Murder Among the Angels (23 page)

“We believe that you killed the Lily look-alikes, and dismembered their bodies at your summer house,” Jerry said. “We also believe that you placed the bouquets of lilies of the valley next to their skulls.”

Dr. Louria took a swig from the glass of whiskey in his hand.

“Do you have anything to say?”

The doctor didn’t reply.

“In the cup!” the announcer said as the audience applauded.

They waited for Dr. Louria to respond. When it became clear that he wasn’t going to say anything, they left. “So much for a confession,” Jerry said as they rode back down the elevator. “It was like talking to a zombie.”

Marta met them at the elevator door on the first floor.

“Marta, did Dr. Louria ever order lilies of the valley?” Jerry asked.

“What is this lilies of the valley?”

“A white flower, very small, with a beautiful fragrance.” He sniffed an imaginary bouquet and then rolled his eyes in mock appreciation.

“Ah,
el muguete
,” she said. “Yes. Once a week, the flowers come. Four, maybe five bouquets. I put them all around the house: the bedroom, the dining room, the Great Hall. Miss Lily, she love
el muguete
.”

“And since her death?”

“At first, no. But later, when the girls start to come here”—a shadow crossed her face—“the doctor, he order the flowers again.”

“What girls would these be?” Jerry asked.

“The girls who look like Miss Lily,” she said.

After leaving Archfield Hall, they continued on down River Road toward the Octagon House. A few minutes later, they were standing on the porch, waiting for Lister to answer the door. Though the rain had stopped, the knoll on which the house was perched was still enshrouded by fog, through which the trunks and branches of the black locusts that studded the lawn loomed like a giant army advancing on a hilltop citadel. The door was answered by Lister, who was wearing blue jeans and a black turtleneck that emphasized the billiard ball quality of his clean-shaven head. After they had exchanged greetings, he led them through the Phrenological Cabinet to the central stairwell, and down the spiral staircase to the basement where the sculpture studio of the “recomposer of the decomposed” was located.

When they had reached the studio, Jerry set his bubble-wrapped package down on a worktable next to an unoccupied cork collar. “This time, we know who the victim is,” he said.

“How?” Lister asked as Jerry proceeded to unwrap the skull.

“Lothian Archibald had seen a young woman who she thought was Lily in the drugstore and followed her home. When we figured out that the murderer was killing Lily look-alikes, we tracked her down through her landlord, thinking that she might be the next victim.”

“But we were too late,” Charlotte said.

Jerry handed Lister a photograph; which showed a young woman in a two-piece bathing suit sitting on a beach. “This is a ‘before’ photograph of the victim that was sent to us by the family.” Then he placed two fingers in the eye sockets of the skull and lifted it out of its plastic nest.

“May I remind you that the superorbital ridge is not to be used as a handle for picking up a skull,” Lister chided him. “You’re treating a human skull as if it were a bowling ball.”

“Sorry,” said Jerry as he handed the skull over to Lister.

“It’s just that they’re fragile,” Lister said, “And these skulls are especially fragile because they’ve been bleached so heavily.” He set the skull down gently in the collar, and then leaned over to study it.

“Obviously, we don’t need the reconstructions for identification purposes. But it would make an impression on a jury if we could show three ‘befores’ with three ‘afters.’ There’s a chin implant here,” Jerry said, pointing to the wedge that had been inserted in the chin.

“Cheek implants and posterior mandible implants too,” Lister said. “The first victim was the only one who didn’t need posterior mandible implants. That’s what made the faces of the Archibald women so unique: that wide, square-jawed look. I always thought they would have made a good ship figurehead.”

He was dancing around the skull, in order to study it from various angles.

“They had the bust lines for it too: a big, high bust,” he said. “Speaking of other parts, do we have the rest of her?”

“Bits and pieces: an arm, a foot,” Jerry replied. “They washed up in Corinth Municipal Park on Friday.”

“Where was the skull found this time?”

“In the undercroft at the Zion Hill Church,” Jerry replied. “The sexton found it early this morning.”

Lister nodded. As they looked on, he ran his fingers over the brow and then the cheekbones of the skull. Then he gently ran the knuckle of his forefinger along one side of the jaw, and paused with it on the chin to gaze into the empty eye sockets.

It was as if he were a lover, and the skull was the face of his beloved—a face that he was about to kiss. Charlotte almost felt as if she should excuse herself from the intimate scene.

At last, he stood back and stared at the skull in admiration, his wild gray eyes beaming. “What a beauty!” he exclaimed. Then he continued: “Botticelli had his Simonetta Vespucci, Whistler had his Joanna Heffernan, Rossetti had his Lizzie Siddal. And I …”

Jerry completed the sentence for him: “You have your Lillian Archibald.”

“Or her daughter,” he said. “Or her daughter’s look-alikes. Not one of them, but three of them.” He clenched his fists and did a little jig. “And now I get to sculpt this face again!”

Charlotte would hardly have called it a face, but she didn’t think that skulls had their own personalities either.

“Do you know what Rossetti said about Lizzie Siddal?” he asked.

They shook their heads.

“He said: ‘All my life, I have dreamt one dream alone.’ We all have one dream: we’re all destined to fall in love with a certain kind of face, and the face of Lillian Archibald is my one dream.”

“You have to sign this, Jack,” said Jerry, handing him the chain of evidence form used by law enforcement officials to keep track of who is in possession of the evidence in criminal cases.

“When do you need these by?” Lister asked as he signed.

“As soon as possible. I think we’re about to make an arrest, and we’d like to have the reconstructions ready to present to the prosecutor.”

Lister’s bald head jerked up. “Really?” he said, with great interest. “And may I ask who it is that you’re about to arrest?”

“Sorry, Jack. You’ll find out soon enough,” Jerry said. “How long will it take you to finish them?” he asked.

“Usually a week for each. But for you—and also because my other business is slow—four days for both.”

They headed back out a few minutes later, leaving Lister gloating over his newest acquisition.

“He’s a very strange guy,” said Charlotte as they passed back out through the Phrenological Cabinet.

“You’d be strange too if your hobby was recomposing the decomposed.”

The radio was crackling when they got back in the police car. It was Captain Crosby, Jerry’s right-hand man. “Sorry to interrupt you, Chief,” he said. “But I have some important news for you about Dr. Louria’s alibi from Bill Warner over at the county.”

“What is it?” Jerry asked impatiently.

“His alibi’s ironclad. He couldn’t possibly have done it. He was in Brazil, just like he said. Warner said he talked with a dozen people. They all backed up the doctor, and they all backed up one another.”

“Were they all relatives?” Jerry asked.

“No,” Crosby replied. “Warner even talked with the officials at the hospital where the doctor’s mother was a patient. He performed a couple of ear reconstruction operations on their patients while he was there. For free,” he added.

“Thanks,” Jerry said. He replaced the microphone in its cradle. Then he pounded his fist on the dashboard. “Hell, shit, and damnation,” he said.

11

Charlotte didn’t think about the case on her drive back to the city, didn’t think about anything, in fact. She was worn-out: all she wanted to do was sit down, put her feet up, and fix herself a Manhattan. But the case wouldn’t let her alone: the newsstand on the corner of the street where her parking garage was located displayed a special edition of the
Post
with a story about Dr. Louria entitled “Murder in the Undercroft.” Never mind that the murder hadn’t taken place in the undercroft, it made a good headline, despite the fact that most New Yorkers probably didn’t have the faintest idea of what an undercroft was. She bought a copy and tucked it under her arm. Back at home, she ignored the blinking light on her answering machine, fixed herself a Manhattan, and sat down with the newspaper. The story featured an artist’s rendering of the skull on the altar, with its offering of the bouquet of lilies of the valley. It also included a write-up on Dr. Louria, and an exterior shot of Archfield Hall, with its medieval-looking tower jutting into the sky. The fact that Jerry had said that Dr. Louria wasn’t a suspect didn’t seem to matter. Nor did the fact that this was a rehash of the material that they had printed the day before. The press was in a feeding frenzy, and with no keeper to hand-feed them, they had set upon the most available target.

As she sipped her drink, she scanned the article on Dr. Louria, which went into great detail about his plastic surgery career. Turning the page, she came across a “before” and “after” photo layout of some of his most famous clients. So much for the much-vaunted discretion of his office staff. Charlotte scanned the faces, many of which were personally familiar to her. Thank God she hadn’t gone through with the surgery, she thought. Otherwise, her “before” and “after” photos would probably have been splashed all over the paper as well.

She stopped at the third photo in the second row from the bottom of the “before” section: it was a photo of her old friend, Kitty Saunders, whose relentless lobbying on Dr. Louria’s behalf had had much to do with why Charlotte had gone to see him in the first place. She and Kitty had been friends for fifty years. They had met on Cape Cod, where they had played in summer stock together. They had both been stars in the forties. But Kitty had dropped out after the birth of her second child, and had never gone back.

No sooner had Charlotte seen the photo than the phone rang. She had a good idea of who it was.

“Where have you been!” said the accusatory voice on the other end of the line. “I’ve left four messages on your machine.” Kitty’s affectedly stagey manner of speech had only become more pronounced over the years, like that of the British expatriates whose Mayfair accents become more clipped the longer they spend on American soil.

“I just walked in the door,” Charlotte said.

“Have you seen the story in the
Post
?”

“I was just reading it,” Charlotte said. “Where are you?” she asked, thinking that Kitty couldn’t possibly have already seen the article in Maine, where she spent most of the year.

“Visiting Laura,” she said, naming a daughter who lived in Connecticut. “Did you see the picture of me?”

“It was a good picture, Kitty,” said Charlotte. “You know what they say: ‘Bad publicity is better than no publicity.’”

“Oh, Charlotte,” Kitty whined. “How humiliating.”

Charlotte listened patiently for five minutes as Kitty went on about the sorry state of the fourth estate. Finally, Kitty asked: “Where have you been?”

“In Zion Hill,” she replied. “Jerry D’Angelo is the police chief there now, and I’ve been helping him out on the case.”

“Are you going to have the surgery?”

“No,” Charlotte replied.

“Because of this?” she said accusingly.

“Not because of this,” she replied. Though it had been her suspicion of Dr. Louria that had resulted in her decision, she had realized when she made it that it was the right one. “Kitty, years ago a doctor gave me some very valuable advice about how to make a decision regarding a medical procedure.”

“What?” asked Kitty.

Charlotte went on: “He said to flip a coin: heads it’s yes, and tails it’s no. If the coin comes up heads, and your reaction is ‘Oh, shit,’ then you shouldn’t go ahead with the procedure.”

“And what happened?” asked Kitty.

“The coin came up heads, and my reaction was ‘Oh, shit.’”

“I did my best,” Kitty said haughtily. “You can lead a horse, and all that.” She paused. “Charlotte,” she continued, “I just can’t imagine that Dr. Louria would do something like this. He’s such a sweet man.”

“He didn’t,” Charlotte said.

But the damage had already been done, she thought. Even if he didn’t commit the murders, the fact that he’d made the Lily clones was enough to ruin his reputation.

Charlotte knew how these things worked. She’d been a victim of false rumors enough times herself over the course of her career.

“What’s going to happen to him?” Kitty asked. “Will he ever be able to practice again?”

“I don’t know,” Charlotte said.

It was two days before Charlotte had a chance to put her feet up and think about the case again: two days of pouring rain that she spent running around the city, tending to affairs that she had been putting off. It wasn’t only that she didn’t have the time: she had also felt as if she needed a break. But on the evening of the second day, after a lovely dinner spent reminiscing with an old actor friend, she found herself thinking about Dr. Louria again. If he didn’t do it, that meant that somebody else did, somebody who wanted to make it
look
as if he had done it. Hence the choice of the summer house as the place to dismember the bodies, hence the bouquets of lily of the valley that were left with the skulls. Who else would have wanted to see Lily dead? she asked herself again. And for what reasons? With the memory of her asparagus lunch still fresh, the first suspect to come to mind was Sebastian. Because of the evidence implicating Dr. Louria, they hadn’t taken him seriously as a suspect thus far. But he might very well have gotten wind of Dr. Louria’s scheme to set up the Lily clone as his amnesiac wife. If Dr. Louria had succeeded with his plan, Sebastian would have been cut out of his inheritance from Lily, which he presumably needed to go ahead with his plan to launch his restaurant in Manhattan. Reverend Cornwall had described Sebastian as having Lily’s same reckless streak, though to a lesser degree. The fact that such a young man was willing to entertain the notion of competing with the top New York restaurants was evidence enough of that. But was he reckless enough to have committed murder? Upon further consideration, she realized that there were a couple of problems with the Sebastian scenario, first among them the issue of plausibility. Wouldn’t it have been simpler and easier to expose the Lily look-alikes as imposters rather than risk a life sentence for multiple murder? Instead of killing them, he could simply have hired a private investigator and tracked down their real identities, as Dr. Louria had suggested. If there were any doubts, he could have resorted to blood typing, X-ray records, dental records: there were lots of ways to prove that the clones weren’t Lily. The second problem was one of what might be called delicacy. It struck her as unlikely that Sebastian would have murdered young women who looked so much like the sister to whom he had been so attached, particularly in such a brutal way.