Valentine (19 page)

“Hello, I’d like the number of the Mill City Town Hall . . .”

Barney went down to the Greek diner on the corner where he had lunch more often than not. He sat at the counter and had the roast beef special, shooting
the breeze with Mr. Colouris, the proprietor. They talked about football and politics, two subjects on which Mr. Colouris was the world’s leading authority. When Barney had killed about an hour, he collected Verna’s order and ambled back down the frozen sidewalk to his building and up to the fifth floor.

Verna was scribbling shorthand a mile a minute. Her notebook was in front of her, the phone to her ear, and she wrote as she listened. She didn’t glance up as he placed the bag with her lunch on the desk, but she immediately reached into it and grabbed the tea.

“Uh-huh . . . uh-huh . . .” was her contribution to whatever conversation was taking place.

He went back into his office, removed his coat and gloves, and sat. He’d shot nearly fifty wadded pieces of paper into the trash can, making only about ten of them, when he heard Verna slam down her phone. She came into his office, flipping through several pages of her notepad, rereading everything she’d just written. At last she looked up at him. Her face was white, he noticed, her eyes wide.

“You are not gonna
believe
this!” she whispered.

Thirty minutes later Jill greeted Barney Fleck at the door, hung his coat in the front closet, and waved him into a chair. She’d just made a pot of herbal tea,
so she got two mugs and put them down on the coffee table. Then she sat on the couch across from him, pushing the useless yellow legal pad aside.

“So,” she said. “What are you so excited about?”

Barney regarded her a moment, licked his lips, and began. “Well, it seems we may be on to something here. I mean about Victor Dimorta. Are you ready for this?—he murdered his parents. About two weeks after he was expelled from Hartley College. Did twelve years in prison. Then—and you’re
not
gonna believe this;
I
don’t believe it!—he was paroled.
Paroled!
‘Model prisoner,’ no less! He’s been out for four years now. And here’s the punch line: not long after his release—about two months, to be exact—Mr. Victor Dimorta disappeared from the face of the earth! Hasn’t been seen or heard from since. Do you
love
this?!”

“No,” Jill murmured, staring, “I don’t. I don’t love this at all.”

“Yeah,” the detective agreed.

There was a pause as they simultaneously reached for their mugs and took long sips. Then she said, “Tell me about the murders.”

Barney pulled a wrinkled sheaf of pages from his pocket. He studied them a moment, his brow furrowing as he apparently tried to make head or tail of someone else’s handwriting. She glanced over at the pages. Shorthand. The secretary, probably . . .

“Okay,” he said at last. “Here goes. On February sixteenth of that year Victor was expelled from Hartley, and he returned to his home in a place called Mill City, Pennsylvania. Small town, despite the name, about seventy miles northeast of Pittsburgh. Paper mill, long since defunct. Kind of a ghost town. Anyway, the father”—he consulted his notes—“Joseph Dimorta, lost his job as foreman at the mill when the paper company relocated. Drank, messed with women, abused Mrs. D. and Victor. . . .”

She sat there, listening to the whole strange, disgusting yet somehow inevitable story. Despite his terrible home life, Victor was apparently brilliant in school, showing a distinct talent for English. His high school English teacher had told him about her alma mater, Hartley, and even spoken to one of her former professors there about him. Result: partial scholarship to Hartley. But only partial, which is where the story took a turn. It seems Victor didn’t tell his parents about the college, but he had some money of his own, from his maternal grandmother. He ran away to Hartley. During the intercession, he stayed at an inexpensive motel near the campus, waiting tables in the motel’s restaurant. One month into his second semester—well, Jill knew all about that. The parents were called by the authorities at the school, and the Dimortas actually drove to Vermont and collected Victor. When they got home (according to Victor’s attorney),
the father beat Victor within an inch of his life and locked him in an upstairs closet for three days. It was not the first time, either, the public defender claimed: Victor was used to that particular punishment.

Angela Dimorta was an ineffectual woman. She had allowed herself to be victimized by a bully, and she never interfered with the mistreatment of Victor. This is what had signed her death warrant.

On the night of February 29, two weeks after his expulsion from Hartley, Victor Dimorta crept into the bedroom where his parents were sleeping and cut their throats with a large carving knife from the kitchen. Mrs. Dimorta died instantly, but Mr. Dimorta had obviously struggled. The next-door neighbor heard the commotion and called the police. Victor was arrested thirty minutes later: they found him crouching in his bedroom closet, sobbing. It was clear to everyone that Victor had acted as a result of years of physical and psychological abuse. His youth was considered, and the incident at Hartley College wasn’t even mentioned. The case never came to trial: the prosecutor offered a plea bargain, and Victor received fifteen to thirty years on each of two counts of voluntary manslaughter, to be served concurrently. He was originally sent to the maximum-security section of the nearest state facility, but after three years of good behavior there he was transferred to its medium-security
section, downgraded when the warden and a review board deemed him unlikely as a threat to society in general.

Just as he was completing his twelfth year of confinement, he came up for parole. He had an excellent record, having spent much time in various rehabilitation programs and even teaching English to the other inmates for several years, all of which helped to reduce the minimum time. His interviews with state authorities and a psychiatrist reviewing his case went very well, and the prison was overcrowded, not to mention the long waiting list, so parole was granted. He left the penitentiary and checked into a rooming house in Pittsburgh. With the help of the parole officer assigned to him, he got a job in the stockroom of a local department store. He met with the parole officer once a week for seven weeks.

Then he vanished.

“It wasn’t just like he disappeared,” Barney was saying, “but like he never even
existed!
He was just gone—poof! They searched like crazy, but . . .” He shrugged and leaned back in the chair.

Jill sat silently for a long time, digesting this. She noticed that her stomach was churning again, but she knew that for once the baby was not the cause.

“What now?” she said at last.

The large, friendly detective leaned forward again.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve been thinkin’. . . .”

He sat in the window across the street from Jillian Talbot’s apartment, listening. His eyes were tightly shut, and he was remembering. The hot tears burned his hot cheeks.

When he heard the detective’s idea and saw Jillian Talbot rise and go into her office, he wiped his eyes and nodded slowly to himself.

Jill came out of the office and handed Barney the yearbook.

“All the names and addresses are in the last section at the back,” she told him. “The entire graduating class. I don’t know how up-to-date they are. . . .”

“S’okay,” he said, smiling to reassure her. “Verna’s a whiz at updating information with that computer of hers. I’ll call you.”

She nodded and saw him to the door. After he had gone, she went back to the couch and picked up the yellow legal pad. She sat staring at it for a long while. Then, with a sigh, she tossed it aside and went back into her office to call Nate.

Tenth Street in New York City is a relatively quiet thoroughfare, no more so than at four o’clock in the afternoon. It is a full hour before rush hour, and, as it is more residential than business-oriented, there are
few people around. Almost anything can happen without anyone noticing.

When the doorbell rang, Dr. Dorothy Philbin was alone in her office. She had seen her three o’clock patient out some ten minutes ago, and she was reading over the notes she had just jotted down during the session and was contemplating going up to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. She had been a widow for four years now, so she lived alone. Lately she’d been thinking about selling this large, three-story townhouse and getting a small apartment uptown, closer to her daughter and grandchildren.

So much for a cup of coffee, she thought when she heard the bell. She rose from her leather chair, straightened her gray suit, and went out to open the front door. A tall, nervous young man stood on the doorstep, a man she’d never seen before.

“Mr. Miller?” she said.

“Yes, Dr. Philbin.” He made a vague attempt at smiling, but he was clearly preoccupied. Distraught, she decided.

“Come in,” she said. He went past her into the reception room, and she closed and locked the door and led him back into the main office. He stood in the middle of the room as she walked by him on her way to the desk.

“Now,” she began, “what seems to be the—”

They were her final words. She never saw the knife.

It was over in a matter of seconds. Then, he lowered her gently to the floor and slipped out the basement door to the street. In less than a minute he was at the comer. He turned onto Fifth Avenue and was gone.

Eleven of the twelve enormous paintings were lined up along the two side walls of the room. The largest,
Life
, dominated the entire back wall. It was before this one that the four of them were standing at nine o’clock that evening.

Jill regarded the picture, wondering what to make of it. The Seven Ages of Man were easy: Shakespeare had generously supplied the text for them some four hundred years ago. Nate had agreed that dividing the famous speech from
As You Like It
into seven successive paragraphs in the brochure was the sensible thing to do. The Four Seasons would each get a passage of appropriate poetry, again from Shakespeare. The unspoken agreement between artist and writer was that the quotes be uniform. The final painting would need something from the Bard on the subject of the human condition, but what . . .? She stared at the vivid, swirling masses of bright color, and at the tiny core of pure white near the center. Is that God? she wondered. The human mind? The
soul? She didn’t want to ask him, and he may not be able to explain it to her, anyway. This dramatic panel was what he
felt
about life, obviously. He probably didn’t have words for it.

“It’s interesting,” she said to him now. “I deal in words, you in images, and yet we’re both doing the same thing. . . .”

Standing next to her before the panel, he squeezed her hand and leaned down to kiss her hair in answer.

“Do you two want to be alone?” Tara asked from behind them. “I mean, if all this raw creativity makes you just want to tear each other’s clothes off, or something, I’m sure Doug and I can amuse ourselves elsewhere.”

Everyone laughed. Well, everyone but Doug Baron, Jill noticed as she turned from the painting to face the others. She wondered about him again. All through dinner at the Ukrainian restaurant down the street, she’d constantly caught him looking at her, felt his eyes on her. Tara is the one he should be looking at, she thought. She remembered her friend’s words from the night before: Tara had mentioned that his dead wife, the fashion model, bore a passing resemblance to her. She wondered if that explained his frequent furtive glances. . . .

It leaped into her mind all of a sudden, and she would never know what had made her think of it. She whirled around to once again confront the big,
final painting in the series. She looked at the bright, vibrant assortment of colors, and then her eyes traveled to the small, almost discreet spot of white pulsating in the center. Was it enlightenment? Hope? Immortality?

Then, thinking of her own private relationship with the artist who had created it, she knew what it was. And before she was aware of it, she spoke Miranda’s words from
The Tempest
.

There was silence in the room as everyone regarded the painting. The quiet was broken by Doug Baron’s reverential whisper.

“Yes,” he said. “
Yes!
”

He turned to stare quite openly at Jill.