Murder Among the Angels (28 page)

“Oh, yes,” he said. “They know all your weaknesses, and they prey on them. But I never had any trouble resisting them. I know why you came here. You think I killed the Lily look-alikes. Because of the legend of the Leatherman, who killed the fiancée who jilted him.”

He may have been crazy, but he wasn’t stupid, Charlotte thought.

“The whole Leatherman thing is the invention of overactive imaginations,” he said. “But I humor them. It doesn’t do any harm, and I get some free meals out of it.”

“I’ve seen you eating at Sebastian’s,” Jerry said. “At the bar.”

“Yes. Sebastian is an old friend of mine.”

“When you eat at Sebastian’s, do you always eat at the bar, or do you sometimes eat in the kitchen?” Jerry asked.

Peter seemed puzzled at the sudden change of tack. “Actually, I usually eat in the kitchen. Sebastian doesn’t like me to eat out front when the dining room is crowded. Though he’s too kind to say so, he’s afraid my appearance would put off the customers.”

“Do you sometimes watch the meals being prepared?” Jerry asked. “The cutting and the chopping and so on.”

“I not only watch, I sometimes help out when Sebastian is in a pinch. With the chopping of the vegetables.”

It looked as if Sebastian put everybody to work, Charlotte thought, reminded of how Jerry had also helped out in the kitchen.

Jerry let out an involuntary little snort, and moved on to another line of questioning: “As near as we can tell, the first victim was murdered around Labor Day, the second at the beginning of April, and the third during the third week in April. I presume that you were here at those times.”

“Where else would I be?” Peter asked.

“You weren’t on vacation in Florida, or anything?”

“I was here,” he said. “I’m always here. I don’t have an alibi. But you’re wasting your time questioning me.”

“Why?” Jerry asked.

“Because I didn’t do it,” he said simply.

“I think you can understand why we have to question you,” Jerry said. “You were one of the few people who knew that Dr. Louria was turning these young women into Lily look-alikes.”

“One of the few, but not the only,” he said. He looked up at them. “I told you, I can resist the demons. But not everyone is as strong as I am. There are some who are tormented by them.”

“And who might they be?”

“I’m not at liberty to reveal what was revealed to me as a result of my contact with the spirits on the other side; it’s privileged information.”

“May I remind you that this is a murder investigation?” Jerry growled.

Peter looked up at him defiantly. “Then take me into custody,” he said.

“I’m afraid that’s what we’re going to have to do.”

13

Peter had gone willingly with them to the police station, where he was being detained while Jerry and his men gathered the evidence that would be presented to the grand jury. The money to post his bail was being raised by the parishioners of the church under the leadership of the Reverend Cornwall. Though the evidence gathered thus far was all circumstantial, there was a lot of it. As their landlord, Peter would have been one of the few people who knew that Dr. Louria was turning the young women into Lily look-alikes. As the church sexton, he had access to the key cabinet and could have seen two of the victims taking their early morning walks on the golf course. As a result of repairing the broken glass at the florist’s, he could have discovered that Dr. Louria ordered lilies of the valley for the Lily look-alikes, as he had for his wife before them. And finally he had access to the kitchen at Sebastian’s, which was where the murder weapon had probably come from. Most incriminating of all, he had a strong motive, the same motive that the Leatherman had had: to take his revenge against the woman who had jilted him. He also had a motive for mutilating his victims: to do to their bodies what had been done to his by an aberrant stroke of lightning, and thereby to humiliate them the way he himself had been humiliated. Finally, he was probably a little crazy as a result of having his brains fried by a lightning bolt, as the locals put it. Though he claimed to be able to resist the demons that supposedly dwelt in the lower depths, the fact that he had admitted to communicating with them at all was enough to make Charlotte doubt his sanity.

Though it would take some legwork, Charlotte and Jerry were convinced that the hard evidence would come. To use the analogy of the pastor’s braid work, they had separated the individual strands from the tangled skein. Each strand had been attached to its own bobbin on the braiding stand. Now all they had to do was plait them into a braid. The golf course personnel would have to be interviewed to see if any of them had noticed Peter on the grounds. Peter’s fingerprints would have to be matched to those on the cleaver and the extension cord, if there were any. His pickup would have to be checked for bloodstains. But Charlotte was happy enough to leave the details up to Jerry and his men. She had been going nonstop for a week and a half now, and she was tired. She was ready for a nice dinner out, perhaps with her stepdaughter Marsha. Or rather, her ex-stepdaughter, since she was now divorced from Marsha’s father—an event that fortunately hadn’t affected their relationship. Then maybe a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a Friday; the museum would be open late. She hadn’t been to the Douglas Dillon Galleries lately, and she always found looking at Chinese landscape paintings to be soothing for the soul. Or a show on Broadway: there was an English farce that she had wanted to see at the Broadhurst. Now
there
was a remedy for a mind saturated with death and dismemberment: an English farce.

She was about to head back to Manhattan when a call came in for Jerry from the dispatcher. “Chief,” she said, her voice taut with excitement, “I think you’d better get right over to Archfield Hall. We’ve got another thirty-seven.”

A “thirty-seven,” Charlotte remembered from the call about the body parts that had been found at the Corinth Municipal Park, was a dead body.
Well
, she thought,
maybe the English farce could wait
.

Half a dozen police cars had arrived at Archfield Hall ahead of them, and a cluster of policemen was gathered in front next to the ambulance that was parked in the circular driveway by the gryphon fountain. A small crowd of curious onlookers had gathered on the road in front to watch the spectacle. A pair of ambulance attendants were crouched on the portico over the front door, lashing a sheet-covered body to a stretcher. It appeared that the victim, who had fallen or jumped from the tower, had landed on the roof of the protruding portico, instead of falling all the way to the ground. As they watched, the ambulance attendants carefully hoisted the stretcher over the ornate metal railing, and then lowered it with ropes to the policemen waiting on the driveway below. There didn’t appear to be much blood; the shroud covering the body was unstained. But Charlotte knew that was often the case with falls, where the injuries were mostly internal. She remembered the case of the dead body of a beautiful young Japanese woman she had once discovered at the base of a cliff in Newport, Rhode Island. She had been as beautiful in death as she had been in life; even her makeup was still perfect.

As they approached, one of the policemen broke away and came up to Jerry. “It’s the doctor,” he said. “Apparently, he jumped from the tower.”

They looked up at the thick, medieval-style tower, whose pointed roof, with its ceramic tiles in sixteen shades of celestial blue, jutted into the cloudless blue sky. It was sixty or more feet high.

“Anyone in the house?” Jerry asked as they watched the policemen untie the ropes from the stretcher and load it into the back of the waiting ambulance.

“Only the housekeeper,” the officer said. “She’s the one who called in the report. Apparently, she saw him hit. Crosby’s in there with her now. He was waiting for you before he went up to the tower.”

A few minutes later, they were taking the elevator up to the tower for the second time with Marta, whose grief-stricken face was streaked with mascara. This time, Captain Crosby was also along for the ride.

The tower room looked much as it had when they had seen Dr. Louria three days before, except that there were even more empty liquor bottles on the coffee table. The television set was tuned to a soap opera.

Seeing the mess, Marta shook her head. “Since Tuesday, he no come down. Only to sleep. Ever since …” Her glance fell on the newspapers on the coffee table, with their boldfaced headlines, and she started to cry.

Ignoring her, Jerry headed over to the cast-iron spiral staircase that led up to the observation deck on the next level. Charlotte was right behind him, and Captain Crosby in turn was right behind her.

They emerged a moment later on the observation deck, which had triple arched openings on four sides, divided by stone columns with Gothic-style capitals. They looked out on a magnificent panorama of the Hudson, with Hook Mountain rising on the opposite shore. Crossing to the other side, they peered over the railing.

“Jesus,” said Jerry, shaking his head.

Then they wordlessly turned away and went back down the spiral staircase to the tower room to begin their search of the scene.

The suicide note was lying on top of the newspapers on the coffee table. It had been written on one of Dr. Louria’s prescription pads, in the nearly unreadable scrawl of the busy physician.

Jerry picked it up and read it aloud: “‘Three young women have died because of me. And everything I valued has been taken away. Without Lily, and without my career, there’s no point in going on.’”

As she looked up, Charlotte’s glance caught the quote from Swedenborg that was carved on the face of the central beam of the ceiling: “The tower is a symbol for the interior life through which we communicate with heaven.”

Only in Dr. Louria’s case, she thought, it wasn’t heaven he was communicating with in the tower, but his own private hell.

As Jerry replaced the note where he had found it, an item made of flesh-colored plastic caught Charlotte’s eye. It was Dr. Louria’s ear, which had been unhinged from the bracket embedded in his skull and set down next to the note.

Seeing it, Charlotte was reminded of what he had told her about the belief of the ancient Egyptians that only those with intact physical appearances would be able to enter the Kingdom of Osiris.

“It’s signed ‘Orejita mala,’” Jerry said. “I wonder what that means.”

“He told me,” Charlotte said. “It means ‘bad little ear.’”

Charlotte did go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art that evening. Not with Marsha, but alone. On the way to the Douglas Dillon Galleries, she paused at the Chinese ceramics on the second floor balcony of the Great Hall, and ended up spending the whole evening there. She loved the ceramics for the same reason that she loved the landscapes, which was that they evoked lives of leisure spent in the contemplative pursuit of music, art, and poetry. The mere thought that people had once led such lives, even if they were Chinese artist/scholars who had lived ten centuries ago, was enough to reassure her that civilization could exist on earth. For this reason, it was the objects for the writing table that she loved the most: the brush washers, the seal color boxes, the inkstones, and, of course, the tea bowls and the wine cups. Gazing on them, she imagined a life spent in contemplation, drinking wine and writing poetry. On this particular evening, however, she found that she loved them for another reason: their exquisite proportions, their gleaming finishes, their elegant simplicity. Most of all, their wholeness. For a week and a half, she had been dealing with grisly images: heads without ears, heads without bodies, feet without legs, arms without hands. On this quiet balcony, high above the noisy, milling crowd on the floor of the lobby below, there were no chips or cracks—only smooth perfection, and she sucked it up as a visual antidote to the horrors she had witnessed the way sandy soil sucks up water after a rain. In fact, were she to have come across a chip or a crack, it was a good bet that the men in the white coats would have to be called in to haul her away, so fragile had her psychological sense of order become.

It was the first night in weeks that she hadn’t gone to sleep thinking of body parts. Instead, she thought of Chinese glazes: the rich yellow of the chicken fat glaze, the deep red of the
sang-de-boeuf
, and the gleaming white ware, like the color of bleached bone.

No sooner had Charlotte resolved to give Jerry a break from her presence than she found herself about to head back to Zion Hill again. He called early on Sunday morning to invite her to an outdoor concert by a Swedenborgian boys’ choir from England. The concert, which would be held that evening, would be preceded by a community picnic on the church lawn. During the event, the church would be illuminated from the inside, allowing concertgoers the opportunity of viewing the church’s magnificent stained-glass windows from the outside. Along with the annual church holiday on June nineteenth, which commemorated the day that Swedenborg completed his most important work,
True Christian Religion
, the concert was one of the biggest community events of the year, Jerry said. He went on to explain that he usually attended with his wife and daughters, but his wife, who was a schoolteacher, would be out of town at an education seminar, and his daughters were now all off on their own. Jerry promised to fill her in on what he had accomplished since he saw her last, but he warned her that it wouldn’t be much. Peter was still maintaining his innocence, and they hadn’t been able to come up with any additional evidence against him. Unless they came up with something soon, Jerry said, they would have to release him.

The weather alone was enough to tempt Charlotte: it was one of those perfect days of late spring, with temperatures that were warm, but not yet warm enough to be uncomfortable. The idea of a picnic on a lawn overlooking the Hudson on the evening of such a glorious day was enticing enough, but given the fact that Jerry promised her a picnic supper from Sebastian’s, it was irresistible.

It was Sebastian himself who delivered their picnic supper to their spot on the church lawn, which was marked by a purple balloon to match the signature purple facade of the restaurant. Sebastian had handed out purple balloons to all of the customers who had ordered picnic baskets, and a dozen purple balloons floated in the air above the blankets and lawn chairs that were spread out in a semicircle around the stage that had been erected at the foot of the church lawn, against the backdrop of the river valley. Sebastian was looking typically dashing. As on the previous occasion, he wore a purple bandanna tied pirate-style around his head, which emphasized the magnificent Archibald bone structure that had so intrigued Jack Lister and his father. He also wore an embroidered white Cossack-style shirt and tight black knee-length Spandex bicycle pants. If his aim was to look like Enrol Flynn in an old-time swashbuckler, he succeeded admirably. All he lacked was a sword and an eyepatch. He even had an earring: a large gold hoop in his left ear.