The content was horrifying. There had been rapes and murders, mutilations and long-term starvations, tampering with genitals, eyes, and fingers; death served in a broad variety of ways and recounted in a dispassionate tone that made the content all the worse.
The only time that Charles showed any emotion in his writing was when he wrote about his mother (who he assumed would already be dead). He blamed her for the homicides, for creating a monster.
...it was my mother, who, by withholding her love made me into a thing that has no relation to right and wrong...
I read the letter through twice, making my plans. I was almost through the third pass when the conference room door opened and Melbourne and Marella came out. The last words of Charles’s confession were in my mind. I go now to my death having completed a life’s work in less than two decades.
“Congratulate me,” Melbourne Westmount Ericson said to Harlan Sackman.
While they were shaking hands and smiling, Marella came up to me.
“Say the word and we can leave right now,” she said, telling me many things.
I wanted to go. I wanted to leave everything behind me and, like my father, disappear into history.
“If you ever have a problem I’ll be there” was my reply.
Sackman approached us then with his felicitations for the bride-to-be... once more.
Melbourne reached out a hand to me and I grabbed it, pulling him close.
“If anything happens to her I will kill you,” I whispered. “Don’t make any mistake about that. So if it’s love I wish you well. Otherwise...”
“You don’t have to worry, Mr. McGill,” he said, managing a calm voice despite the pain in his hand. “I love her more than anything.”
What could I say? Marella wasn’t in jeopardy, Melbourne was.
50
Soon after the announcement Melbourne whisked Marella away in his limousine while Sackman asked the doorman to get him a taxi. When they’d gone I asked the front desk for a few pieces of stationery and sat down in the bar to pen a note to my lawyer, Breland Lewis. I put the last three sheets of the serial killer’s confession in an envelope and sealed it; then I wrapped the envelope in my letter. I put this package into another, larger envelope and brought the whole thing to the front desk. The man there put my communication into a FedEx pouch bound for Lewis’s office the next morning.
It wasn’t until I was in the elevator that it hit me. In just a few moments my connection with Marella had been severed, hacked off. For the past week, I realized, her name and face had been repeating over and over in my mind like a madman’s mantra. She was, in many ways, the perfect woman for me. Sure, that passion would kill me one day but we, all of us, die.
I tried to accommodate the loss in my mind, to leave it in the hotel lobby as I rose upward in the elevator car. But when the doors slid open she was still with me and I knew that the best I could hope for was the pain I felt.
“Pop,” Twill greeted when I entered our suite.
“Son.”
“That Mr. Ericson seemed like an all-right guy but you know he’s a fool.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Takin’ off with a woman like Marella is kinda like seein’ a tornado comin’ and runnin’ out to say hello.” Twill was subject to dialect when he waxed philosophical.
“What does a New York City boy know from tornadoes?” I asked.
“I seen my share,” he said. “You want a drink? They got four little cognacs in the minibar.”
We seated ourselves at the coffee table in the common room of the suite. I was thankful for both the liquor and the company of my son.
“You know I would prefer it if you didn’t get killed,” I said.
“I know,” he muttered shyly. “It just looked so simple.”
“That’s not the kind of detectives we are. You keep goin’ it alone and one day you won’t come back.”
“What time tomorrow morning?” he asked and I knew that he had accepted my terms.
“Nine forty-four.”
“Okay,” he said and then stood. “I’ll see you there sometime before nine thirty.”
“Where you going now?”
“I know these people.”
“What people?”
He shrugged. “You know, a girl and some’a her friends. There’s this club over in Somerville where they don’t even start up till midnight.”
“Somerville? How many times have you been up here?”
“A few. You know.”
I couldn’t stop him. In the end I wouldn’t be able to save him. But in the meanwhile I could run interference.
“You’re going in that suit?”
Twill gave me a big smile, beautiful.
He struck a pose and said, “I kinda like it.”
“Be careful.”
“You know it, Pops.”
I was sound asleep, my veins running amber with cognac, when the cell phone sang. If I’d been at home and sure of the safety of my kids I might not have answered.
“Hello?” The digital clock next to the bed read 3:54.
“Do you still want me, Lee?”
Drowsiness, hangover, heartache — all gone.
“Are you there?” she asked.
“Yeah, yeah I’m here.”
“Are you alone?”
“From the moment you took off.”
“I offered to stay.”
“Yeah. That’s why I thought you were gone forever,” I said honestly. “I had it in my mind to let you go.”
“I’ll call you from time to time, Lee. Maybe one day you’ll be ready.”
“That would be nice,” I said.
“Good-bye.”
I have overslept exactly three times in my life. I’ve gotten up on time through concussion, blood loss, and fever. But that morning I didn’t get out of bed until 9:23.
I staggered to the bathroom but even the ice-cold shower didn’t completely revive me.
I was in the taxi on the way to South Station when I realized that I had left my phone plugged into its charger back at the hotel.
When I got to the small table at the coffee kiosk in the great rotunda of the train station, Twill was sitting there with Celia Landis.
“Hey, Pops,” he greeted as I let my weight fall into the extra chair set there for me. It was a bouncy metal chair dipped in blue latex the same color as Harlan Sackman’s suit.
“You didn’t answer your phone,” my son said. “Five minutes more and I was going to take Celia and go looking for you.”
Even though Twill probably hadn’t been to bed, or at least been to sleep in a bed, he was bright-eyed and alert.
“Too many jobs all at once,” I confessed. “One day I’m gonna have to retire.”
“But not today,” Twill assured our client.
“No,” I agreed. “Not today.”
“Remember,” I told Celia. “I’m here representing you and I will do all the talking. You and Twilliam are my silent backup.”
We were ten steps away from the knobless door of Evangeline Sidney-Gray’s city mansion.
Mounting the stairs, I called out loud, “We’re here.”
It was a three-minute wait.
Black and beautiful, but not necessarily likable, Henry Lawrence Richards answered the door. He didn’t speak at all, just led us through the foyer-turned-office and to an elevator that delivered us to Dame Gray’s top-floor library.
The kids stayed half a step behind as I led them to the rich woman’s bone desk. This time there were three calcified chairs waiting for her visitors. I imagined that there was some butler whose sole job it was to get the right number of chairs set out for whatever guests his mistress entertained.