws with him. But I don’t think he makes house calls, so I’ll take a look—it’s probably something minor. Computers get all huffy if you miss a step during a standard program, and they just
love
to tell you that you’ve made a mistake.” Then he laughed.

“What’s so funny?” Erika demanded.

“There’s a story that’s been going around at Boeing since the dark ages when people had to use IBM cards to put information into huge computers that covered an acre or more. Anyway, there was an engineer who was having an argument with an insurance company about whether or not he’d missed a premium payment. The only trouble was that he couldn’t get in touch with a human being. All he got was a long string of letters telling him that he owed them money. He finally got a bellyful of that, so he went down to the shop, cut a stainless-steel sheet down to the size and shape of an IBM card, punched a few square slots into it, and then painted it buff-colored. It looked exactly like one of those old IBM cards. Then he magnetized it and mailed it off to the insurance company. Some clerk who was only half-awake fed it into the company’s computer, and it erased the whole damn thing. There was absolutely nothing in their computer.”