Murder Among the Angels (16 page)

Leave it to Jerry to have a backup theory, Charlotte thought. It was an angle that hadn’t even occurred to her.

“I know it sounds farfetched, but I’m grasping at straws,” Jerry said.

“I suppose it’s correct,” Dr. Louria said, “although I imagine he could have tried to prove she was an imposter.”

“Did Lily have any money of her own?” Jerry asked.

“Yes, a fair amount,” the doctor replied.

“How much is a fair amount?” Jerry asked impatiently. “Two or three million? Or enough to pay next month’s bills?”

“The former. Somewhere between a million and a half and two million.”

“From Edward Archibald trust funds?”

“She had inherited some money from her grandfather, but much less than you’d expect. Most of his fortune was left to trusts that were set up to benefit the community, as I’m sure you are aware. The rest was divided among his eight children and nineteen grandchildren.”

“Then where did her money come from?” Jerry asked.

“She had a small inheritance. Also, the men she kept company with before she married me were very generous with their …” He paused for a moment, apparently searching for the right expression, and then said: “Gifts.”

Jerry gave him an inquiring look, but said no more.

The doctor’s implication was that his late wife had not been above exchanging sexual favors for money. Charlotte remembered what Lothian had said about the balls at Buckingham Palace, the weekends in France. It didn’t sound as if Lily Louria had been quite the angel everyone was making her out to be.

“She also invested wisely,” he continued. “It seems odd to say of someone like Lily, whose personality was so extravagant, but she was very good with money. She wasn’t a spender. Herself, that is. She’d get other people—like me”—he smiled sheepishly—“to spend money on her behalf.”

“Where’d she learn how to invest?” Jerry asked, his curiosity piqued. “From reading investor’s guides?”

“Lily never read anything,” he said. “She’d pump people for information. She had a nose for money: she knew who had it, and who didn’t; whose portfolios were doing well, who was living off their capital.”

“I wish I had some of that talent,” Jerry said. “We’ll need the name of the estate lawyer.”

Dr. Louria gave him the name.

“Has any of the estate been distributed?”

The doctor shook his head. “The settlement has been held up by the fact that her body was never recovered.”

“Any other ideas about who might have wanted to kill the Lily look-alikes?”

The doctor shook his head. “No ideas at all.”

8

After their talk with Dr. Louria, Jerry summoned his troops, and the search of Archfield Hall began. While one of Jerry’s men stayed with Dr. Louria in the Great Hall, half a dozen others spread out over the house and grounds in search of evidence that might incriminate the doctor. Jerry himself had chosen to search the library, and Charlotte tagged along. Unlike the rest of the house, which tended toward the monumental, the library was warm and cozy, with a low ceiling and hand-carved wooden bookcases, above which ran a frieze with a quote from Swedenborg: “The doctrine of charity teaches: The common good in a society or kingdom consists of these things: there shall be morality, knowledge, and uprightness. There shall be the necessities of life—occupation, industry, and protection. There shall be justice. There shall be a sufficiency of wealth. There shall be what is divine among them.” A round table surrounded by Windsor chairs occupied the center of the room. The fact that its surface was covered with file folders indicated that this was where the doctor spent much of his time. As in the Great Hall, there was a fireplace at one end of the room. The opposite end was taken up by a “media center,” which included a large-screen television set and a built-in desk.

They started by scanning the bookshelves, which held mostly medical books and journals. Several of the medical texts were authored or edited by Dr. Louria, including a thick tome with the forbidding title,
Osseointegrated Alloplastic Auricular Reconstruction
. Finding nothing on the bookshelves, they moved on to the media center. It was here that Charlotte made her first discovery: a series of videotapes labeled “Lily I,” “Lily II,” and “Lily III.” They were on a shelf above the television set, sandwiched in among a series of videotapes demonstrating cosmetic surgery techniques.

“I’ve found something,” she said as she pulled them off the shelf.

Jerry was at her side in an instant, and she showed him the labels on the spines of the plastic cases.

“Since they’re included with the technical tapes, I presume they’re videos of the surgical procedures that were used on the Lily clones,” she said.

“There’s one way to find out,” Jerry said. Taking the tape labeled “Lily I,” he turned on the television, inserted the tape into the videocassette recorder, and pushed the “Play” button.

Then they sat down on the couch to await the show.

As it turned out, the tape wasn’t a record of the operations, but of the postsurgical “Lily lessons,” in which, in the case of Kimberly Ferguson, a poor, uneducated girl from backwoods Arkansas was transformed into the pampered wife of a rich cosmetic surgeon.

The tape started off with several close-ups of Lily, then cut to Kimberly sitting at a dressing table in a bedroom that, judging from the massive hand-carved furniture, was the master bedroom at Archfield Hall. She was wearing a white terry cloth bathrobe and applying makeup. Though they had seen Lister’s “after” reconstruction of Kimberly’s face, it was nevertheless remarkable to see that face reflected in the mirror of the dressing table, and to see how closely it resembled the original. The only difference was the hair, which was straight and blond and of medium length. Obviously, Kimberly had yet to dye it red.

The date on the videotape said August 15, 1991, which would have been shortly before Kimberly disappeared. It was gruesome to think that the face of this pretty young woman would be nothing but an eyeless skull in only a matter of weeks. The voice of Dr. Louria, with its hint of a Portuguese accent, was giving Kimberly instructions: “After you put on the eyeliner, take the Q-tip and rub it down into the base of the eyelashes. That’s how she always did it. First the eyeliner, then the mascara.”

With the video camera recording her every move, the Lily look-alike applied the makeup, removed it, and reapplied it under Dr. Louria’s watchful eye until she got it right.

“Weird,” said Jerry after Dr. Louria had pronounced the job perfect.

“I’ll say,” Charlotte agreed.

“Now the perfume,” Dr. Louria said.

Kimberly looked down at the array of bottles on the dressing table. “Which one?” she asked with a drawl that would have made Henry Higgins wince.

“The Muguet,” said Dr. Louria. “That’s what she always wore. She ordered it from Grasse, France.”

Searching among the bottles, Kimberly picked one out and applied it to the skin behind her ears and on the insides of her wrists.

“Now the jewelry,” Dr. Louria said. As he gave a voice-over discourse on what type of jewelry Lily had worn (she had been particularly fond of bangle bracelets), Kimberly proceeded to put on the gold hoop earrings and heavy gold bangle bracelets that the doctor had laid out for her on a tray. After she had finished putting on the jewelry, Dr. Louria asked her to put on the dress that he had laid out on the bed. “It was one of Lily’s favorites,” he said as Kimberly slipped the dress on over her head.

It was a long, snug-fitting sheath of a dark green wool jersey, which was worn with a wide green snakeskin belt and high-heeled green suede boots. Even on Kimberly, with her thin, straight, blond hair, the outfit was stunning; it must have been all the more so on Lily, with her mane of vivid red.

As they might have expected, Dr. Louria then asked her to walk around the room, but it was
how
he asked her to walk that surprised Charlotte. It wasn’t with the phony grace of a make-believe princess or the mincing prance of the runway model, but with her chest stuck out and her rear end swaying as if she were a Playboy bunny. Poor Kimberly, who had the lunging stride of the country girl, was obviously finding it rough going, and complained that the high-heeled boots hurt her feet. But Dr. Louria mercilessly made her repeat her circumambulation of the room over and over until he was satisfied.

Charlotte wondered if Lily had really walked like that. The stride struck her as so unnatural and so stereotypically provocative that she wondered if Dr. Louria might be taking liberties with the truth in order to satisfy the demands of his own sexual fantasies.

Throughout it all, the girl had been cooperative, and quick. She had talent, Charlotte thought. She would have made a good actress, though her Arkansas twang would have taken some work.

They were about to look at the tape labeled “Lily II” when they were interrupted by a knock on the door.

A policeman stuck his head through the door opening. “I think we’ve got something, Chief,” he said.

The policeman didn’t say what they had found, and Jerry didn’t ask. He would see for himself soon enough. With the policeman in the lead, they passed through the house and across the lawn to a patio that was cantilevered out over the railroad embankment. Though it seemed odd to build a recreational structure so close to the railroad tracks, there was no getting away from the tracks if you wanted to take advantage of the view. Charlotte had seen mansions on the Hudson that had the railroad tracks running right past the front door. From the patio, they headed down a path that traversed the embankment. Though it was now overgrown, it was clear that the path had once been beautifully landscaped. The green shoots of garden perennials—Charlotte recognized those of daylilies and Oriental poppies—peeked up through the weeds in the terraced beds, and colonies of lilies of the valley grew among the pachysandra, their buds still only tiny dots on the stems. The path had probably been used for access to the river when it had still been clean enough to swim in. An old canoe lay in the weeds next to railroad tracks below, leading Charlotte to wonder if people still canoed on the Hudson.

At the end of the path, about twenty yards up the embankment from the tracks, was the type of structure that Charlotte had known in her youth as a summer house: a pavilion-like building made of wood, with half-open sides. It was painted dark green. Though it must once have been charming, it had fallen into disrepair: the roof had caved in on one side, and it was overgrown with a tangle of old wisteria vines.

As they approached, they could see a small cluster of policemen inside. The group looked up expectantly as Jerry entered.

“What have we got?” he asked.

The policemen stood aside to reveal a workbench piled with stacks of old clay flowerpots. Charlotte’s first thought was that the summer house must have been put to later use as a potting shed, and the workbench as a potting table. But then she noticed the stench that permeated the spring air, and saw that the surface of the workbench had a greasy sheen, and was stained with dark blotches, and that the rough wood bore fresh scars from the blade of a cutting instrument.

His question was answered by Captain Crosby, who nodded at the workbench. “We’ve found where the doctor cut up the bodies, Chief,” he said. Then he nodded at a heap of old burlap bags on the cement floor, which were also stained with dried blood. “We think these are the burlap bags he used to carry the bodies down to the river. We haven’t found the cleaver. I figure he probably kept it, or threw it in the river. But Bert’s looking for it with the metal detector, anyway.”

Jerry nodded and went over to the workbench.

Seeing the gashes in the wood, Charlotte conjured up a mental image of the corpse cutter at work on his grisly task. It must have been hard work carrying the bodies down the path, and then carving them up. Suddenly, she felt her knees begin to buckle. She realized that it was nearly two, and she was hungry. The smell would have been hard to take in any case, but it was even more so on an empty stomach.

Stepping forward, she tapped Jerry on the shoulder. “Jerry,” she said, “I’m going to take a little walk down to the river. It’s the smell,” she explained, and remembered what Jerry had said about wool absorbing the corpse reek. Damn! She had worn a wool jacket.

He nodded. “It takes some getting used to,” he said with a grimace. “Some people never get used to it,” he added. “Like me, for example.”

Leaving the summer house, Charlotte continued on down to the railroad bed, where a policeman was scanning the weeds at the side of the tracks with a metal detector. Crossing the tracks, she stood on the riverbank, and took a deep breath; the air smelled refreshingly of the sea.

Captain Crosby had been quick to jump to the conclusion that Dr. Louria was the murderer, but Charlotte was skeptical. One of Jerry’s favorite sayings was that the crime scene was the mirror of the perpetrator. But the summer house hardly struck her as the crime scene of an eminent plastic surgeon. For one thing, why would he have used a summer house that was virtually in his own backyard when he had an operating room at his disposal? If he had arranged to perform cosmetic surgery on the young women in private, surely he could have arranged to cut them up in private, as well.

But even if one conceded that there was a reason behind his use of the summer house—perhaps to mislead the police by making them think that he was too obvious a suspect—it was still difficult for Charlotte to believe that a surgeon would have left the crime scene such a mess. In fact, she guessed it would have been constitutionally impossible. Neatness would have been as intrinsic to his methods as precision for an engineer, or logic for a mathematician. No, she concluded, if Dr. Louria were to have planned a murder, she was sure he was capable of a more elegant, and less incriminating, job.

A far more likely scenario was that the murderer was someone who had wanted to incriminate Dr. Louria. She wondered if the murderer had taken the path down the embankment. If so, he would have had to park on River Road and then carry the body across the Archfield Hall property, a scenario that struck her as unlikely, given the risk of being observed. Which meant that he had probably come from some other direction. She looked up and down the tracks: to the south, there was nothing; to the north was the railroad station.