Murder Among the Angels (24 page)

From Sebastian, her thoughts turned to Connie, who appeared to be in love with Peter De Vries. If Peter still carried the torch for Lily, as Connie had said, then it made a kind of sense that Connie might want to see the Lily look-alikes dead. But there were numerous problems with the Connie theory, which was pathetically weak to begin with. Though she would have to check with Jerry (who had taken courses on criminal psychology), Charlotte suspected that it was highly unlikely that a woman would dismember her murder victims. At least, Charlotte had never heard of such a thing (Lizzie Borden excluded), and she’d been reading the tabloids for fifty years. The second problem with the Connie theory was that her love for Peter hadn’t struck Charlotte as being passionate enough to serve as a motive for murder; it seemed to fall more into the category of a nostalgia for
les temps perdu
.

Nor did it seem likely that Peter, in his eccentric role as the one-armed Leatherman, would even be tempted to enter into a liaison with any of the Lily look-alikes. Which brought her to her third suspect: Peter himself. If it was true that Lily had jilted him because she couldn’t bear being married to a man without an arm, it was very possible that Peter could have been taking his revenge against Lily out on her stand-ins. Hadn’t the Leatherman murdered the woman who had jilted him? If Dr. Louria’s father had considered his son’s lack of an ear a reflection on his masculinity, what would be the effect of the loss of an arm on Peter, especially if he was jilted on account of it? Moreover, the Peter theory would explain the dismemberments. If Lily had jilted Peter because he had been dismembered, albeit by a bolt of lightning, wouldn’t it make a kind of sense that he might try to get back at her by dismembering her look-alikes?

Her mind racing, she got up to fetch herself another drink and a bowl of potato chips. There was also the fact that Peter had been the landlord for the Lily look-alikes, she thought. Dr. Louria had said that the Lily clones had been kept under wraps—both literally and figuratively—that they had seldom gone out, except to see him. Everything they needed had been delivered. (Except hair coloring, she thought, remembering Lothian’s sighting of Doreen Mileski.) But Peter, being their landlord, would have known of their existence.

Her drink mixed, she took it back to her chair. She felt like Jack Lister must have felt when he started getting a sense of what a face looked like. She was also getting the sense of a face, the face of a murderer. As the pastor’s pamphlet on the Leatherman had put it: someone who has escaped from the constraints of society. She swirled the ice around in her glass, and then took another sip. Peter would also have known exactly what Dr. Louria was up to, and recognized that he would make a convenient scapegoat for the murders. Hence the orders for the lilies of the valley in his name, she thought. Reminded of her visit to the florist, she found herself transported back to the greenhouse, with its exotic smells and the sound of the raindrops thrumming on the glass roof. Suddenly, she made one of those mental connections that she probably wouldn’t have made had not the rational side of her brain been dulled by the alcohol. The pieces fit together as neatly as two of the pieces from one of Lister’s fractured skulls. The first was a leaky greenhouse roof made of glass and iron, and the second was a man who fixes stained-glass windows.

Getting up from her chair, she retrieved her handbag from the table in the hall, and, after a bit of rummaging around, produced Lisa Gennaro’s business card. She checked her watch: it was five past nine—not too late to call. She dialed Lisa’s home number, and was relieved when she picked up right away.

“I have two questions,” Charlotte said, after reminding Lisa who she was. “The first is about Dr. Louria’s orders for the lilies of the valley. Were they always delivered, or did he sometimes pick them up?”

“Both,” Lisa replied. “Usually we delivered them to Archfield Hall, but there were a couple of instances in which he said that somebody would be stopping by to pick them up.”

Yes, the skull was beginning to take shape, Charlotte thought. She continued: “Then he didn’t pick them up himself?”

“No,” she said. “Or rather, I don’t really know. We have a kind of anteroom by the front door. Maybe you remember it.”

“Yes,” Charlotte said.

“He said that he or someone else—I don’t really remember which—would be coming by just after we closed, so I left the flowers out there in a water bucket with his name on them. They were gone the next morning.”

“Was that the case with the most recent order?”

“Yes,” she said. “It was.”

“Then how did he pay for them?”

“Oh,” she said, as if she thought the answer to that question was clear, “he had a standing account. We billed him every month.”

Aha
, thought Charlotte.

“My next question is a personal one,” she said. “I have a little greenhouse in my kitchen window [which was true] and I need someone to repair the glass [which was not true]. I was wondering who does your glass repairs.”

“Sure,” she said. “His name is Peter De Vries. He’s a local person. I don’t have his number handy—it would be at the office—but I’m sure you could find him in the phone book. He’s actually a stained-glass artisan.”

“Thanks,” Charlotte said, “you’ve been very helpful.”

Jerry was considering Charlotte’s theory that Peter had murdered the Lily look-alikes because of their resemblance to the fiancée who had jilted him, just as the Leatherman had murdered the fiancée who had jilted him. She had driven up to Zion Hill early the next morning to regale him with her theory and run into him just as he was going out. He had invited her to join him, and she had presented him with her theory as they drove south on the Albany Post Road. It was a theory to which she’d devoted the best part of a sleepless night.

“The sight of a woman with long red hair and a strong jaw sends him into a murderous frenzy,” he said, recapping the gist of her idea. “It’s good, Graham,” he said. “Very good. In fact, it’s the best theory we’ve come up with yet.” He went on: “That was exactly what happened in the Ted Bundy case,” he said, naming the infamous serial killer. “He couldn’t take out his rage against the fiancée who had jilted him—she had too much power over him—so he took it out against women who looked like her. All his victims had long, straight, brown hair that was parted in the middle, and all of them wore gold hoop earrings, just like his fiancée. The difference is that Ted Bundy had to go out and find victims who looked like his fiancée, while in this case, Dr. Louria was serving up victims whose faces were custom-designed to meet the demands of Peter’s fantasies.” He looked over at Charlotte. “By the way, Bundy decapitated his victims too. And that’s not all he did to them. But out of consideration for your stomach and the earliness of the hour, I won’t go into the rest. Your theory about why Peter dismembered his victims makes sense too,” he added. “Though mutilation is fairly common in cases where the murder reflects a hatred of women.”

For a moment, they rode in silence. It was a glorious morning, the heavy rain of the previous two days seeming to have scoured the landscape of the lingering grime of winter, and to have given the sluggish spring a much-needed nudge. The drifts of daffodils that lined the roads of Zion Hill were now in full flower, and the buds on the flowering cherry trees were about to burst. “I didn’t finish telling you my theory about the flowers,” Charlotte said finally. “The way I figure it is this: knowing Lily as well as he did, Peter probably knew that lily of the valley was her favorite flower, and that Dr. Louria ordered them for her through Winter Garden. He probably found out that Dr. Louria was ordering lilies of the valley for the Lily look-alikes as a result of working at the florist. Maybe he overheard someone taking an order, or saw the tag on a bouquet that was about to be delivered. Once he had decided to kill the Lily look-alikes, it was natural to try to pin the blame on Dr. Louria, and what better way to do it than through the flowers? He knew that the police would eventually figure out where the flowers had come from, and when they did, that the blame would fall squarely on Dr. Louria. It was very safe: not only was it unlikely that the florist would have questioned the order—Dr. Louria had a standing account—it was also unlikely that Dr. Louria would even have questioned the bill. If indeed he even paid the bills himself,” she added, thinking of her own devoted secretary, Vivian Smith, who paid all of her bills—God bless her heart.

She went on to tell him about her skull analogy: “I feel as if I’ve pieced a good part of it together, but that there are still some gaps where the pieces are missing. Like where he killed the victims, how he killed the victims …”

Jerry interrupted her. “We’ve got the ‘where’ piece,” he said. “At least, I think we might have the ‘where’ piece.”

At Charlotte’s inquiring look, he pulled into a driveway flanked by tall stone pillars on which were mounted discreet brass plaques engraved with the words: “Zion Hill Country Club. Founded 1909. Members Only.”

“Is this the ‘where’ piece?” she asked.

Jerry nodded. “I got a call this morning from the grounds supervisor, a man named Tom Sullivan. He said he found something by the skeet-shooting range that he thought might be of interest to us.”

“But he didn’t say what?” Charlotte said.

Jerry shook his head.

“I didn’t realize this was the Zion Hill Country Club,” she said, as they headed up the winding drive. Though she had driven by the course a number of times and had also looked down on it from the church on the hill above, she had never noticed the sign.

“It’s one of the finest courses in the country,” Jerry said. “It was founded by Edward Archibald, like everything else in Zion Hill. As you may have gathered, the Swedenborgians don’t harbor the guilt that some Christian denominations do about the possession of wealth.”

“So I’ve noticed,” said Charlotte, remembering Peter’s joke about how the church bells ring every day at six to signal the cocktail hour. Though taking time out for the cocktail hour didn’t necessarily imply wealth, it did imply a leisured lifestyle.

“The Swedenborgians don’t believe that wealth itself is inherently bad,” Jerry continued. “There’s none of this ‘eye of the needle’ stuff; it’s whether or not you use your wealth for good ends that counts.”

“I can appreciate that point of view,” Charlotte commented.

“They’re also very liberal-minded,” he added. “Not only do you not have to be a WASP to be a member of the country club, you don’t even have to be a Swedenborgian.”

The driveway led upward through the woods to the clubhouse, which was built of stone in the same English Gothic style as the church, which seemed appropriate, at least for the many people (Charlotte’s own father having been one of them) for whom golf was as close to a religion as they would get.

After parking under the porte cochere, they entered the clubhouse. To the left of the entrance hall, a group of gray-haired women were playing bridge at tables that had been set up in a library in front of a fireplace in which a fire burned merrily. A waiter was serving coffee from a silver pot.

Seeing them, Charlotte was struck by a “there, but for the grace of God” feeling. It was a life she had been born to and bred for, a life that in many ways would have been more comfortable than her own, but it was also a life that she would have found utterly stifling.

Continuing on to the reception desk, they were directed to an office at the back, where they met Tom Sullivan. The grounds supervisor was a tall man in his fifties, with a weather-beaten complexion, watery blue eyes, and a thick Irish brogue.

After explaining that he’d read about the case in the paper, he invited them to take a ride in his pickup truck to see what he had discovered. “I don’t know if this will mean anything or not,” he said, as they headed out to a parking lot in the back, “but I thought I ought to report it.”

“You did the right thing,” Jerry assured him.

The three of them climbed into the front seat, and Sullivan set out down a narrow road next to the driving range at the rear of the clubhouse. Drawn out by the fine weather, men in slacks of cranberry-red and lemon-yellow were already out perfecting their drives.

Past the driving range, the road climbed uphill along the side of a long fairway, where a flock of Canada geese was resting on the grass. As the pickup drew even with the geese, they suddenly rose en masse into the air and flew off to the east, as if they were leading the way.

“They’re headed to the quarry pit,” said Sullivan, looking up over the wheel. “They move around several times a day, always at the same time and to the same places. They’ll spend a couple of hours at the quarry pit, and then they’ll head over to the water hazard on the tenth hole.”

“Creatures of habit,” said Charlotte.

“Just like the rest of us,” said Sullivan.

A few minutes later, they arrived at the skeet-shooting range, which consisted of a clearing in the woods with a log cabin clubhouse on one side of the road and the skeet range on the other. Continuing on, Sullivan pulled to a stop at a truck-width-sized gap in a stockade fence that lined one side of the road. Beyond the fence was what appeared to be a dump: a flat, cleared area where there were heaps of brush, leaves, cast-off pallets, tree stumps, broken-up asphalt, old stovepipe—even a child’s tricycle.

Getting out, Sullivan entered the dump area and led them to a spot just behind the stockade fence, about fifteen feet in from the edge of the opening. “There,” he said, looking down at the bare ground. At his feet were a brown extension cord with shoelaces tied to either end, and a small change purse made of bright orange fabric with a key ring attached. “I noticed this when I came out here this morning with one of my men to dump some clippings,” he said, nodding at a nearby pile of evergreen branches. “I didn’t touch anything.”

Taking a plastic evidence bag out of his jacket pocket, Jerry picked up the change purse and opened the Velcro flap, revealing a plastic-covered pocket that held an identification card. The name printed in blue ink on the card was Doreen Mileski, and the address was 33 Liberty Street, Corinth.