Murder Among the Angels (15 page)

Charlotte remembered what Jerry had said about Dr. Louria’s refusal to accept Lily’s death setting the stage for Lothian Archibald’s belief that the young woman she had seen was a victim of amnesia.

“I would go back to that beach with her towel and her beach bag, and spread them out as they had been spread out that day. I thought that if I recreated the same conditions that had existed at the moment we decided to take that swim, that I could turn back the clock. I was mad with grief,” he said simply. “I’m still mad with grief,” he added. “I’m just mad in a different way. Anyway, I went on like that for over a year. Then one day, a patient came to me wanting a complete facial reconstruction. She was in her late twenties. I did three operations on her. To my surprise, she came out looking like Lily.”

“Was that Kimberly Ferguson?” Jerry asked, nodding at the “after” photo of the reconstructed face of the first murder victim.

“No,” the doctor said. “This young woman came before Kimberly. She was the one who gave me the idea of creating a new Lily. During the time I was working on her, I noticed that my mood improved. The world didn’t seem as black as it had. I looked forward to getting up in the morning because I had something important to do. That’s when I decided that I would try to create the perfect Lily. I placed the first ad in
Variety
that May.”

“That would have been May of 1991, then,” Jerry said.

He nodded. “I installed a special telephone for taking the calls.” He went on: “I was concerned that I wouldn’t get enough replies to yield a good pool of candidates, but I needn’t have worried.”

“How many did you get?” Jerry asked.

“Over seventy, and half a dozen of them met the physical requirements.” He continued: “As you know, I chose Kimberly Ferguson. She was from a small town in Arkansas. Grew up in a mobile home, quit high school when she was sixteen, had a baby out of wedlock when she was eighteen. The baby later died, which was when she decided to come to New York to pursue an acting career.”

“What made you choose her?”

“Two reasons, apart from the general resemblance to Lily. The first is that she was bright. Some of the young women who responded weren’t intelligent enough to have impersonated someone as unique as Lily. I also wanted someone who didn’t have connections: no strong family ties, no steady boyfriend, no close friends. Because I had other plans for her.”

“To kill her, you mean?” Jerry asked.

He shook his head and smiled ironically. “No,” he said. “Why would I have wanted to kill what I had labored so long and hard to achieve?”

“I can think of a number of reasons,” Jerry said. “One might be that she didn’t measure up, that she wasn’t the perfect Lily. That you killed her because you wanted to start with a fresh canvas, so to speak.”

“If that were the case, I could simply have advertised again. I wouldn’t have needed to kill her,” he said. “But, in fact, she did measure up. She was the most true to Lily of them all. As you can see from Jack Lister’s reconstruction. He did an incredible job, by the way.”

For a moment, they all looked at the photo of the reconstructed face of Kimberly Ferguson after she had undergone the plastic surgery.

“Kimberly was pretty even before the surgery,” said Charlotte as she compared the photo of the “after” reconstruction to the photo of the “before” reconstruction that lay beside it.

“Yes,” said Dr. Louria. “She was the prettiest. I wondered why she even wanted the surgery, but she had a poor self-image. Often it’s the prettiest women who think they’re the most unattractive.”

“Is the ‘before’ reconstruction as accurate as the ‘after’?” Jerry asked.

“It’s incredible,” he replied. “As is the one for Liliana. Kimberly’s hair was a little shorter, but he got the style and color exactly right.”

“I presume Liliana was the second victim,” Jerry said.

The doctor nodded. “I’ll get to her. But to continue with Kimberly for a moment: I never would have killed her because she didn’t measure up. In a way, she looked more like Lily than Lily herself. Besides, I wouldn’t have killed her because, as I said, I had other plans for her.”

Jerry looked up at him. “What plans?” he asked.

“I wanted to make her my wife,” he replied. “For over a year, I had been married to a corpse. By transforming Kimberly, I could look forward to being married to a real woman. Plastic surgeons talk about the Pygmalion complex: the plastic surgeon who feels as if he has
created
his patient. That was my goal: to bring Lily back to life, to make my creation warm to my touch. The new face was just the beginning. I also was planning to enlarge her breasts, to have her teeth capped, to get her fitted with tinted contact lenses …”

“A latter-day Henry Higgins,” Charlotte interjected.

“Yes. I did think of myself in those terms,” he said. “Creating Lily would be an act of parturition. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. Especially with a girl from backwoods Arkansas. She would have to be schooled in Lily’s speech, gestures, mannerisms. But I looked forward to the challenge of it.”

“Which is why you chose aspiring actresses,” Charlotte said.

He nodded.

“Would you have had her pose as an amnesia victim?” Jerry asked.

“Yes. It’s not as farfetched as it sounds. It even happens with some degree of frequency to people who undergo near-death experiences. I had studied the medical literature after Lily’s death. I knew enough about the condition that I could have made a very convincing presentation.”

Jerry nodded, and made a notation.

“My plan was to fly Kimberly to Mexico and set her up in a village on the coast of Yucatán, and then to go down there and ‘discover’ her. Since I’d been there three times already to search for Lily, it wasn’t a stretch of the imagination that I might actually find her. Or rather, her stand-in.”

“And Kimberly?” asked Charlotte. “What did she think of this?”

“She liked the idea. It was like a game for her. Of course, she wasn’t thinking beyond the immediate future. Nor was I, for that matter. I had no long-term plans. She also liked the money,” he said. “I paid her liberally.”

“Then what happened?” Jerry asked.

“She disappeared.”

“When was that?” Jerry asked.

“Just after Labor Day.” He continued: “As you know, I had set her up in the apartment on Hudson Street. She would come here every day for Lily lessons. When she didn’t show up, I went over to the apartment, and she wasn’t there. Our agreement was that she wasn’t to see anyone but me until her coming out.”

“At the governor’s ball?” asked Charlotte. She explained: “That’s where Henry Higgins introduced Eliza Doolittle in Shaw’s
Pygmalion.
”

He smiled. “I hadn’t decided how I would formally introduce her, but it would be something like that.” He continued: “I thought that she’d violated our agreement—gone to the city to visit a friend, perhaps. I kept going back to the apartment to check, but there was no evidence that she’d returned. After a couple of weeks, I concluded that she’d taken advantage of me, that she’d only been staying around for the free surgery.”

“Were you upset?” asked Jerry.

The doctor shrugged. “Upset, but not surprised. She wasn’t from the most stable of backgrounds.”

“Then what?” Jerry prompted.

“I advertised again. The second girl’s name was Liliana, as I mentioned. I chose her because of the similarity in the names. Out of sentiment, which was a mistake. Her background was similar to Kimberly’s, except that she was originally from Florida, instead of from Arkansas. But she wasn’t as smart: she wouldn’t have been up to the part. Nor did she have the bone structure. She didn’t come out looking as much like Lily as Kimberly had, despite the fact that her surgery was much more extensive.”

They looked at the photo of the reconstruction of Liliana’s face after she had undergone the cosmetic surgery. Though there was a strong superficial resemblance to Lily, her features were more coarse and leaden.

“In fact,” Dr. Louria continued, “I was considering letting her go after she was finished with the series of operations.”

“But it wasn’t necessary to let her go, because she disappeared too,” Jerry said. “When was that, exactly?”

“The end of March.”

“Didn’t it alarm you when your second Galatea disappeared?”

He shook his head. “She knew I wasn’t happy with her. We’d had a number of run-ins. In addition to being stupid, she was unreliable. She wouldn’t show up when she was supposed to. She also had a negative attitude. I figured that she’d just walked off the job.”

“Then you advertised for the third time.”

“Actually, I already had. I was working on two at once. I’d had a sense that Liliana wasn’t going to work out, so I advertised again a month later. In fact, I wondered if Liliana took off because she found out that she had a competitor. The third girl’s name was Doreen Mileski. She was from Detroit, had been to college. She would have made the best Lily of all. She wasn’t from a white trash background, like Kimberly and Liliana. She didn’t come out looking as much like Lily as Kimberly had, but she came out looking very much like her, and she was a very good actress. She had Lily down pat. I was upset when she disappeared. She seemed more committed than the other two had been. We also got along well. No one could ever have replaced Lily for me, but Doreen was a start. I was even beginning to entertain fantasies that she would agree to stay permanently with me—that it would be something more than just a game. And I think she was beginning to entertain the same fantasies.” He sighed. “Then you showed up here with your skulls.”

“We’ve found some of her body parts,” Jerry said.

The doctor looked up at Jerry, and then away. As Jerry continued to speak, he gazed out of the leaded glass windows at the silver stream of the river.

“A forearm and a foot washed up at the Corinth Municipal Park on Friday,” Jerry said. “We identified them as Doreen’s through a break in the forearm. If the murderer sticks to his pattern, we can expect to find her skull in a local cemetery within the next few days.”

Removing his glasses, the doctor leaned his head against the wing of the oversized chair and wiped a tear from the corner of his eye.

“When was the last time you saw her?” Jerry asked.

“It was on Tuesday, April twenty-first,” he said. “She had gotten some dye for her hair that morning at the drugstore.”

That must have been when Aunt Lothian saw her, Charlotte thought.

“She was a brunette, and Lily, as you know, had red hair. She was going to dye her hair that afternoon, and come over here that evening to show me how it turned out. She’d also gotten fitted for some tinted contact lenses. Lily had green eyes, and Doreen’s were blue-gray. She never showed up. As I said, it wasn’t like her. I kept going over to the apartment to look for her, as I had done with the others.” He sobbed quietly. “But she never showed up.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“I thought about it,” he said, regaining his composure. “But that would have meant revealing the nature of my … strange obsession, if you will. Anyway, any impulses I might have had of that nature were obviated by your appearance with the skulls. I realized that, if it was discovered that I had performed the surgery on the dead girls, I would be the one accused of the murders.”

Jerry nodded. “Which brings me to the question of where you were when these three young women disappeared.” He went on: “We don’t have any exact times, which means that it’s going to be difficult for you to establish an alibi. Unless you were out of the country, or something like that.”

Dr. Louria sat up at attention.

“
Were
you out of the country?” Jerry asked.

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I was. Not when Liliana disappeared. But I was out of the country when Kimberly disappeared. I had gone to Rio to visit my mother in the hospital. She’d had a hip replacement operation. I only found out after I got back that Kimberly had taken off.”

“Is there any way we can confirm this?”

“Yes, you can call my mother.”

Jerry looked skeptical.

“Or call Varig Airlines. They should still have the records. I would have the exact dates and flight numbers in my appointment book.”

“I’d appreciate that information,” Jerry said.

“If you don’t believe that my mother would tell the truth”—he smiled—“and to be perfectly honest, she would say anything to protect me—I have other relatives who’ll verify my alibi. You could talk to them. There was a family get-together at my brother’s; there were thirty people there.”

“I’d like all the names and telephone numbers,” Jerry said. “Also, we’ll want to search your house. I could get a search warrant, but it would be easier if you would just offer your consent. We’re also going to have to talk with the people you see on a daily basis: the housekeeper, your office help.”

“I understand,” he said.

“Did anyone else know about the Lily look-alikes?”

“Only my housekeeper, Marta,” he said. “Marta Herrera. She lives here.”

Jerry wrote down the name. “Did you have a nurse assisting you during the operations?” he asked. “Or an anesthesiologist?”

He shook his head. “I didn’t need a nurse, and I used a local anesthetic.”

Jerry leaned forward. “Dr. Louria, if it’s true that you didn’t kill these three young women—and I think it should be fairly simple to verify your alibi—then it means that somebody else did.”

Dr. Louria nodded.

“Let’s say for the moment that you were successful in your attempt to pass off one of these young women as your wife. Is there anyone you know of who would have a reason for not wanting to see this come about?”

He shook his head.

“Were you your wife’s heir?” Jerry asked.

“No,” he said. “She thought I had enough money. Which I do. Her heir was her brother, Sebastian Archibald.”

Charlotte remembered Jerry saying that Sebastian was borrowing the start-up money for his new restaurant against an inheritance. This must have been the inheritance that he was counting on.

“Then it would be correct to say that Sebastian would have stood to lose his inheritance from his sister if you had been successful in your scheme to resurrect your wife from the dead.”