Savant (3 page)
He was also matching his voice and its rhythms to the effeminate clothes, the sissified speech affectations, and the woman's obvious expectations, based on her call—and now on her body language—but he was quite careful not to lay it on too thickly. All he wanted was enough to counterbalance her natural fears, offset his massive size a bit, and give her something to remember him by. He was more animated than usual, and he never allowed his rubbery face to sink into the look it normally wore when in repose.
"There is one other thing I wonder about—and it's something I would pay extra for, in fact considerably extra. A telephone. You know, I was going to break my longstanding rule and install a phone in the gallery itself, but I detest doing that. They're so intrusive! And—no more than we'd use it, I wonder…would you consider renting me the use of your phone for one day each month? Say for an additional two hundred a month?"
"Oh, certainly. I have a private line at my apartment, and you could use it one day a month. Would the calls be local?"
"Um. I wouldn't be using it to call out. We'd be receiving calls on it. I could run the number as our auction line."
"Of course. That would be fine." She shook her head. "I wouldn't charge that much, though. Not just for you using it one day a month."
"I appreciate that, Miss Roach. However I would like to pay it for this reason. Occasionally—I mean, perhaps two or three times a month—I might get a customer inquiring about an item listed in the mail auction. And if you didn't mind, here's what I'd like you to do: You answer the telephone in your normal way, and if they ask if this is the Norville Gallery you tell them yes, but that the director is out, and that I will return their call. Each evening I would give you a call and you'd pass those numbers along to me. You'd seldom get such inquiries, so it wouldn't become a bother. But if you'd be willing to allow the use of your phone in that manner I'd make your salary fourteen hundred a month instead of twelve hundred a month."
"Certainly," she said quickly, mentally counting the financial windfall. They spoke some more about the gallery and what the auctions were like. He'd chosen his person well. Elaine Roach was rather at ease now, evidently pleased by the nature of the work and the pay scale.
"It's done then." He stood up heavily and she got to her feet. "I'll start you on salary instantly, and I'll call you in the morning with your first day's duties." He saw something in her face, sensitive to sea changes as ever. "Monday, rather. I forgot what day it was." He said this in a hushed, prim voice, and she nodded her understanding, She had nothing against a homosexual employer. Perhaps she would find this a pleasant association after all. She mentally made a note to remember to use the word "gay" instead of homosexual.
"So, Mr. Norville, I'll be working out of my apartment essentially, and not at the gallery?"
"Yes. Pretty much so, essentially. You'll make a trip to the bank and post office now and again, but for the most part you'll just stay all nice and cozy, in your apartment." She brightened as he fed her lines back to her. Clearly she was someone who didn't relish being back out in the work force.
The job sounded wonderfully ideal to Elaine Roach, who had not been treated kindly by her fifty-four years on the planet. It was almost too good to be true. She also thought she sensed Mr. Norville's genuine pleasure with her qualifications and it was reassuring that at last she had met someone whose needs she in some way filled.
They said their goodbyes, and he came back inside the hotel room. If she learned at some point that Giles Cunningham was the name on the register as occupant of the room in which she'd met Tommy Norville, it could be explained away in the most understandable terms. Giles and Tommy were roommates. He would wait awhile and Tommy Norville would now cease to be, for a bit, except in print and over the phones.
For the moment, the image that stared back at Tommy Norville in the Hyatt Regency's mirror was one that bore surprisingly little resemblance—size aside—from that of the man who had not long ago occupied Cell 10 in the Violent Unit of D-Seg at Marion Federal Penitentiary. Clothes did indeed make the man. The bleached, newly shorn hair, and such touches as the "seamstress" bifocals, made a remarkable change. But it was his movements, in character, that added texture to the Norville persona.
Chaingang had observed an actor on a television talk show proclaiming what a terrific training ground the daytime soaps were for thespians. He'd watched a few minutes of these programs and found their broadly played, scenery-chewing histrionics laughably inept. Along with his many unique gifts, Bunkowski had the natural skills of a consummate actor: keen powers of observation and mimicry, a predisposition for thorough preparation, the ability to instantly summon up stored emotion, and the feel for a character's center. The acting and reacting he'd seen on the daytime dramas had been ludicrously unconvincing.
He intuitively knew that he'd hammed up the Norville character. If he played him again—and he would—the next time he'd not draw on such a broad stereotype. He filed away a quick critique of his kinesiology and a mental list of suggestions for how he might better locate Tommy's center, when next he came to life.
With that done he shed the character as much as possible. A cap would cover the hair when Giles Cunningham checked out, and he would forget to drop his door opener at the desk. The bellhop who took his bag to a waiting cab would find himself the beneficiary of another oversize tip, with a request to return the key card with thanks. The bill had been prepaid with checkout in mind. The fewer persons who saw Mr. Cunningham prior to his becoming nonexistent, the colder a trail he'd leave behind.
As always, his computer sorted options and retraced movements, calculating the time it would take the authorities to follow his paper trail along the interstate highway. He felt fairly confident that he'd lost his trackers, but for once Bunkowski couldn't have been more wrong.
Blue Springs, Missouri
In the parking lot of a shopping mall down the highway from Blue Springs Antiques Barn, the gigantic killer pulled out photocopies of ads, familiarizing himself with his merchandise, both real and imagined, seeing where the holes were in his presentations.
The first auction would be Wednesday night at six P.M., closing at midnight, Central Daylight Savings Time. By then the results of the first series of letters would have arrived and the collectors wishing to respond could reach Elaine Roach by telephone.
These were memorabilia collectors of one kind or another whose ads Tommy Norville had seen in various publications. It didn't matter what you were looking for, so long as it was shippable, the Norville Galleries probably had it: militaria, clocks, china, cut glass, French cameo, antique firearms, Indian Americana. Name a category and he stocked it in depth. Your top want, in each instance, was the item that caught his expert eye. You were prepared to pay the maximum for X item and he had X item in his next auction—what a coincidence! You could phone your bid in Wednesday night. In some cases, he even sent a Polaroid of the item in stock.
The ideal merch was something for which ten different collectors across the country lusted. By some coincidence again—on those particular items—there would be ten winners! He looked at the ads and computed the logistics of the come-on. First there would be a week while the invoices were mailed out to the winners. Allow another ten days for all those "winning" bidders to respond with their remittances, and he estimated a three—to three-and-a-half-week window between that moment and the time the money was in his pocket.
He was already sending in the ads for the direct priced-sale offering of collectible weaponry that would run more or less simultaneously. Tommy Norville had learned all these fields in the same way he'd learned everything else of a survival nature, and he knew everything from toxicology to locksmithing; he'd force-fed it to his brain.
For the past week, he'd been all over the Kansas City area, driving as far as fifty miles out to visit promising shops and galleries, photographing rare merchandise. Especially weapons. He'd even taken a few illicit shots in museums. The dealer's shops were much more lenient about permitting a would-be customer to "keep a visual record" of such-and such for his files. He'd learned there were dealers called "runners" who used such a technique, finding scarce items, running to find a buyer, then running back to buy the item only if they had a money-in-hand sale.
He read ".
69-caliber flintlocks. Beautifully dec. 18th century. Gold-washed barrels and mounts
." The rare pair of cased weapons represented an expenditure of $6.50 in gasoline, Polaroid film, and a flashbulb.
"
Unique .55-caliber flintlock has solid ivory stock with silver and gilt inlays, enamel niello work and gorgeous cloisonné. Clean, superb, no cracks. Ivory ramrod is original. Fourteen-inch barrel octagonal at the breech. Lockplate has no bridle on frizzen. Ivory stock/carved dragon's head butt makes this a museum-quality flintlock
." A gun collector's wet dream. Indeed, it was museum quality, all right. The nearby Patee Museum is where he'd obtained the photo.
The next half dozen with pictures were firearms that could actually be purchased from dealers within ten to fifty miles: an unusual wheellock from around 1600; a Japanese matchlock long rifle from the same time period, dripping in ornate brasswork; a little sterling sash pistol; a sheathed hunting sword dated 1550. Pieces Tommy Norville could actually buy and sell. Weapons with checkable histories to lend credibility to his scam.
The remainder of the auction was composed of fantasies, pure artifacts of the imagination, and scarce goodies with pictures and/or descriptions cribbed from other collectibles auctions.
".
58-cal. cased set of flintlock duellers by Wogdon. Extraordinary presentation set marked 'to the inestimable
Conan Doyle
from his admirer.' Signed
Wogdon.
Museum qu. pair of cased duellers. Pristine mint, lavish gilt and sterling inlays on long, slim barrels. Gold-lined b. vents. Set, complete with documentation from the author's estate, accompanied by engraved, gold powder flask rod, and inlaid bullet mold. Rare wood presentation case with brass corners, carved
Sherlock Holmes
image on lid of case, marked inside
, Wogdon, London."
A more experienced weapons buff would have realized that Wogdon was not making cased dueling pistols when the creator of Holmes and Watson was alive, but nobody's perfect.
Fantasy listings would be certain to elicit a few outstanding bids, and they would gain attention for the priced-sale items to be offered at the same time.
When the first week to ten days' worth of remittances from the auction and the sale ads had been banked by the trustworthy Miss Roach, Tommy Norville would have her make a withdrawal. Shortly thereafter, the up and coming antique weapons dealer who ran the auction galleries would cease to exist.
A dissimilar-appearing but equally large man had once hired a nice lady to aid him in much the same type of enterprise, working from a nearby post-office drawer she had rented, and utilizing a bank account and telephone in her name. He'd netted over eleven thousand dollars profit from two sales of "rare regulator and advertising clocks."
When a chief postal inspector and local authorities finally got around to following this paper trail, they'd end up with a perplexed Elaine Roach, whose sissified Tommy Norville description would be somewhat at odds with the tenant of the upstairs office on East Minnesota Avenue, should they even track him to that particular lair. It was all most confusing. Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski was rebuilding his war treasury.
T
he next few days found Daniel Bunkowski busy with the details of his mail-order scam, and searching for a likely rental location for his safe house. Because the East Minnesota Avenue office had running water and toilet facilities, he could make do with a sleeping bag on the floor for a couple of weeks. Sometime in the next three weeks, however, he needed to find a suitable place where he could hunker down when he "ran his traps," courtesy of Elaine Roach, and pulled the lion's share of money out of his auction remittances. At that point he needed to vanish.
An extremely large but well-spoken gentleman with a full beard, who did something academic and terribly vague for a living, put a deposit on a small rental property in Overland Park. Two months in advance, as agreed, with the first month's rent effective in thirty days. It was adequate for his needs of the moment, and the terms fit his window of logistics. If he had to bail out in three weeks rather than four he could always extemporize for a few days. He was the very definition of "field expedient."
With safe house rented, office and temporary dwelling paid for, ads in the mail, Elaine Roach with her nominal make-work, letters of auction solicitation out, Bunkowski had time. Time to kill, that is.
For the first time since they'd freed him from Max Security in Marion, Illinois, once again blessed with an official sanction to go out there and take lives, he'd analyzed his choice of an escape route. As always, he made such decisions instinctively, but with the constant spoonfed data from his mental computer, acting in sync with whatever presentient vibes were brought forth.
It had been the most natural thing to decide on a northerly course as an exfiltration route from Southeast Missouri. When the Waterton spree reached a climax he'd prepared a suitable identity, legal wheels, and without much analysis headed for Kansas City. Now, with a bit of time on his hands, he could ponder the why of it. He'd been heading for Kansas City, perhaps, because it was home, as much as the beast could be said to have a home.
He had time now to reflect on his early life, something he seldom cared to do. It had been a horror-filled hell of torment: at the hands of a perverted "stepfather" of sorts, a cruel foster mother, and the older boys who turned his early reform-school years into a nightmare without end.