Murder Among the Angels (13 page)

“Place of employment?” asked Jerry, who was making notes.

“She wasn’t employed,” he said.

Jerry looked up at him. “How’d she pay the rent if she wasn’t employed?”

“She didn’t pay the rent. It was paid for her.”

“By whom?” Jerry asked.

“Dr. Victor Louria,” he said. He held up the file folder for them to see. The tab was labeled “Dr. Louria.”

“He rented the apartment; he even filled out the rental application, for that matter. Hey,” he said, clapping a palm to his broad chest, “who am I to ask questions?”

“You figured he’d be good for the rent,” Jerry said.

“You’re darned right I did,” Peter said. “He’s probably got an annual income of a million dollars.”

“Do you have any idea why he rented the apartment for her?”

Charlotte wondered too. Why wouldn’t he have put her up at Archfield Hall? Then she answered her own question: he would have wanted to keep her a secret, and if he’d put her up at his house, people would have seen her coming and going, and become curious.

Peter shook his head. “As I said, I didn’t ask any questions. Why do you want to know, anyway?”

“She’s been missing since a week ago last Monday,” Jerry replied. “She probably went on a trip, but we thought we’d check it out.”

Peter nodded.

“You wouldn’t happen to know if she had any friends or relatives in this area, would you?”

Peter shook his head. “I have fourteen properties in Corinth,” he said. “I can’t keep track of the personal lives of all of my tenants.”

“Fourteen!” said Jerry.

“Yeah,” he replied. “I bought the first one eight years ago. Fixed it up and rented it. I’m pretty handy,” he said, “despite this.” He looked down at his empty sleeve. “Then I bought another, and another …”

“A one-man gentrification movement,” Charlotte commented.

“I guess you could say that,” he said.

“Has Dr. Louria ever rented any other apartments from you?” Jerry asked as they were getting up to leave.

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” he said.

Jerry’s head swiveled sharply around, his throwaway question having yielded an unexpected payoff.

“He had two other girls in another one of my apartments; it’s on Hudson Street, down by the river.”

“Names?” Jerry shot out the question.

“I don’t remember,” he said. He leafed through the file folder in his lap. “Here it is,” he said. “The first one was Kimberly Ferguson.” He gave an address on upper Broadway, near Columbia. “She moved in last May.”

“When did she move out?” Jerry asked.

“She never did move out. She just took off. I still have her stuff stored in the attic over there. The furniture stayed for the next tenant; it was all Dr. Louria’s. He had furnished the apartment for her.”

“When did she take off, then?” Jerry asked.

“Early September,” he said.

Which was when the skull of the first victim was found, Charlotte thought.

“The second one was Liliana Doyle. Born October 12, 1966, which would have made her twenty-six. She moved in late last September.”

“After Kimberly had disappeared,” Jerry said.

He nodded.

“Last address?”

“Let’s see,” he said, studying the form. He pushed his long blond hair out of his face with his one hand. “Here it is. In the city, again. In the East Village.” He gave an address on East Fourth Street.

“What happened to her?” Jerry asked.

“Same thing,” he said. “She up and left. At the beginning of last month.”

“Didn’t you think it unusual that three young women occupying apartments rented on their behalf by Dr. Louria disappeared?” Jerry looked over at Peter, awaiting his explanation.

He shrugged. “Now I see that it’s unusual, yes. But I was only aware of two. I didn’t know about this last one until just now. To tell you the truth, I didn’t think much about it. It happens all the time.”

“It does?” Jerry said.

“Yeah,” he said. “You’d be surprised. People just take off. Especially these young women. They meet a guy, and—poof!—they’re gone. In this case, the furniture didn’t even belong to them, anyway. I’m not dealing with the most stable class of people.”

“Did Liliana take her personal belongings?”

Peter shook his head. “They’re in the attic of the house on Hudson Street with the first one’s stuff.”

“We’ll probably want to take a look,” Jerry said. “Would you be able to let us in there sometime?”

“Sure,” he said. Reaching into one of the pockets in his leather apron, he pulled out a business card and passed it to Jerry. “This is my number here. If you can’t reach me here, you can try my beeper number. I’m always out and about fixing toilets and the like.”

Jerry stood to leave. “Thanks,” he said, holding out his hand. “You’ve been an enormous help.”

“Anything I can do,” Peter said.

They had written Dr. Louria off as a suspect because of his reaction at seeing the skulls, but maybe they had done so prematurely, Charlotte thought as they drove back down the hill. She was reconsidering Jerry’s theory that Dr. Louria had created the young women in his dead wife’s image, and then killed them out of a need to exert the control over his dead wife that had eluded him when she was alive. The fact that he had set them up in Peter’s apartments as if they were kept women would seem to point to such a need. It struck her as unlikely that a man with such a solid public persona would harbor a homicidal obsession, but then she remembered what he had said about being forced to keep his “bad little ear” a secret until he was eight years old. To a person schooled in secrecy as he must have been, the ability to conceal such an obsession didn’t seem so farfetched. It was quite possible that he went through life wearing an invisible mask that concealed his dark side as thoroughly as the iron mask he displayed in his office had concealed the face of the French nobleman who had worn it for so many years.

Charlotte wondered what to do about her own surgery. She was supposed to let him know by next week if she wanted to go ahead with it, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to sign on with a surgeon who might be a homicidal maniac.

They had reached the bottom of the hill before either of them spoke. “What do you think?” Charlotte asked as they pulled out onto the highway.

“I think we’re in business,” said Jerry. “We know who the victims are. At least, I think we know who they are. That’s half the battle …” He was interrupted by the crackle of the police radio.

“I’ve got the registration on that Honda,” the dispatcher said. “It’s registered to Dr. Louria. The plastic surgeon on River Road.”

Charlotte and Jerry exchanged looks.

“There’s something else too, Chief,” she said. “We just got a call from the Corinth P.D. They’ve got a thirty-seven at the municipal park at the foot of Hudson Street. It’s in the water,” she added.

“Shit!” Jerry muttered. Then he picked up the microphone and spoke to the dispatcher: “Tell them I’ll be right over.” He thanked her and returned the microphone to its cradle with an angry thunk.

“What’s a thirty-seven?” Charlotte asked.

“A dead body,” he said.

A few minutes later, they turned off the Albany Post Road onto Hudson Street, a road that pitched steeply down to the shore of the river. The river’s mood had changed once again. A stiff breeze had come up at the close of the day, and the surface of the water, which had been so placid only a few hours before, was now choppy again. Sea gulls wheeled and dove for their dinner against a sky that was tinted orange by the setting sun. The water, which had looked blue-gray earlier in the day, now looked emerald-green against the diminishing light of the sky. At the foot of the road, a small postage-stamp shaped park jutted out into the water. Half a dozen police cars were parked at the base of the footbridge that led over the railroad tracks to the park, and policemen were strung out along the shore of the park like fishermen at the edge of a trout stream on the opening day of fishing season.

As they parked, one of the policemen drew away from the cluster gathered around the police cars and came over to speak to them. He was dressed in plain clothes. Jerry introduced him as his captain, Harry Crosby.

He was a tall man with stooped shoulders, a big belly, and a long, lugubrious-looking face that was heavily lined.

“I hear we’ve got another body,” Jerry said.

“Not a body,” Captain Crosby said. “An arm bone.” He turned to nod at a group of picnic tables under a small grove of willows whose branches were just beginning to bud. “A young couple spotted it while they were having a picnic.”

Charlotte grimaced at the thought.

“Any other body parts?” Jerry asked.

“That’s what we’re looking for,” Crosby said, nodding at the policemen who were spread out along the shore. “The county guys came right over.”

As he spoke, one of the policemen who was searching the shoreline at the far side of the park let out a shout. “I’ve found something,” he yelled, signaling for the others to join him.

A few minutes later, Charlotte and Jerry were heading toward the policemen who had gathered at the water’s edge.

“Are you sure you want to see this?” Jerry asked.

Charlotte nodded.

The latest find was floating between the rotted pilings in the water and the algae-coated boulders that buttressed the shore. It was a woman’s foot, neatly severed at the ankle. A size eight, Charlotte guessed.

The little group stood staring at the foot, which rocked gently in its watery pen on waves driven inland by the stiff breeze. No one spoke: it was as if they were mesmerized by its perfection.

There were no corns or calluses, no twisted toes or bunions. Only a dead-white foot, its toenails perfectly painted with red polish.

Charlotte couldn’t get the image of the foot, with its perfect pedicure, out of her head. She thought about it all the way back to New York, all the way through her dinner at her favorite neighborhood bistro, and, afterwards, as she sat in an armchair in the living room of her town house in Turtle Bay. Like the twisted nose on the woman she had met at the Hollywood party, the dismembered foot seemed to symbolize a quest for physical perfection that had gone awry, in this case horribly awry. Doreen Mileski, like Kimberly Ferguson and Liliana Doyle before her, had sought out cosmetic surgery to improve her appearance, and had lost her life as a result. Who were these young women who had been willing to undergo operation after operation in order to look more beautiful? Presumably, Dr. Louria had operated on them free of charge, paying their rent and probably their other living expenses as well. Maybe he had even paid them a salary. If so, it meant that they must have been young women in need of money, who didn’t have educations, or good jobs, or middle-class parents holding out a financial safety net. Were they prostitutes, perhaps? she asked herself, and then dismissed that idea on the basis that they wouldn’t offer pristine enough working material for Dr. Louria. Runaways from the Midwest? But how would Dr. Louria have established contact with them? Then she thought of a possible answer to her question: aspiring actresses.

Aspiring actresses would fit all the requirements. With the exception of models, there were probably few categories of young women who were more concerned about their looks. They were also accustomed to a transient way of life, and were always in need of money. The addresses confirmed that: Morningside Heights, the East Village. They were the kinds of neighborhoods where young aspirants to the stage might share a low-rent apartment. Also, their acting talents would come in useful, if, as they suspected, Dr. Louria’s ultimate intention was to have them take over the role of his dead wife. And there would be a large pool to draw from. New York was a mecca for aspiring actresses. How would he have recruited them? she wondered. Then she thought of the answer: an ad in
Backstage
, the periodical that was the equivalent of the daily newspaper for every young aspiring actress, or maybe
Variety
, which served a similar purpose.

Though Charlotte didn’t subscribe to
Backstage
, which was virtually all casting calls, she did get
Variety
. She liked to keep up with what was opening, what was closing, who was making what movie. Getting up, she went into her library, where her housekeeper, Julie, stored the old issues, presumably because she was saving them for recycling, though they seemed to accumulate until they were eventually thrown away. A three-foot stack stood behind one of the chairs in the corner. Where should she start? she asked herself.

She had no idea how long the process of facial reconstruction took: how many operations were needed, how far apart the operations could be spaced. So she took a wild guess—half a dozen operations, spaced a month apart. Presuming that Dr. Louria wouldn’t have killed the most recent victim, Doreen Mileski, before her course of surgery was completed, she counted back six months, which brought her to November. Which sounded about right: Peter had said that Doreen had moved in in November. Searching through the stack of back issues, she located the October issues near the bottom—thank God they hadn’t been thrown out already—and pulled them out. Taking a seat, she started leafing through them one by one. But a review of the month of October turned up nothing. Going back to the stack behind the chair, she pulled out the September issues.

She found it in the issue for the second week of September. It was in the “Health and Fitness” column of the classified section:

COSMETIC SURGERY—FREE
!

Seeking to improve your appearance? Highly respected board-certified plastic surgeon seeks young women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty to serve as models for the demonstration of new techniques of facial reconstruction. Must be five foot six inches tall, and of normal weight. Safe, effective. Excellent results.

The ad didn’t say that the recruits would serve as experimental subjects, Charlotte noted, but rather as “models”: a term that was guaranteed to appeal to those with image problems. It was a new twist on the old ruse of offering modeling assignments or posing as a talent scout in order to lure young women to a particular location for nefarious purposes. The ad gave a telephone number with a Westchester area code. Going over to her telephone, Charlotte dialed the number, and received a recorded message saying that the number was no longer in service. Then she called the operator and asked what town the exchange was for.