Dreams in the Key of Blue (2 page)

Gilman was not gloating. His tone and attitude suggested that he disapproved of the arrangement. I doubted, however, that he objected to his office, a virtual showplace of the finest leathers and woods, albeit dusty and appearing unused.

“I’m afraid you’re way ahead of me, Stu,” I said. “What is MI?”

“You’ve never heard of Martin International?”

I shook my head.

“Huh,” he grunted. “It was Melanie’s idea to invite you.”

“You may as well tell me who Melanie is while you’re at it.”

Gilman’s head wobbled and his shoulders jerked. “Melanie Martin
is
Martin International. She’s the company’s founder, principal owner, and CEO. We’re a small firm, but easily one of the most successful and powerful enterprises of its kind in the world. Melanie insists on serving as a board member here. She monitors the meetings by phone.”

Five years ago, Gilman continued, Martin International was nothing more than a $200-perhour consulting firm specializing in organizational development for a dozen American companies. Melanie Martin was fresh out of Harvard Business School and possessed by a single obsession: to build the most powerful consulting network in the world. The company’s operations in Mexico and Canada were natural moves after GATT and NAFTA. Europe always made financial sense. Countries in the Far East, the Pacific Rim, transformed Martin International into a multibillion-dollar power broker for the politicians who regulated the moves and mergers of Martin’s former corporate clients.

My quick read was that the company had done the sideways slither from business to politics.

“Our clients don’t close deals on anything without MI’s… input,” Gilman concluded.

I was not sure, but I had the feeling that he had wanted to say MI’s “approval,” then yielded to a late surge of restraint.

Without any effort, I had managed to never hear of a company with the kind of money and influence usually reserved for a Nike or a Disney. I knew what GM and Wal-Mart were, but Martin International was a mysterious Goliath.

I had also never heard of Melanie Martin. She obviously knew who I was. I decided that was unfair and would have to be rectified.

GILMAN INTRODUCED ME TO JAYCIE WAYLON, A MEMBER
of my seminar, who escorted me to Bailey’s Silo, the building that housed my classroom. The red, barnlike structure loomed at the north end of the oval drive.

“It really was a barn,” Waylon said. “When this was a seminary, they kept horses there.”

“Why did the seminarians need horses?” I asked.

We walked in silence for a moment, then Jaycie looked up at me. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe they just liked to ride. Nobody ever asked me that.”

“They should’ve been reading their Bibles,” I muttered.

Jaycie laughed. “You have an unusual way of looking at things.”

She was a senior, an attractive young woman whose brown eyes laughed when she did.

We wandered on oiled hardwood floors through the hallways and found the room that Gilman had assigned me. Faculty members stopped and introduced themselves—Ted in tweed and English Lit, shaggy-haired Molly
in history, Steve Weld in tie-dye and communications. Most of them struck me as psychologically institutionalized, wondering how students simply drifted through on their way somewhere else, somewhere in the real world.

The students smiled, nodded as we passed each other in the hall, but were not driven by the same compulsion to share names, shake hands, and tell me how many years they had been “on the hill.”

My classroom featured fifteen-foot ceilings, dangling light fixtures, radiators that clanked and hissed, a black slate chalkboard, and a wall of windows that offered a view of the harbor islands. The desk-chair combinations were vintage 1950s, branded with the carved initials of subsequent generations.

As we entered the room, Jaycie whispered, “I’ll find out why they kept horses.”

I was impressed with the students in my seminar. Dawn Kramer, who resembled Sinead O’Connor in her bald period, came to class armed with a copy of June Stephenson’s
Men Are Not Cost-Effective.
Like many of her peers, she dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and fleece vest.

“Why should I pay taxes and fees to fund jails and courts and police departments at the same rate you pay?” Kramer asked. “Women are responsible for only four percent of corrections department expenses.”

Kramer got no argument from me. The human male’s evolution clearly has lagged from when the first Neanderthal stood outside his cave, picked up a rock, gestured in a menacing manner toward his captive spouse, and said, “Cook.”

In addition, the male-dominated criminal justice system has developed a lexicon of excuses for women who do engage in aggressive behavior. Even if the courts were to hold women accountable for behavior typically excused as premenstrual, menstrual, post-partum, or menopausal
medleys of hormones and emotions, I doubted that women would achieve criminal parity.

Jaycie Waylon, my guide and equestrian researcher, was a tall, slender brunette, a business major who intended to pursue a graduate degree in organizational psychology. “Aggression fascinates me,” she said. “I’ve read about the things that people do to each other and I don’t understand them. I’ve read Konrad Lorenz and some of the other ethologists, but I don’t see how we can generalize from instinctual animal behavior to human atrocities. There has to be some other explanation.”

“Tigers might get into an occasional territorial tiff,” I agreed, “but they don’t prey on one another. With the exception of some fish, we’re unique in that regard. Hell of a claim to fame, isn’t it?”

Amanda Squires was raven-haired and dressed in jeans and a red flannel shirt, the latter unbuttoned to reveal a Patti Smith T-shirt. “I read your last book,” she said. “Harry Tower, Stanley Markham, George West. Except for the victims, there weren’t any women in it. Aside from references to male sexual pathology, there was very little about gender.”

“It’s an issue that I’ve thought about over the years,” I said. “I haven’t done much with it. I have a few ideas that I’d like to explore with this class, but I hope that the group generates some ideas of its own. Did you want some background on the subject?”

A few heads nodded.

“Researchers have found evidence of varieties of abuse, often sadistic, in the histories of men who behave violently,” I began. “They estimate that as many as seventy-five percent of all violent offenders were maltreated during childhood. The theory is that these men experience their pain, then inflict suffering on others.”

“Vengeance,” Waylon said.

“Or, they’ve learned violence as a way of dealing with the world. There are many more men who experience trauma and don’t become aggressors. We don’t know why. Each clinical discipline seems to have its own theory. The general belief about women who kill is that they have turned their trauma inward, and that childhood incidents in which they were trapped, helpless, and repeatedly preyed upon, especially by someone they trusted, caused a fragmenting of personality. Men
and
women dissociate, or split off, feelings and experience. With the predatory male, the splitting seems to assist him in his violence. Women are perceived as candidates for multiple personality disorder, which
DSM-IV,
the psychiatric bible that metamorphoses nearly as fast as the phone book, has relabeled dissociative identity disorder.”

“The man takes his pain and lashes out,” Waylon said, smiling at my editorial comment, “but the woman collapses inwardly. Both are coping, but managing to survive only in ways that are destructive.”

I nodded. “That’s a succinct and effective way to put it. I want to add that this gender distinction is a popular view, but I don’t necessarily subscribe to the theory.”

Kramer cocked her bald head to one side. “Explain, please.”

I shrugged. “Most of us experience spontaneous hypnoid states. We continue to function. We don’t break into pieces. The best example is ‘highway hypnosis.’ The mind wanders to pleasant, distant, sensory-rich places, and the mind continues to correctly operate two tons of machinery hurtling through space. We have a wonderful head trip, we don’t crash or take a wrong exit, and when we snap back, we’ve painlessly gobbled up thirty miles of the journey.”

“What about the exceptions to the theories?” Squires asked.

“Do you mean someone like Billy Milligan?” I asked,
referring to the famous Ohio case from the seventies, the first verdict in U.S. legal history that validated a defendant’s insanity claim based on a diagnosis of multiple personality disorder.

“Milligan suffered from MPD and was also a human predator,” Kramer said.

“Aileen Wuornos,” Squires added. “She’s on Florida’s death row, a serial killer who certainly didn’t seem like her mind wandered from the task at hand.”

“Good examples,” I agreed. “Most female serial killers have been caretakers… nurses, that kind of thing. Or they’ve killed relatives. Some have participated, along with predatory males or other females, in what amounts to a symbiotic, or mutually interdependent, relationship. I hasten to add that I don’t consider someone like Wuornos an exception. She’s a variation on a theme.”

“No woman on her own has done it all,” Squires observed. “Killed people she knows or is related to,
and
killed strangers, only because she loves to kill.”

I hesitated, unsure where Squires was headed. She, like the others, brought eagerness and intensity to a subject that was both frightening and strangely titillating.

“I don’t know of a case,” I said, nagged by the feeling that I did know of a case but could not recall it. “That doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.”

Carol Bundy grew to enjoy the sexually sadistic murders of Sunset Strip prostitutes. Tapes of Carla Homolka’s Canadian killing spree revealed her pleasure at exercising homicidal power. In Texas, Karla Faye Tucker claimed to have experienced orgasm while wielding a pickax at her one victim. All of these women participated with males in their carnage.

Squires sat up in her seat and leaned forward. “What I’m talking about is a hybrid.”

“Yeah,” Kramer agreed, “someone so far outside the labels and theories that she defies classification.”

“What if I were a serial killer?” Squires hypothesized. “What if I killed people I knew, and also killed strangers?”

“Would that make her unique?” Waylon asked.

“Say that it’s lots of people that she does away with,” Kramer added.

Squires nodded. “A father who abandoned me. An abusive stepfather, maybe. The people I don’t know, don’t forget about them. The strangers. I kill them, too.”

“Why?”

“Why not? I mean, isn’t that how she would think?” Waylon said. “I mean, it’s not like she would have a conscience.”

“She, my hybrid, is a woman who kills repeatedly over time because she enjoys it,” Squires continued. “She knows some of the people she kills, like Marie Hilley did, or Velma Barfield, that woman they executed in North Carolina in 1984, but she also kills strangers, and she’s not about to stop until somebody stops her.”

Barfield murdered five times, administering arsenic to her victims, including her mother. Until Texas lethally injected Karla Faye Tucker, Barfield held the distinction of being the last woman executed in the United States. Audrey Marie Hilley also preferred the cumulative effects of arsenic and nearly succeeded in killing her daughter. Hilley died of a heart attack before the state of Alabama could complete a final tally of her victims and exact its retribution.

“Off the top of my head, I don’t know,” I said weakly. “You may drive me back to the books.” I was still wrestling with the notion that their hypothetical hybrid existed.

I ended the day pleased at the promise of an excellent seminar. These young people thought for themselves, and
would challenge traditional notions about human behavior and motivation.

“HOW DID IT GO?” STEVE WELD ASKED AS WE WALKED
together to the parking lot.

“Communications, right?”

He smiled. “An essential field in a civilized society. If only we were civilized.”

Weld was a slender man of average height. He was in his early forties, and sported a long gray ponytail and a prematurely white beard. His tie-dye was a Grateful Dead artifact that looked as if he had worn it through a few road trips.

“The seminar went very well,” I said. “An intelligent group.”

“The kids here are bright. The setting is beautiful.”

I followed Weld’s gaze at the Atlantic. With clouds billowing across the sky, and the sea surging in swells, the view was worthy of a
Yankee
magazine cover. In the foreground, students crossed the oval from one vintage New England building to another.

“Seems like it should be the perfect place to teach,” Weld said.

“You have reservations?”

“Not with the students,” he said, returning his gaze to me. “You just got here. Give it time.”

“I don’t understand.”

He climbed into an old Subaru. “You will.”

As Steve Weld drove off, Stuart Gilman stumbled from the administration building and walked over. “One of our more disgruntled faculty members,” he said.

“Oh?”

“I suppose he was entertaining you with stories.”

I did not intend to dive or be shoved into the swamp of
college politics and personal squabbles. “Actually, we were discussing how bright the students at Harbor are.”

He shrugged. “Weld can be a negative influence,” he said. “Your day went well?”

“Yes,” I told him. “I have an excellent group of students.”

“Anything you need, let me know,” Gilman said indifferently, slipping into his silver Jaguar.

Stuart Gilman and his wheels did not fit on the Harbor College campus. I wondered if he had twitched his way out of the corporate boardroom’s good graces and into the make-work position of liaison to the college.

It was after six
P.M.
when I left the campus and drove into the village. I planned to do a complete shopping, but for the first few days I could survive on my stops at Downtown Grocery.

The small general store was dark and dusty, and reeked of dill pickles and fish. Dead flies and wasps decorated the plate glass window’s sill. However, a half-hour drive across the flats and back was out of the question. The village market had the only game in town.