The Good Friday Murder (17 page)

I called Jack at eight on Monday morning and told him everything. Although he sounded perfectly calm, his reaction was like overkill. He wanted me to come to Brooklyn and stay at his apartment. I refused adamantly.

“This isn't sex, Chris. It's protection.”

“I didn't think it was sex.” Well, maybe I did. “I want to stay near the twins. They've grown fond of me and they trust me.”

“Damn it, this guy's a killer.”

“Well, it won't do him any good to kill me. If anyone's in danger, it's the twins.”

“Why do you expect a killer to act rationally?”

“Jack, I'm not leaving here. I'm going to call my neighbors and ask them to keep an eye on my house. If they see anyone around, or a strange car, they can call the police.”

“Terrific.” I could hear the sarcasm in his voice. “I'll come to see you and get shot in the back by a trigger-happy neighbor with a hunting rifle or some country cop on his first stakeout.”

“I'll get a special dispensation for you,” I said softly.

“Chris, I'm not kidding.”

“Neither am I. I'll keep in touch. I have some calls to make today, and I want to check with the hospital on the lab report.”

He wasn't happy, but I remained firm and we left it that way. I did as I promised and spoke to my neighbors, all of whom assured me they would stay alert. A little after nine, I made my first long-distance call.

It was to New Hope, the institution where James had spent forty dismal years of what some people called life. I asked the operator who answered how she handled calls about patient information.

“I got a number I send them to,” she said.

“Could you give me that number?”

“Sure.”

A woman answered. I told her I was trying to find someone related to James Talley, who had been released several months ago, and I wondered whether anyone had ever called for information on him.

“His cousin did,” she answered with no hesitation.

“His cousin?”

“He always said, ‘This is James's cousin Joe. How's he doing?' ”

“How often did he call?”

“About once a month. Before Christmas. That kind of thing.”

“So he knew when James was transferred to Greenwillow.”

“I told him myself.”

I made a similar call to Robert's institution and got similar answers. Then I called the residence in Buffalo.

“Yes, I think someone did call a couple of times,” the woman who answered told me.

“His cousin?”

“It may have been a cousin.”

“Do you recall when he called for the last time?”

“I do. It was just before the Fourth. I told him Robert was moving to Greenwillow and it might be permanent.”

“Thank you.”

I didn't really have to call Greenwillow, but I did, just to satisfy myself that the chain had been completed. “Cousin Joe” had been calling Greenwillow to check upon James since about a week after his arrival. And last Thursday, July fifth, he had called to see how both his “cousins” were doing.

“I told him you were the driving force behind getting the twins together,” she said. “He seemed really pleased.”

I'll bet, I thought. “Thank you,” I said.

After I hung up, Virginia called. “I've got some very frightening news,” she said. “I've just seen the lab report. Someone injected a very powerful poison into that candy bar. That was no Halloween prank. I think someone wanted James dead.”

“Somebody did,” I said. I remembered what one of the twins had said when we were taping on Saturday. Jerry was nice. Jerry had brought them chocolate.

Jerry was ready to kill—again.

I had nowhere else to turn, so I went back to the papers Dr. Sanderson had sent. Over the next couple of hours I read the ones I had not yet looked at. James and Robert were described in each of these papers, sometimes quite cavalierly—“a pair of savant twins with the mental capacities of five-year olds”—and the results of “games” were detailed. There was very little that was new to me, but I found that the papers with the most names listed as authors lacked Dr. Weintraub's easy, thoughtful style. I suspected the “junior collaborators” in those articles were the soldiers who had done much of the compiling of the data and the actual writing, younger people on their way up, among whom might be the elusive Jerry, although none of the names seemed probable.

Only one article looked promising, a paper by Henry Courtland, M.D., in which he discussed the length of time it took the twins to come up with answers (like prime numbers, dates, or days of the week), clocked with a stopwatch, and described how they looked at each other during the process. I wondered if Dr. Courtland might have been on to something. Also, although the papers were heavily footnoted, most of the references were to older works of the same kind, some of them dating to the nineteenth century. But Dr. Courtland, at the point of discussing the twins' looking into each other's eyes, wrote in a footnote, “See also my paper
in
Psychological Review,
” followed by the date and volume number.

I called around Westchester until I found a library with a complete set of
Psychological Review.
Then I cut myself a piece of Swiss cheese, drank a glass of juice, folded the article into my bag, and drove off.

The journal was bound, and I found the Courtland article with little difficulty. It was clear he thought the twins' habit of looking at each other intently as they came up with answers to questions was important to the process, but his opinion was that they were giving each other moral support. He spent most of the article talking about other retarded people who displayed remarkable gifts. But in the sentence where the twins were mentioned, there was a footnote: “See also ‘The Role of Visual Contact in the Performance of Savant Twins,' G. K. Spanner, Dept, of Psychology, unpublished papers.”

My heart nearly stopped. Maybe we had a Gerry instead of a Jerry! I hurried home and called the NYU School of Medicine. They had an address for Dr. Henry Courtland, who had retired a few years ago to Florida, and I persuaded the young woman to give me the phone number. Two minutes later I was on the phone with Dr. Courtland.

I went through my explanation and refreshed his memory. He recalled the twins well, although he had not seen them very often. He had accompanied Dr. Weintraub on a few occasions, but their interests were different. Dr. Courtland was involved at that time in studying how people recalled facts and solved problems in their heads. When Dr. Weintraub told him that the twins seemed to take increasingly longer to generate increasingly larger prime numbers, Dr. Courtland thought it was worth some investigation.

“I've just read your article in
Psychological Review,
” I told him. “You've got a footnote there that intrigues me. Something about an unpublished paper, ‘The Role of Visual Contact in the Performance of Savant Twins,' by G. K. Spanner.”

“Oh, Gerry Spanner. I haven't thought of him for years.”

“What can you tell me about him, Dr. Courtland?”

“Well, if you want a very unscientific opinion, I thought he was nuts.” He laughed at his own joke.

I chuckled to show my appreciation. “In what way?”

“As a person, he had a nasty temper. The slightest thing could set him off, so it was tough going working with him. And professionally, Gerry thought there was some kind of ESP going on between the Talley twins, that they couldn't perform unless they were in the same room, or something like that. Frankly, I always put ESP in a class with witchcraft, but he was very adamant.”

“Was he a medical student?”

“Good heavens, no. He was in the psych department, but he knew someone, maybe one of Dr. Weintraub's associates, and got to see the twins that way.”

“Did he publish those findings?”

“I wouldn't call them ‘findings.' They were guesses at best. And he couldn't publish. He wanted to use the idea as the basis for his doctoral dissertation. You can't use previously published material for that, as I'm sure you know.”

I did know, having done a master's essay some years ago. “What was this ‘unpublished paper' you referred to in your article?”

“It was a talk he gave to the psychology club or some such thing. When he heard about my study, he asked me to footnote his ‘paper,' if that's what you would call it. He thought it would enhance his small reputation. I agreed, frankly because I wanted to get rid of him. He was making a pest of himself.”

“Dr. Courtland, do you know of any plans he had to take the twins away from their mother for the purpose of his study?”

“Oh, he had some grandiose idea. He wanted to put them in a controlled environment and study them together and separately. He wanted to see whether they responded with a wall between them, with their backs to each other, at various distances. If he'd been able to prove anything, it would have been an excellent dissertation topic.”

The “hiding game,” I thought, realizing I had jumped to a wrong conclusion that they had played hide-and-seek. “He didn't do it, though, did he?”

“No, and no one seems to know what happened to him. I think he dropped out after the killing. I suppose having the twins in jail spoiled his plans. As I recall, they were sent to separate institutions.”

“They were. So he never got his Ph.D.”

“Not that I know of, but I really had nothing to do with the psych department. You could call over there; I'm sure they'd tell you. But I'm pretty certain someone told me he'd given up altogether, went into the family business or some such thing.”

“Do you recall his first name, Doctor?”

“Gerard, I think it was.”

I thanked him very much and hung up. Then I tried Jack, but he wasn't at the precinct. I pulled out Aunt Meg's worn old copy of the Manhattan directory and looked up Spanner. There was no G., G. K., or Gerard. I called Information, and they confirmed that there was no listing. The same was true in Westchester. It occurred to me that he might live anywhere in the country. The calls to New Hope and Greenwillow and the other places could have originated anywhere. And if he wasn't living in the area, but had come in to do harm to the twins, there was no telling where he was staying now, if anywhere. He might be holing up in a station wagon or van.

It was now late afternoon, and my chances of getting any more information from the university or the medical school were slim. I went out to the car and drove to Greenwillow.

The twins were in their room replaying a scene from the 1940s, which, after all, was practically yesterday in their memory. I stood at the door watching them until James turned and saw me.

“Look, it's Chris,” he said happily.

I went in and talked to them for a while. James was feeling much better. Remnants of tea and bouillon on a tray told me
what he'd been eating, and his cheerful demeanor told me much more.

I stayed an hour, then went home and tried Jack. He was still out somewhere, or maybe, I thought, he'd gone home for the day. But he wasn't at that number either.

Although there were still a couple of hours of daylight left, I went around the first floor and closed blinds, shades, and curtains. Feeling rather foolish, I went down to the basement and looked around. Aunt Meg's supply of canned goods was arranged on shelves built into the wall, and a pile of my cartons, still unopened, stood nearby. The patio furniture was piled in a corner. There was a furnace and a water heater, which turned on while I was there, nearly sending me into a panic. Otherwise, the basement was fairly empty.

Four small, hinged windows, two on the front and two on the back of the house, all seemed to be closed and latched. I wasn't very hungry, but I went upstairs, made a salad, and ate it while reading the paper.

When I was finished, I sat at the dining room table and made a list of all the coauthors of all the articles Dr. Sanderson had sent me. Most of the names were repeated from article to article, so the final list was less than ten. Tomorrow I would try to locate each of them and see if anyone remembered or, better still, had kept in touch with Gerard Spanner.

That done, I found the book I was reading and got myself comfortable on the sofa. I would have liked to play some music or even watch television, but Jack had made me so nervous that I thought I ought to keep it quiet so that I could hear if a car approached or someone tried to break in.

As it turned out, I didn't hear anything until the doorbell rang, and when it did, I froze. Suddenly I felt very alone and very vulnerable. I got up and walked nearer the front door, being careful not to stand in front of it.

“Who is it?” Hoping I didn't sound terrified.

“Jack.”

I felt as though I'd had a reprieve from the gallows. I opened the door and he came in and held me. I heard the
door close and realized he must have kicked it shut. Then we kissed.

“You okay?”

“Fine.”

“How about putting some clothes in a bag and coming home with me, just for overnight?”

I considered it. “We'd have to go in two cars. I can't spend tomorrow in New York.”

He said, “Shit,” under his breath. Then, “Chris, I don't think you're safe here.”

The phone rang, startling me. I went to get it.

“Chris?” a woman's voice said.

“Yes.”

“Are you all right?”

“I'm fine. Who's this?”

“Midge McGuire next door. I was taking the dog for a walk and I saw a car in your driveway. You said to look out—”

“Oh, thanks, Midge. A friend just dropped by. I really appreciate it.”

“I hope you don't mind—”

“Mind? I think you're wonderful.”

She assured me she'd keep her watch, and we said goodbye.

The phone call seemed to change Jack's mind a little about my leaving, and anyway, I was determined not to go.