The Killing Game (30 page)

“Why do you say that, Will?”

“You know the answers. You get all the best grades.” He moved his face to the slats and showed a leering face. “I fuck you every night, bitch.” He pumped his hand above his crotch. “Like this.”

Wendy cocked her head, concern on her face. “What’s wrong, Will? What’s bothering you?”

The angry face turned pensive. Pendel thought for a long time.

“I don’t want to be here any more, Wendy.”

“Why, Will?”

“Because I’m different. I got thrown away and lived in the dark. There were babies everywhere but they never cried. They forgot how.”

Wendy shot me a glance,
Do you know what he’s talking about?
I shrugged,
No idea.
She took a step forward.

“I don’t understand, Will. Help me understand.”

“Did you know I wore a diaper until I was eight years old? No one taught me how to make doo-doo on a potty.”

Another
What is this?
glance from Wendy. Pendel took a swig of the liqueur and scratched his temple with the barrel of the weapon. “You want to know my real name, Wendy? It’s stupid and ugly.”

“Will, I’m sure it’s not—”

“Haralamb Bumbescu. Can you believe that’s a name?”

“It’s a great name, Will,” Wendy said. “You’re lucky to have two whole names. Most people only have one.”

Pendel scowled. “It’s a stupid name, but it’s the right name.” His eyes floated to the sky, the ground, the treetops. Then, out of nowhere, “I DON’T WANT TO GO BACK TO GROUP!”

“You don’t have to, Wilbert,” Wendy said. I watched him reverse the gun in his hand, thumb in the trigger guard, moving it to his face, mouth open. My heart climbed into my throat. My head screamed
NO!

But Pendel stopped, frozen, staring to my left. Wendy was slowly unbuttoning her blouse. Pendel lowered the gun, staring.

“What are you doing, Wendy?”

“I can’t let this day go to waste, Will. I’m going to work on my suntan.”

“Your tan?”

She undid another button. “I need sun on my body.”

Pendel leaned forward, eyes wide. “Are you gonna show your titties?”

Wendy tossed the shirt aside, standing there in a burgundy bra. She pulled it down an inch to show the tan line. “I have to if I’m gonna get a full tan, Will. That’s the way it should be done, right?”

“You’re s’posed to take all your clothes off, Wendy,” Pendel said. “That’s the right way.”

She reached behind her and snapped her bra loose and turned her face to the sky. “Oh, Will, the sun is soooo warm.”

“You have to take that off so you can get a tan.”

The bra hanging loose, Wendy popped the top button on her shorts and undid the zipper. The shorts fell a couple inches, exposing a strip of white panties. She stepped closer to the fort.

“Where are you going?” Pendel said. “Are you going to suntan?”

“Right now, Will. Here under the tree.”

He frowned. “It’s shady down there.”

“There’s a little patch of sun just the size of my body.” She stepped three paces nearer, now almost under the fort. Pendel’s face pressed the slats as he looked down.

“I can’t see you, Wendy.”

“I’m right here, Will. Almost under you.”

She slipped off the bra and tossed it out where Pendel could see. He moaned and stood, the gun wavering in his hand, a line of saliva dripping from the wet hole of his mouth.

A heavy
whump.
A dark blur caught Pendel on his shoulder and sent him tumbling over the railing. I jumped beneath him with my arms locked over my head, hoping to keep him from breaking his neck. It was like having a cow dropped on me and we slammed the ground together, Pendel landing on his side with his head against my ribs.

The paramedics were there in four seconds, Harry in five, the riot gun still drizzling smoke from the fat charge of the beanbag round.

“You all right, Cars? Jesus.”

A moaning, babbling Wilbert Pendel was rushed away, looking as though he had nothing worse than a busted ulna and collarbone. They found nothing wrong on my end, but I knew getting out of bed would be tough for a couple days.

“Where’s Wendy?” I asked.

“Here.”

I craned my head around. She was standing above me, backlit by sunlight. “You were supposed to wear a bulletproof vest,” I mumbled. “And use the bullhorn to talk to Pendel from the house.”

“I hate bullhorns,” she said. “And I guess I just plain forgot about the vest.” She paused and thought for a moment, tapping her lips with a pink finger. “You still plan to teach tonight, Detective Ryder? If so, I gotta run home and finish my paper.”

Gloria Estridge’s doorbell rang. She muted the court TV show and tiptoed to the door, frowning through the peephole. She stepped back and pushed a smile to her lips as she opened the door. The man Gloria knew only as Bill crossed the threshold wearing unbuttoned white painter’s overalls with a skin-tight shirt under it, like a bodystocking. Billy was weird – all that shit about special soap and mouthwash – but he paid good and didn’t argue when his time was up.

“Billy, baby. It’s so early. Why didn’t you call?”

“I was in the neighborhood. Something wrong with that?”

“Nothing, sweets,” Estridge took Bill’s hand. “But you shoulda called.”

“I won’t be long.”

“Want I should take a special shower, Billy? We can have an early party.”

Billy cupped his hand over his crotch, as if making an assessment, shook his head no. He strode to the bureau and opened the top drawer, looking inside.

“You got any more of those special bags?”

“I’m out, baby. But I got a friend can swing by with some in mebbe ten minutes. How much you want?”

“Remember that bag that I got the other day?”

“You want another bag like that?” Gloria asked.

“I want five of them.”

“That’s a lot of money, baby.”

“Not really,” Billy said, his eyes glittering like dark jewels. “Not to a guy about to become a sextillionaire.”

Harry and I drove to the hospital to see how Pendel was faring. Given his erratic behavior and suicidal actions, he was under protective custody. We walked toward his room recalling how our last trip here had been to see Tommy Brink, the poor little kid whose mother treated him like a bag of rocks she’d been forced to carry.

We started into the room, almost bumping into a petite woman who was exiting. “If you’re here to see Willy, I’d wait,” she said in a voice tinged with Slavic vowels.

I looked past the small woman in the cream pantsuit and saw Pendel prone on the bed with his arms, legs and torso restrained, his eyes less staring at the ceiling than boring holes through the tiles. “Probably a form of psychotic catatonia,” the woman sighed. “His mind became overwhelmed and he’s hiding deep inside it.” She studied us. “Do you know Willy?”

The three of us did introductions, Harry and I meeting Dr Sonia Szekely, a psychologist and friend of Pendel and his family.

“I was one of Wilbert’s instructors at the police academy,” I said.

Szekely couldn’t hide a frown. “You were going to turn Will into a policeman?”

“Never would have happened, Doctor. To be frank, I’m not quite sure how he got into the academy in the first place.”

“Willy can be persuasive at times. And he isn’t stupid.”

I saw a chance to discover more about Pendel and his family, said, “How about we go to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee, Doctor?”

A knowing twinkle in the woman’s eyes. “How about we step outside for your questions, gentlemen? I need a cigarette break.”

We reconvened at a picnic table beside the hospital, a place for employees to have lunch or just hang out and enjoy air free from disinfectant and disease. The area was landscaped with azaleas, myrtle and bougainvillea, here and there a magnolia tree. Birds tittered from nearby branches.

“What was your relationship to Ms Pendel, Doctor Szekely?” I asked after the doc fired up a Marlboro light.

“We met in the EEOSA group almost a dozen years ago.”

“Excuse me?” Harry said.

“Sorry. The Eastern European Orphans Support Alliance, a support group, mainly for Romanian orphans. It’s for children and parents, each has their own group. We work on a host of issues.”

“Wilbert was adopted from one of these orphanages?” I asked.

She nodded, pushing gray hair behind one ear. “Willy was one of the lucky ones.”

Her answer explained Pendel’s strange comments and the foreign name he claimed, Bomblescu or whatever. It also hinted at the social estrangement he seemed to project.

“Why the geographic specialization, Doctor?” Harry asked.

“You’ve heard of Nicolae
Ceaușescu
?” Szekely’s nose wrinkled when she said the name.

Harry nodded. “The former president or whatever of Romania?”

“An evil, brutal man. In 1966 he decided to enlarge the country’s workforce by increasing the birth rate. He made contraception and abortion illegal and encouraged huge families. Unfortunately, Romania was a desperately poor country. Children couldn’t be fed or supported, so they were abandoned. Six hundred state orphanages were built to hold the cast-off children.”

“I’m not seeing a pretty picture,” Harry said.

“Think of chicken coops for babies. Vast rows of cribs holding children fed with cheap, tasteless slop a couple times a day. They aged in their boxes, no nurturing, no interaction with others, no emotional bonding. They existed –
lived
is too strong a word – in filth and squalor, isolated from feeling, from discovery, from joy. The first reformers into the institutions reported children with faces incapable of projecting emotion.”

Harry closed his eyes. “My God.”

“That’s just the surface. Get below and you find what has always plagued institutions where adults control innocents.”

I said, “Pedophilia.”

“Perversion of every persuasion, Detective. Physical and mental abuse. Sex parties. This is not to say all caregivers were bad, but they were uneducated, poorly paid and overwhelmed by the volume of children. Record-keeping was poor, many children unaccounted for and easily sold into the sex trade.”

“When did it stop?” Harry asked.

“The horror began to abate in the early 1990s. But many orphanages continued with elements of the old ways deep into the decade.”

“It’s gotta be hard to enter normal society,” I said, “when you have no concept of normal.”

Szekely puffed on her Marlboro, legs crossed. “Many adoptees have RAD, or reactive detachment disorder, affecting their ability to express normal emotion. Others have fetal alcohol syndrome. AIDS is a problem. Anger issues are common … frustration at not fitting in and never quite knowing why, anger at authority figures or self-directed anger. As one might expect from barren and loveless childhoods, there are elevated levels of sociopathy.”

“Why is this such an issue for you, Doctor?” Harry said.

“I’m Romanian. My parents brought me to the US in 1976 and I took a degree in child psychology. When I heard of the orphans I started EEOSA.”

“I take it Willy had problems in the group?” I said, recalling his scream,
I DON’T WANT TO GO BACK TO GROUP!

“Willy has manifestations of RAD, including problems relating with others. But he has no mental deficiency, no retardation or physical ailments from his eleven years in an orphanage. Still, he sometimes acted out in group, his insecurities manifesting.”

“The struggles must seem insurmountable,” Harry said.

“Many children thrive when given love and care. A woman who had a breakdown in her teens just received her degree in accounting. Others are successes in business, or as educators or healthcare workers. The sky’s the limit. One fellow came here almost mute, with suppressed anger and what I suspected were sexual issues. He discovered a genius-level propensity for math and now makes a good living writing software.”

“Sounds like a success story.” I’d spent a lot of time around people wounded by their pasts and was fascinated by those who had transcended horrors. “Is the man totally normalized?”

Szekely thought a long moment.

“There are still issues. He was never socialized as a child and probably never will be. He has affect problems as well, RAD. I’m not convinced he’s found a way to vent internal rage. He had a breakdown after college and spent several months in an institution. During that time his step-parent passed away, father.”

“Mother?” I asked, having lost mine at about the same age.

“She left three years after the children were adopted, too much of a strain. The father was a kind man, determined to see his son succeed. He died before he got the chance, though perhaps the inheritance he left helped.”

“The son left the institution a wealthy man?”

“Comfortable wealth, not major. But the son had to demonstrate the competency to manage his own affairs. It was specified in the will.”

“But basically the guy made it?” I said.

Szekely nodded. “Due, in large measure, to a sister who stayed by his side. She helped him back to reality, prodded him into finding a job befitting his skills, found him a house in a nearby neighborhood so she could keep an eye on him.”

“The sister was in the same orphanage?”

“Yes, though she came through in better shape.”

“Why the difference?” Harry asked.

Szekely shrugged. “She doesn’t talk about the orphanage. I suspect she was in a ward where the care was more humane and personal. Or perhaps female children received more nurturing because of gender.”

“Is the sister another math genius?” I wondered.

A smile. “Not even close, but she may be the reason for her brother’s stability. Ema makes a point of getting together with her brother on a regular basis, though I know Gregory finds the get-togethers grating.”

“Grating? That seemed to be Wilbert Pendel’s take on group therapy. He didn’t want to go back.”

“The more insecure patients sometimes mistake the sessions as judgemental and take them personally. Willy and the other fellow, Gregory, followed that model. They were in group together for several months until I shifted them to different sessions. They never got along and I figured they were probably too much alike.”