Regina's Song (21 page)

“You know, I’ve noticed that myself,” Charlie agreed.

“I thought I’d noticed you noticing,” James observed.

After supper, James, Charlie, and I ran over to the Green Lantern to see if Bob had anything new and exciting to tell us about the Seattle Slasher.

“What’s the good word, Bob?” Charlie asked his brother when we’d retired to one of the back booths.

“There aren’t any, kid,” Bob replied sourly. “Did you want to hear a few bad ones?”

“I already know most of those,” Charlie replied. “Are you getting any closer to chasing down old ‘cut and run’?”

“Not really,” Bob admitted. “Do you remember that sailor who got carved up just before Christmas?”

“The black man?” James said.

“That’s the one. I think I told you guys that the department was all pissed off because the Navy refused to release the body for an autopsy, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” James replied. “Didn’t you say that the Navy doctors were going to do it themselves, then pass the results on to the Seattle police?”

“That’s the way it went. Our pathologists came up with egg on their faces about
that
one,” Bob said. “They were positive that the Navy doctors didn’t know the first thing about conducting an autopsy, and that turned out to be
way
off base. Those Navy boys are real pros. They ran tests that never would have occurred to our guys, and they turned up something that our medical examiners had totally missed.”

“Oh?” Charlie said. “What was that?”

“Have you ever heard of curare?”

“Isn’t that some kind of poison?” Charlie asked.

“Sort of. It’s a concoction of certain plant extracts that some Indian tribes in the Amazon jungle smear on their arrows. It paralyzes animals—or people—when it gets into the bloodstream. And there was a whole bunch of curare in that dead sailor’s blood.”

“So
that’s
why nobody’s ever heard any screaming when the Slasher starts cutting chunks off of people who ain’t dead yet,” Charlie said.

“You got it, kid,” Bob replied, “and after they’d found the curare in the sailor’s blood, those Navy doctors went over the carcass with a microscope. Guess where the needle mark was.”

“In the guys
throat
?” Charlie demanded in a half-strangled tone.

“You guessed ’er, Chester,” Bob said. “Evidently, the Slasher carries a loaded hypodermic needle, and he nails the guy he wants to kill right straight in the gullet with the damn thing. After that we get these real quiet murders. The curare paralyzes the vocal cords and the lungs, so the poor bastard can’t even squeak while he’s getting all cut to pieces—
and
, of course, within seconds he can’t run or even raise his arms to protect his face.”

“Where could anybody get his hands on a supply of curare?” I asked. “That’s pretty exotic stuff, isn’t it?”

“Our pathologists tell us that it’s available in any well-stocked pharmacy. It’s a muscle relaxant, and doctors use it to bring a patient out of convulsions—usually when somebody’s having an epileptic seizure, but I guess there are some other things that cause convulsions as well.”

“Wouldn’t that suggest that the Slasher’s a doctor—or maybe a male nurse or a pharmacist?” James asked.

“Not necessarily,” Bob disagreed. “It almost has to be somebody who knows what curare does, but that could just be some guy whose sister or cousin was an epileptic. I mean, it’s not some great big secret. Anyway, after we found out that the Slasher was using curare, one of the guys ran a quick computer check, and the word ‘curare’ turned up in the burglary of a drugstore over in the Queen Anne district last October. It was unusual, because whoever broke in passed up all kinds of opiates and other feel-good products and
only
grabbed the curare.”

“It sounds to me like having the Navy doctors do the autopsy was a stroke of good luck,” Charlie noted.

“Come on, kid,” Bob protested. “Our pathologists have carcasses by the dozen they have to check out. Sometimes they get rushed, that’s all. They’re not going to start looking for poison in the body of a guy who’s been gutted out like a fresh-caught fish. The cause of death is pretty obvious, so our pathologists concentrate on pinpointing the exact time of death. Those Navy doctors weren’t rushed, so they could go into greater detail. They even started to get exotic. They took measurements on every single cut and scrape on that sailor’s body, and they came to a very peculiar conclusion.”

“Oh?” Charlie said.

“They seem to think that the Slasher’s using some kind of homemade knife. It’s got a blade that’s only about two and a half inches long, shaped like a hook. The Navy guys think that the Slasher stabs the point in and then pulls the blade through the meat—shoulders, throat, belly—wherever. The poor bastard getting carved up can’t move or make a sound—because of the curare—so the Slasher can drag it out and make it last for as long as he wants it to. If he’s halfway careful, it could take at least an hour for his victim to die.”

“Ouch!” Charlie said, wincing.

“Yeah, ouch,” Bob agreed. “We’ve
got
to get that maniac off the streets. A shooting, or a stabbing with a regular knife is one thing, but this Slasher isn’t satisfied with just killing somebody. He wants pain, and lots of it. I’ve got a hunch that in the right circumstances he’d do his very best to keep the guy he’s killing fully conscious for a week or more while he was getting this, that, and various other things cut away. And to make it even worse, the poor bastard can’t move a muscle or even squeal.
That’s
the part that raises the hair on the back of my neck.”

That first week of classes was a bit scrambled. It always takes a while to make the adjustment. I was reading Hemingway’s “Torrents of Spring” on Thursday morning, having a ball with that outrageous parody of the ponderous writing of the once-famous Sherwood Anderson. If we can believe Papa, he churned that one out in ten days, and it was one of the great literary swindles of the twentieth century. Hemingway’d gotten a very interesting offer from Scribner for
The Sun Also Rises
, but he was already under contract to Boni and Liveright—who were also Anderson’s publishers. In fact, Anderson was the heavy-hitter for Boni and Liveright, so when Hemmingway turned in the mocking “Torrents of Spring,” B&L wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. That freed Hemingway from the slave clause, and he immediately cut a deal with Scribner for much bigger bucks. Papa could be very shrewd sometimes.

It was about nine o’clock when Erika yelled up the stairs. “You’ve got a phone call, Mark,” she shouted.

“Be right there,” I called as I dashed downstairs.

It was Mary. “Ren’s flipped out again, Mark,” she told me.

“Damn! I thought she was getting over those.”

“Not really. She was going full-bore when I came home. I got about fifteen minutes of it on tape, then I zonked her out.”

“Did anything at all unusual show up this time?” I asked her.

“No, I think she’s going to keep doing these same things over and over until somebody—Fallon, or Sylvia—cracks the code. And I don’t think we should wait too long, because we can’t be positive about how many more of these blowouts she’s got left in her. The day’s going to come before too much longer when she won’t bounce back. At that point, it’s back to the funny farm, and
this
time, I don’t think she’ll graduate.”

“You might be right, Mary,” I agreed. “We’d better kick some butt and see if we can put Fallon and Sylvia into high gear. Time could be running out on us.”

“See if you can find Sylvia. Let’s get copies of this tape before I lose it.”

“I’ll get right on it, Mary,” I promised her.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Sylvia was on campus that morning, and I could probably have spent the whole day looking for her. I
did
have an alternative, though. I had an old dual-deck tape player-recorder that I’d retired when I’d replaced it with a better sound system, so I dug it out of the back of my closet, stuck a couple of blank tapes in my pocket, and carried the heavy recorder downstairs.

“What’s up, Mark?” Erika asked me.

“Twinkie’s flipped out again,” I replied. “Mary got most of it on tape, and I want to run copies. Sylvia’s going to want one, and so will Doc Fallon.”

“That’s happening more and more frequently, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, it is. Mary seems to think that if we don’t get a handle on it pretty quick, Twink’s going to wind up back in the bughouse, and this time she won’t be coming back out again.”

“Damn!” Erika swore.

“At least damn,” I agreed.

Mary was waiting when I got to her place. “Where’s Sylvia?” she demanded.

“She’s on campus somewhere,” I replied, “and I don’t feel like chasing her down. I can run copies of your tape on this machine and hand them off to her when she comes home.”

“Good thinking,” Mary agreed. “Let’s set up in the kitchen. There’s room enough for that big recorder of yours there, and we won’t mess up the living room.”

“Sounds good to me,” I agreed.

I ran off several copies of Mary’s tape, and I was just about to pack things up and go home when I had an idea. “Has Twink ever played her favorite tape for you, Mary?” I asked.

“The one where there’s a woman singing along with a pack of wolves?”

“That’s the one. Does she play it very often?”

“Often enough to make me pretty sick of hearing it. Why?”

“You know the way she complains about wolves howling when she goes bonkers? Doesn’t it seem odd to you that she complains about it on her bad days, but listens to it when she’s a normie?”

“Now that you mention it, it
does
seem peculiar.”

“If she’s always listening to it, it’s probably in her tape player right now. If you can sneak into her room without waking her up, I’d like to run off a copy of that tape too. It might give Sylvia and Doc Fallon a few clues about what’s bothering her so much.”

“I won’t have to sneak, Mark. Right now, an earthquake wouldn’t wake her up. I’ll go pull that tape out of her player.”

“I’d appreciate it, Mary. I’ve got a hunch that it might turn out to be pretty important.”

“Let’s get some copies of it then.”

It was about three o’clock that afternoon when Sylvia came home and read the note I’d Scotch-taped to her door. “Hey, up there,” she called up the stairs.

I went out into the hallway. “I’m here,” I told her. “You’d better come up. Twink had another bad one, and Mary got most of it on tape. I made some copies.”

“Was there anything new this time?” she asked, climbing the stairs.

“Not that Mary and I picked up. It seems like a rerun of that one last November.”

“Play the tape,” she directed.

The tape started with Twink moaning about the wolves howling. After Andrew Perry’d told us about the wolf-dogs near Forest Park, it made a lot more sense than it had back in November. The “I’ve got blood all over me,” business
might
have been a reference to something that hadn’t shown up in the police reports, or in the local newspaper. When Twink had found Regina’s body, she might very well have tried to take her sister in her arms, and that would have definitely bloodied her up more than just a little. I still couldn’t make any sense out of the whimpers about how cold it was. If these bad days
were
in fact the result of the recurrent nightmare during which she relived the night of her sister’s murder, “cold” was
way
out of place. Regina had been murdered in late May, and it’s not cold in May. I stopped the tape.

“Her voice is different,” Sylvia said. “Did you notice that?”

“It seems pretty much the same to me,” I disagreed.

“You probably haven’t listened to the November tape as many times as I have. There’s a definite difference, Mark. She’s more strained and filled with horror. Back the tape up and play it again.”

I rewound the tape and then punched the PLAY button. Then I listened very carefully. “Maybe you’re right,” I said, stopping the tape again. “I guess I was listening for ‘what,’ not ‘how.’ She
does
sound more agitated, doesn’t she?”

“Run it on for the rest of the way,” she said.

“All you get from here on is twin-speak, Sylvia.”

“That’s not important. I want to hear the
tone
, not the words.”

The agitation we’d both noticed in the first part of the tape carried over into the twin-speak section, and if anything, it grew even more pronounced.

“It sounds to me like she’s coming apart, Sylvia,” I said glumly, after we’d heard the rest of the tape. “Oh, I’ve got something else for you, too. There’s a tape that Twink plays all the time, and I cut some copies.” I pulled the copy of Mary’s tape, and stuck in the wolf tape. “You’d better brace yourself,” I warned her. “This one’s sort of spooky.” I punched the PLAY button.

Sylvia’s eyes grew wider and wider as the woman’s voice joined in with the howling of the wolves. “Dear God!” she choked when the tape ended. “What
is
that awful thing?”

“I haven’t got the faintest idea,” I admitted. “Twink’s tape of this doesn’t have a label, and for all I know, it might be something Regina copied. The first time I ever heard it was last fall—right after Twink moved in with Mary. I gave her a call one evening, and I could hear this playing in the background. Her voice was kind of dreamy, and she told me not to pester her while her wolves were singing to her. Then she hung up on me. I’d almost forgotten about it until Twink started moaning about wolves howling. Doesn’t it seem a little odd that she listens to this over and over when she’s a normie, but starts carrying on about wolves howling when she’s all torqued out?”

“I’ll have to pass this one off to Dr. Fallon,” she said. “I’m
way
out of my depth here. I
do
think this tape is important, though.”

“I’m glad you liked it.”

“I didn’t say that I like it, Mark. It might turn out to be important, but it scares the hell out of me.”

After Sylvia’s class on Friday morning, she took Twink to Lake Stevens. Sylvia was trying to put the best face possible on the situation, but she was obviously very worried.

After my Friday classes, I went back to the boardinghouse for lunch, and I found Charlie camped on the kitchen TV set. “What’s up?” I asked him.

“They found another stiff,” he said. “It’s down near Auburn, and it’s been there for quite a while—long enough, anyway, that the Pierce County coroner can’t come up with a precise date. The TV guys are all excited about it, but I don’t think the cops are going to get anything useful out of it. It’s a pretty stale body.”

“Have they put a name to it yet?”

“They’re still working on it—or else the cops are keeping it under wraps. Bob probably knows, but it’s not really that important. Auburn’s quite a ways from here. We’ll see what he has to say this evening.”

I fixed myself some sandwiches while Charlie ridiculed the assorted reporters and commentators trying to ride the Slasher story to celebrity. When you get right down to it, TV reporters are a pathetic bunch. Their desperate need for attention drives them down the path to absurdity, and their pious babbling about “the public’s right to know” overlooks the fact that most of their viewers were probably sick and tired of the whole damn thing. I know I was.

After supper that evening, James, Charlie, and I made our customary pilgrimage to the Green Lantern to get the inside dope from Bob West. I suppose that if somebody wanted to pursue it, we were being as silly as all the other empty-heads hungrily watching the TV sets for the latest bit of dumb-show and noise.

Bob seemed a little tense when we got to the Green Lantern. “What’s got you so worked up?” Charlie asked him.

“I ran my mouth when I should have clammed up,” Bob said bluntly. “I want you guys to keep what I told you about curare strictly to yourselves. We don’t want that to leak out. Right now, it’s the only solid thing we’ve got to work with, and if word leaks out, the guy we’re looking for might change the way he operates—or take off for Chicago.”

“I gather that curare showed up during the autopsy of the fellow they found in Auburn?” James said.

“It sure did,” Bob replied. “The body wasn’t in very good shape, but there was enough left for the coroner to find traces of curare. Evidently, that’s been going on since day one—all the way back to the Muñoz killing last September. We’re guessing, obviously, but we’re fairly sure that the guy we’re after isn’t six-foot-six and three hundred pounds. He’s using curare instead of brute force to keep the victim from trying to fight him off.”

“Have they come up with a name for the guy in Auburn yet?” I asked.

“Larson,” Bob replied. “Samuel Larson. He was another small-timer—like a lot of the other ones the Slasher’s taken out. Most of his arrests were for shoplifting or illegal possession of drug paraphernalia. He was a suspect in a rape case in Tacoma a few years back, but that was before the public realized the DNA is even better than fingerprints when it comes to identifying people. The victim took a long hot bath before she reported the rape, and she couldn’t positively point the finger at Larson in the lineup, so the Tacoma cops didn’t have enough on him to take it to court.”

“Rape or attempted rape shows up in the record of quite a few of these victims, doesn’t it?” James suggested.

“It’s not particularly unusual, James,” Bob told him. “We’re dealing with a subculture here. Girls who hang out with petty criminals aren’t too bright to begin with, and the line between rape and consensual sex can be pretty blurred among those people. If the girl doesn’t scream or pull a knife, the guy—who’s usually about half-drunk or doped up—thinks she’s just being coy, so he doesn’t wait for anything like formal permission. Just about all of these small-timers have at least one rape or attempted rape on their police records.” He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to run now,” he said, standing up. “Don’t forget what I told you guys. Keep the curare thing strictly to yourselves. It’s the only solid thing we’ve got to work with, so don’t screw it up for us.”

I spent that weekend holed up with Hemingway. The writers of that period between the two world wars had some peculiar work habits. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a short story at a racetrack once, they say. And when Papa Hemingway lived in Paris during the 1920s, he’d go to a little bistro on a cobblestone street about six o’clock every morning and do his writing on a small table with a checkered tablecloth and wire-backed chairs. He’d keep at it for as long as the writing was going well, and he’d stop at a place in the story when he knew exactly what was coming next. He wrote several of the classics of twentieth-century short fiction there, using a small notebook that’d fit in his coat pocket and a stubby little pencil, quite probably sharpened with his knife. So much for the notion that you absolutely
must
have a computer if you want to write good fiction.

I was still coming down from the quarter I’d spent with Milton, and I had to shift gears just a bit to move into Hemingway territory. The guys who’d been through the First World War were a somber bunch. The mind shudders from the horrors they’d faced in the trenches, and it seems that they all had to keep a tight grip on their emotions to avoid flying apart. Their writing was very visual—almost clinical—and emotions were understated. You can’t just skim the surface when you take on Hemingway. You have to get in there with him. I think that maybe the sixties seriously damaged American literature. That “spill your guts” approach doesn’t produce very good fiction.

Since I wasn’t teaching during that quarter, I couldn’t keep a close eye on Twinkie the way I had during the fall quarter, so I had to rely on James and Sylvia to keep track of her for me. She was still “in the family,” so to speak, but she was about one step removed from where she’d been before, and that made me a little edgy. Both Sylvia and James were sharp, that goes without saying. But no matter how hard they tried, they’d never know her as well as I did. I could spot things they’d probably miss, and Twink would tell me things she’d never mention to either of them.

“She keeps asking questions that I can’t answer,” James told us at the supper table on Tuesday. “Every so often we have arguments about the ethics of the criminal justice system and whether it really serves any purpose.”

“Oh?” Trish asked.

“She takes the position that X number of years in jail isn’t really a deterrent—
if
the criminal feels that he has a moral or ethical duty to commit the crime. Sometimes she almost sounds like a Mafioso—’if Luciano beats up on my buddy, I’ve got a moral obligation to blow his brains out,’ for example. The rule of law flies out the window at that point, and moral justification takes over.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Trish exclaimed.

“Maybe so, but it does raise some interesting questions, doesn’t it?”

“If you think
that
raises difficult questions, you should hear her when she gets started on psychosis,” Sylvia said. “She’ll even give lectures on that. Her position is that the psychotic is simply responding to the external world in his own personal way.
We
think he’s crazy, but
he
knows that he’s not.”

“Welcome to the wonderful world of Twinkie,” I told them. “Now you two can see why I had so much fun last quarter.”

On Tuesday of that week there was another confession to the Slasher killings. This time, though, the reporters took the time to check out the guy’s record
before
they rushed to the studio to get on camera. Evidently, this was another nutso who’d confess to just about anything. One reporter who actually had his head screwed on straight made a very interesting observation. He said that these guys who confess compulsively seem to suffer from a form of hypochondria. Instead of “you name a disease and I’ve got it” though, the guy making phony confessions takes credit for crimes he couldn’t possibly have committed. The hypochondriac wants the doctors to pay attention to him; the guy confessing is trying to get the attention of the cops—
and
the media. A
real
whacko will sometimes even go so far as actually to kill a celebrity, just to get his name in the papers—which takes “Look at me! Look at me!” out to the far edge.