The Murder Channel (19 page)

He attacked the keyboard a second time. “She talked to a dozen people out there.”

“Work from Dorchester Avenue back to the playground,” I suggested.

“It’s got to be this one. Adele Robbins. Fuller Street. Lucas, this is one hell of a long shot.”

“You want to clear the case, right?”

“You think there’s a connection to Levana Zrbny.”

I shrugged. “It’s just a hunch.”

I wish that I had kept count of the number of times I have flown by the seat of my pants. A hunch, intuition, a somewhat informed visceral sense of connectedness or meaning, often directed my work.

“I’ve got Vigil arraignments to deal with,” Bolton said, “and it’s still snowing. I can get to this in a couple of days.”

“This is a mild winter at Lake Albert,” I said, pushing myself from the chair. “If you don’t have any objections, I’ll head out to Dorchester.”

“Wait. That reminds me.”

He grabbed a sheet from his in-basket and pushed it across the desk. “That’s a formal complaint,” he said.

I skimmed the first few lines. “Who’s William Hennesy?”

“He manages Riddle’s Bar.”

“Willy?” I read more. “I’m surprised. That’s fairly accurate. I’ll take care of this.”

“Lucas, you’re lucky that got kicked up to me. You have to respond to that in seven days.”

“A misunderstanding,” I said.

“Did you fire the gun?” Bolton’s hands shot into the air. “Don’t answer that.”

“Willy and I will have a good chat over a couple of mugs of Guinness,” I said, folding the complaint and stuffing it into my pocket. “You get anything on that second car parked at the courthouse?”

“Media,” Bolton said.

“Fremont said there was a second car.”

“That wasn’t it. We have the plate number.”

“Registered to whom?” I asked.

Bolton shuffled through papers. “I don’t have it yet.”

“Let me see it before you stuff it into your allegedly chronological file.”

THE SNOW WAS HEAVIER THAN IT HAD BEEN
the previous night, but the wind had died. Visibility and drifting were less problematic. Unlike many of the Dorchester side streets, a plow had visited Fuller Street.

Adele Robbins lived on the top floor of an asphalt-shingled three-story walk-up. The smell of eggs frying in butter greeted me in the hallway,
grew stronger on the second floor, and faded on the third. I tapped on the door and waited, listening to TV noise from elsewhere in the building.

When the door opened, I looked down at a wizened, white-haired woman, less than five feet tall, weighing perhaps ninety pounds, and holding a cocked .44 caliber handgun.

She peered over the top of her half glasses and asked, “What the fuck do you want?”

I glanced from the weapon to her eyes, then back to the menacing artillery. “My name is Lucas Frank,” I began.

“You didn’t answer my question,” she snapped.

“I want to ask you a few things about Theresa Stallings, the young girl—”

“I know who she is. You’re no cop.”

“I work with the police,” I said quickly.

“Why’d it take you eleven years to get here?”

“You called Detective Garcia,” I said.

“Of course I did. I told that twit what I saw out my window. She put down the phone and went off somewhere. That call was my damn dime. You got a gun?”

I do not recall a time when I have lost control of an interview so efficiently and quickly. “Yes,” I said.

“Good. I got one, too. Mine’s out and the hammer’s back. You remember that.”

“I will,” I said, wondering what I had gotten myself into.

“Now you walk to that window and take a look,”
she said, backing into her apartment and pointing with her left hand.

Her living room was a virtual library of word puzzles—paper volumes of crosswords, anagrams, acrostics, cryptograms. Classical music drifted softly from her radio.

“May I push the curtain aside?” I asked.

“You can’t see if you don’t.”

I looked at the playground—down forty feet, across an alley, and over a chain-link fence. “You saw what happened that day,” I said.

“That’s what I tried to tell the cop. Then I waited. They were going to different places on the street, asking questions. They never knocked on my door. That woman had been here before, asking me about a shooting on the avenue. She never came back.”

“I’d like to know what you saw that day,” I said.

“Now I’m gonna tell you that. Then you’re gonna get out of here. I was sitting in that chair by the window, working on one of my mammoth crosswords. I needed a nine-letter word for wailing that started with a C.”

“Caterwaul?”

“Smartass. I looked out when I heard the kids playing. That annoys some people but I like it, knowing the kids are out there with a basketball and not somewhere taking drugs. The red-haired bastard parked at the end of the alley. He’d been showing up for a week. I saw him do the same
thing three times. He’d park, sit, get out of the car for a smoke, go back in, and the whole time he watched those little girls. The day it happened, he must’ve been following them, because he pulled in right after they got there. This time he didn’t bother watching, he didn’t have his smoke. He walked into that playground, grabbed the Stallings girl, dragged her to the car, and drove off. The whole thing was over in less than a minute.”

Adele Robbins was telling me more than she realized. This guy had stalked Theresa Stallings, selected her ahead of time, and chose his location with care. He had done this before. Self-assured, confident, prepared—he was an experienced abductor.

“Can you describe him?” I asked.

“You waited eleven years to get here,” Robbins said, “don’t you get impatient with me. I don’t guess heights, and I don’t guess weights. Red hair I know when I see it. Cut short. He wore blue jeans every time I saw him. That last day, he had on a light blue shirt. Before you ask me about his car, I’m gonna tell you. White, like I said. They change so often, I don’t know makes, but it was a big car, American, four doors. And before you ask me the license plate, I’m gonna give it to you.”

She yanked open a drawer. I waited for her to produce a crumpled and yellowed slip of paper with a partial number. Instead, she lifted out a Massachusetts license plate.

“I didn’t like the way he watched those kids,” she said. “One day when he parked down there, I took my canvas shopping tote and a screwdriver and went out like I was doing my shopping. I crossed the street, went up a ways, then crossed back and came up behind the car. He was leaning against the front fender, smoking his cigarette, and I ducked down and took that off.”

She gave me the plate. “You got three questions left, right?”

I looked at her. This was her show.

“Did I know who he was? Had I seen him before? Have I seen him since?”

I smiled. “That about covers it.”

“I don’t know who he was. I never saw him before. I saw him one time since, two years ago in Jamaica Plain. I was visiting my brother. I was on the bus and I saw him getting into a car on South Huntington Avenue. It was a white car, but not the same one I took that plate off. It happened real quick. His red brush cut was gone. He was bald.”

“Am I allowed to thank you?” I asked.

“No. Just get the hell out.”

THE CRIMINAL PSYCHIATRIC UNIT, A 1930S-
vintage brick institution, loomed behind ominous stone walls topped with razor wire. I found the visitors’ parking lot and hiked through the snow to the main entrance.

Although it is considered a treatment facility, CPU had the appearance and feel of a prison. The primary reasons for the unit’s existence were to provide residential evaluations—what we used to call thirty-or sixty-day papers—of violent offenders to the courts, and to house those convicted of their offenses but deemed insane. I have never understood the distinction since one institution is much like another, and there were probably as many legally sane patients here as there were legally insane inmates in Walpole.

Six of one, half dozen of the other, I thought as the door clicked and I emerged from the locked sally port into a large, rectangular lobby.

I stopped to allow a determined young man in bathrobe, pajamas, and slippers to pass. He stopped abruptly, shouted “Nelson,” thumped himself soundly on his chest with both fists, then continued his focused trek across the lobby.

I headed for a cubicle that housed the only other person in sight.

Her nameplate said she was Beck. Short for Rebecca? Or Ms. Beck? She wore a pink volunteer’s smock and was close in age, but fortunately not disposition, to my friend Adele Robbins.

“I saw you on
Unsolved Mysteries,”
Beck said, before I could speak.

“I wasn’t the fugitive they were hunting,” I said.

She laughed.

“I’m Lucas Frank. I called this morning and left
a message for Ben Moffatt. He should be expecting me.”

“Let’s see. Ben’s on Ward 6. Just a moment.”

She punched buttons on her phone, waited, punched more, then delivered her message. “He’ll be right down,” she said. “It’s just terrible about Felix Zrbny. I never met him. We aren’t allowed on the wards, and even if we were, I wouldn’t go there. Some of the attendants referred to him as the Gentle Giant. Not so gentle, I’d say.”

The man in the bathrobe made another pass. “Nelson.” Thump, thump.

Ben Moffatt emerged from a door marked Restricted Access.

“Dr. Kelly suggested that I talk with you,” I said.

“I don’t know what I can tell you that he can’t,” Moffatt said, directing me to one of the many vinyl sofas in the waiting area.

“I’m trying to understand how Felix Zrbny thinks, how his delusions are expressed in his behavior. If I can accomplish that, I might be able to come up with an idea where he is, perhaps narrow the search a bit.”

“Wow,” Moffatt said, pushing his hands through his hair. “I don’t know how he thinks. Felix is a bright, complex man. Did Dr. Kelly tell you about the Escher print?”

I nodded. “And the lady of sorrow, the De Quincey reference. I have no idea how any of that
fits together, and I don’t understand the role that his sister’s disappearance plays in all this.”

“Levana,” he said. “When Mrs. Zrbny committed suicide, her husband was totally overwhelmed. People usually bounce back after a tragedy. There’s a healing process, then they try to put a life together. He couldn’t do that. Felix and Levana took care of each other. She was older, so mostly she looked after him, but he did his share of the cooking, washing dishes, laundry. They were friends. He’d always been a loner. Levana was more outgoing. She led. He followed.”

“Ben,” Beck called. “Ralph’s coming through with the laundry cart.”

Moffatt excused himself, unlocked the door, and crossed the lobby with a short, one-armed man pushing a laundry bin. Moffatt unlocked then secured the second door.

“D-wing,” he called to Beck as he returned and settled into the sofa. “The day Levana was abducted—”

“You sound certain of that.”

“I don’t think Felix ever lied to me. He withheld. If I asked him a direct question that he didn’t want to answer, he just didn’t. One time when he was talking about Levana, I said, ‘You saw her grabbed, didn’t you?’ He sat there stone-faced.”

“He might have had the same response if he had killed his sister.”

Moffatt shrugged. “Maybe, but I don’t see it happening that way. I think he blamed himself for what happened. The next couple of years it gnawed at him. He needed someone in his life. There was no one. That’s when he became obsessed with the Escher print. He saw it as a finite world with infinite unrealized possibilities. That’s a quote. If people shared space, but on different planes, they couldn’t see or touch each other. He knew his victims. He believed that not only did they not know him, but that they refused to see him. When he stumbled across the De Quincey passage, his delusional system crystallized. Levana is the mythical force that inspires and empowers a family member to present a newborn child to the world. Then Levana watches as the child develops, and pays special attention to a child who is grieving.”

“Felix was in grief over his sister,” I said, catching Moffatt’s direction.

“Levana’s ladies of sorrow were tears, sighs, and darkness.”

It was the same thing Kelly had told me.

“Tears,” Moffatt said. “He told me about walking out of a classroom in high school. Gina Radshaw was outide the door crying. He tried to talk to her, to see if there was anything he could do to help. She never looked at him. She ran out of the building. His lady of tears.”

“And someone who could not, or did not see him,” I suggested.

“You’re catching on. Florence Dayle needed help turning a faucet that was stuck. She led Felix into the cellar. He said she sighed these huge, breathy sighs, as if she were impossibly sad. She never looked at him. When he had done what she asked, she told him to leave.”

“Shannon Waycross was dark skinned.”

“Our lady of darkness. She hid behind sunglasses, said she didn’t want the newspaper Felix was selling.”

Moffatt was able to see the significance of themes in Zrbny’s life. Approach; a service offered or provided; rejection.

“What tipped him?” I asked.

“Radshaw worked in his neighborhood. Waycross and Dayle lived there. No one of them knew any of the others. When Radshaw left work, she walked past both of the other women’s houses. They were next-door neighbors, but they didn’t know one another, and neither knew Radshaw.”

“Escher,” I said.

Moffatt smiled. “Some docs are slow to catch on. You’re okay.”

“Why would Zrbny say he’d been interrupted?” I asked. “There are three ladies of sorrow. He killed three times.”

“I wondered about that. I wouldn’t describe Felix as rigid exactly, but his thinking is ordered. Even at his most delusional he is organized. Sorry. I can’t do the math on that one.”

“Is there any reality referent for the Escher print?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said. “Felix told me about the dungeons at the top of Ravenwood. It’s an old fort that was used in both World Wars to watch the coast for the enemy. The area is fenced off now because the field that surrounds it is riddled with sinkholes and old wells. There’s a lookout tower and hundreds of yards of underground corridors and cells. I don’t know how it fits, but I think that’s the piece of reality in his delusions.”