Murder Among the Angels (10 page)

Like the design of the house, the furnishings showed an unusual aesthetic sensibility. The furniture was dark and heavy, and medieval in character. Above the fireplace hung a tapestry of a woman, a woman with a jutting jaw, dreamy green eyes, and long, flowing red hair.

There was that face again
, Charlotte thought as they sat down on a couch facing the fireplace.

Miss Archibald had taken a seat in a Gothic-style armchair. “The cookies are actually for the pastor’s reception,” she said. “He always has a little sherry reception before the concert for people who are especially active in the church. I’m the bell ringer,” she added proudly.

Charlotte remembered what Dr. Louria had said about the entire family being musically gifted.

Miss Archibald turned to Jerry. “Do you know the pastor?”

“I’ve met him,” he said.

“He used to be Lily and Sebastian’s teacher at the Zion Hill School. I think he’s the best pastor we’ve ever had. He delivers the most intelligent sermons, and he never even uses notes.” Having satisfied the social requirement for small talk, she then asked: “What can I do for you, Chief D’Angelo?”

“I have a question to ask about your niece.”

“Anything I can do to help,” she replied, snapping to attention.

“My question is this: did your niece ever have any cosmetic surgery? Perhaps because she was married to a plastic surgeon, he might have had occasion to improve upon her appearance.”

“There was no need to improve upon her appearance,” she said huffily. “She was a beautiful girl.”

“Yes, she was,” Jerry agreed. “Then she never had any plastic surgery?”

She shook her head. “Why do you ask?”

“I have an apology to make,” Jerry said.

Miss Archibald looked at him expectantly.

“Frankly, I thought when you told me that you’d seen your niece that you were imagining things,” he said. “It’s not unusual for someone who’s lost a loved one to imagine that they’ve seen them.”

The expression on Miss Archibald’s face changed from one of polite hospitality to one of avid interest.

Jerry raised a hand. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry to say that the young woman you saw is not your niece. At least, we don’t believe she’s your niece. But we
do
think you saw a young woman who looks very much like her. In fact, we think you may have seen three different young women who look very much like her.”

She looked confused. “Just like her?” she repeated.

Jerry went on to explain about the skulls that had been found in the cemeteries, and about the facial reconstructions that had borne a striking resemblance to her dead niece. For the moment, he left out the part about the body parts that had been found in the river.

She threw up her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ve lost me.”

Jerry explained: “Both of the skulls we found bore evidence of cosmetic surgery. If your niece never had cosmetic surgery, that means that neither skull belongs to her. We think the skulls belong to young women whose faces were remodeled by a plastic surgeon to look like hers.”

“But why?” she asked. Then she said softly: “Victor Louria.”

He nodded. “Exactly,” he said.

“Actually, I’m relieved,” she said. “I was beginning to think I was losing my mind. But then, who would have killed them?”

“Perhaps your niece’s husband. He’s the most obvious suspect, anyway.”

She stared at him, wide-eyed. “But … why?” she repeated.

“One theory is that he killed the ones who weren’t perfect reproductions of your niece. Another is that murdering these young women was a way of exerting control over your niece. A need for control is often a motive for men who murder women, particularly if they’ve been rejected.”

Charlotte hadn’t thought of the latter explanation: murder as the ultimate form of control. But it made sense—more sense than the killing-the-ones-who-don’t-measure-up theory.

“That’s why we’re here,” Jerry continued. “We were wondering if you could tell us a little bit about their relationship.”

“Where do I begin?” she asked.

“You could start by telling us how they met,” Jerry replied. He took a notepad out of his breast pocket and flipped it open.

She shook her head. “Victor,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

“You don’t have to believe it, Miss Archibald. It’s just a theory—the first one we’ve managed to come up with. By the way, we would appreciate your not discussing this with anyone else.”

“I understand,” she said. “They met the summer after Lily graduated from college. At the restaurant—Sebastian had just opened it the month before. Lily was working there as a waitress. She was planning to go to Europe in the fall, and it was a way of occupying her time until then.”

“That would have been 1985, then,” Jerry said.

“Yes,” she said. “Late June, maybe July. They were married two years later. When he and Lily met, he had just purchased Archfield Hall, which, as you know, was built by my father.”

Jerry nodded.

“I grew up there, as did Lily’s mother. In fact”—she waved an arm at her surroundings—“most of the things in this room came from there. We had to sell it to pay the inheritance taxes. The price of riverfront property had climbed so high that none of the children could afford to buy it.”

Charlotte nodded at the tapestry that hung over the fireplace. “I notice that the figure in the tapestry bears a strong resemblance to the statue of the angel we saw at Omega Studios,” she said. “Was Lily’s mother the model for the woman in the tapestry too?”

Miss Archibald nodded, and turned to look at the tapestry. “That used to hang in the dining room at Archfield Hall. Lily’s mother was the favorite model of the craftsmen that my father imported from Europe to work in Zion Hill. Her face had that transcendent quality that was in fashion at the time.”

“Angelic,” said Charlotte.

“Yes,” she said. “She
was
an angel too. But her daughter …” She shook her head, and smiled. “Her daughter was something else again.”

“How old was she when her parents died?” Jerry asked.

“Four. She had red hair and the temper to go with it. She would scream for hours to get what she wanted. Everyone always said that she looked like a little angel—they were thinking of her mother, you see—but I knew better. I loved her, but she could try my patience to the breaking point.”

“Did her behavior improve as she got older?” Jerry asked. “Kids do have a way of growing up.”

“She only got more sophisticated in the ways in which she manipulated people,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong. I loved her very much. She had enormous charm. Everyone loved her—especially men. From the time she was a baby, she could wrap any man around her finger, starting with her brother.”

“But she was difficult,” Jerry said.

Miss Archibald nodded.

“I have a daughter who’s like that myself,” Jerry said. “Only one out of four, thank God. I assume, then,” he went on, “that she had Dr. Louria wrapped around her finger as well.”

“Yes. Lapping at her feet would be a better way of putting it. The way she treated him was abominable. It seemed as if the more abominably she treated him, the more he liked it. The things she said to him …”

“Did she love him?”

She shook her head. “I doubt it.”

“Then why did she marry him?”

“I’m not a psychologist,” she said simply.

“But you must have a theory,” Jerry prompted.

She nodded. “Two theories, in fact.” She thought for a moment. “Actually, three. The first is the simplest: that she married him for his money. Lily was a creature of luxury. Not that she liked
things
—she wasn’t a material girl. She’d wear the same pair of jeans all week long, but she liked excitement.”

“She liked the high life,” Jerry said.

“Yes. Victor has friends in influential places. She liked the balls at Buckingham Palace, the hiking treks in Nepal, the weekends at the French baron’s country estate in Burgundy. But, as I said, she could have charmed any number of rich men into marrying her …”

“Why him, you mean?” asked Jerry.

“Yes. Which brings me to theory number two. Which is that by marrying him she could reclaim her ancestral home. Have you ever been in Archfield Hall?”

Jerry shook his head.

“Magnificent is the only word for it. My father lavished his fortune on two things: his home, and the church. No expense was spared. When we realized we couldn’t keep it in the family, we tried at least to keep it in the community. We wanted to make it into a community museum.”

“I understand that you couldn’t raise the money,” Jerry said.

Miss Archibald nodded. “We had just raised seven million dollars for a new Swedenborgian library. To have asked the town for money for a museum on top of that would have been too much. It broke our hearts to have to sell it to an outsider, but …” She shrugged. “Life goes on, doesn’t it?”

Jerry nodded. “Yes, it does,” he agreed. Then he continued: “So your niece liked the idea of being the princess of her grandfather’s castle.”

Miss Archibald nodded. “That was part of it. But she also had dreams of restoring it to the community. She had talked about setting up a foundation in their wills to fund a museum.”

“And what did Dr. Louria think of this?”

“He would have done anything she asked him to do.”

“And theory number three?”

Miss Archibald nodded. “Theory number three isn’t so much a theory as it is a fact. I don’t know if you know that Victor has a condition called microtia.”

“What’s that?”

“He was born without an ear. He was drawn to a career in plastic surgery because he had his ear reconstructed as a child. Anyway, my theory is that he was attracted to Lily’s beauty—to her physical perfection, if you will—because of his own physical deformity.”

“Beauty and the beast,” said Jerry.

She nodded. “He’s the first to admit that he loved her because of her beauty. He certainly didn’t love her because of how kind she was to him. She, in turn, thrived on that feeling of power that came from being able to manipulate him. He was insanely jealous.”

Though it was common enough, Charlotte always found it hard to understand men who could be in total control of every aspect of their professional lives but allow their personal lives to be dominated by women.

“She loved to test his limits,” Miss Archibald continued. “It was a game for her to see just how much she could provoke him, especially by flirting with other men.” She shook her head. “To call it an unhealthy relationship would be an understatement, to say the least.”

“Then it fits the picture that he could be so obsessed with her that he would remodel the faces of young women to look like her,” Jerry said.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “It does.”

“And murdering them …”

“He’s a very kind and generous man,” she said. “He operates for free through the World Health Organization on children from around the world who are born with no ears.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Jerry said.

She paused for a moment to think. “If it’s true that he was creating these clones of Lily because he was obsessed by her memory, and if it’s true that murder is a means of exerting control over what you can’t have …”

Jerry nodded.

“Then, yes. I think he would have felt a need to control her.”

Charlotte had called Dr. Louria’s office from Sebastian’s and been told by his secretary that she could stop by any time that afternoon. They were in luck that it was a Friday: Dr. Louria had left his New York office to return to Zion Hill at midday. Jerry wasn’t planning to confront him now—only to present him with the skulls, and ask his opinion. Surely the doctor would expect to be consulted on a murder in his community that involved cosmetic surgery. As they headed back toward Archfield Hall, Charlotte found herself again considering Dr. Louria as a murder suspect. The fact that the skulls had been left in cemeteries, especially cemeteries in his own community, was the most puzzling aspect of the case. Why wouldn’t he have just chucked the skulls into the river with the other body parts? Then she answered her own question: because the skull was what he had made, and what he had fallen in love with. By killing it, he had possessed it. But then, what to do with the material evidence of this possession? She considered the other possibilities. Toss it into the river with the other body parts to decompose? Bury it in an unmarked grave? Consign it to the city dump? None of these options would have been acceptable to a man who had created perfection. But to reduce it to its purest essence, to cleanse it of its last remnant of earthly flesh, and then to bleach it white; to exalt it by placing it on a pedestal, just as Pygmalion had placed his Galatea on a pedestal for all men to see what a perfect woman he had created?
That
made sense. She was reminded of the bouquets of lilies of the valley that the murderer had placed at the foot of the headstones: put her on a pedestal and bring her gifts. Had he caressed her too, as Pygmalion had caressed his creation? Had he kissed her fleshless lips? She shuddered at the thought.

A few minutes later they were walking down the path to Dr. Louria’s office in the old music studio at Archfield Hall, where Lily’s mother had played with her family, and her aunt Lothian as well.

This time there were two other patients in the waiting room: the young woman, Melinda, whom Charlotte had met before, and whose nose bandage had now been removed, though her face was still blotchy from the surgery, and an older woman, who also appeared to recently have had a nose job.

With a start, Charlotte recognized the older woman as a comedienne who was a frequent guest—and a sometime substitute host—on one of the popular late night television talk shows. They nodded at one another in mutual recognition. Then the door opened, and Dr. Louria invited Charlotte in.

Charlotte followed him into the inner office, with Jerry right behind her. Once Jerry had closed the door, Charlotte introduced him to Dr. Louria.

“I’m afraid I’m taking advantage of my connection with you to help Chief D’Angelo, who’s an old friend of mine, on some police matters,” she told the doctor. “He’d like to ask you some questions on technical matters pertaining to cosmetic surgery. Would you mind?”