Twisted: The Collected Stories (36 page)

The man must have been ten years younger than Mary. He wasn’t handsome and he had a belly. How could she be seeing someone like him? How on earth? He didn’t look rich either—he was wearing a cheap, unstylish suit. No, there was only one reason to see him. . . . He must be good in bed.

Dennis could taste the familiar metallic flavor of his rage.

And then he realized that Mary was wearing the navy blue dress that he’d bought for her last Christmas! He’d purposely picked a high-necked one so she couldn’t go flaunting her breasts at every man she passed. And he realized that she’d picked it today as a private joke—an insult to him. Dennis pictured this fat slob slowly undoing the buttons,
slipping his pudgy fingers under the cloth while Mary whispered words that this fat asshole would hear every time he looked at the blank Christmas card.

Dennis Linden wanted to scream.

He spun away from the window and strode to the front door of the inn. He pushed it open and stepped inside, shoving a waiter out of the way. The man fell to the floor.

The maître d’ saw the gun and gasped, backing away. Other patrons too.

Mary glanced at him, still smiling from her conversation with fat boy, then her face went white. “Dennis, honey, what—?”

“Am I doing here?” he raged sarcastically.

“My God, a gun!” The boyfriend lifted his hands. He stumbled backward and his bar stool fell over.

“I’m here,
honey,
” he shouted to Mary, “to do what I should’ve done a long time ago.”

“Dennis, what’re you talking about?”

“Who’s he?” the chubby man asked, his eyes huge with fear.

“My husband,” Mary whispered. “Dennis, please, put the gun down!”

“What’s your name?” Dennis shouted at the man.

“I—It’s Frank Chilton. I—”

Chilton? Dennis remembered him. He was married to Patty, Mary’s good friend from the church committee. She was betraying her friend too.

Dennis lifted the gun.

“No, please!” Frank pleaded. “Don’t hurt us!”

Mary stepped in front of her lover. “Dennis, Christ! Please put the gun away. Please!”

He muttered, “You cheat on somebody, there’s going to be payback. Oh, you bet there is.”

“Cheat? What do you mean?” The actress within Mary was looking innocent as a child.

A scream from nearby, a woman’s voice. “Frank! Mary!”

Dennis glanced toward the bar and saw a young woman freeze as she stepped out of the rest room, a horrified look on her face. She ran to Frank and put her arm around him.

What was going on?

Dennis was confused. It was Patty.

Eyes wide, breathless, Mary gasped, “Dennis, did you think I was seeing Frank?”

He said nothing.

“I ran into Patty at the mall,” she explained. “I told you that. We decided to have a drink and she called Frank. I invited you too. But you didn’t want to come. How could you think—?” She was crying. “How could you—”

“Oh, nice try. I know what you’ve been up to. Maybe it’s not him. But it
is
somebody.” He aimed the gun at his wife. “Too many discrepancies,
honey.
Too many things don’t quite add up,
honey.
”

“Oh, Dennis, I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. I’m not seeing anyone. I love you! I was just out buying you a Christmas present tonight.” She held up a shopping bag.

“Did you get me a card too?”

“A—”

“Did you buy me a Christmas card?” he screamed.

“Yes!” More tears. “Of course I did.”

“You buy cards for anyone else?”

She looked completely confused. “Just the ones we’re sending together. To our friends. To my family . . .”

“What about the card you hid in the closet?”

She blinked. “You mean, in my bathrobe?”

“Yes! Who’s that one for?”

“It’s for
you!
It’s your card.”

“Then how come it was sealed up and blank?” he asked, smiling triumphantly.

The tears had stopped and now anger blossomed in her face. It was an expression he’d seen only twice before. When he’d told her he wouldn’t let her go back to work and then when he’d asked her not to take that business trip to San Francisco.

“I didn’t seal it up,” she snapped. “It was snowing yesterday when I came out of the Hallmark store. The flap got wet and it stuck. I was going to work it open when I got a chance. I hid it so you wouldn’t find it.”

He lowered the gun. Debating. Then he smiled coldly. “Oh, you’re good. But you’re not fooling me.” He aimed the pistol at her chest and started to pull the trigger.

“No, Dennis, please!” she cried, lifting her hands helplessly.

“Hold it right there!” a man’s voice barked.

“Drop the weapon! Now!”

Dennis spun around and found himself facing two New York State troopers, who were pointing their own guns at him.

“No, you don’t understand,” he began, but as he spoke the Smith & Wesson strayed toward the cops.

Both officers hesitated for a fraction of a second then fired their guns.

Dennis spent three weeks recuperating in the detention center hospital, during which time several psychiatrists gave him a thorough evaluation. They recommended a sanity hearing prior to trial.

At the hearing, held on a cold, bright day in February, Dennis’s long history of depression, uncontrolled temper and paranoid behavior came to light. Even the prosecutor gave up on the idea of finding him fit to stand trial and conceded that he was incompetent. There was, however, some disagreement about the type of hospital to place him in. The DA wanted him committed indefinitely in a high-security facility while Dennis’s lawyer urged that he go to an unsecured hospital for six months or so of observation.

The gist of the defense argument was that no one had actually been endangered by Dennis because, it turned out, the firing pin of his gun had been removed and the weapon couldn’t be fired. Dennis had known this, the lawyer explained, and had merely wanted to scare people.

But no sooner had he made that point then Dennis leapt up and shouted that, no, he
had
thought the gun was working properly.

“See, the firing pin is the key to the whole case!”

His lawyer sighed and, when he couldn’t get Dennis to shut up, sat down in disgust.

“Can you swear me in as a witness?” Dennis asked the judge.

“This isn’t a trial, Mr. Linden.”

“But can I talk?”

“All right, go ahead.”

“I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, Your Honor.”

“Have you, now?” the bored judge asked.

“Yessir. And I’ve finally figured it out.” Dennis went on to explain: Mary, he told the judge, had been having an affair with somebody, maybe not her boss, but
somebody.
And had arranged the business trip to San Francisco to meet him.

“I know this ’cause I looked for the little things. My friend told me to look for the little things and I did.”

“The little things?” the judge inquired.

“Yes!” Dennis said emphatically. “And that’s just what I started doing. See, she wanted me to find evidence.”

He explained: Mary knew he’d try to kill her, which would get Dennis arrested or shot. “So she took the firing pin out of the gun. It was all a setup.”

“You have any proof of this, Mr. Linden?” the judge asked.

Dennis sure did. He read from weather reports showing that it hadn’t rained or snowed the day before the assault.

“And why’s that relevant?” the judge asked, glancing at Dennis’s lawyer, who lifted his eyebrows hopelessly.

His client laughed. “The wet flap, Your Honor.”

“How’s that?”

“She really
did
lick the flap of the envelope. It wasn’t the snow at all, like she claimed.”

“Envelope?”

“She sealed it to make me think she was going to
give it to her lover. To push me over the edge. Then she hid it, knowing I was watching her.”

“Uh-huh, I see.” The judge began reading files for the next case.

Dennis then gave a long speech, rambling on about the significance of blank messages—about how what is unsaid can often be a lot worse than what’s said. “A message like that, or a
nonmessage,
I should say, would definitely justify killing your wife and her lover. Don’t you agree, Your Honor?”

It was at that point that the judge had Dennis escorted out of the courtroom and ruled from the bench that he be indefinitely committed to the Westchester County Maximum Security Facility for the Criminally Insane.

“You’re not fooling anyone!” Dennis screamed to his tearful wife as she sat in the back of the courthouse. The two bailiffs muscled him through the door and his frantic shouts echoed through the courthouse for what seemed like an eternity.

It was eight months later that the orderly supervising the game room at the mental hospital happened to see in the local newspaper a short notice that Dennis’s ex-wife was remarrying—an investment banker named Sid Farnsworth.

The article mentioned that the couple were going to honeymoon in San Francisco, which was “my favorite city,” Mary was quoted as saying. “Sid and I had our first real date here.”

The orderly thought about mentioning the story to Dennis but then decided it might upset him. Besides,
the patient was, as usual, completely lost in one of his projects and wouldn’t want to be disturbed. Dennis spent most of his time these days sitting at a crafts table, making greeting cards out of red construction paper. He’d give them to the orderly and ask him to mail them. The man never did, of course; patients weren’t allowed to send mail from the facility. But the orderly couldn’t have posted them anyway—the cards were always blank. Dennis never wrote any messages inside, and there was never a name or address on the front of the envelope.

“H
ow long has she been missing?”

Stout Lon Sellitto—his diet shot because of the holiday season—shrugged. “That’s sort of the problem.”

“Go on.”

“It’s sort of—”

“You said that already,” Lincoln Rhyme felt obliged to point out to the NYPD detective.

“About four hours. Close to it.”

Rhyme didn’t even bother to comment. An adult was not even considered missing until at least twenty-four hours had passed.

“But there’re circumstances, “ Sellitto added. “You have to know who we’re talking about.”

They were in an impromptu crime scene laboratory—the living room of Rhyme’s Central Park West town house in Manhattan—but it had been impromptu for years and had more equipment and supplies than most small-town police departments.

A tasteful evergreen garland had been draped around the windows, and tinsel hung from the scanning electron microscope. Benjamin Britten’s
Ceremony of Carols
played brightly on the stereo. It was Christmas Eve.

“It’s just, she’s a sweet kid. Carly is, I mean. And here her mother knows she’s coming over but doesn’t call her and tell her she’s leaving or leave a note or anything. Which she always does. Her mom—Susan Thompson’s her name—is totally buttoned up. Very weird for her just to vanish.”

“She’s getting the girl a Christmas present,” Rhyme said. “Didn’t want to give away the surprise.”