Michael Lister - Soldier 02 - The Big Beyond (8 page)

Chapter 20

“I
checked on those sailors like you asked me to,” Ruth Ann said.

“Thanks,” I said. “How they doin?”

“Gonna make it.

I was in her room gathering my stuff when she walked in looking and sounding even more like Lauren. Had she been studying her? Looking at her pictures? Listening to the recordings of her? Reading her journals and letters?

Thinking of Lauren’s letters made me want to read the one she left with Keller again.

“Twelve saved, all told. You saved half of ’em, soldier. What’re you doing?”

“Packing up my stuff.”

“What? Why? Where you goin’?”

“To the couch tonight. Out of your hair tomorrow.”

“No,” she said. “No need to shove. ’Sides, you’re in no condition, fella. It’s no good. Stay. Let me take care of you. It’s no bother. I like having you here.”

I continued to pack. Slowly. How I did everything these days.

I was slow enough without the arm, but the wound had worsened even that.

“Think about how much you’re dealing with, soldier. Let me help you. I like helping you. I want to. Sleep on the sofa if you wanna, but don’t leave. Besides, where would you go?”

Good question. I had no idea.

I placed Lauren’s picture in the box with her letters and records and the other things I had of hers.

“I appreciate all you’ve done,” I said.

“Am I doing something wrong?”

I shook my head. “But I feel bad for how much of a burden I’ve been, how much of your time and resources I’ve taken up.”

“It’s not a burden. I want to help you. Hell, I want you happy. I see how sad you are. I just want to make you happy. Let me help you. Let me make you happy.”

A
s I fell asleep, I reread Lauren’s letter again. Several times. Bits of it swirling around my head in the twilight between consciousness and sleep.

Meeting you has saved me. Being with you has caused me to wake up. Our love, mine for you and yours for me, has forever changed me.

This experience has been overwhelming for me, and I know I have not handled it well. I’m so very sorry for that. I know you’ve not understood and that you’ve felt betrayed, rejected, abandoned.

Please forgive me. Please know how very deeply I love you. Please don’t ever stop loving me that same way.

Forgive me. Forgive Harry. Forgive yourself.

Quit trying to save the world.

There’s so much more I want to say, but I’m out of time. You and I were always out of time, weren’t we?

See you soon, my dear strong soldier.

All my love, all of me.

When I did fall fully asleep. I dreamt of her.

Lauren and I were making love in Margie’s big bed. It was a foggy Friday morning, and we were entangled in a euphoria of sleepy sensual sex, the smell of her sending me, putting me in an altered state.

This was before. Back when Lauren was alive and Margie was alive and a friend to us, and let us use her place when Harry was in a board meeting or up to some other banking business neither of us cared a bit about.

We were saying things to each other that so many lovers before us had, so many after us would, but in our mouths they sounded like we were the first to say them, the only ones who ever would.

We felt like twins, two halves of the same soul, the same little piece broken off of the big all, that which was below and beneath and above and around. Love.

I was the god of her idolatry.

I had no god to commit idolatry on, so she was just my goddess.

I was hers. She was mine. Body and soul.

“I love your guts,” she said.

“I adore every second, every inch, every breath, every beat of you.”

I awoke with tears streaming out the corners of my eyes and into my ears.

I had agreed to stay a little longer at Ruth Ann’s, but only on the couch, so when I opened my eyes, I was confused at first, disoriented, uncertain of where I was.

I looked around, remembering I was in Ruth Ann’s living room.

What woke me up? What had I been dreaming?

And then I saw her. Lauren. Standing at the end of the sofa.

Her sheer robe was open, revealing her smooth, milky skin, the mound her dark hair in the inverted V the meeting of her legs made, the valley between her breasts, the nipples that pressed against and shone through the sheer.

“Lauren.” I said her name like a supplicant’s soft prayer in the darkness.

It really wasn’t until she moved toward me and I saw her prosthetic leg that I had any idea it was Ruth Ann.

I started to sit up but she shoved me back, and she knelt down beside the sofa.

“I just want to make you happy, soldier,” she said.

“Ruth—”

“Let me be her for you. I don’t mind.”

“You can’t. I can’t.”

“We can. Let me show you.”

She began pulling down my pajama bottoms and underwear.

“Ruth Ann,” I said. “Stop.”

“Just let me put you in my mouth. Let me show you how good I can be to you, how good we can be together.”

She looked so good, and her hands on me, her body so close to mine, felt so good.

“It’s no good,” I said. “I couldn’t if I wanted to. Remember?”

“Soldier, let me tell you a little secret. You can.”

“Why are you—”

“I’ve been caring for you, fella, and I’m telling you you’re just fine.”

“What? What are you saying?”

“When you were out. When I bathed you.
Every time
I bathed you, you … ah … responded.”

I couldn’t believe it. What was she telling me?

“You can,” she said. “We can.”

I was so lonely, so sad, so wanted to be touched. Needed it. Could I let her be Lauren for me?

“I’ve always carried a torch for you, soldier,” she said. “Always. I want you. I know you want her and I don’t mind so much.”

I could feel the warmth of her breath and skin, and her sleepy whispered voice was sweet and sexy at the same time. She looked and smelled like Lauren.

God, I missed her so much. Wanted her so bad. Needed her more than anything.

“Please,” she said. “Let me heal you. I can make you feel good again. Let me show you.”

And that’s what did it. I didn’t want to be healed, didn’t want to feel better. I was miserable without Lauren, and though I didn’t think anything could change that—not even a Lauren-like substitute–I didn’t want to take that chance. I couldn’t.

“I just can’t,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

We sat there in silence a moment, breathing, being. Eventually, she laid her head down on me.

“Please don’t be sore,” I said. “Try to understand.”

“You’re a true romantic, soldier. I understand all too well. I’m not the least surprised. Lauren was one lucky girl. I just wanted a little of that. Not so much. Just one small little piece.”

“Sorry.”

“Plus I know I could make you happy.”

“If anyone could …” I said, letting it drift there between us. “And that’s a chance I just can’t take.”

That seemed to give her some amount of comfort, and I was glad I said it.

Chapter 21

T
he photographs were grainy, underlit, underdeveloped, utilitarian.

The contrast between them, between what was being captured and the way it was being captured, was stark and added to the overall unsettling nature of the images. It was as if a hack newspaper photographer was haphazardly snapping pictures of a Monet plein-air painting.

I was sitting up on Ruth Ann’s couch flipping through the crime scene photographs, finding it difficult to do with one hand, awkward because it was my left.

The pictures were stacked in my lap atop the envelope they came in. They were 8x10s on thick, stiff paper. One at a time, I withdrew one from the stack, studied it, then placed it facedown next to me on the sofa.

They were in chronological order so I was moving from first victim to fourth, observing the killer’s expansion and escalation.

Ruth Ann was in her bathroom getting ready. We had been eating breakfast when Roy brought the photographs by. It made him sore as hell that I was here and had obviously spent the night, but he didn’t say anything, only seethed silently.

I was studying the pictures of the first victim, Janet Stewart, comparing what I had seen in the morgue with what I was seeing now.

She had obviously been a beautiful woman in life, and even after everything that had been done to her, she retained a certain bloom in death.

There was no blood.

Her skin was impossibly white.

Her dark hair was impossibly dark.

She was lying on black fabric that looked like satin.

The high contrast between the background and her body was severe and served to heighten the shocking impact of the image, and though the photograph was black and white, the subject matter was such that it would’ve looked the same at the scene.

Her legs were spread open, her feet extended up and out. There was something subtly but decidedly sexual about the pose. Above her legs, the top half of her bloodless bisected body was only a few inches away, but had not been lined up precisely, so the two parts were slightly askew.

Her arms were up, one draped over her eyes, as if sleeping while shading from a bright light, the other bent so that her hand fell gently between her breasts.

As I moved to the second victim, I realized I only had the name of the first one. None of the victims’ names had yet been released, so none were in the paper, and if Roy had mentioned any but the first’s name, I didn’t recall.

The second body was also posed on the black satin material and looked nearly identical to the first—except in addition to being bisected, the right arm had been cut off at the shoulder. The positioning of the body was different as well.

This time, the bottom half of the body was turned over, the knees up and out, raising the buttocks as if preparing for rear entry or anal sex. The top half remained facing up, but there was more room between the two parts. The left arm that was still attached was extended straight out, while the detached right arm was several inches from the place where it had been severed, at a ninety-degree angle, hand open, palm up.

Displayed on the same cloth, the bloodless body prepared in the same pristine manner, the third victim was not only bisected but both arms had also been cut off. This time, the torso was facedown and the bottom half was up. On top of her pubic bone, just above the dark triangle of curly, coarse hair, her crossed arms formed an X.

Finally, the fourth was bisected and had both arms and both legs cut off.

Splayed out wide on the black satin with nearly a foot between each section, the pale parts of the young woman formed a cadaver crucifixion—arms stretched out wide, hands closed into fists of pain, legs straight down, feet pointing down, crossed at the ankles.

After studying each image over and over again, I returned to the very first impression I had upon seeing the very first photograph. The contrast between what was being captured and the way it was being captured was jolting. The photographs were serviceable at best, but their subjects were something else entirely.

The killer was creating art. The photographer was merely making a record.

It made me wonder what a photographic artist could have done, and I felt certain the killer had created artistic renderings of his work—drawings, paintings, photographs, films. Something. Some way to savor it.

“Well?”

I looked up.

Ruth Ann was standing there.

“Well?” she said again. “What do you think?”

“There’s something there,” I said. “Something about them… reminds me of something I’ve read or seen, but I just can’t quite … If I had my books …”

“I thought you did,” she said, glancing over at the boxes in the corner of the room.

“My office at the agency and my room at the Cove were full. That’s just a few of them.”

“I can help you get them.”

“No need. I know who to ask. But there is something you can do.”

“Name it.”

“Will you see if you can get the names of all the victims from Roy? Where they were found. Anything else he knows about them. And I’d also really like to see pictures of them from when they were alive if there’s any way.”

“I’m on it.”

Chapter 22

“Y
ou gotta good eye, sugga,” Mama Cora said. “’Specially for a dead man.”

She was flipping through the crime scene photographs, smoke from her long ivory churchwarden pipe swirling around her.

I wasn’t sure what all was in the pipe, but I knew it wasn’t just tobacco.

“They’re artistic, right?” I said. “I mean, he’s creating something, experimenting maybe. Definitely displaying, exhibiting.”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Now give Mama a minute to look at them.”

Mama Cora was a three-hundred-pound Creole woman with light caramel skin and closely cropped rust-colored hair—most of which was hidden beneath a colorful silk do-rag. She had bohemian sensibilities, which were reflected both in the gypsy way she dressed herself and the artistic way she decorated her house.

The explosion of color inside the small house off Cherry Street was so intense it was too much to process. Bright yellows and brilliant aqua blues, oranges and limes, pinks and purples on rugs and walls, furniture, screens, hanging beads, and works of art.

Mama Cora wore a silk teal wrap with pink and gold and purple designs. She had rings on every finger, several in each ear, and one in her nose.

“Sit down, honey,” she said. “Give Mama a second to study these.”

I stumbled onto a too low stack of pillows that were less stable than they even appeared and waited.

The stunningly beautiful and talented daughter of a French- African woman and a white man, Cora had toured and lived in most of the world as a singer and dancer when she was younger, including France, Germany, and England. A born student and collector, she had an insatiable appetite for information, knowledge, wisdom, art, and artifacts. She knew more about most things than anyone I knew.

“Why does Dada come to mind?” I asked.

She smiled her enormous smile, her chubby cheeks rising, her eyes narrowing. Her teeth were big and blindingly white, the front two with a gap the size of a matchstick between them.

“Soldier boy done been usin’ his library card again. Good on you, baby. Dada’s not quite right but it’s close. It inspired what inspired this.”

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

“Anti-war, anti-bourgeois movement. Began in Switzerland during World War I. Involved art, literature, visual arts. Was a rejection of the norms and standards of the time. Included some anarchy. Was meant to point out the meaninglessness of the modern world.”

I nodded, tying to recall anything I could about the movement.

“This cat here is a surrealist—or inspired by them. And surrealism was influenced by Dada.”

“So surrealism is …”

“Can be anything, baby,” she said. “Art, literature, philosophy—anything stressing the subconscious, the non-rational, imagery arrived at by automatism, chance, unexpected juxtapositions.”

“Automatism?”

“Automatic writing or drawing,” she said. “Kinda like improvisational jazz for visual artists.”

I nodded.

“It’s been flourishing in Europe,” she added. “Now, with so many them poor folk fleeing Europe, it’s taking root here. Dada produced works of anti-art, deliberately defying reason, but not surrealism. No. Surrealism emphasizes not the negation as Dada did, but the positive—artistic expressions that challenge, not destroy. It’s a reaction against rationalism, a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious, dream and fantasy.”

I sat there silent for a moment, balancing on the pillows, thinking about what she had said.

“Let Mama show you, sugga,” she said, grunting as she struggled to get up. “I got some examples ’round here somewhere. You’ll see what I mean.”

It took a while, but she finally found some loose leaf drawings and a bound book or two with images that illustrated everything she had been telling me, and I could see why with even as little as I had known, something in my subconscious had linked the work of the killer and the artists in the movement.

The surreal images she showed me were filled with a variety of female body parts and partial female bodies, nearly all of which were melted and misshapen, oblong and elongated. Many of them were mixed with parts of animals and elements of nature, but some were neither distorted nor mingled with other objects—just pieces and parts of the female form that closely resembled, in style and sensibility at least, the crime scene photographs.

We finished looking at everything surrealist she had, she agreed to let me borrow a couple of books, and as was her custom she was walking me to the door to hug and kiss me goodbye.

“So we’ve got a ripper-like killer making art out of his victims,” I said. “He could be from Europe, but wherever he’s from he’s either a surrealist or influenced by them.”

“I’d say that about sums it up, sugga,” she said. “Let me ask around a little and see what else—”

She stopped in midsentence as she opened the door and Butch was standing there, gun drawn, huge, mean smile on his face.