‘Trust me,’ said Riker. ‘It’ll be more fun my way.’
Not likely.
William Heart cringed at the noise. The recluse was not good with human interaction and did what he could to avoid it. Worst was the knock at the door, the sound of a trap closing. He stood very still, hardly breathing, but his visitors would not go away, and now he heard the voice of the landlord saying, ‘I know he’s in there. Takes him all damn day to open the door. Bang harder.’
However, the stranger was more polite, only lightly rapping, as he said, ‘Thank you,’ to the dwindling footsteps of the landlord. And now the visitor spoke to the locked and bolted door. ‘Hello? Mr Heart? Your gallery gave me your address.’
The cultured voice was reassuring and carried the lure of a potential sale. William opened the door to see a fairy-tale bag of metaphors. This tall man had the body, the clothes and patrician air of a prince, but eyes like a frog and the beak of Captain Hook. The broad shoulders were threatening, magically enlarging in every passing second.
When William stepped back a pace, his visitor took this for an invitation. The man walked past him and paused by the couch, a threadbare affair of lumpy cushions and barely contained stuffing. It was the only piece of furniture that might accommodate his large frame. The chairs were made of flimsy wooden sticks.
‘May I?’
William nodded, and the frog prince sat down.
‘My name is Charles Butler.’ The man’s grin was so foolish, William smiled against his will as Mr Butler handed over a business card. ‘Your gallery dealer tells me you do crime-scene photography.’
‘No, that was a long time ago. I don’t do it anymore.’
Butler was staring at a radio on the coffee table, and William wondered if he recognized it as a police scanner. He cleared his throat. ‘I mean – I don’t work for the police anymore. I do car wrecks, that kind of thing.’
‘Yes, I know. Your work is almost tabloid genre, wouldn’t you say? High contrast, hard light, black shadow. And some cruelty in every image.’
The photographer vacillated between flight and a faint. Charles Butler was obviously an art collector and well heeled, but several of the degrees on his business card related to psychology. William distrusted head shrinkers.
‘I’d like to see your earlier work,’ said Butler. ‘The crime-scene photos. I’m particularly interested in Natalie Homer. Perhaps the name’s not familiar. It was twenty years ago. The newspapers called it a suicide by hanging.’
‘I didn’t keep – ’ William shook his head and began again. ‘I couldn’t do the job. My camera was broken.’ Even as these words trailed off, he realized that he was not believed. Charles Butler’s face expressed every thought and doubt. William could actually see himself being measured and evaluated in the other man’s eyes. He even saw a hint of pity there.
‘It’s not a picture most people would want in their heads.’ This was a true thing. Only a specific type of ghoul sought that kind of image, and Butler did not seem to fit that category.
‘So you did take at least one shot.’ The man was not posing a question but stating fact.
William clenched his sweating hands, then looked down at the leather checkbook which had suddenly appeared on the coffee table beside an old-fashioned fountain pen. And now he relaxed again, for this was merely a money transaction, a simple purchase.
‘That’s one photograph I’d be very interested in.’ Butler opened the checkbook. ‘Very interested.’ He glanced up at William and broadened his smile, killing all trace of alarm and increasing the comfort level in the room – then delivered his bomb. ‘You knew Natalie, didn’t you?’
William could not have spoken had he wanted to.
Mr Butler continued, ‘It’s a reasonable assumption. Your landlord tells me you’ve lived here all your life. I understand you inherited the lease from your mother. And this building is only a block from where Natalie died. Must’ve been difficult to photograph the body of someone you knew.’
‘I didn’t – know her.’ William wrapped himself in his own arms to quell the panic. He could see that, once again, he was not believed. In that tone of voice reserved for the confessional, he said, ‘She only lived in this neighborhood for a little while. I never spoke to her.’ Losing control of his nerves and his mouth, he continued in a chattering stammer, ‘But I used to see her on the street sometimes. She was so pretty. She didn’t belong here. Anybody could see that. God, she was beautiful.’
He had never lusted after her as the other watchers did, for her smile had reminded him of the painted madonnas and statuettes that had adorned this apartment while his mother was alive. Pretty Natalie in her long summer dresses.
William studied Charles Butler’s tell-all face, checking for signs that he had given away too much. ‘It wasn’t just me that watched her, you know. She turned heads everywhere she went. All those men, they just had to look.’
‘And after she died, you took her photograph,’ said the visiting mind reader. ‘Nausea doesn’t come on in an instant. I’m guessing you had time to get off one shot before you vomited. You’re such a fine photographer. It would’ve been a natural reflex action – taking that picture.’
So he knew about the vomiting too.
‘All right. I’ll give it to you.’ William was actually relieved, though this certainly meant that Butler was a ghoul, the kind of customer who paid the rent, but a twisted type he had never wanted to confront outside of an art gallery. So this was really all the freak wanted, a grisly crime-scene souvenir.
Upon entering the bedroom, William locked and bolted the door behind him. When he emerged again, a print of the old photograph was in his hand.
After the man had departed with his purchase, William noticed that the amount entered on the check was more generous than the quoted price. He looked around at the evidence of his poverty, and he was frightened anew, for he suspected Charles Butler of being a compassionate man and not a freak after all.
William Heart returned to his bedroom. Again, he carefully locked the door and drew the bolt, though his landlord had no keys to this apartment. He lay down on the bed and stared at the opposite wall. Every night, before switching off the lamp, this was what he saw, a wall of a hundred pictures, all the same – the same face, the rope, the massing insects. This photograph was the best work he had ever done. The flies had been so thick and fast that the camera could only capture them as a black cloud surrounding the Madonna of the Maggots and Roaches.
CHAPTER 12
Erik Homer’s second wife, now his widow, lived in a large apartment on East Ninety-first Street. ‘It’s rent control,’ she said. ‘Two-eighty a month. Can you beat that? This used to be such a crummy area. But look at it now.’
Detective Riker guessed that this woman’s view of her neighborhood was limited to what she could see from the nearby window. He nursed a cup of strong coffee and longed for a cigarette, a little smoke to kill the stench of a sickroom.
Jane Homer was a mountain of sallow flesh, and he could roughly guess when she had become housebound, unable to fit her girth through a standard doorway. Her hair was a long tangle of mouse brown. Only the ends had the brassy highlights of a bleach blonde. Vanity had died years ago.
On the bureau, there were dozens of photographs of her younger self posed with her late husband. Jane had once been as slender as the first Mrs Homer. There were no portraits of her stepson.
A visiting nurse bustled about in the next room, chattering at Mallory while cleaning up the debris of a meal.
Mrs Homer’s handicap worked in Riker’s favor. Like most shut-ins, she was eager to gossip, and now she was saying, ‘I saw the TV coverage the other night. Natalie’s hanging was never on TV.’