The Church of Dead Girls (31 page)

“Who was this professional man?”

“I don't want to say. I mean, I don't know if she was ever with him.”

“Whether you want to or not, this is police business—you have to say.”

Two men entered the bar and Sheila moved toward them.

“I promise you,” said Ryan, “I'll take you to my office.”

Sheila glared at him. “Well, the fact is, I don't really know. But I bet it was Dr. Malloy. Are you happy now? Janice said she liked fucking doctors, they always smelled clean.”

Ryan watched her move down the bar, already greeting the two men. He recognized them as farmers but he didn't know their names. He thought about Janice and her appetites. Then he left the tavern and walked back to his car. He drove over to Janice's house on Hamilton Street.

In the next hour, Ryan talked to Janice's neighbors, Floyd and Lois Washburn on the left side and Mrs. Winters on the right. He had talked to them immediately after Janice's murder but now he wanted to talk to them again. His question to each was the same: Had Aaron McNeal spoken with them recently?

All three said that Aaron had visited them several times in the past few months. He had wanted to know what people they had seen entering Janice's house around the time of the murder.

“He even asked if I'd seen you,” said Mrs. Winters. She was a retired teacher and her living room had the musty smell of old books and too many cats. “‘Did you ever see Ryan Tavich?' That's what he asked me. But he asked about other men as well.”

“Who?” asked Ryan. He stood in Mrs. Winters's hallway.

“All sorts of men. No, that's not true. He was interested in what he called ‘professional men.' There were several lawyers, an accountant, a professor, an engineer.”

“Was the accountant Paul Leimbach?”

“Yes, it was.”

“What about the professor?”

Mrs. Winters blinked her small black eyes. “Professor Carpenter over at the college.”

“And had you seen any of these men?”

“I told him that I didn't spend my days and nights looking to see who was visiting his mother.”

“Did he ask about Dr. Malloy?”

“Never.”

Floyd and Lois Washburn gave Ryan pretty much the same answers. They were having lunch in the kitchen and Ryan accepted a cup of coffee. Floyd repaired home appliances and wore green pants and a green shirt.

“He rattled off a bunch of names,” said Floyd. “Most I didn't know but you were one of them. Of course I'd seen you with Janice but that was some time before she was killed.”

“You'd think we'd kept a list,” said Lois. “I mean, he seemed surprised that we hadn't.”

“Tell you the truth,” said Floyd, “I tried not to see who was going in there. It could be embarrassing. Like your dentist—can you imagine your dentist having an illicit affair?”

“And you know for certain,” said Lois, “that he'll be touching your mouth with the exact same hands.”

When Ryan left, he had learned scarcely more than he had in the weeks after Janice's murder, and what he had learned concerned Aaron rather than his mother. Yet he felt good about this. It made Aaron's behavior seem less arbitrary. Ryan drove over to the college. He wanted to talk to Sherman Carpenter in the history department, the man with whom Harriet Malcomb had gone to a motel on Halloween. Ryan had talked to him earlier in order to verify Harriet's story. Now he had another question.

Carpenter was with a student and Ryan waited in the hall. Other students passing by looked at him curiously. He could hear Carpenter laughing and telling a story about John L. Lewis and his thick white eyebrows.

When the student left, Ryan stuck his head through the door. “One question. Did Harriet ask you anything about Janice McNeal?”

Carpenter was seated at his desk, which was covered with papers. “Come in and shut the door, will you?”

Ryan stepped into the office and shut the door. Carpenter was an athletic man in his late thirties. Ryan had nothing against him except that he looked and talked like a professor: too much tweed and facial hair.

“She asked if I'd been fucking Janice.”

“And had you?”

“A couple of times. To tell you the truth, she was too bossy. Do this, do that. I didn't like it.”

“When was this?”

Carpenter rubbed his forehead. He looked both sheepish and ironic at the same time, as if he were embarrassed but not too embarrassed. “About a month before she was killed.”

“Did Harriet ask if Janice had ever mentioned ‘a professional man'?”

“Yes, but Janice never did. For all I know, I was the professional man. Janice and I didn't talk much. Mostly we just got down to work, if you know what I mean.”

Ryan found himself clenching his teeth.

“Did Harriet ask if Janice had mentioned Dr. Malloy or Paul Leimbach?”

“No, she only asked about one man in particular.” Carpenter again assumed his expression of ironic embarrassment.

“And who was that?”

“She asked if Janice had ever mentioned you. I told her I only remembered one time. Janice said that the women you went out with called you Old Silent. Harriet laughed at that.”

—

The day after I was visited by the Friends of Sharon Malloy, I decided to get a haircut. This was not entirely casual on my part. I mostly went to a barbershop called Jimmy's where an elderly man by the name of Jimmy Hoblock cut my hair. Indeed, he had cut it when I was young. But I had noticed that Make Waves advertised itself as a unisex hair parlor so I decided to have Jaime Rose cut my hair. You will understand that my curiosity was getting the better of me.

I drove downtown after school and after a short wait I found myself in Jaime's chair.

“Been a while,” he said.

I explained that I had had my hair cut the previous month.

“I mean since I laid eyes on you,” he said. Jaime had an immaculate black beard that he must have trimmed hair by hair. It wasn't bushy but clung neatly to his cheeks. The sheet with which I was covered seemed made of black satin.

I said that I'd been busy and that in any case the awful events in our town had dissuaded me from leaving the house unless absolutely necessary. Cookie Evans was working on Brigit Daly across the room, talking constantly as she trimmed and combed.

“It's hardly worth living here anymore,” said Jaime.

“Do you think you'll leave?”

“I've thought of it. I have friends other places.” He gave a slight emphasis to “friends.” Jaime was not especially effete, but neither did he strike one as masculine.

“I can't believe that whoever is responsible lives in Aurelius,” I said.

“Oh, I wouldn't be surprised.”

“Are you serious?”

Jaime looked at me in the mirror. He knew more about me than I cared to have him know, though we had never been together, nor were we interested in each other—in that way, I mean. On the other hand, he knew I would help him if he needed it, as I knew he would help me. I wouldn't have felt the same way in New York, but Aurelius was a small town.

“Believe me,” he said, “I've known some doozies.”

“That doesn't mean one of them might abduct a little girl.”

Jaime went back to my hair. It was the first time in my life I'd had a razor cut. I wondered what it would cost me.

“Perhaps not, but if I were to tell the police about two or three of our fellow citizens, it would make quite a squawk.”

“Who do you mean?” I asked, as mildly as I could.

Jaime winked at me in the mirror. “Don't be pushy.”

“If you know anything about those girls,” I said firmly, “you should tell the police.”

“Of course I don't know anything like
that
,” said Jaime, defensively. “I'm just saying that some people aren't what they pretend to be. In fact, some people are quite nasty.”

I was dying to know whom he meant but I felt that I couldn't be insistent. “We all have secrets,” I said.

Jaime sprayed something on my scalp. “Some are darker than others.” He snipped some more. “Do you know those two brothers in that Marxist group at the college?”

“Jesse and Shannon Levine?”

“That's right.”

“Do they have dark secrets?”

“Nothing like that. I happened to speak to them at the bar at Gillian's and they were abusive. I was quite surprised.”

“Apparently they beat up Barry Sanders, or tried to.”

“Doesn't surprise me. Really, I was only making small talk.” Standing behind me, Jaime put his hands on my cheeks and turned my head a little to the left, then to the right in front of the mirror. “It could stand some thickening,” he said.

“I'm afraid I'm rather past thickening.”

“What a dreadful thought,” said Jaime. “Perhaps I should leave here after all. What am I doing in such a silly town? Even Syracuse would be better.”

“Do any of these people frighten you?” I asked. “I mean the people with secrets?”

“Of course not,” he said, fluffing my hair to make it stand up a little. “I'm just making conversation.”

Shortly, I was through. Really, the whole thing was just a little blip in a long day dominated by my teaching. And even this event would have remained unimportant if it weren't for what happened later. My claim that I visited Make Waves primarily to see Jaime Rose is probably untrue. The fact is my hair was thinning, and I was getting balder. From vanity and nothing more I thought Jaime could do something about it. And my hair looked much better, I'm sure of it, for at least several days.

E
ver since Meg Shiller's disappearance, the door to the police station and the three other doors to City Hall had been under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. Captain Percy was hopeful. If the same person was responsible for both disappearances, then surely he would return Meg's clothes, just as he had returned Sharon's.

The question raised later was how many people knew about the surveillance. Watching the doors required someone to scan four video monitors around the clock. Two of the cameras were in the stockroom of Weber's Shoes, across the street and north of City Hall. The other two were on the second floor of Bob Moreno's men's haberdashery, to the south. The monitors themselves were in the basement of City Hall. Bob Moreno knew the cameras were upstairs, as did Charlie Weber. So when the question arose as to how the person who had taken the two girls knew that the police station was being watched, the answer seemed obvious. Too many people knew about it for the secret to remain a secret.

Frieda Kraus, who in the opinion of many people kept the
Independent
afloat, got to work at seven-thirty each morning, sometimes earlier. Franklin had been lucky to hire an insomniac with the energy of a Mack truck. If she had had any writing ability, she might have taken over the paper, but fortunately for Franklin she didn't. She was perhaps fifty, had five Siamese cats, and a large garden. Two of the cats lived at the newspaper office because they didn't get along with the three at home. Frieda had many boyfriends when she was younger but none stuck. It was Franklin's opinion that she had worn them out. Now she had an ongoing relationship of convenience with a self-employed roofer who visited weekly from Norwich. Because of her energy and constant talk (mostly she described the sporting events she watched through the night on her satellite-dish TV), she was a difficult person to spend time with.

Frieda was a second cousin of Meg Shiller's mother, Helen Kraus Shiller, and so she was especially affected by Meg's disappearance. Not that anyone was unaffected. Frieda was a solid-looking woman with short black hair brushed forward like Marlon Brando's in the movie
Julius Caesar.
She wore glasses with great oversized lenses that magnified not only her eyes but her eyebrows and upper cheekbones.

As she walked the six blocks from her apartment to the office, Frieda thought how dull the day ahead would be. Since the paper had gone on sale the previous night, there would be little to keep her busy. Stores were still closed and few people were visible, though a couple of cars were parked in front of the Aurelius Grill across the street. As Frieda approached the front door of the
Independent
she saw a Miller's beer case wrapped with silver duct tape hanging from the knob. Sometimes a local stringer would leave a late story about a night basketball game or even about a traffic fatality taped to the front door. But this was the first time there had been a box.

The tape was wrapped around the doorknob and Frieda used her Swiss Army knife to cut through it. Then she unlocked the door, went inside, and put the box on her desk. Before investigating its contents, she fed her cats. Then she opened the box. When she lifted the lid, the first thing she saw was a hand, palm upward, with bloody fingernails. She quickly stepped back, knocking over a chair. It took her a moment to realize the hand was false, a rubber Halloween hand to fit over one's own. This hand, however, had been filled with plaster of Paris and was solid. It rested on a pile of folded clothes.

Frieda called Chuck Hawley at the police station and Franklin at home. Then, as she waited for the police, she took several photographs of the box with the hand, which appeared in the following Thursday's newspaper. Frieda knew that the police were watching City Hall. It didn't surprise her that the box had been left at the
Independent.

Captain Percy was the first to arrive. He seemed angry, but more likely it was frustration.

“Why'd you open the box?” he asked Frieda.

“How was I to know what it was till I opened it?”

Franklin appeared several minutes later to find his office taken over by the police. Indeed, he had to use the back entrance while the front door was photographed and checked for fingerprints and the area around it searched.

When Franklin entered, he saw Percy take an envelope from the box and put it in his pocket. “What's that?” he asked.

“None of your business. I don't want you in here.”

“Are you going to kick me out of my own office?”

“Exactly right,” said Percy, and he did.

Apart from the hand, the box contained the clothes that Meg Shiller had worn on Halloween. They had been washed and folded. At first there was excitement because of the red stains on the white shirt, then it became clear they were paint stains and part of Meg's costume. Her parents identified the clothes. There was something awful about thinking of Sharon and Meg naked someplace. At least that was how it seemed now that their clothes had been returned.

The police reports that came back from the lab in Ithaca that afternoon revealed that nothing inside or outside the box or around the front door of the
Independent
gave any sign who had left it there. And no one had seen anything. Roy Hanna had completed his patrols of Main Street about five that morning and said nothing had been attached to the door when he passed at four-thirty. Members of the Friends took it on themselves to ask people living downtown if they had seen anything suspicious. At times they appeared just as the police were leaving. And of course they asked the same questions that the police had asked.

Percy complained to Paul Leimbach about the presence of the Friends, though technically he should have complained to the cochairmen, Sandra Petoski and Rolf Porter.

“We want to make sure that everything that can be done is in fact being done,” said Leimbach, rather aggressively.

Ryan maintained that, even though Percy didn't like Leimbach and saw him as a nuisance, he was grateful for the volunteers during the searches and had a sense of their power—political power. So he was careful not to offend Leimbach.

“I assure you everything's being done,” said Percy.

“The girls are still missing,” said Leimbach.

“It doesn't help to have your people in the way.”

“They want to make sure that nothing is overlooked.”

Percy had pink cheeks—not naturally pink but as if they had been scraped with rough sandpaper. In contrast, his forehead was quite pale.

“And you think something is?” asked Percy.

“Have the girls been found?”

Franklin, who witnessed this exchange, said that Percy's voice sounded as brittle as dried sticks. He stood very straight, with his arms folded. Public confrontations between people who dislike each other but can't show it can be very painful.

“What would you do that we're not doing?” asked Percy.

“I'd search every house in town,” said Leimbach. “Every house in the county.”

“That would be against the law.”

“Aren't the girls more important?”

—

When they were alone that morning Percy and Chief Schmidt opened the envelope that Percy had taken from the box. They were in Schmidt's office.

Again there was a list of words made up of letters cut from a newspaper and pasted to a sheet of paper. Certain letters had been crossed out—almost ground away with a dark pencil—so that “
SLUT
” became “
LUT
” and “
WHORE
” became “
WHRE
.” Fingerprint analysis of the sheet of paper revealed nothing.

The psychologists provided by the FBI made much of the fact that Meg's clothes had turned up more quickly than Sharon's had. They also spoke of the difficulties of leaving the clothes at the newspaper and how shrewd the person had been. On the other hand, leaving the clothes was a public statement. The psychologists claimed that, even though the person responsible was trying to protect himself, part of that person wanted to be caught. At some level, the person was horrified by what he was doing. As a result, he would begin to take greater risks and act with greater frequency—not out of bravado but out of a wish to be stopped.

Ryan Tavich was present at these meetings.

“What you will see,” said a psychologist from the city, “will be increased brutality and daring on the part of the criminal, which one could almost interpret as a cry for help.” He was a small black-bearded man in a tweed jacket. Ryan said that he looked like a sleek rodent.

“You mean there'll be more disappearances?” asked Schmidt.

“Most certainly,” said the psychologist. “At least there will be attempts. All this is consistent with classic acceleration patterns.”

Ryan objected to these professionals, feeling they were taking advantage of our troubles to charge a fat fee. “All I know,” he said later, “is we got a town packed with assholes.”

Another incident should be mentioned at this point. Madame Respighi, the psychic investigator, was still at the Aurelius Motel, engaged in her arcane inquiries. Two days after the box of clothes was found at the office of the
Independent,
she was given the white shirt with red paint stains to investigate or sniff or think about, however she did her work. The police were not in favor of this, but Meg's parents asked that it be done and the Friends of Sharon Malloy asked as well. In fact, they insisted. Although Captain Percy thought it was absurd to give the shirt to a psychic, he felt he couldn't refuse.

Madame Respighi received the shirt and retired to the privacy of her room while members of the Friends waited outside. Donald Malloy was there and perhaps six others, including Sandra Petoski. Sandra was one of those people who need to be involved with everything and talk about it endlessly. One wonders how much her classes suffered during this period.

After ten minutes Madame Respighi summoned the group. As I have said, she was a rather conventional-looking woman who favored gray suits and horn-rimmed glasses. Indeed, gray suits were her trademark. Though she lived in northern California, she was originally from Brooklyn and had a faint Brooklyn accent.

“Several images have manifested themselves,” she told them. She sat on a chair by the table and the others stood. It was a motel room like any other, a mixture of the cozy and the impersonal. She held the white shirt with the red paint stains in her hands—her fists really. “I see a basement with a dirt floor,” she said.

I won't lead you through this, which was quite protracted. Of course the Friends hung on her every word. She described a house in need of paint, a white house perhaps a hundred and fifty years old. She described a front porch. A long, narrow three-story house with a one-car garage in back. She described a bow window and black shutters. She described maple trees in the front. She described a man living alone. The house could have been one of many in Aurelius, but the more she described it, the more particular it became.

“Can you give us the name of a street?” asked Donald Malloy.

“A famous explorer,” said Madame Respighi. “A ship.”

“Hudson Street,” said Sandra Petoski.

I should say that we also have streets named after De Soto, Cook, and Francis Drake.

More questions were asked, a street map was produced, and it was decided that Madame Respighi was talking about Irving Powell, who lived on Hudson Street and who had been the one to discover Chihani's body. By this time it was late Saturday morning.

“Do you see a dog?” asked Sandra Petoski, thinking of Powell's chocolate Lab, Sidney.

“No, I don't see a dog,” said Madame Respighi.

Donald Malloy wanted to go directly to Powell's house. But Sandra decided it would be better to call the police. She called and spoke to Ryan Tavich.

After she explained to Ryan what Madame Respighi had said, Ryan told her, “We can't search Powell's house without a search warrant and we can't get a warrant on the word of some crazy psychic. Come on, Sandra, use your head.”

Ryan was later criticized for his lack of tact. “From now on,” Captain Percy told him, “I talk to these people.”

Sandra told Malloy and the others how Ryan had responded.

“Then we'll go over there ourselves,” said Donald.

Irving Powell had worked in the city clerk's office for thirty years, and the elected clerk, Martha Schroeder, claimed that he ran the place. A widower with grown children, he lived by himself with his dog. He was a mild-mannered fellow in late middle age. He belonged to the Readers' Club at the library, a garden group, and also a chess club. As far as I know, he wasn't gay, which was a blessing.

Around noon Malloy, Sandra Petoski, and several others went to Powell's house and explained their business. Powell kept them out on the porch. In any case, the dog was barking inside. It took him about ten minutes to realize what they were talking about. He was a bony man with a slight stoop who favored cardigan sweaters and always leaned forward to listen.

He said, “You certainly may not search my house.”

Malloy and the others retreated to the sidewalk. If Powell was guilty, they felt he might destroy the evidence. Sandra said they needed more people, and Tom Simpson drove to the Friends' office for help. By twelve-thirty, fifty volunteers were milling around the house. When Powell looked out the window, he called the police, claiming that his house was under attack. Four police cars arrived within a few minutes and Captain Percy arrived shortly after that. He was not happy to see the Friends.

“Why didn't you call us?” asked Percy.

“We did,” said Donald. “We talked to Ryan Tavich. He wasn't interested.”

By now quite a crowd had gathered. Irving Powell stood on his front porch holding Sidney by the collar. It was unclear who was protecting whom. Franklin had arrived and was interviewing Sandra Petoski. “We felt we had no choice but to act,” she kept saying. Someone shouted at Powell, calling him “pervert.” At first this seemed a joke, but such was the tension in the crowd that it only took a moment to realize how serious people were. There was the hope that something would be found and Powell would be arrested, just to bring matters to a close. Consequently, a certain amount of gossip was circulated. Some suggested that Chihani had been alive when Powell found him and that Powell had finished him off. Many people were willing to think ill of Powell even though he had led, as far as I know, a blameless existence. But the fact that Powell seemed blameless meant nothing. Who knew what he did in the dark of the night when he was by himself?