I'll Let You Go (53 page)

“I will, sir. The night nurses have just arrived.”

“I'm going to move them in, Winter—we need three shifts. Two isn't enough. Because it's far too much for you, now isn't it?” He felt an onrush of emotion for this selfless woman, who had served so long and so well. “We need three shifts, and we need the people already here so we're not at the mercy of waiting—so
you
don't have to wait. Extra pairs of eyes to watch over her … so you're free to go to your room and look at television. Or to the Village to take in a movie. And not be burdened by waiting for someone to show up. That's already in the works.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He gave her a hug and ushered her out before she had a chance to start bawling.

J
ane Scull heard a commotion. Some lights came on, and she was confused. Was it morning? She climbed down from her bunk, rubbing her eyes. Then looked up: horror! She ran to William, now surrounded by policemen, hands fastened behind his back.

“It's all right, Janey! It's all right.”

A staffperson restrained her while a lady cop stood between Jane and her beau.

“
Uttt? Cant ake youuuh!
” Now all the hours spent enunciating before the mirror were for naught. She trundled after, and William asked an officer if he might please say a word to his frightened friend. Seeing that he was peaceable, they allowed a supervised moment before locking him away.

“Janey darling, it's a mistake—I'll be back, don't worry! Don't
cry
, there's no
reason
for it. I left ice cream in the freezer with a special topping. You'll have some, won't you?”

She nodded and composed herself to speak as best she could. He leaned to her mouth and had trouble understanding, but at the last moment, just before they made him go, his eyes flashed righteously—she was asking if he'd hurt a girl, a little girl! That's why she thought they had come for him …

“Janey, Janey, who told you such a thing? That child was my life! I did everything I could to help her!” He was flabbergasted, and numbly took in those gathered around as if they were picadors and he had been one hundred times lanced. “Who would tell you such a thing?” They pulled him away, and William had no time to explain. “Now, don't you worry your pretty head,” he shouted. “D'you hear? I have done
nothing
, Janey! [His refutation being general, for he knew not why they had come for him, either.] Have your ice cream in the morning and by the time you finish, I'll be home!”

As the handcuffed giant awkwardly insinuated himself into the backseat, an officer held a palm over his head in the baptismal gesture that ushered the doomed into custody.

“See to my personal things, Janey! My book—see that it's safe!”

She nodded vigorously, while the staffers held her back, and cried
when the black-and-white peeled away, joyful with what she'd known in her heart all along: her William was bighearted and tender and good. Her William was the Lord's child, and innocent too! She would visit Please-Help.-Bless once more,
then
have dessert—and by the time she finished the very last spoonful, her man would be forever home.

T
he very next morning, Samson Dowling drove downtown to interview the prisoner, who was being held on charges of murder and rape. Arraignment wasn't until Tuesday, and a public defender would not be appointed before then; the client would be shackled and already in court on the occasion of that first meet.

After the MacLaren interview, his gut told him it was unlikely that the suspect (who since the arrest had reluctantly identified himself as William Marcus) had participated in any nefarious acts, sexual or otherwise, involving the girl. He would no doubt be cleared of such accusations—but that was the least of the prisoner's worries.

Regarding the murder, Samson had a few threadbare theories. He believed the defendant was in a relationship with the deceased and that there had been a squabble over money or drugs—perhaps even a classic sex-gone-bad scenario escalating to homicide. Things got a little murkier after that. One of his thoughts was that after the killing, a remorseful “Mr. Marcus” aided the girl as a kind of penance. Yet what troubled the detective most were the vicious circumstances surrounding the mother's death.

The coroner's report concluded that the woman had been raped postmortem. Amaryllis had told intake workers that her brother and sister were crawling on the bed when she came home to find the body, meaning they had been either in the kitchenette or the room itself while the crimes were being committed. Whether they were sound asleep or not meant little; their sheer presence betrayed a coldness on the part of the killer that was unsettling.

Other details nagged. Investigators were unable to lift prints from the scene; it was the detective's experience that in a case like this, such fastidiousness (given the low-life players) was unusual to say the least. In other words, there was a degree of professionalism involved. Then there was the actual method of strangulation, accomplished by ligatures of uncommon complexity. What was the meaning of it?

But the most damning piece of evidence was the navy-blue ascot. Amaryllis had corroborated that it belonged to William Marcus aka Topsy; and while the silken item—stuffed deep in the victim's throat—had not been the instrument of her death, it revealed yet another layer of brutality.

Samson found himself high in the Twin Towers, sitting opposite a weather-beaten mountain of Caucasian male, roughly forty-five years of age, with long, slender fingers on delicate hands and cool, gray eyes. His informant (whom the detective paid off and hoped never to have dealings with again) had accurately conveyed that since relocating to the beach, the formerly hirsute “Mr. Marcus” was now in fact close-shaven; Samson wished he'd at least gotten a glimpse of that near-legendary beard, for it had helped him better form a picture these last few months. William Marcus was assumed to be an alias but would have to be lived with until the computers told them otherwise.
^†

He began rather delicately, for his instincts told him there was no other way to approach the creature before him; but soon he was asking anything he wanted, for something in the man made him want to rush to the heart of things. Where had he been living before the beach? Had he bivouac'd downtown, under a bridge? Had he ever worked for a man named Gilles Mott in a Temple Street bakery for pocket money? Did he bring a young girl there? And where did he meet that selfsame girl? Was it the girl's mother who introduced them?

The mind is a mysterious, plastic thing and never ceases to invent
itself; it can plod faithfully along with a yeoman's awareness or sparkle with exquisite brilliance before losing its way. It learns and relearns with startling agility but, like any Thoroughbred, likes to be put through its paces. As implausible as it may seem, had Detective Dowling not lately gone through the mental gymnastics of connecting the dots between the short-haired “consul's daughter” recently met at the Saint-Cloud maze and the pallid little beast he had once driven from Hotel Higgins to MacLaren—if his brain had not been suchwise jarred, then his sudden and precipitous recognition of the lost soul before him might never have occurred at all—this being a roundabout way of explaining why midway into the thirty-minute interview his eyes glazed and his pulse quickened. What tipped him over? The odd, vaguely anglicized turn of phrase—remnants of an accent heard long-ago in Adirondacks interrogations? Intuition of familiar bones beneath fleshy mask before him? Or the ineffable thing of Trinnie's voodoo upon Samson's séanced heart … it was—it was—it was—

“Marcus?”

“Yes?”

“You're Marcus Weiner.”

“Man, who?”

“You
are
him.”

Whether he knew or knew not, and if so by and what degree, William wasn't ready to abandon his post.

“Marcus! It's
Samson
,” he said, pointing rather absurdly to his own chest. “Samson
Dowling—Dodd's
friend. Dodd
Trotter—
”

He glowered and said, “Sir, do not challenge me!”

The detective took a long breath, and retrenched. “Look: I want to help you.”

“Man, I am not desirous of your help!”

“Do you not know that your name is Marcus Weiner? That you have a family? And that you've been missing thirteen years? Do you not know this?”

S
eaShelter, the morning after. An agitated SeaStaff bristles: can it possibly be that William,
their
William, eccentric lord of the kitchen and shining rehab poster boy, was actually a fugitive wanted in
connection with the heinous murder of a downtown woman some months back? And that wasn't all! Rumor had it that on top of it, he was being charged with the kidnapping and molestation of—suddenly paranoid, one of the day managers thought it prudent to pay a visit to Le Marmiton and gather up any items extant that were William-made. Only days before, the Montana Avenue bakery had bought a half-dozen jars of pomegranate preserves, along with his trademark thumbprint cookies ladled with the fruit's special sauce; such was their popularity that all had sold out. The woman behind the counter was glad to see the representative so she could order some more. The SeaStaffer anxiously scanned the shelves for potentially poisoned goods and, as he left, made an empty promise that a delivery would soon be on its way.

Jane Scull was devastated. SeaShelter “guests,” whom she thought of as friends, now declared with aplomb that William—whose pastries and foodstuffs they'd so greedily inhaled, and who had patiently adjudicated their squabbles and poignantly attended their subliterate tales of woe, and who had transcribed in careful calligraphic hand all their wretched poetries—their William,
her
William, was a strangler and a child-fucker who was going to fry!

She had an important question for Please-Help.-Bless.

Upon her request, a counselor opened William's locker so Jane could retrieve
News from Nowhere
, wrapped in oilcloth and tightly bound with twine; her plan was to bring it to him in the afternoon. The same staffer had been good enough to draw a map showing how to get to the jail, albeit the wrong jail, but it's the thought that counts. She put the book in her backpack, then launched for Pico Boulevard and environs.

She walked for hours, but there was no sight of him. Maybe he was done with her and had moved on to the next case—he was, after all, or so he said, a professional informant. “Me and Gold Shield, we's a team!” She would not mention the woman they said her William had killed, for she wished to hear no lies about that, nor would she bother to tell him it was not true about William touching the girl; she already felt ashamed for not having gone to her man right away to tell him of the blackmailer. She had let herself be raped instead. She felt so agonized and traitorous and diseased on so many fronts—no, she would not press the outrageous innocence of her William's case, not with that devil, nor with anyone else. She knew that in jail a murderer might be well regarded but the
“other” kind, the child-bothering kind was … the thing Jane wanted to know,
needed
to know, was:
would her William be killed in jail?
For that's what he had said …

Killim! Killim! Killim—

It was more than her heart could bear! Why
did
the devil say such a thing? And how would he
know
? She could not rely on her William being released, for the wheels of justice move slowly and the maulers of children are guilty until proven innocent. She knew nothing of the girl—could it be his daughter?—knew nothing of anything but her William. Was it possible the devil had made up a story just so they would kill him? That her William's life was in
his
hands? But how, how! And there, in Tujunga, was Jilbo—Jilbo, who'd fathered her child,
his
hands on all the little ones … and her William in jail, this devil in her holes and Jilbo free as a dirty bird! She would talk to Gold Shield—
My William is going to be killed!
she would say.
And that should not happen to a man when he is in jail, especially an innocent who is awaiting his trial. It is
not
right, it is not
supposed
to happen …
She would find Gold Shield when she visited the prison. Jane bit her lip in recrimination; she should have asked for him on the night of the arrest. Selfishness! The police were all around and she could have talked to Gold Shield
then
, could have talked to any one of them … but she was busy blubbering instead; busy getting assurances from her true love that he was not a molester of children—assurances that he was not a devil—when she took
this
devil's assurances whenever he liked—collecting her husband's startled consolations: that's how she'd spent their last moments together. As if anything her William might have done (no matter how immoral) could ever make a difference, or injure her love for him.