“Mister Lazarus, I have just been informed of your curiosity concerning the late mister and missus Jackson, and believe I might have some information in that regard that might assist you in your inquiries. Please telephone me at 212-555-1717 at your earliest possible convenience, and we can arrange a meeting.”
The caller did not provide a name. That was unnecessary. Ricky recognized the voice.
It was Virgil.
Part Three. Even Bad Poets Love Death
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ricky fled.
Bag hurriedly packed, tires squealing, accelerating down the highway, he raced away from the motel in New Jersey and the familiar voice on the phone. He barely took the time to wash the fake scar from his cheek. In the space of one morning, by asking a few questions in the wrong places, he had managed to compress time, turning it from his ally into his enemy. He had thought he would slowly scrape away at Rumplestiltskin’s identity, and then, when he’d managed to discover everything he needed, he would take a slow and sturdy approach to designing his own revenge. Make certain that everything was in place, traps set, and then emerge on an equal footing. Now, he understood, that luxury had disappeared.
He did not know what the connection was between the man at the kennel and Rumplestiltskin, but it surely existed, for following his departure, while Ricky was idly inspecting the grave site of a dead couple, the kennel owner had been making telephone calls. The ease with which the man had found the motel where Ricky had been staying was daunting. He told himself that he needed to be far more careful covering his tracks.
He drove hard and fast, heading back to New Hampshire, trying to assess how compromised his existence truly was. Random fears and contentious thoughts reverberated throughout him.
But one idea was paramount. Ricky could not return to the passivity of the psychoanalyst. That was a world where one waited for something to happen, and then, before acting again, tried to interpret and understand all the forces within. It was a world of reaction, of delay. Of calm and reason.
If he fell into its trap, it would cost him his life. He knew that he had to act.
If nothing else, he had to create the illusion that he was as dangerous as Rumplestiltskin.
He had just passed the welcome to massachusetts sign on the roadway, when an idea came to him. He saw an exit up ahead, and just beyond that the common American landscape marker: a shopping mall. He steered the rental car off the thruway, and into the mall’s parking lot. Within a few minutes, he was shoulder to shoulder with all the other people, heading in to the array of stores, all selling more or less the same things for more or less the same prices, but packaged in different manners, giving shoppers the sensation they were finding something unique amid all the similarity. Ricky, seeing some dark humor in it, thought it a wildly appropriate spot for what he was about to do.
It did not take him long to find a gathering of telephones, near the food court. He remembered the first number easily. Behind him, there was a low buzz of people at tables eating and speaking, and he half covered the receiver with his hand as he dialed the number.
“
New York Times
classified.”
“Yes,” Ricky said, pleasantly. “I’d like to purchase one of those small one-column ads for the front page.”
In rapid order, he read off a credit card number. The clerk took the information and then asked, “Okay, Mr. Lazarus, what’s the message?”
Ricky hesitated then said:
Mr. R. game on. A new Voice.
The clerk read it back. “That’s it?” he asked.
“That’s it,” Ricky said. “Make sure you uppercase the word
Voice
, okay?”
The clerk acknowledged the request and Ricky disconnected the line. He then walked over to a fast-food outlet, purchased himself a cup of coffee, and grabbed a handful of napkins. He found a table a little ways apart from most of the crowds, and settled in, with a pen in his hand, sipping at the hot liquid. He shut out the noise and the activity and concentrated on what he was about to write, tapping the pen occasionally against his teeth, then taking a drink, all the time calming himself, planning. He used the napkins as scratch paper, and finally, after a few fits and starts, came up with the following:
You know who I was, not who I am.
That is why you’re in a jam.
Ricky’s gone, he’s very dead.
I am here, in his stead.
Lazarus rose, and so have I,
And now it’s time for someone else to die.
A new game, in an old place,
Will eventually bring us face-to-face.
Then we’ll see who draws the last breath,
Because, Mr. R., even bad poets love death.
Ricky admired his work for a moment, then returned to the bank of telephones. Within a few moments, he’d connected with the classified department at the
Village Voice
. “I’d like to place an ad in the personals section,” he said.
“No problem-o. I can take that information,” this new clerk said. Ricky was mildly amused that the person in classified at the
Voice
seemed significantly less stuffy than their counterparts at the
Times
, which, when he considered it, was more or less as expected. “What sort of heading do you want on the message?”
“Heading?” Ricky asked.
“Ah,” said the clerk. “A first-timer. You know, the abbreviations like WM for white male, SM for sadomasochism…”
“I see what you mean,” Ricky replied. He thought a moment, then said, “The top should read: WM, 50s, seeks Mr. Right for special fun and games…”
The clerk repeated this to Ricky. “Okay,” he said, “something else?”
“Oh, yes, indeed,” Ricky said. He then read off the poem to the clerk, making the man repeat the message twice, to be certain that he had it correctly. When he’d finished reading, the clerk paused.
“Well,” he said, “that’s different. Way different. This will probably bring them all out of the woodwork. The curious, at least. And maybe a few of the crazies. Now, do you want to pay for a box reply? We give you a box number, and you can access the replies by phone. The way it works, while you’re paying for the box, only you can get the answers.”
“Please,” Ricky said. He heard the clerk clicking on a computer keyboard. “All right,” he said. “You’re box number 1313. Hope you’re not superstitious.”
“Not in the slightest,” Ricky said. He wrote down the number for accessing the answers on his napkin and hung up the phone.
For a moment, he considered calling the number that he had for Virgil. But he resisted this temptation. He had a few more things to arrange first.
In
The Art of War
, Sun-Tzu discusses the importance of the general choosing his battleground. Occupying a position of mystery, seizing a location of superiority. Taking the high ground. Being able to conceal one’s strength. Creating advantages out of topographical familiarity. Ricky thought these lessons applied to him, as well. The poem in the
Village Voice
was like a shot across the bows of his adversary, an opening salvo designed to get his attention.
Ricky realized it would not take long for someone to arrive in Durham searching for him. The license plate number noticed by the dog kennel owner fairly guaranteed that. He didn’t think it would be particularly difficult to discover that the plate belonged to Rent-A-Wreck, and soon enough, someone would show up, asking for the name of the man who’d rented that car. The issue he faced, he thought, was complex, but wrapped up in the single question: where did he want to fight the next battle? He had to choose his arena.
He returned the rental car, stopped briefly at his room, and then went directly in to his night job at the crisis hot line distracted by these questions, thinking that he did not know how much time he had purchased for himself with the ads in the
Times
and the
Voice
, but a little. The
Times
would run the following morning, the
Voice
at the end of the week. There was a reasonable likelihood that Rumplestiltskin would not act until he’d seen both. All the man knew, so far, was that an overweight and physically scarred private investigator had arrived at a dog kennel in New Jersey asking disjointed questions about the couple that records showed had adopted him and his siblings years earlier. A man hunting a lie. Ricky did not delude himself that Rumplestiltskin wouldn’t see the links, find other signs of Ricky’s existence rapidly. Frederick Lazarus, priest, would show up in inquiries in Florida. Frederick Lazarus, private investigator, arrived in New Jersey. The advantage Ricky had, he thought, was that there would be no clear-cut link between Frederick Lazarus and either Dr. Frederick Starks or Richard Lively. One was presumed dead. The other still clung to anonymity. As he took his seat at a desk in the darkened office, behind a multiline telephone, he was glad that the semester was wrapping up at the university. He expected callers with the usual stressed out, final exams despair, which he was comfortable dealing with. He did not think that anyone would kill themselves over a chemistry final, although he had heard of sillier things. And, in the deep of night, he found that he was able to concentrate clearly.
He asked himself: What do I want to achieve?
Did he want to kill the man who had driven him to fake his own death? Who threatened his distant family and destroyed everything that had made him who he was? Ricky thought that in some of the mystery novels and thrillers that he’d devoured over the past months, the answer would have been a simple yes. Someone caused him great harm, so he should turn the tables on that someone. Kill him. An eye for an eye, the essence of all revenges.
Ricky pursed his lips and told himself: There are many ways to kill someone. Indeed, he’d experienced one. There had to be others, ranging from the assassin’s bullet to the ravages of a disease.
Finding the right murder was critical. And, to do that, he needed to know his adversary. Not merely know who he was, but what he was.
And he had to emerge from this death with his own life intact. He wasn’t some sort of kamikaze pilot, drinking a ritual cup of sake, then going to his own death with nary a care in the world. Ricky wanted to survive.
Ricky held no illusion that he would ever be able to return to Dr. Frederick Starks. No comfortable practice listening to the whinings of the rich and discomfited on a daily basis, for an easy forty-eight weeks of the year. That was gone, and he knew it.
He looked around himself, at the small office where the crisis hot line was located. It was in a room off the main corridor of the student health services building. It was a narrow spot, not particularly comfortable, with a single desk, three telephones, and a few posters celebrating the schedules of the football, lacrosse, and soccer teams, with pictures of athletes. There was also a large campus map and a typed list of emergency services and security numbers. In slightly larger print, there was a protocol to be followed in the case where the person manning the suicide prevention line became convinced that someone had actually attempted to kill themselves. The protocol explained the steps to take, to call police, and have the 911 operator run a line check, which would trace a call back to a location. This was to be used only in the direst of emergencies, when a life was at stake, and rescue services needed to be dispatched. Ricky had never availed himself of this capacity. In the weeks he’d worked the graveyard shift, he’d always been able to talk, if not common sense, at least delay, into even the most frantic of callers. He had wondered whether any of the young people he’d helped would have been astonished to know that the calm voice speaking reason to them belonged to a janitor in the chemistry department.
Ricky told himself:
This is worth protecting.
A conclusion, he recognized, brought him to a decision. He would have to lead Rumplestiltskin away from Durham. If he was to survive the upcoming confrontation, Richard Lively needed to be safe and remain anonymous.
He whispered to himself: “Back to New York.”
As he was reaching this realization, the phone on the desktop rang. He punched the proper line and picked up the receiver.
“Crisis,” he said. “How can I help you?”
There was a momentary pause, and then he heard a muffled sob. This was followed by a string of disconnected words, that separately meant little, but taken together, said much. “I can’t, I just can’t, it’s all too much, I don’t want, oh, I just don’t know…”
A young woman, Ricky thought. He heard no slurring beyond the sobs of emotion, so he didn’t think there were any drugs or alcohol involved in the call. Just middle-of-the-night loneliness and low-rent despair. “Can you slow down,” he said gently, “and try to fill me in on what is going on? You don’t have to give me the big picture. Just right now, right this moment. Where are you?”
A pause, then a response: “In my dormitory room.”
“Okay,” Ricky said, gently, starting to probe. “Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
“No roommate? Friends?”
“No. All alone.”
“Is that the way you are all the time? Or does it just feel that way?”
This question seemed to cause the young woman to think hard. “Well, my boyfriend and I broke up and my classes are all terrible and when I get home, my folks are going to kill me because I’ve dropped off the honors list. In fact, I might not pass my comp lit course and it all seems to have come to a head and…”
“And so something made you call this line, right?”
“I wanted to talk. I didn’t want to do something to myself…”
“That makes eminently good sense. It sounds like this hasn’t been the best of semesters.”
The young woman laughed, a little bitterly. “You could say that.”