Murder Among the Angels (14 page)

“Zion Hill,” was the operator’s reply.

Next she called Jerry. As she suspected, he was still at the office. “Do you have one of those telephone books in which you can look up a telephone number and find the address of the person it belongs to?”

“A reverse directory,” he said. “I have one for Westchester County. What’s this about, anyway?”

“Westchester County’s what I need. I’ll tell you what it’s about when you find the number.” She gave him the number, and waited. She could hear the sound of the pages being flipped.

“Here it is,” he said finally. And then: “The address is a residence at 300 River Road, Zion Hill.”

“Archfield Hall,” she said.

7

Charlotte had been right: all three young women had been aspiring actresses working marginal jobs—two as waitresses, the third as a part-time salesclerk in a SoHo boutique—while waiting for the big break. Jerry had spent the next two days tracking them down. He had also sifted through their belongings, which, as Peter had predicted, didn’t amount to much. One had originally been from Arkansas, one from Florida, and one from Detroit. All three had been five feet six inches tall, with blue or blue-gray eyes. Two had been blondes, and one a brunette. The first two victims, Kimberly Ferguson and Liliana Doyle, had been matched through their dental records to the skulls that had been found in the cemeteries; the third victim, Doreen Mileski, had been identified through X-ray records of an arm broken in an ice-skating accident, which matched X-rays of the forearm that had washed up in Corinth. No skull had yet been found for Doreen Mileski, though the county police had instituted round-the-clock surveillance at local cemeteries in anticipation that the killer would leave his latest victim’s skull on a gravestone, as he had the skulls of his first two victims. Friends and associates of all three victims had been questioned. A former roommate of Doreen Mileski’s remembered Doreen talking about her intention to answer Dr. Louria’s ad. She had taken off not long afterward, and they hadn’t heard anything more from her. In the transient world of the city’s aspiring actresses, roommates were always coming and going. Nor had the suspicions of the families of the victims been aroused when they didn’t hear from their daughters; in all three cases, communication had been intermittent at best, and relations between the girls and their families—or rather, their mothers, since in all three cases, the fathers were absent—had not been good. Perhaps weak family relations was one reason Dr. Louria had chosen these women over the other respondents to his ad. In addition, of course, to a basic resemblance to his dead wife.

In any case, the time had come to confront Dr. Louria.

Charlotte and Jerry arrived at Archfield Hall at ten the next morning, after having called first to make sure that Dr. Louria would be in. Though Charlotte had now visited Dr. Louria at his office in the former music studio on two occasions, this would be her first visit to Archfield Hall, and she was eager to see the inside of the fabled former residence of the founder of Zion Hill. After pulling into the circular driveway, which surrounded a pool with a fountain in the shape of a medieval gryphon, they parked the car, and mounted the stone steps to the front door, which was covered by a columned portico. If the front door was any indication, Archfield Hall was indeed the architectural masterpiece that Lothian Archibald had described. The double door was crowned by an arch on which was carved a series of ten sheep: a ram and a ewe with their heads intertwined, and four lambs on either side. The names Edward and Ruth were inscribed above the ram and the ewe, and the names of the Archibald children, including Lillian and Lothian, above each of the lambs. The door, which stood ten feet high, was made of glass set in a frame of ornamental metal in the form of a soaring tree. The monel handles were wrought in the shape of birds, whose heads had turned a silvery white from the touch of human hands.

The door was answered by a short, sweet-faced Hispanic housekeeper, who admitted them into an entrance foyer with a richly paneled ceiling. The walls were sheathed in glittering mosaics dotted with medallions illustrating scenes from the Bible. But the entrance hall was nothing compared to the Great Hall into which the housekeeper then led them. It was a huge room, baronial in scale, with a vaulted ceiling and a fireplace on the river wall that was big enough to stand up in. A second-story balcony made of the same beautiful hand-carved wood that paneled the entrance foyer ran around the other three walls. The furniture was in the heavy Gothic style—suitable for your typical Westchester castle—and the stone floor was covered with exquisite Oriental carpets.

But the feature of the room that captured Charlotte’s attention was the magnificent mosaic above the fireplace. It depicted a heavenly chorus of angels surrounding a central angel with a familiar face. It was a face with wide green eyes, a jutting jaw, and long, flowing red hair. It was the face of the marble angel in Jack Lister’s gallery, and of the tapestry angel in Lothian Archibald’s living room. It was the face of Lillian Archibald, and of her dead daughter, Lily Louria.

Leaving them at the door to the Great Hall, the housekeeper excused herself to summon the doctor, who appeared momentarily. He was casually dressed in a dark-patterned sports shirt and gray flannel slacks.

“What a majestic room!” Charlotte said as the doctor showed them to a cluster of furniture by a floor-to-ceiling window with a view of the river.

“Majestic, but comfortable at the same time, which is what I like about it,” the doctor said. “Edward Archibald built it to be the center of family life for the Archibald family.”

He indicated that Charlotte and Jerry should be seated in an oversized couch upholstered in a tapestry fabric, and then he sat down in a navy blue Queen Anne-style wing chair.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” he asked, which reminded Charlotte of the delicious Brazilian coffee he had served at his office.

Much to Charlotte’s disappointment, Jerry declined the doctor’s offer, and Dr. Louria dismissed the hovering housekeeper with a nod of his head.

“I think you know why we’re here,” Jerry said. He nodded at Charlotte, who reached into her tote bag for the copy of
Variety
she had brought along. She set it on the coffee table. The ad was circled in red.

The doctor nodded resignedly.

It struck Charlotte that he didn’t look nervous, only exhausted: as if he had been through a long ordeal that was finally coming to an end.

“We know that you placed this ad,” said Jerry. “We also know that you set up the young women who responded to this ad and the others like it in apartments in Corinth, and we know that you operated on them.” Reaching into his briefcase, Jerry pulled out a clasp envelope and withdrew four five-by-seven color prints. “These are photographs of the soft tissue reconstructions that were made from the skulls that we showed you the other day. They were done by a local forensic sculptor named Jack Lister. You’ve probably heard of him.”

The doctor nodded in recognition of the name.

“He did two facial reconstructions for each skull. The first represents what he thought the victims looked like before their cosmetic surgery, and the second represents what he thought they looked like after their cosmetic surgery.” He spread the photos out on the coffee table next to the copy of
Variety
: the two “befores” on one side, and the two “afters” on the other. “And this”—he reached into his briefcase again and pulled out another envelope—“is a photograph of your late wife, which was given to us by her aunt.” He removed the photograph and set it down above the two “after” photographs. “What these photographs tell us is that you were trying to recreate the face of your late wife,” Jerry said. He studied the photographs for a moment, and then looked back at Dr. Louria. “Would you like to explain?” he asked.

The doctor sat with his head down and his hands clasped between his knees. For a moment he was silent, and then he spoke: “When I first saw Lily, it was as if I’d been hit over the head with a two-by-four. I’d never had that feeling before. Suddenly I knew what the lyrics meant in the love songs: walking on air, head over heels. Before that, I’d always thought they made them up. I didn’t know you could feel that way. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep.”

Jerry nodded solicitously. He was a good listener.

“Despite my profession, I had always felt intimidated by beautiful women. It was because of this.” He touched a hand to his artificial ear. “I always thought that women would be revolted, as in fact they had been in the past. But I was determined to have Lily. She was the ideal of feminine beauty that I had been seeking for years to create in my patients. I pursued her with a vengeance. I sent her flowers. I wrote her love letters. I bought her jewelry. I thought that if I could possess someone as beautiful as Lily, it would be a refutation of this.” He touched his hand to his ear again. “I was amazed when she didn’t reject me, and even more amazed when, in time, she consented to marry me. I knew that she didn’t love me, that she wanted to marry me for all this”—he glanced around the room—“but I don’t think I’m flattering myself if I say that I think she had some regard for me.

“Anyway, the fact that she didn’t return my love didn’t matter to me. I possessed the most beautiful woman in the world. For two and a half years, I was the happiest man alive. I was married to an angel.”

Charlotte looked up at the mosaic over the fireplace.

“Her mother,” the doctor said, following Charlotte’s glance. “They could have been twin sisters.” He continued: “Then came that afternoon in Cozumel.”

“Tell us about that,” Jerry said.

“She had been captivated by the beauty of a secluded beach we had seen on one of those Robinson Crusoe tours we had taken of the island. The boat had stopped there for lunch. It was on the southern shore, nestled in a half-moon shaped cove tucked into the cliff: a little jewel of a beach. It was our last day—our last afternoon, in fact. We had a few hours to kill before our flight, and Lily suggested that we go back there for a swim. She liked to swim in the buff.”

There was a pause as he delved into his memory. Then he continued: “I still don’t know how it happened. One minute we were swimming in the turquoise waters, the next she was slowly being carried away from me. It was as if she’d boarded a train that was pulling out of the station.” He clenched his fists, and his face became twisted with the pain of the memory. “Then I got caught up in the current too. I don’t remember much after that. Fighting to stay afloat, seeing her in the distance, struggling to make it back to shore. Finally, crawling back up on the beach, and finding that she was … gone. I still have nightmares about her beach towel—it was striped, red and white. Her beach bag, her sunglasses, her container of sun block. All just sitting there, as if she would be back any minute.”

He shut his eyes and massaged his brow. After a moment, he lifted his head and went on with his story: “I blamed myself, of course. I’d play the ‘if only’ game for hours on end: if only I’d taken a different flight, left earlier for the airport, paid attention to the warnings in the guidebooks about swimming at unsupervised beaches. If only I’d been in better physical shape …” He continued: “I came back here. I went back to work. I went through the days like an automaton. And at night, I would dream of her being swept away in the current, and of her red-and-white-striped towel lying there on the sand. I spent the hours between work and sleep sitting in this chair, looking out at the river.” He stared out at the river, which sparkled in the morning sun. “I called it my chair of inertia,” he said. “Once I sat down in it, it was impossible to get back up again.”

“I have one like that in my house too,” Jerry joked.

The doctor made a feeble attempt at a smile, and then continued: “On a couple of occasions, I had experienced the illusion that I could see her out there on the river, being carried downstream by the current. I would sit here for hours with my binoculars”—he nodded at the binoculars that rested on a table next to the chair—“looking out at the river in hopes that I would catch another glimpse of her. I would be just about to give up, and then I’d see her head bobbing out there among the whitecaps again.” Shifting position, he turned away from the river, as if he couldn’t bear to gaze upon the entity that had been so parsimonious with its offerings.

Charlotte was reminded again of the severed foot bobbing in the water, with its painted toenails. If Dr. Louria was the murderer, his identification with the river—with the current that had taken his wife away—might explain why he had disposed of the body parts by throwing them in the river.

“I sought consolation in religion,” he continued. “I envied Lothian and Peter their belief in the afterlife. At least they had the comfort of believing that they would eventually join Lily in heaven. I wanted to believe: I went to discussion groups, I talked with the pastor. But it didn’t work for me.”

“Who’s Peter?” Jerry asked.

“Peter De Vries,” Dr. Louria replied, “who owns the rental properties in Corinth. He was a childhood friend of Sebastian and Lily’s. They all went to the Zion Hill School together. Peter is Sebastian’s best friend, and he and Lily were very close as well.”

Jerry nodded, and then said: “You were saying?”

“I was talking about the afterlife. Even the consolation that I might see Lily again in heaven wasn’t enough to make me believe in a God who had been cruel enough to take her away from me in the first place. Another reason I found it difficult to develop faith in the afterlife is that I never really believed she was dead. I kept expecting her to come walking in. I had convinced myself that she was a victim of amnesia, that she had washed ashore somewhere. I thought it was only a matter of time before she’d turn up.”

“I understand you went to Mexico to look for her,” Jerry said.

“Yes,” he replied. “I would show her picture around in the villages on Cozumel and along the coast of Yucatán.” He nodded at the photograph on the coffee table. “That same picture, as a matter of fact.”