Dreams in the Key of Blue (18 page)

Now I reconsidered the debt of thanks. What promised to be a pleasant sojourn by the sea had immersed me to the teeth in murder.

“Am I a target,” I muttered, “or an audience of one?”

LATE-NIGHT RADIO OFFERED MAHLER, GARTH BROOKS,
and Madonna. I opted for silence on the short drive to the police station.

I made the mistake of entering through the front door. Reporters talked on cell phones, ate lobster rolls, or stood in small groups comparing rumors about the murders. They filled the small waiting area and spilled over onto the stairwell. As I waded through the media trap to the dispatcher’s window, a young man shoved himself from the wall and blocked my way.

“Dr. Frank, I’m Bailey Lee with the
Ragged Harbor Review,”
he said.

“Tide charts, fishing forecasts, and the seafood specials at Downtown Grocery,” I said, sensing the loss of my anonymity.

A TV reporter shoved her microphone at me as a cohort aimed his camera. “What links these murders, Dr. Frank?” she demanded.

I doubted that Jaworski had said anything about connections among the killings.

“Is it true that the FBI has entered the case?” Bailey Lee asked.

“Direct your questions to the chief,” I said as I waved to the dispatcher and caught her attention.

I grabbed the handle on the security door and waited for the signal that would allow me to enter.

“Steve Weld was shot with the same gun that killed the students, wasn’t he?” another reporter shouted, jostling his way through the crowd.

“What about Stanley Markham?” someone yelled as the steel door clicked and I stepped inside, temporarily rescued.

I found Jaworski in his office preparing for a press conference. “Late for that, isn’t it?” I asked.

“I had told them I’d hold a briefing this afternoon. Then our shooter hit Weld. Same gun. Looks like two shots to the face. I put the media folks off. They want something for morning.”

The chief pushed away from his desk and paced the room, tension evident in the lines below his tired eyes. “I have to say something. This town’s coming apart at the seams. Hubble Saymes wants the National Guard down here. Jesus Christ.”

Karen Jasper stood at one side of the room with her arms folded tightly across her chest.

“I’m beat,” Jaworski said.

“Anything more on Weld or Dorman?”

“Not much. Too soon on Weld. They’re still working at the scene. No fruit, though. We got the name of the woman Dorman lived with in South Portland. Katrina Martin.”

I stared at Jaworski. “In her fifties.”

“I didn’t do the math. You look like you’ve seen a ghost. You know the woman?”

For part of one summer in Provincetown on Cape Cod, I knew a Katrina Martin. It was the mid-sixties.

How many Katrina Martins could there be? I wondered.

I worked as a short-order cook in an oceanfront restaurant. Katrina bounced from one relationship to another, always where the drug scene was happening, smoking and swallowing anything available on the beach. She was from Maine. I hadn’t thought about her or that summer in years.

“Maybe,” I answered.

I remembered one of the first afternoons I worked the grill that summer. I was preparing to leave for the day when Katrina arrived with the rest of the crew that waited tables during dinner. The others were in uniform; Katrina wore a bikini.

She looked at me. “You won’t mind,” she said, slipping off the bathing suit.

I leaned against the dish shelf and watched her perform.

“Haven’t you ever seen a naked girl?” she asked.

“Not like you.”

She dressed. I observed.

Finally, she looked at me again. “I get off at nine. Come back and we’ll go for a swim.”

I did go back, but Katrina was gone. I found her on the beach an hour later, stoned and cold and doubled over with peyote cramps. That night established the pattern for many nights to follow.

Through those few weeks, she told me that her mother was crazy, a frequent flyer at a state psychiatric hospital. I wondered if Katrina was soaring in the same direction. I held her hand and talked her through drug-induced hallucinations, assured her that they were caused by the chemicals and would pass when the drugs ran their course.

I remembered that her craziness frightened me. For a while, I avoided her.

She smothered me with notes, greeting cards decorated with pictures of kittens, bunches of wildflowers. She said that she loved me. Then she changed her mind and said that she loved the idea of being in love. I am no longer certain whether Katrina was irresistible or unavoidable.

“It’s been more than thirty years,” I said to Jaworski. “It is unlikely she’s the Katrina Martin I knew.”

In July, Katrina had gone home to have a breakdown in the same hospital that her mother favored. She wrote me a disjointed letter about not knowing whether her dreams were dreams or bizarre slices of reality. She’d met a young man, she said. He worked at the hospital, and they were dating.

“This Katrina Martin has a place in Bayberry Trailer Park in South Portland,” Jaworski said. “Norma Jacobs went out there, tried to talk to her. Martin wouldn’t open the door. A neighbor told Jacobs that Martin’s mentally ill. She sits in her trailer, watches TV, and talks to herself when she isn’t talking to Vanna White.”

Jaworski handed me a file folder. “Jacobs sent that. She thought you’d be interested. It’s a psychological report on Martin’s kid that was appended to Martin’s petition for a permanent restraining order against Harper Dorman.”

“I’ll take a look at this,” I said, yanking myself back to the moment.

“Why the hell would any of this matter?” Jasper demanded shrilly. “I’m sure that some mental case holed up in a trailer, who may or may not be a blast from your past, is just totally fascinating. But let me remind you that we are looking for a killer.”

Jaworski covered his weary face with his hands, rubbing his eyes. “The weapon connects these cases,” he said. “To some extent, so does Martin International. Dorman was an MI employee, and he was married to a woman
named Martin. Lucas doesn’t believe in coincidences. I’m getting pretty skeptical of them, too.”

“Stanley Markham is our suspect,” Jasper said. “He connects these cases, and he’s at the top of an extremely short list.”

I looked at Jaworski, then at Jasper. “How the hell does Markham connect the cases? We’ve got a pile of bloody orange peels on Crescent Street. Nothing at Dorman’s; nothing at Weld’s.”

I did not mention my skewered orange. I had no intention of reinforcing Jasper’s Markham obsession. Jaworski noted my omission by turning away.

“Probability alone is enough to require that we eliminate him before we start flying off in all directions,” she said.

“Probability also dictated that Sonny Liston hammer the daylights out of Muhammad Ali. Twice. Once right here in Maine. My memory does get a little furry at times, but I don’t think that’s what happened. Numbers offer only an illusory comfort.”

“We know that Markham headed this way,” Jasper said.

“I think he’s going home,” I told her.

“You can’t know that.”

I shrugged. “Okay. I don’t know it.”

“We have to be concerned with Markham’s movements,” she continued. “His most likely destination is Canada. Based on sightings so far, that increases the likelihood that he will travel through this area. We’ve intensified patrols on all the primary routes. New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire are cooperating. We’re saturating the border towns with Markham’s picture.”

Jaworski looked at me. I breathed deeply, briefly debating whether to respond to Jasper’s steel-fortified rigidity
or to keep my thoughts to myself. Never the diplomat, I crashed ahead.

“I’m not certain of anything,” I said, “but Markham is a creature of habit. When he was killing, he drove during high-traffic times. His was one of thousands of cars on the road. If he needed rest, he pulled off at vacant hunting and fishing camps, ski chalets, or lake cottages, concealed his vehicle, broke in, and slept. He doesn’t like to drive at night. He’s afraid of the dark.”

“He could be driving north on the interstate right now.”

“He could be,” I conceded.

Jasper’s intensity radiated from her darkening eyes. She was angry, unaccustomed to having her judgment questioned.

“I don’t think he is,” I said.

“Jesus. You’re insufferable.”

“Look, Jasper, let’s put our personal differences aside,” I began, but before I could offer the terms of a truce, the detective stormed out the door and slammed it.

Jaworski leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Hell of a team I’ve got here.”

“She’s right,” I said. “I am insufferable.”

Jaworski made a snorting noise, unwrapped a second stick of cinnamon gum, and said, “What now?”

“We’ll wait for Detective Jasper. She just needed an excuse to go outside for a smoke. Considerate of her, really. She knows that you recently quit.”

The chief held his piece of gum poised at his open mouth and stared at me. “You being insufferable again?”

“Nicotine stains on the index and middle fingers of her left hand. Distinctive odor despite the breath mints she prefers. I smoked off and on for twenty years.”

He nodded slowly and slipped the gum into his mouth. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t share all that with her.”

I smiled. “No problem.”

“She says you’re as bad as her father. Maybe worse. Guess they don’t get along.”

“Why me? Why not you?”

“I’m not the insufferable one.”

“Huh,” I grunted, wondering if I really
was
insufferable. Cranky, yes. But insufferable? Surely not.

“Well,” I said, “when we don’t confront the demons in our emotional closets, we do go blindly through life re-creating the past in the present. Jasper needs to work through her anger.”

That didn’t sound insufferable, did it?

I wandered to the window and gazed at Main Street, illuminated by intersecting beacons from the competing networks’ klieg lights. The street’s soundtrack was a collage of voices, the hum of diesel generators on grumbling flatbed trucks, and a simmering, black ocean’s hiss in the background. A group of students participated in the college beer-drinking rite and waited to be interviewed about their take on the town’s horror.

“You know what brings people into psychotherapy?”

I watched Jaworski’s reflection in the window. He shrugged.

“If therapists probe deep enough, they will invariably find conflicts related to sex or anger. We’ve been culturally conditioned to not deal well with either.”

When I was completing my psychiatric residency in Boston, my supervisor remarked that he considered me the angriest person he’d ever met. He wanted to know about my family, so I told him. His facial expressions ranged from contortions of horror to open-mouthed disbelief.

“You understand rage because you contain so much of your own,” he said.

He intended his observation as a penetrating insight for me. It was not. I never denied my anger. I struggled
with my closet ghouls and achieved a working relationship with fury.

Later, when I opened my practice on Beacon Street, a friend gave me an urban renewal map of the Roxbury section of Boston. The map was detailed, and a small square represented the tenement where, for a decade, my family had occupied the third floor. I framed the map and hung it on my office wall. It was my reminder of a past that I could too easily have left behind.

Dear Lucas.

Katrina Martin’s last letter arrived in the spring of 1967. I remember wondering why she wrote. I told myself that on a few rough occasions the previous summer, I was kind to her. That was all.

She had sensed the turbulence that was my life. She knew that I was not yet comfortable with the person I was becoming.

Feeling so much better. Married. Baby. Do you remember Steampot Pond?

I don’t know if I would have answered the letter. It didn’t matter. I lost it, and could not remember the return address, although I was nearly certain it was somewhere in Maine.

One Sunday that summer, we carried a picnic lunch to a pond that had no name. It was near a low railroad bridge where a steam train stopped to take on water for its boilers. Perhaps she derived Steampot from that, but what did it have to do with getting married and having a child?

Now I turned from the window and told Jaworski, “If we refuse to know and feel the early wars in our lives, we end up reliving those conflicts in our relationships with others. We hurl all of our shitty baggage at our friends and lovers and wives and children and colleagues.”

“You’ve got Jasper diagnosed, do you?”

“Herb, I don’t have myself diagnosed. When it comes
to human behavior, it’s the biggest toss-up there is. Heads, I’m sane; tails, I’m starkers.”

In five minutes, Jasper was back.

“I apologize,” I said to the detective.

Arms folded, she glared at me.

“Scan the highways for Markham,” I said to Jaworski. “I’ll chase after the Martin angle.”

The three of us marched upstairs to the select board’s conference room. I wandered in through the rear door behind two dozen newspaper and TV reporters, sharks crowding the shark pool.