Shayne: “Do you know any gynecologist’s office he might be using?”
“No-o. It couldn’t be the University one, because somebody I know had an appointment there this afternoon.”
“Was he there for dinner?”
“I didn’t see him. Nobody comes to every dinner. You sign up a day ahead.”
“Do you keep the sign-up sheets?”
“That wouldn’t mean anything. You can change your mind at the last minute and miss dinner, and you have to pay for it anyway.”
“Then we can slow down,” Shayne said. “Do you know anything about the sex research project Natalie mentioned?”
“There’s been a lot of talk about it. But if Bruno applied — and I don’t think he did — they turned him down. This is a cool house, and people come and go, but Bruno has zero sex, as far as I know. He grinds. He got a couple of B’s last semester and he’s been at it hard ever since to get back to all A’s. Somebody else here wants to say something.”
Another girl’s voice: “He’s been having headaches and dizziness. He fell down one night washing dishes. I know he went to the Health Services shrink. The kind of advice you get there — take a couple of Valium and call next week if you don’t feel happier.”
“Do you like him?” Shayne said.
“Oh, he’s kind of a creep. He asked me to go to an X-rated movie once, and I thought to myself, better not. But he has some wild theories, and you have to dig somebody who gets that enthusiastic. Keeping pets is against the law here, and he has an illegal kitten. Maybe that’s not much of a reference.”
Shayne asked several more questions, talked briefly with the first girl, and came back to Natalie.
“A kitten,” she said. “That fits.”
“I think I’m beginning to believe this,” Shayne said. “Now tell me the end.”
“It got sort of emotional. He didn’t want to kill me but I could see he just about had to. I promised I wouldn’t tell anybody, but how could he trust me? We did sex once more, and this one was really fine. The myotonic contractions, if that’s the right word, were magnificent, he said, but he said I did it just to please him so he’d take pity. I went to sleep right afterward. I didn’t get sleepier and sleepier, everything turned off. Snap. I woke up in a motel off the interstate in Broward County. I was tripping. What he did, he fed me some tabs of very pure LSD, and when I came down naturally I didn’t know how much was trip, how much was Bruno. I called Jake to come and get me. I was wrecked for days. There were red marks on my wrists and ankles and I hurt in all the places you hurt if you’ve been raped that many times. But nobody believed me, and after I stopped hurting, I didn’t believe it myself.”
“You didn’t tell any cops about it?”
“I’m not too crazy about talking to cops. They have an attitude I don’t like. And what would I say? I don’t know what town it was in, what state, even. You know his name now, and I suppose you’ll get him sooner or later. But if you want to know what I think, not that I’m famous for the way my mind works, you won’t get the right man. I mean a killer. Because he never killed anybody. That was a movie. Just the only way he could get a girl.”
Chapter 17
“Do you really have a kitten?” Frieda asked.
Bruno moved distractedly about the room, sometimes where she could see him, but more often not. Her question embarrassed him.
“It was there on the back steps, meowing. I don’t even know if it’s male or female.”
He stopped in front of the radio. “I can’t listen to any more of this.”
His hand stopped short of the volume knob. Shayne was taking another report from Harmon, the police lieutenant in West Palm Beach. Andy Anastasia, in his noisy VW, had moved on to another town, where, again, he stopped at a phone booth, ripped a page out of the book, and resumed his search.
Bruno muttered, “What’s the bastard looking for?”
“Let’s talk about it,” Frieda said. “Maybe we can figure it out.”
He stopped at the foot of the table, his face sullen. “He’s looking for gynecologists. That means he’s looking for me. The police are following him, and he’ll lead them here. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Rescue. A kiss on the lips. Death to the mad rapist.”
“If you haven’t killed anybody—”
“I killed Meri Gillespie!” He clutched his head. “Now I have to kill you. You can see that.”
“I wonder. How many girls have you done this with?”
He walked away and came back. She said softly, “Tell me.”
“You’re the fourth!” he burst out. “The one we just listened to was first. She said her name was Becky. She’s even crazier than I am! At the end she wanted to make love with me strapped to the table, which wouldn’t make much sense scientifically, would it? I wonder if it’s true that her uncle raped her. I wanted to keep her longer, to find out, but I had to get back. I had a pathology exam.”
“What happened to the second?”
“She was going to Alabama. I fed her the acid and drove her all the way to Birmingham, even though I couldn’t really afford the time. I left her asleep in a bus depot.”
He exclaimed suddenly, “I know what Anastasia is looking for! Don’t go away, will you?”
He went out of sight. A door opened and closed. After a moment he came back, carrying a pink stucco flamingo. He was grinning.
“Not just any gynecologist, a gynecologist with his office in his house and a flamingo in the front yard. You don’t see many of these anymore. Houses look the same in Fort Lauderdale and Opa-Locka, but not many of them have pink flamingoes.”
“Which one is us, Lauderdale or Opa-Locka?”
“I’m not telling,” he said, his good humor partially restored.
“How did Anastasia know about the flamingo? Meri told him, of course. Where did you take her, Bruno?”
“She left under her own steam. Look — will you call me Bud? Nobody else will. I can’t even get my own father and mother to.”
His eyelid flickered. He ran his fingers back from the corner of that eye into his hair. “This whole side of my head is about to come off.”
“If you’ll unfasten one of my hands I’ll rub it away for you. I’m good at it.”
“I’ll live with it, thanks. I tried that with Meri, and look at what happened.”
“What did happen, Bud?”
“I didn’t even rape her once! I lost control of her. We hit each other with everything we could get our hands on. I’ve never hurt a girl before in my life. I recommend it to everybody. It’s an astonishing feeling! I was much thinner, and six feet two. You notice this Band-Aid. There are teeth-marks underneath. I made her bleed. I still don’t know how she got all the way loose — some kind of contortionist, that girl. Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t intend it to happen that way. I knew this was dangerous. That’s one of the things all the shrinks told me: I’m too cautious; I’d never get anywhere unless I was willing to take a chance. So goddamn it, that’s what I did! I took a chance! I took a chance and it paid off! If I hadn’t tried to work in that dumb variation and left one of the cuffs too loose. She had a heavy lab bottle. She looked like a cornered wolf. It went through my head in a flash. ‘You can’t let her walk out of here.’ I hit her with something; I don’t know what. I think the stool. She couldn’t see. Now was the time for me to grab her and get the straps back on, but then this damn vertigo. Everything whirled. Around and around and around. When I reached for her, she wasn’t even in the room.”
“I don’t suppose you want to tell me how far we are from where she was found.”
“Far enough. She found one of those phones where you can get a tone without using a coin. She made a collect call to Seminole Beach, to Mrs. What’s-her-name, and the guy was listening in on an extension, and she babbled about the mask, the flamingo. She wandered along the edge of the road and somebody picked her up. When he found out what shape she was in, he made her get out. She stumbled out on a golf course and died there.”