My Sister, My Love (39 page)

CUFFED AND DAZED AND BLEEDING FROM SEVERAL FACE AND HEAD WOUNDS,
Gunther Ruscha was to be the first “person of interest”
*
taken into custody in the Bliss Rampike homicide investigation; so promptly, the Fair Hills police were to be universally praised, within an estimated twelve hours of the little girl’s death.

“IT’S HIM. HAS TO BE.”

Quickly it was discovered by Fair Hills police that Gunther Ruscha had been several times in the past three years detained by patrol officers for “suspicious behavior” on Ravens Crest Drive, where, according to complainants residing at 89 Ravens Crest, 65 Ravens Crest, and 47 Ravens Crest, he’d been reported to be riding a bicycle “repeatedly” on the curving road, to the cul-de-sac at the end of the road and back to the intersection with the Great Road; questioned by patrol officers called to the scene, Gunther was able to convince them that he was “only just bicycling” in the neighborhood because the road ended in a cul-de-sac and there was little traffic; and because this was a “beautiful, quiet neighborhood” with a “feel of holiness” to it. He was “cooperative”—“unarmed”—“a Fair Hills resident.” Stricken with regret for having upset anyone, Gunther eagerly suggested to police officers that he be allowed to apologize in person to the complainants as well as to the family (name unknown: so the canny pedophile pretended) living in the Colonial at 93 Ravens Crest Drive: “Someone in that house might have seen me, too, and wondered who I was. And if I—if I offended—anyone in that family—a young child, for instance—little girls are especially wary of strangers!—I want to say how sorry—how sorry—how sorry I am.”

Needless to say, Gunther Ruscha was not invited to “apologize” in person and warned to stay away from Ravens Crest Drive or he’d be arrested.

“THAT’S HIM. THAT MAN…”

Quickly it was determined by the Rampikes’ housekeeper Lila Laong,
brought to the Fair Hills police station to observe, through one-way glass, the sickly-looking/shifty-eyed/twitchy Gunther Ruscha, that this was the very man who had bicycled to the Rampikes’ house several weeks ago, in early January, just before Bliss was scheduled to skate in a competition in Pennsylvania, bringing her a bouquet of flowers—a “large, beautiful bouquet of spring flowers”—and a hand-printed card signed
G.R.
Lila had thought it was “strange” that the flower delivery was made on a bicycle—and in such cold weather!—by this “youngish man, very pale”—“red-haired, with no hat”—“smiling so hard, his mouth looked stretched”—“not dressed right for a delivery man”; and this G.R. was the same person who’d brought a present for Bliss’s sixth birthday the year before: “Oh it was so—unusual! At first, it was—very nice. Pretty stuffed birds inside a little glass box, a robin and a little female bird dressed like a groom and a bride, that Mrs. Rampike wouldn’t let Bliss keep and had me throw away because it was ‘disgusting.’”

Asked why the gift was “disgusting,” Lila Laong said: “Because, Mrs. Rampike said, the birds were real birds, and hadn’t been ‘fixed’ right, like you do with chemicals when you stuff a bird or an animal, and so the poor things were rotting inside their feathers…You could smell them.” Lila shuddered, recalling the smell.

As soon as
The Marriage of Miss Finch and Cock Robin
had been disposed of, Lila said, Mrs. Rampike forgot it; Bliss had cried, because she’d wanted to keep the “special” present, but after a day or two Bliss forgot it, too; for Bliss received so many cards and gifts from strangers, and people were always wanting to see her, and Mrs. Rampike had too many things to think about managing Bliss’s career: “Mrs. Rampike would never think that any of Bliss’s fans would want to hurt her! They all loved her so.”

Lila shuddered again, and hid her grief-ravaged face in her hands.

(THE HAND-PRINTED CARD FROM GUNTHER RUSCHA, SIGNED
G.R., ONE OF HUNDREDS
of cards kept by Betsey Rampike in a half-dozen albums in Bliss’s “trophy room,” which the reader might remember from an earlier chapter titled, “The Marriage of Miss Finch and Cock Robin,” would soon be dis
covered by Fair Hills detectives and “positively linked” to Morris County’s pedophile. The noose was tightening around G.R.’s slender neck!)

“THIS MAN! THOSE EYES! SUCH EVIL IN THOSE EYES…”

In Fair Hills police headquarters, Mummy was being shown “mug shots” of Gunther Ruscha. As if overcome by sudden faintness Mummy swayed in her chair, clutching at her head, and Morris Kruk, who would never leave a client’s side when police officers were anywhere near, leaned over her, and encouraged her to take slow, deep, calm breaths, and to try to remember if she’d seen this man before.

“This man”: at the time incarcerated in the Morris County Men’s Detention Center, in “quarantine” from other, non-sex offender/pedophile detainees.

It was the day following the day
it
had happened:
it
was a way of the Rampikes to speak, meaning.

As, for some,
G-d
is a word not to be uttered. So is not to be uttered within the Rampike family.

Mummy, Daddy, and Skyler were at police headquarters. I think, yes Skyler was there.

Skyler had been brought by Mummy and Daddy and Mr. Kruk to the Fair Hills police station because wherever you might look, Bliss was not there.

Skyler was only beginning to comprehend. There was Bliss’s remains, which had been taken away (where? Skyler did not want to know) but Bliss herself was gone and was not anywhere.

So strange! To look around, Skyler’s narrowed eyes, Skyler’s withheld breath, and
Bliss was not there.

And the wicked thought came to Skyler that, the last time Mummy, Daddy, and Skyler had been alone together like this, without Bliss, had been long ago: before Edna Louise was born.

In a faint voice Mummy was saying: “—this man! I know this man. I’ve seen him at Bliss’s skating competitions. You get to recognize their faces. His face!—I know him. He was very aggressive, videotaping Bliss. Videotaping us. The first time I’d seen him was years ago. At a skating rink here
in Fair Hills where I’d taken Skyler—not Bliss, Skyler—
he
can skate, too!—and there came this stranger, pushing close to us, such eyes! such hair! and around his neck a bright-colored orange or red scarf—and he asked if my child was ‘a beautiful little girl or a beautiful little boy’ and I said, ‘Skyler is my son.’ And years later, when Bliss won her first title, Miss Tots-on-Ice 1994, she was only four years old, and there came this same man up to us, with a video camera pushing in our faces, I remembered him at once, that red hair that doesn’t look like a normal man’s hair, and that wet rubbery smile, and around his neck he’d tied a bright crimson silk scarf that was nothing a normal man would wear, and he said: ‘The first time we met, Mrs. Rampike, you had a beautiful little boy-skater with you, and now you have a beautiful little girl.’ Oh God! I was putting my own children at risk, in the presence of a pedophile, and
I had no idea.
”

Bitterly Mummy began to cry. And now Daddy moved to comfort her, stiffly like a man rousing himself from a stupor. For all this while, Daddy had been sitting silent and stony-eyed staring into a corner of the fluorescent-lit windowless interview room chill as an autopsy room as if he wasn’t listening to anything that was being said. Before entering the police station (what an ordinary building!—single storey, resembling a dental clinic, on Charity Street sharing quarters with the township clerk’s office and a small windowless courtroom of no more interest or intrigue than a classroom at Fair Hills Day) Daddy had stood on the steps outside staring at the sky smoking a cigarette, smoking in swift pleasureless drags, Skyler did not remember Daddy smoking anytime before this and so it seemed strange to him, and wrong. And it seemed strange to Skyler, and wrong, that Daddy seemed not to see him but to
look through him
as if Skyler was a ghost!—not Sky-boy, not Big Boy, or son, but—a ghost! And now Daddy roused himself to comfort Mummy but with a look of strain and distaste as if you might comfort a wounded or diseased creature at whom you could not bear to look, Daddy’s hand on Mummy’s shoulder and Mummy shivered not turning to Daddy as Mr. Kruk spoke quietly in Mummy’s ear. Poor Mummy!—so stricken by
it.
Who would never recover from
it.
Who’d been taken by ambulance to the emergency room at the Fair Hills Medical Center when she’d fainted and fallen to the floor of the family room striking her head hard and waking not knowing where,
hooked to a heart monitor and made to breathe pure oxygen and an IV needle in the crook of her right arm where an ugly bruise of the hue of rotted bananas had begun to bloom and where was Bix? where was Bix? where was her family? what had become of her family?—but now it was the following day and Mummy had been released from the medical center and here was Daddy beside her, and Morris Kruk was beside her, and Mummy was eager to cooperate with Fair Hills detectives who’d been so kind to her and Bix, in their somber faces you could see how shaken these men were by the terrible thing that had happened to Bliss, a “home invasion” here in Fair Hills, a kidnapping, or attempted kidnapping, a six-year-old child murdered in her very home while family members slept unknowingly in their beds: the stuff of nightmare! of frenzied tabloid headlines! Assigned to the case were senior detectives Sledge and Slugg,
*
longtime “veterans” (as journalists would note with varying degrees of respect/irony) of the tidy little suburban Fair Hills Police Department where the usual arrests were for traffic violations, drunk driving, underage drinking and drug sales (pot, “uppers”) at Fair Hills High; and where no one could recall a homicide investigation, still less claim to have been involved in one. And so, Detectives Sledge and Slugg moved about the Rampike household with the clumsy caution of dumfounded cattle being urged to the slaughter, fumbling to take notes in small spiral notebooks, as they’d been trained; both took pains to address the grief-stricken Rampikes with respect for clearly these were prominent Fair Hills citizens, obviously very well-to-do; Bruce Rampike was, it seemed, a “high-ranking executive” at the mega-corporation Univers, Inc., Betsey Rampike was a member of the Village Women’s Club; both belonged to the ultra-exclusive Sylvan Glen Golf Club; they lived in a beautiful Colonial in a very expensive residential neighborhood; they belonged to the Trinity Episcopal Church, and were close friends of Reverend Higley and his wife; still more impressively, the Rampikes were friends with the Morris County district attorney Howard O’Stryker, for whom the Fair Hills PD worked; they were friendly with Chief Justice Harry Fenn, and
their lawyer was the “brilliant” and “controversial” criminal defense attorney Morris Kruk. And the murder victim herself: here was no “casualty” of impoverished/drug-addled parental negligence/abuse in association with the notorious incompetence of the New Jersey Child Welfare Bureau: no six-year-old child “of color” discovered abused, strangled, broken in an elevator shaft in a Newark tenement, or in a Dumpster behind a WaWa in Trenton. Here was a Fair Hills child. A Caucasian child. A six-year-old
famous child
! For already, to the distress of Detectives Sledge and Slugg, the normally idyllic Village of Fair Hills was beginning to swarm with intruders: TV camera-crew vans, journalists and photographers, brash emissaries from the “media” world with the terrible power to expose, humiliate, vilify the merely competent, the well-intentioned-but-inexperienced veterans who’d made their fairly frictionless way through the ranks of a small-town police department looking to retirement and generous public-service pensions and so if the unspeakable thing that had happened in the Rampike house was a kind of fire, it was a fire only just beginning, a fire on the verge of exploding into a conflagration, how desperate the wish of the veteran guardians of the law to
put it out.

“Skyler? Do you recognize this man, son? Take your time answering.”

Slugg spoke quietly. Or was it Sledge. Men of indeterminate age, older than Skyler’s father by many years, faces drawn with unease, fatigue. Skyler was made to know that he should say
yes
. How powerful the wish, that Skyler say
yes
. Staring at “mug shots”—as on TV!—of a frightened-looking youngish man with stark shadowed eyes and a soft, bruised mouth. Longish hair, disheveled. Who was this? The “ex-convict sex offender” who’d broken a basement window in the Rampikes’ house, crawled inside with the intention of kidnapping Bliss—but killed her instead? Heavily sedated Skyler (Serenex, Zomix) was having trouble thinking over the roaring in his ears. How many hours or days this was, after “it” had happened, Skyler could not have said. His heart was pounding hard and sharp as an ice pick in his chest, for all the adults in the room were staring at him and waiting for him to speak.

“—saw him at an ice rink? Did you?”

“—on Ravens Crest Drive? Outside your house?”

Skyler tried to think. He had seen this man somewhere: he knew. At
one of the ice rinks? The staring eyes, the soft bruised mouth that felt like Skyler’s own mouth for he’d been gnawing at his lips. The man’s eyes were bulgy as Skyler’s eyes and there was that stricken/guilty look
Please have mercy, I am your friend
.

Suddenly Skyler remembered: a horizontal mirror, a mirror spanning a wall in a men’s restroom, above a row of sinks. In that mirror the rusty-red-haired man stood watching him, a smile stretching the rubbery lips.

Quickly Skyler shook his head, no.

“D’you mean—no? You don’t recognize this man?”

Stubborn Skyler shook his head.
No
.

Mummy was staring at him, disappointed. Mummy’s face swollen and discolored from crying. And Daddy, puffy-skinned and tired-looking rubbing a big-Daddy fist over his mouth.

No! Skyler didn’t remember this man. No more than Skyler remembered
it
.
*