She strapped on her seat belt as Richie pulled out into traffic.
"You get off at nine-thirty, right?"
"Right," she said, feeling kind of sorry for him that he had to struggle to make conversation. In the cafeteria, he had always seemed so self possessed and self confident. He knew very well that she got off at nine-thirty.
"Well, maybe around nine or so I'll go get us some Dairy Queens."
"Dairy Queens? Are they open already?"
And here he looked younger than ever. Not the dark teen idol despite his calculated appearance, but rather the kid brother got up to look like the teen idol.
In that moment something came to her-something that was better than all the gauzy unreal fantasy first dates could ever offer-she liked Richie and liked him lots and thought he was really cute and clean and appealing.
"Boy, that sounds great," she said, wanting her own enthusiasm to match his.
"You like Blizzards?"
"I love Blizzards," she said.
He glanced over at her and grinned. "Great," he said. "Great."
Ten blocks from the bookstore you started seeing winos and homeless people. They clung to the shadows of crumbling buildings and rambled listlessly down the cracked sidewalks amid the garbage and wind-pushed litter. There were homeless dogs and cats, too, and they roamed after their human counterparts. Dirty children belonging to some of the people who lived and worked in the neighbourhood played in the gutters, too far from their parents, too close to traffic. Nobody seemed to notice or care.
Towering over all this in the near distance were the spires of the university, great Gothic structures built at the turn of the century. While the university itself had not been touched by the poverty and hopelessness and shambling violence of the streets, everything around it had been.
The Alice B. Toklas Bookshop was situated in an aged two-storey brick building that sat on an alley. Across the alley was a pizza place that seemed to do business twenty-four hours a day.
Marie showed Richie where they could park in the rear-in a shadowy cove next to a Dumpster that always smelled of rotting meat from the pizza place-and then they went inside.
They walked in on a familiar scene-a customer at the cash register buying a book and Brewster giving his opinion of the book to the customer. Arnold Brewster looked like Maynard G. Krebs on the old Dobie Gillis show. Except this was Maynard at fifty years of age. Round, bald, stoop-shouldered, he wore a wine-coloured beret, a little tuft of grey goatee on his chin, and a FUGS T-shirt. Marie wasn't even sure who the FUGS were exactly-just some kind of musical group that had prospered briefly during the hippie era.
The customer-a proper looking man, probably a professor, in a tweedy sports jacket and a white button-down shirt and a narrow dark necktie-looked as if he wanted badly to get out of here. Every time he pulled to go away, Brewster started telling him how bad a writer Sartre (the man had bought a copy of Nausea) really was.
Actually, Marie had met many bookstore owners who were not unlike Brewster. Maybe they weren't quite as forthcoming but they were certainly as opinionated. They ran their stores like little fiefdoms over which they were absolute masters-dispensing approval or disapproval (this author was good, this author was bad), handing out second-hand gossip (did you know that this writer was getting a divorce, that that writer was an alcoholic?), and pushing their own pets (you could tell the authors they really liked because they referred to them almost as personal friends).
As Brewster wound up his harangue ("Camus was the artist; Sartre was just a journalist"), Marie glanced over at Richie who looked both fascinated and repelled by Brewster's loud earnest diatribe.
Marie spent the last few minutes of the verbal barrage looking around the store. One thing you had to say for Brewster, he was a Zen master of organisation. Every book was very strictly categorised and God forbid you-customer or employee-put the book back in the wrong place. If he saw you do this, he'd come screaming down the aisle like a maniac and make you put the book in its proper place.
The weird thing was, Marie actually liked Brewster. He was crazed, he was obnoxious, but he loved literature and books with a true passion that was moving to see in this age of television and disco. He knew 3,453 things about Shakespeare and at least 2,978 things about Keats and this made him-by Marie's definition anyway-a holy man.
On the walls above the long aisles of books-he sold everything from the plays of Henrik Ibsen to the sleazy 'adult' westerns of Jake Foster-were drawings and photographs of the men and women he admired most-Shakespeare, of course, but also Shaw and Whitman and Hemingway and Faulkner.
When the customer left, Brewster picked up his lunch sack from underneath the register and said, "Who's this?"
"This is Richie." Then she introduced them.
"You a reader, Richie?" Brewster wanted to know, pushing his black hom-rimmed glasses back up his tiny pug nose.
"Sometimes," Richie said.
"Good," Brewster said, quite seriously. "I wouldn't want Marie here to have any friends who weren't." Then he looked back to Marie. "I cleaned it and oiled it today. Okay?"
Marie felt her cheeks burn again. "Okay."
"I know hippie-dippies like myself aren't supposed to believe in such things, but I don't want you to take any chances, all right?"
"All right."
Brewster cuffed Richie on the shoulder and said, "Nice to meet you, Richie."
"Nice to meet you."
"Talk to you tomorrow, Marie."
Then Brewster went out the back way to his car.
"You were put into Hastings House as a patient and one night while you were half asleep you felt this compulsion to go to the tower that was a part of the hospital's first building. You had to go through the air conditioning ductwork but you made it. And then upstairs in the tower-"
Emily Lindstrom then described to Richard Dobyns how he stood in the centre of the dusty tower room and watched the snake come out of the crack in the wall and how the snake then entered his body.
She then described the peculiar amber light of the snake's eyes.
He just sat across from her in the small, shadowy apartment, staring.
And then she told him about the killings.
"My brother didn't understand why he killed those women," she said gently. "And it wasn't his fault. But he didn't believe that. He just thought that the snake and the way it controlled him was illusory."
They sat for a time in silence.
She said, "Are you thirsty?"
"No."
"Hungry?"
"No."
"Is there somebody you'd like me to call for you?"
"How did you know about this apartment?"
"I've spent every day since my brother's death-as you may remember, he was shot and killed by a policeman-trying to find out what happened. This apartment is part of it."
He fell into silence once more.
Traffic noise. Children being called in for dinner. A subtle drop in the temperature; the dusk chill now despite the blooming day.
She said, "I want to help you."
"You're going to the police, I suppose."
"The police won't help us. They won't believe us."
He shook his head again.
And now he did start sobbing.
He put his hand to his stomach. "I want to cut this goddamn thing out of me."
And then he just cried.
She lit a cigarette. She was down to six a day now but she couldn't quit completely. Times like these drove her to light up.
"I'm going to see a TV reporter in a little while," she said.
Slowly, he quit crying and looked up at her. "A TV reporter?"
"A woman named Chris Holland."
"How can she help?"
"I don't know if she can, but I at least want to try. She's covered a lot of murders in this city, including the ones my brother supposedly committed. She'll at least listen, I think."
"I'm afraid of tonight."
"Afraid?"
"There was a girl's name in the manila envelope."
"I saw it. Marie Fane."
He touched his stomach.
She was slowly becoming aware of the odour; the uncleanness.
"I want you to help me."
"How?" she said.
He reached in the pocket of his sport coat. "I stopped by a hock shop this afternoon. I got these."
In the shadows, he held up a pair of handcuffs.
"While you're gone visiting the reporter, I want you to handcuff me to the bedpost. And you take the key." He looked at her through his teary eyes. "I don't want to hurt this Fane girl. I don't want to hurt anybody at all."
She sighed. She couldn't go to the police but maybe Chris Holland could. She might at least listen to her.
"I'll be glad to help you," she said. Then, "Do you know there's some bourbon in the kitchen? Would you like a shot?"
"Yes. Please."
"I'll be right back"
While she was pouring them two drinks, he said, "You know there's an old man at Hastings House who knows all about the tower."
"There is?"
"His name's Gus."
She brought the drinks in. "Really?"
"Yes, but whenever he tells people about the tower and the snake, people just smile at him. Think he's crazy."
"I wonder how long he's known."
"Years probably. He's been there since the fifties."
"My God."
Richard Dobyns sipped his whiskey. "That's why I'm afraid to tell anybody about what's happened to me. They'll start looking at me the way they look at Gus."
"There's also a janitor named Telfair who knows about the tower." She sighed. "My brother tried to get back to Hastings House. After he killed those women, I mean. So did the other men."
"Other men?"
She nodded, sipped at her own whiskey. "Since 1891 there've been six escapees who committed murder and were then killed- either by police or by suicide. Every one of them tried to get back to the tower. One of the men committed suicide by climbing up on the turret next to the tower and jumping."
He stared at her, miserable again. "I know why those men committed suicide, believe me."
"The thing inside you," she said.
He smiled bitterly. "The devil made me do it?"
"Something like that, yes."
He bowed his head and ran a shaky hand through his hair. He looked up at Emily again. "I called my wife today. I couldn't explain to her, either."
"I know."
"I just wanted to see her one more time before-" He paused. "You'll help me with the handcuffs?"
"Of course." She glanced at her wristwatch. She had to turn it so she could get the light of the dying day through the edges of the curtain. Nearly 5:45. She had to get going if she was going to be on time meeting Chris Holland.
She stood up and walked over to the chair.
This close, the odour was stomach turning.
She recalled the same smell on her brother.
His eyes had looked like Dobyns's, too. So sad; so sad.
"Come on," she said softly, taking the handcuffs from him.
She led him into the bedroom.
He sat on the soft double sized mattress, the springs squeaking beneath his weight.
She'd never held handcuffs before. Not real ones; only play ones that Rob and she used to use when they were cowboys and Indians. These cuffs were heavy and rough.
She snapped one cuff on his wrist and one cuff to the brass bedpost.
"Too tight?" she said.
"No. Fine."
"I'll be back here after I see Chris Holland."
He reached out and touched her hand. "I can't tell you what this means to me. I don't want to get-overwhelmed again and-kill anybody. You know?"
She touched his forehead gently. "I know." She smiled and touched his cheek now. "I'll be back as soon as I can."
"Would you call my wife when you come back?"
"Really?"
"Yes. It'll all sound less-insane-coming from you. Then maybe afterward I could talk to my daughter. For just a few minutes. Before we go to the police, I mean."
He was a decent and honourable man, she thought. And now she wanted to cry, too.
Her brother had also been a decent and honourable man.
She left him there, handcuffed to the bed.