Dead Sleep (51 page)

“I do understand that,” I tell him, my eyes settling on Thalia's inert body. “That's why I've lived the life I have.”
How can this man possibly see the ruin Thalia is now as a release?
“But the painting you're doing now must have a different theme.”

He nods, flicking his hand right, then left, his eye leading the strokes with lightning precision.

“It's my emergence,” he says. “My freedom from the prison of duality.”

“From Roger, you mean?”

“Yes.” Again the strange smile. “Roger's dead now.”

Roger's dead?
“How did he die?”

“I shed him, like a snake sheds its skin. It took a surprising amount of effort, but it had to be done. He was trying to kill me.”

Now Frank Smith speaks from my memory, confiding that Roger Wheaton wanted his help with suicide. “Roger went to Frank Smith for help, didn't he?”

Wheaton's eyes are on me now, trying to gauge the depth of my knowledge. “That's right.”

“Why go to him? Why not to Conrad Hoffman? Your helper? Hoffman set this place up for you, didn't he?”

Wheaton looks at me like I'm three years old. “Roger didn't know Conrad. Except from that first show, which he quickly forgot. Don't you see?”

I can't digest the information fast enough. “Does—
did
—Roger, I mean—did he know about
you
?”

“Of course not.”

“But how do you hide from him? How have you done all this work without him knowing?”

“It's not difficult. Conrad and I set up this special place, and this is where I do my work.”

“Is that what you did in New York, too?”

Wheaton cuts his eyes at me, a wolfish look in them. “You know about New York?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“A computer program enhanced the faces in your earlier paintings, and an FBI man recognized one of the victims.”

“Kaiser, I'll bet.”

“Yes.”

“He's a sly one, isn't he?”

I hope so.
As Wheaton paints on, I ponder the chances of the FBI finding me here. They know what happened by now, of course. John and Baxter. Lenz. The NOPD. They know Gaines was not the killer. They've seen Wheaton's finger painting, found Agent Aldridge. But what could possibly lead John to this place? The infrared photos? FBI planes shot total coverage of the French Quarter and the Garden District; they have a definite number of houses with courtyards by now. Dozens of agents are probably at the New Orleans courthouse right now, wading through the deeds to those places, searching for any connection to Roger Wheaton or Conrad Frederick Hoffman. Will they include houses with conservatories? Yes. John will be thorough. We talked about houses with skylights; anything that lets in lots of light will be on the list.

How long have they been looking for me? Is this the evening of the day Gaines was shot? Or the next day? Or the next? I suddenly realize that I'm terribly hungry. Thirsty, too.

“I'm starving. Do you have any food?”

Wheaton sighs and looks up at the glass roof, checking the diminishing light. Then he sets down his brush and walks to my left, out of my field of vision. Straining to turn my neck, I see him reach down into a brown grocery bag and bring out a flat narrow package about eight inches long. Beef jerky. Suddenly I'm standing in Mrs. Pitre's driveway, outside the garage apartment Conrad Hoffman rented, where John found Hoffman's stash of junk food. Beef jerky was part of it.

Beside the grocery bag stands something else that must have been Hoffman's. An Igloo ice chest. The standard three-foot-wide plastic model, big enough for two cases of beer. Or IV bags filled with saline and narcotics. It depends on the customer, I suppose.

Wheaton's gloved hands give him difficulty tearing open the yellow pastic wrapper of the jerky, but he knows I can't manage it in my present state. At last he pulls it apart and walks over to the tub. With tremendous effort, I raise my hand and take the brown strip from him.

“Very good,” he says.

Ugh,
I think as I slide the tacky stuff into my mouth. But when I grind the flat strip between my back teeth, my tongue savors the grease expressed from the meat like crème brûlée. If only I had some water to go with it. I could cup some bathwater and drink, but I don't fancy a mouthful of urine. If I regain my muscular control, I'll drink from the tap.

“How do you know Roger is dead?” I ask. If I have a potential ally in this room, his name is Roger Wheaton.

The artist laughs softly. “You remember the finger painting on the floor at the gallery?”

“Yes.”

“That was his last gasp. His death throes. An infantile attempt at some sort of confession. Pathetic.”

“And now you don't need your—
his
—eyeglasses anymore?”

“You see me painting without them, don't you?”

Yes, but you're still wearing your gloves.
“What about your other symptoms?”

Wheaton glances at me, and his eyes flicker with confidence. “You're very close to it now. You see, Roger's efforts to kill me aren't anything new. He's been trying to kill me for a long time now. More than two years. Only I didn't know it.”

“How?”

Wheaton pauses with his brush, then adds a few judicious strokes. “Autoimmune diseases are poorly understood. Multiple sclerosis. Scleroderma. Lupus. Oh, doctors understand the mechanics of how they kill you well enough. But the etiology? The cause? You might as well consult a witch doctor. Do you know what an autoimmune disease is? A phenomenon in which the body's immune system—which evolved to protect the body from outside invaders—actually malfunctions and
attacks the body itself.
” Wheaton gives me a triumphant look. “Isn't
that
food for thought? How did the weakling come upon it? Perhaps his guilt and self-disgust were so consuming, his desire to kill me so powerful, that they manifested themselves physically. My disease waxes and wanes in severity as it progresses, and I noticed that the waxing phases occurred when Roger had control. Then he began actively trying to murder me, with Frank Smith's help. With insulin. You know what
that
told me? There were chinks in the wall that separated us. He was beginning to see into my mind. That's when
you
walked into my life. A mirror of a woman I'd already painted. A woman who was dead. Yet here was her double—her
other half
—perfectly healthy. I knew then. A new vision had come to me, and this painting was part of it. I had to save myself.”

I stare speechless from the steaming tub. The complexity of his delusion is staggering. Born in the mind of an abused child, it blossomed and flowered in the crucible of a dying artist's fear of extinction.

“Are you—I mean, has it worked? Are you cured?”

“It's happening. I can feel it. I'm breathing more easily. My joints are less stiff.”

“But you're still wearing your gloves.”

A tight smile. “My hands are too delicate to take chances. And there's systemic damage. That will take time to heal.” He glances up at the darkening sky. “I want you to be quiet now. My light's almost gone.”

“I will. But there's one thing I don't understand.”

He frowns, but I push on. “You say you killed the women you painted to release them from their plight. To spare them a life of pain and exploitation. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Yet each Sleeping Woman was raped before she died. How can you stand there and tell me you're sparing them pain, when you're putting them through the worst thing a woman can experience short of death?”

Wheaton has stopped painting. His eyes glower with anger and confusion. “What are you talking about?”

“Conrad Hoffman. Before he died, he had a gun to my head. He told me he was going to rape me. He said that even if he had to shoot me in the spine, it would still be nice and warm between my legs.”

Wheaton's eyes narrow to slits. “You're lying.”

“No.”

“Then he was trying to intimidate you, to get you into the car.”

I shake my head. “I saw his eyes. Felt the way he touched me. I've been raped before. I know how rapists' eyes look.”

A strange cast of compassion comes over the long face. “You were raped?”

“Yes. But that's not the point. The last woman taken before Thalia—the one taken from Dorignac's and dumped in the drainage canal—the pathologist found semen inside her.”

His head jerks as if avoiding a blow.

“Was it yours?” I ask softly.

Wheaton throws down his brush and takes two steps toward me. “You're lying.”

The prudent thing would be to stop, but my salvation may lie in the root of this paradox. “The FBI is sure you killed the Dorignac's woman. They worked out the timing of Wingate's death, and they know when Hoffman flew back from New York. Hoffman couldn't have taken her.”

Wheaton is wheezing now, like a child with asthma. “I took her, but—” He stands with his mouth open, unable to continue.

He really does believe that by killing those women he was sparing them. But I can't spare him. Somewhere, buried behind those deranged eyes, is the gentle mind of the artist I met earlier in the week.

“Help me understand,” I plead. “A man who saves a twelve-year-old girl from being raped in Vietnam turns around and helps some pervert rape the women he claims he's saving?”

Wheaton's chin is quivering.

“I guess it was Roger who saved that girl in Vietnam—”

“No!”
A single, explosive syllable
. “I did that!”

I say nothing. The fault line running through Wheaton's mind is torturing him more painfully than I possibly could. His face twitches, and his hands shiver at his sides. With a jerk of his head he looks up at the nearly dark sky. Then he walks to a table behind his easel, lifts a hypodermic syringe from it, and walks back toward me, his face devoid of emotion.

My newfound confidence vaporizes, leaving pure terror in its wake. If Wheaton wants to stick me with that needle, there's nothing I can do about it. That reality sends me hurtling back to Honduras, to the night my innocence died forever, when I learned the most terrible of life's lessons: you can shriek and fight and beg for someone to stop hurting you, but it won't make them stop; you can plead to God and your mother and father, and they will not hear you; your cries will not move to pity those who rend you.

When Wheaton steps behind my head, the skin of my neck crawls, awaiting the prick of the needle. Summoning all my strength, I twist my neck to look up and back. He is standing by my IV tree, injecting the contents of his syringe into my IV bag. I scream now, with all my power, but he tosses the empty syringe on the floor and walks back to his easel. My left arm begins to burn at the wrist, and tears of anger and helplessness flow from my eyes. Sucking in great gulps of air, I try to fight the unknown poison, but in a matter of seconds my eyelids fall as surely as shutters being pulled down by a man with a hook.

26

THIS TIME THE WORLD returns as stars in a black sky, a universe of stars slightly blurred by glass, and the sound of a man sobbing. The anguished sobs seem to echo all the way from a distant planet. The planet of childhood, I suspect.

I'm shivering again, which is not such a bad thing. It's when you stop shivering that you're in trouble. I can barely see Thalia across from me in the tub, so dark is the night. But I'm thankful for the darkness. I've been many places where my only light at night was the stars, and I know this: if I can see Polaris and the horizon, I can estimate my latitude. Not with enough accuracy to navigate a ship by—not without a sextant—but enough to guess my location in general terms. It's one of the practical tricks my father taught me. A good thing for a world traveler to know, he said, especially if you're ever hijacked on a boat or a plane, which he once was.

I don't know which star is Polaris yet, because I can't see either the Big or Little Dipper, which are the quickest guides. Polaris may not even lie within my field of vision. But I am facing north and surrounded on three sides—and overhead—by glass, my view only partly obscured by tree branches. If I can watch long enough, stay conscious long enough, all the stars will move around the sky but one: Polaris, which rotates in a two-degree circle above the north pole. The Pole Star. The North Star. That constant light has guided many a desperate traveler, and I am certainly that now.

My problem is the horizon. I can't see it, because of the high brick wall outside.
Not to worry,
says my father.
You can use an artificial horizon. The best is a bowl of mercury on the ground.
Mercury reflects stars remarkably well; you simply measure the angle between Polaris and its reflection, then divide by two. That's if you have a sextant, which I don't. In the absence of a mercury bowl, the surface of a pool of water can be substituted, and that I do have. But the conservatory glass distorts the starlight enough so that, combined with the movement of the bathwater caused by breathing and blood circulation, no clear reflection exists.
Not the end of the world,
my father assures me.
You can guess where the horizon is—

The anguished sobbing has stopped.

I sense that Wheaton is lying on the floor somewhere, but I can't see him. As I try to make out objects in the room, an amazing new reality comes to me.

My muscles are under my control.

Leaning back, I look up at the silver line of my IV stand. The hanging bag is flat. Whatever was keeping my muscles in limbo has stopped flowing into me. But my mind is not yet clear. It seems unnaturally focused on the idea of the stars and where I am. But this information
is
important. New Orleans lies roughly on the thirtieth parallel. If I can verify that I'm on the thirtieth parallel, I can reasonably assume that I'm still in New Orleans, that Wheaton has not flown me to some distant killing house, where the other victims await me like the living sculpture Thalia has become. Of course, Polaris will not tell me my longitude; so the thirtieth parallel could put me in Bermuda, the Canary Islands, or even Tibet. But these are outside possibilities. For me, thirty degrees latitude will mean a real chance of rescue by the FBI.