Joyland (28 page)

“Was the show in town when the Sharp girl was killed in the movie theater?”

“Left the day before.” She tapped the bottom of the sheet. “All you have to do is look at the dates, Dev.”

I wasn’t as familiar with the timeline as she was, but I didn’t bother defending myself. “The third girl? Longbottom?”

“I didn’t find anything about a carny in the Santee area, and I sure wouldn’t have found anything about the Wellman show, because it went bust in the fall of 1964. I found that in
Outdoor Trade and Industry.
So far as I or any of my many librarian helpers could discover, it’s the only trade magazine that covers the carny and amusement park biz.”

“Jesus, Erin, you should forget photography and find yourself a rich writer or movie producer. Hire on as his research assistant.”

“I’d rather take pictures. Research is too much like work. But don’t lose the thread here, Devin. There was no carny in the Santee area, true, but the Eva Longbottom murder doesn’t look like the other four, anyway. Not to me. No rape in the others, remember?”

“That you know of. Newspapers are coy about that stuff.”

“That’s right, they say molested or sexually assaulted instead of raped, but they get the point across, believe me.”

“What about Darlene Shoemaker? Was there—”

“Stamnacher.
These girls were murdered, Dev, the least you can do is get their names right.”

“I will. Give me time.”

She put a hand over mine. “Sorry. I’m throwing this at you all at once, aren’t I? I’ve had weeks to brood over it.”

“Have you been?”

“Sort of. It’s pretty awful.”

She was right. If you read a whodunit or see a mystery movie, you can whistle gaily past whole heaps of corpses, only interested in finding out if it was the butler or the evil stepmother. But these had been real young women. Crows had probably ripped their flesh; maggots would have infested their eyes and squirmed up their noses and into the gray meat of their brains.

“Was there a carny in the Maxton area when the Stamnacher girl was killed?”

“No, but there was a county fair about to start in Lumberton—that’s the nearest town of any size. Here.”

She handed me another Xerox, this one advertising the Robeson County Summer Fair. Once again, Erin tapped the sheet. This time she was calling my attention to a line reading 50
SAFE
RIDES PROVIDED BY SOUTHERN STAR AMUSEMENTS. “I also looked Southern Star up in
Outdoor Trade and Industry.
The company’s been around since after World War II. They’re based in Birmingham and travel all over the south, putting up rides. Nothing so grand as the Thunderball or the Delirium Shaker, but they’ve got plenty of chump-shoots, and the jocks to run them.”

I had to grin at that. She hadn’t forgotten all the Talk, it seemed. Chump-shoots were rides that could be easily put up or taken down. If you’ve ever ridden the Krazy Kups or the Wild Mouse, you’ve been on on a chump-shoot.

“I called the ride-boss at Southern Star. Said I’d worked at Joyland this summer, and was doing a term paper on the amusement industry for my sociology class. Which I just might do, you know. After all this, it would be a slam-dunk. He told me what I’d already guessed, that there’s a big turnover in their line of work. He couldn’t tell me offhand if they’d picked anyone up from the Wellman show, but he said it was likely—a couple of roughies here, a couple of jocks there, maybe a ride-monkey or two. So the guy who killed DeeDee and Claudine could have been at that fair, and Darlene Stamnacher could have met him. The fair wasn’t officially open for business yet, but lots of townies gravitate to the local fairgrounds to watch the ride-monkeys and the local gazoonies do the setup.” She looked at me levelly. “And I think that’s just what happened.”

“Erin, is the carny link in the story the
News and Courier
published after Linda Gray was killed? Or maybe I should call it the amusement link.”

“Nope. Can I have another nip from your bottle? I’m cold.”

“We can go inside—”

“No, it’s this murder stuff that makes me cold. Every time I go over it.”

I gave her the bottle, and after she’d taken her nip, I took one of my own. “Maybe
you’re
Sherlock Holmes,” I said. “What about the cops? Do you think they missed it?”

“I don’t know for sure, but I think . . . they did. If this was a detective show on TV, there’d be one smart old cop—a Lieutenant Columbo type—who’d look at the big picture and put it together, but I guess there aren’t many guys like that in real life. Besides, the big picture is hard to see because it’s scattered across three states and eight years. One thing you can be sure of is that if he ever worked at Joyland, he’s long gone. I’m sure the turnover at an amusement park isn’t as fast as it is in a road company like Southern Star Amusements, but there are still plenty of people leaving and coming in.”

I knew that for myself. Ride-jocks and concession shouters aren’t exactly the most grounded people, and gazoonies went in and out like the tide.

“Now here’s the other thing that troubles me,” she said, and handed me her little pile of eight-by-ten photos. Printed on the white border at the bottom of each was PHOTO TAKEN BY YOUR JOYLAND “HOLLYWOOD GIRL.”

I shuffled through them, and felt in need of another nip when I realized what they were: the photos showing Linda Gray and the man who had killed her. “Jesus God, Erin, these aren’t newspaper pix. Where’d you get them?”

“Brenda Rafferty. I had to butter her up a little, tell her what a good mom she’d been to all us Hollywood Girls, but in the end she came through. These are fresh prints made from negatives she had in her personal files and loaned to me. Here’s something interesting, Dev. You see the headband the Gray girl’s wearing?”

“Yes.” An Alice band, Mrs. Shoplaw had called it. A
blue
Alice band.

“Brenda said they fuzzed that out in the shots they gave to the newspapers. They thought it would help them nail the guy, but it never did.”

“So what troubles you?”

God knew all of the pictures troubled me, even the ones where Gray and the man she was with were just passing in the background, only recognizable by her sleeveless blouse and Alice band and his baseball cap and dark glasses. In only two of them were Linda Gray and her killer sharp and clear. The first showed them at the Whirly Cups, his hand resting casually on the swell of Grays bottom. In the other—the best of the lot—they were at the Annie Oakley Shootin’ Gallery. Yet in neither was the man’s face really visible. I could have passed him on the street and not known him.

Erin plucked up the Whirly Cups photo. “Look at his hand.”

“Yeah, the tattoo. I see it, and I heard about it from Mrs. S. What do you make it to be? A hawk or an eagle?”

“I think an eagle, but it doesn’t matter.”

“Really?”

“Really. Remember I said I’d come back to Claudine Sharp? A young woman getting her throat cut in the local movie theater—during
Lawrence of Arabia,
no less—was big news in a little town like Rocky Mount. The
Telegram
ran with it for almost a month. The cops turned up exactly one lead, Dev. A girl Claudine went to high school with saw her at the snackbar and said hello. Claudine said hi right back. The girl said there was a man in sunglasses and a baseball cap next to her, but she never thought the guy was with Claudine, because he was a lot older. The only reason she noticed him at all was because he was wearing sunglasses in a movieshow . . . and because he had a tattoo on his hand.”

“The bird.”

“No, Dev. It was a Coptic cross. Like this.” She took out another Xerox sheet and showed me. “She told the cops she thought at first it was some kind of Nazi symbol.”

I looked at the cross. It was elegant, but looked nothing at all like a bird. “Two tats, one on each hand,” I said at last. “The bird on one, the cross on the other.”

She shook her head and gave me the Whirly Cups photo again. “Which hand’s got the bird on it?”

He was standing on Linda Gray’s left, encircling her waist. The hand resting on her bottom . . .

“The right.”

“Yes. But the girl who saw him in the movie theater said the
cross
was on his right.”

I considered this. “She made a mistake, that’s all. Witnesses do it all the time.”

“Sure they do. My father could talk all day on that subject. But look, Dev.”

Erin handed me the Shootin’ Gallery photo, the best of the bunch because they weren’t just passing in the background. A roving Hollywood Girl had seen them, noted the cute pose, and snapped them, hoping for a sale. Only the guy had given her the brushoff. A
hard
brushoff, according to Mrs. Shoplaw. That made me remember how she had described the photo:
Him snuggled up to her hip to hip, showing her how to hold the rifle, the way guys always do.
The version Mrs. S. saw would have been a fuzzy newspaper reproduction, made up of little dots. This was the original, so sharp and clear I almost felt I could step into it and warn the Gray girl. He
was
snuggled up to her, his hand over hers on the barrel of the beebee-shooting .22, helping her aim.

It was his
left
hand. And there was no tattoo on it.

Erin said, “You see it, don’t you?”

“There’s nothing to see.”

“That’s the point, Dev. That’s exactly the point.”

“Are you saying that it was two different guys? That one with a cross on his hand killed Claudine Sharp and
another
one—a guy with a bird on his hand—killed Linda Gray? That doesn’t seem very likely.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I thought I saw something in one of the photos, but I wasn’t sure, so I took the print and the negative to a grad student named Phil Hendron. He’s a darkroom genius, practically lives in the Bard Photography Department. You know those clunky Speed Graphics we carried?”

“Sure.”

“They were mostly for effect—cute girls toting old-fashioned cameras—but Phil says they’re actually pretty terrific. You can do a lot with the negs. For example . . .”

She handed me a blow-up of the Whirly Cups pic. The Hollywood Girl’s target had been a young couple with a toddler between them, but in this enlarged version they were hardly there. Now Linda Gray and her murderous date were at the center of the image.

“Look at his hand, Dev. Look at the tattoo!”

I did, frowning. “It’s a little hard to see,” I complained. “The hand’s blurrier than the rest.”

“I don’t think so.”

This time I held the photo close to my eyes. “It’s . . . Jesus, Erin. Is it the ink? Is it running? Just a little?”

She gave me a triumphant smile. “July of 1969. A hot night in Dixie. Almost everybody was sweating buckets. If you don’t believe me, look at some of the other pictures and note the perspiration rings. Plus, he had something else to be sweaty about, didn’t he? He had murder on his mind. An audacious one, at that.”

I said, “Oh, shit. Pirate Pete’s.”

She pointed a forefinger at me. “Bingo.”

Pirate Pete’s was the souvenir shop outside the Splash & Crash, proudly flying a Jolly Roger from its roof. Inside you could get the usual stuff—tee-shirts, coffee mugs, beach towels, even a pair of swim-trunks if your kid forgot his, everything imprinted with the Joyland logo. There was also a counter where you could get a wide assortment of fake tattoos. They came on decals. If you didn’t feel capable of applying it yourself, Pirate Pete (or one of his greenie minions) would do it for a small surcharge.

Erin was nodding. “I doubt he got it there—that would have been dumb, and this guy isn’t dumb—but I’m sure it’s not a real tattoo, any more than the Coptic cross the girl saw in that Rocky Mount movie theater was a real tattoo.” She leaned forward and gripped my arm. “You know what I think? I think he does it because it draws attention. People notice the tattoo and everything else just . . .” She tapped the indistinct shapes that had been the actual subject of this photo before her friend at Bard blew it up.

I said, “Everything else about him fades into the background.”

“Yup. Later he just washes it off.”

“Do the cops know?”

“I have no idea. You could tell them—not me, I’m going back to school—but I’m not sure they’d care at this late date.”

I shuffled through the photos again. I had no doubt that Erin had actually discovered something, although I
did
doubt it would, by itself, be responsible for the capture of the Funhouse Killer. But there was something else about the photos.
Something.
You know how sometimes a word gets stuck on the tip of your tongue and just won’t come off? It was like that.

“Have there been any murders like these five—or these four, if we leave out Eva Longbottom—since Linda Gray? Did you check?”

“I tried,” she said. “The short answer is I don’t think so, but I can’t say for sure. I’ve read about fifty murders of young girls and women—fifty at least—and haven’t found any that fit the parameters.” She ticked them off. “Always in summer. Always as a result of a dating situation with an unknown older man. Always the cut throat. And always with some sort of carny connec—”

“Hello, kids.”

We looked up, startled. It was Fred Dean. Today he was wearing a golfing shirt, bright red baggies, and a long-billed cap with HEAVEN’S BAY COUNTRY CLUB stitched in gold thread above the brim. I was a lot more used to seeing him in a suit, where informality consisted of pulling down his tie and popping the top button of his Van Heusen shirt. Dressed for the links, he looked absurdly young. Except for the graying wings of hair at his temples, that was.

“Hello, Mr. Dean,” Erin said, standing up. Most of her paperwork—and some of the photographs—were still clutched in one hand. The folder was in the other. “I don’t know if you remember me—”

“Of course I do,” he said, approaching. “I never forget a Hollywood Girl, but sometimes I
do
mix up the names. Are you Ashley or Jerri?”

She smiled, put her paperwork back in the folder, and handed it to me. I added the photos I was still holding. “I’m Erin.”

“Of course. Erin Cook.” He dropped me a wink, which was even weirder than seeing him in old-fashioned golfing baggies. “You have excellent taste in young ladies, Jonesy.”