Shame (2 page)

Again, nothing.

Caleb couldn’t bring himself to just push open the door; that wouldn’t be quite right. Once again he knocked. The front door was oversized and made of heavy wood, but it was well-balanced. The door swung completely open, allowing him to see in. Windows and skylights made the interior light and cheery. He contemplated the tiled hallway. It led forward, first to the living room, and beyond that to the stairwell.

“Anybody here?”

Even to Caleb’s ears, his voice sounded strained. Almost desperate. Turn around, he tried to tell himself, and walk away.

But he couldn’t. Caleb took a deep breath. No one would be able to fault him for going a little ways forward, maybe as far as the stairwell, where he could shout upstairs. The circumstances all but dictated that. It was possible Mrs. Sanders had succumbed to her allergies. But he still found himself balking at the doorway, his foot hovering over the entryway as if he were girding himself to jump into cold water.

The foot dropped. He was inside. He took a second step forward, then a third. Caleb saw the white, plush carpeting in the living room, a color that bespoke no children, or the ability to afford very frequent carpet cleaning, or both.

Then he saw the bare leg.

“Hello,” Caleb said, the word coming out as not much more than a whisper.

The leg didn’t move.

Caleb stepped into the living room and found Mrs. Sanders. She was naked, her back propped up against a love seat. Her legs were spread apart. On the inside of her upper right thigh the red letters
S
and
H
had been written. An arch wound its way along the outskirts of her golden pubic patch, with a letter barely visible through the hair. An
A
. The
M
and the
E
were scripted on the inside of her left thigh.

SHAME.

Caleb wanted to be shocked. He wanted to feel outraged. But he couldn’t. It was almost as if he had expected just such an encounter.

I tried to believe I could escape, he thought, but it’s always been there, always been a part of me.

Caleb turned and ran.

As fast as Caleb was driving, the terror was still catching up to him. He sneaked another glance in his rearview mirror. Nothing pursuing him, at least not yet. The mirror showed only his white face and his scared eyes. He didn’t find his reflection in any way reassuring.
He’s dead, Caleb told himself. He’s been dead for more than twenty years.

Caleb took a deep breath. Maybe I should go back, he thought, and call the police. But facing up to the situation frightened him. It went against a lifetime of habits. His urge to deny everything was strong, too strong. Given a choice, he didn’t want to be connected in any way with Mrs. Sanders, but as fervently as Caleb wanted to believe that his stumbling upon her was an accident, the word—the curse—belied that.

Someone knew his secret. Caleb had been found out. He had always dreaded the thought of this moment, but the death of Mrs. Sanders made it even more horrific than he had ever imagined, and he had always imagined the worst.

Thinking about her made him feel sick, and also guilty. He hadn’t even made sure she was dead. He’d been too afraid, too panicked, to check. He had to do something.

Neither of the pay phones at the supermarket was being used. Caleb punched 911.

“Emergency nine-one-one,” the dispatcher answered.

Disguising his voice, making it atonal and low, Caleb said, “Go to thirty-four seventy-two Via Monterrey in Rancho Santa Fe. There’s a woman there who has been seriously injured.”

“Thirty-four seventy-two Via Monterrey in Rancho Santa Fe,” the dispatcher repeated. “Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“And can you tell me the severity and type of injury?”

“Get there quickly,” Caleb said.

“What’s your name, sir?”

Caleb hung up.

That afternoon a call had been made from a different pay phone. A woman answered but didn’t offer any other greeting than, “Answering service.”

The caller knew his voice wasn’t known to the operator, but he disguised it anyway: “I’d like to leave a message for Elizabeth Line.”

“I’ll connect with her voice mail.”

Elizabeth Line had told him that in an emergency he could have her service page her, but the man didn’t want to talk to her directly. It was easier just leaving a message.

I feel like a fucking spy, he thought. Making this kind of cloak-and-dagger call wasn’t for him. He was a cop, a San Diego County deputy sheriff who’d never even had the ambition to hide his badge in his wallet.

A computer-generated voice interrupted his thoughts: “Leave your message now.”

The artificial voice didn’t sound very different from the operator who had answered. The deputy sheriff knew Elizabeth Line needed to protect herself. It came with her turf. But he wondered if her friends got tired of this routine.

“There’s been another one,” he said. “It happened this morning in Rancho Santa Fe. That’s where a whole lot of rich people live. It’s in the north of San Diego County. The victim’s name is Teresa Sanders. Same MO as the other one. This one’s a bit older, she’s thirty-two, but I’m told she was pretty and could have passed for twenty.”

The officer looked all around. There was no one within hearing distance, and no one who appeared to be looking his way.

“They’re putting a big clamp down on the investigation. I was lucky to hear as much as I did. Prepare to be stonewalled. Prepare to be counterquestioned. I guess I don’t need to be telling you that. It’s not like you don’t know the routine. If you need to talk to me, call from a pay phone and leave a message on my machine. Identify yourself as Aunt Millie and leave a safe number where I can get back to you.”

The deputy sheriff scanned the area a second time and decided he could say a few more hurried words.

“I heard he used her lipstick to write the word, but that’s probably third- or fourth-hand information. A male made a nine-one-one call and said a woman had been seriously injured. The call came from a pay phone in Encinitas, about six miles from where she was murdered. There are a lot of theories going along with that call. Did a Good Samaritan see something but was too scared to get involved, or was Shame playing some kind of game? That’s what they’re already calling him: Shame.”

He lowered his voice to a whisper. “’Course that’s not supposed to get out to the public on threat of severe reprisal. It’s not only the secrecy thing—people are worried about a panic around here.”

If this Line woman hadn’t helped out his brother Larry, he’d never have dropped a dime. Larry was also a cop, and Line had saved his brother’s ass a few years back, had validated his police work in print when the entire city of Seattle was ready to ride him out of town. The family owed her. This was her marker.

“Bet you never thought you’d be writing about Shame again,” he said. “He’s all yours, lady. Shame on you.”

T
HE NEWS BREAK
allowed Elizabeth Line a five-minute respite from the phone calls. She left her headphones on and listened to the newscast, a junkie indulging in her habit.

The door to the broadcasting booth opened, and the talk jock waved to her. He went by the name of Kip, or as he seemed to prefer, The Kipper. As he donned his headset he winked at Elizabeth, did a sound check with the engineer, then signaled to her that they were about to go on air. His signal came by hand instead of eye, and for that Elizabeth was grateful. The Kipper moved slightly forward to his microphone. He was round and his puffy face had an almost neon-pink hue, but he was porcine without the squeal. The Kipper had a mellifluous and powerful voice and had the power to make the inane sound important.

“You’ve got the right-right station,” he said, “because this is the Knight-Nights show coming to you live from our nation’s capital in Washington, DC.”

No more late-night book promotions on radio, vowed Elizabeth.

“This is The Kipper,” he said, “and we’ll be continuing for the next hour with our special guest, true-crime author Elizabeth Line.

“For those of you who were with us during the last hour, you know we’ve been talking murder, folks. Elizabeth’s latest is
A Magnolia Hanging
.

“We’ve got Dave from Springfield, Missouri, on the line, and I do mean line as in our guest Elizabeth Line. How ya doing, Dave?”

“Doing fine, Kip. But after listening in tonight, I went around and made sure all my doors and windows were locked, and I just now put a loaded gun under my pillow. I can’t say you’ve got a very reassuring guest.”

As if, Elizabeth refrained from saying, Dave and the loaded gun under his pillow were cause for comfort.

“She does have some mean stories, doesn’t she, Dave? But you’d never know it to look at Elizabeth. You’d think she was some model, not some milk carton chronicler.”

Elizabeth supposed that was a compliment. “Thank you, Kip,” she said.

“Well,” Dave said, “I wanted to ask her a few questions about Shame.”

What a surprise, Elizabeth thought. In her first hour on the show, most of the questions had been about Gray Parker. They always were.

“I’m listening, Dave,” Elizabeth said.

Usually she was able to get out of coming to the studio. She preferred being a call-in guest, doing the so-called phoners. Radio booths made her feel claustrophobic. But her publicist thought it was good PR to make occasional personal appearances, especially on shows with a national audience. In a weak moment she had agreed to do the spot.

“Yeah,” Dave said. “I’ve heard that after Shame died they cut him up and sold his body parts. Supposedly some college got his brain to study. But I also heard some woman paid twenty-five thousand dollars for his, um, Johnson. I was told it’s floating around in this ten-gallon bottle. Word is that it’s, uh, about
as big as Einstein’s brain, you know, real oversized, and that it’s available for private showings.”

“You mean
privates
showing,” Kipper said.

The two men laughed.

“Well, how about it, Ms. Line?” Kip asked. “We got a killer’s genitalia on the loose?”

The Kipper offered his question while stroking the large microphone in front of him. There was a good reason, Elizabeth thought, why many radio personalities did much better as voices than as people. Kip thought he was God’s gift to women. During the break he’d suggested that Elizabeth hang around until he was off at 1:00 a.m., at which time they “could catch a bite, or whatever.”

That’s why very long bubble baths had been invented, Elizabeth thought. To wash away certain days.

“I’m afraid the reports of Gray Parker’s body parts,” Elizabeth said, “have been greatly exaggerated.”

Even Shakespeare, Elizabeth comforted herself, had often resorted to ribaldry to amuse the groundlings. Over Kipper’s laughter, she continued. “I’m not referring to the size of his organ. Of that, I have no knowledge to offer. But the rumors of his bodily remains have persisted for years.

“The basis for the talk, I’m fairly certain, stems from his attempts to have his organs donated. Parker wanted his death to have some meaning, or at least that’s what he publicly stated, but his method of execution didn’t allow that. To be usable, organs have to be removed while the donor’s blood is still circulating, and his being electrocuted eliminated that possibility.”

“You don’t think there’s any chance, then,” Dave asked, “that someone collected a souvenir?”

“No,” Elizabeth said. “He was cremated just a short time after his execution.”

“Then how’s come I keep hearing there’s a big market out there trafficking in everything from his fingers to his ears to his, well, you know?”

“Guess we’d call that a
Gray
market,” Kip said.

Elizabeth let their laughter die down before answering. “No part or parts of Gray Parker survived his execution,” she said, “but that’s not to say there hasn’t been a morbid history to collecting of such souvenirs. There was a hanging in Kentucky in the thirties where people fought over the disposition of the death mask, and worse, hacked off pieces of the body as keepsakes.”

“You got
whut
in your freezer?” said Kip.

“And it wasn’t that long ago when sideshow exhibits displayed the bodies of executed criminals. But luckily, those days have passed.

“Incidentally, Dave, the rumor about Parker and his supposedly gargantuan organ isn’t anything new. The same stories were told about John Dillinger. It seems that every generation wants its villain to be some sort of superman. Why that is, I don’t know.”

“Thank you,” Dave said.

He sounded sort of breathless, Elizabeth thought. She hated to think what might be exciting him.

“In the pursuit of science,” Kip said, “I think I should take this opportunity to offer a twenty-five-dollar reward to anyone who can produce Gray Parker’s penis in a bottle. It’d make a hell of a centerpiece at a
cock
tail party I’m having next week.”

Kip gave Elizabeth his best “Ain’t I a bad boy?” look. She mentally added another five minutes to her long-awaited bath.

“And now,” Kip said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to kill a little time with a commercial. Stay tuned for more of Elizabeth Line and true crime.”