Wallflower (44 page)

"Of course," she said sadly. "Of course. . . ."

He felt awful when he put down the phone. Would Monika now hold this against him? She said she understood, but did she? He was a detective, not a therapist. Now he had to do his job.

A
fter much discussion and many rehearsals, he and Aaron agreed that since there was no way of knowing how Beverly would react, their best approach would be the simplest and most direct. No big dramatic production at the door. Just walk up the front steps picture in hand, ring the bell, offer to place it in the hall for her, then let the chips fall where they may.

Figuring she'd be tired and thus more vulnerable at the end of the day, they parked their van across from her house a little after 6:00 P.M. There they waited until 6:45, when her last patient left.

They had uncrated the picture earlier; it was now covered only with a sheet. They pulled it out of the van, picked it up, and together carried it across the street.

Aaron pushed the buzzer. It was a while before Beverly answered on the intercom.

"Who's there?"

"Janek."

A short pause. "Go away. I'm not in the mood today."

"I brought you something." He spoke cheerfully. "Something from Cleveland." He tried to entice her with his tone.

"Oh, really . . ." Her voice was lethargic. She certainly didn't sound upset.

"Open the door and I'll show you," he said. He paused again; he was getting into the rhythm of the thing. "You won't be sorry, Bev."

Aaron gave him a thumbs-up as they heard the lock mechanism being turned. Then the door opened and Beverly stood in the archway, hands planted on her hips. She looked a perfect little butterball as she stared at them and then at the sheet-covered picture in between.

"Is that great big thing for tiny little me?" She spoke with a sarcastic lilt.

Janek nodded. "Want us to bring it inside?"

"I don't know that I'm going to accept it. Remember the old saying: Beware Greeks bearing gifts."

"What're you afraid of? Think it's a Trojan Horse?"

She stared at the picture curiously. "What is it anyway?"

"A painting."

"What kind of painting?"

"Aretzsky's second portrait of your mother," Janek said.

She tut-tutted him. "Oh, Janek, you're so tiresome. I know all about that second portrait."

"Sure, you know about it. But did you ever look at it?"

"No. And I don't intend to."

As she started to close the door, he felt his case begin to slip away.
Do something! Razz her! Don't let her close you out!

"Scared to look, Bev?" he taunted.

She hesitated. "No, I'm not scared to look."

"There are things in this picture you won't see in the one upstairs."

She nodded. "I know the story. A drunk old painter's revenge."

"Maybe something deeper than revenge, Bev. Maybe something true."

"All the truth went into the first portrait. The second was painted on the rebound. That's the way I heard it."

He shook his head. "You heard wrong. The first time Aretzsky was blinded by love. The second time his eyes were wide open."

She glared at him. "You're an ass, Janek." Again she tried to shut him out.

This is it,
he thought.
Go for broke!

He blocked the door with his shoe. When he spoke again he used no taunts nor was there any trace of sarcasm in his voice.

"The MacDonalds were a mistake, Bev. You sent Diana out to kill the wrong boys. Sure, they gave you a hard time. But it was your mother who put them up to it." He snatched the sheet off the picture, tilted it so she could see Victoria's face. "Look into her eyes. Check out her mouth. See the cruelty, the depravity, the selfishness? This is the lady who set you up. She told Melissa Walters she didn't want you to be a wallflower. But when you look hard at this picture you have to wonder if she meant it. Because that's what you are, Bev. A wallflower. Now and for the rest of your life." He thrust his finger at the painting. "And this is the lady who made you one. Not the MacDonalds.
Her!"

He nodded to Aaron. They turned and walked away. The plan was not to look back, not to give her a chance to answer, or gesture at them, or show her contempt by slamming the door in their faces. By the time they heard it slam they were already at the curb. And still they walked. It was only when they reached the other side of the street and got into their van, that Janek turned and looked and saw with satisfaction that the door to the house was closed and the picture they'd left was no longer on the stoop.

G
ive her the night with her new mama, Janek thought. Let them cook together, heat each other up. Then, maybe, butterball will be ready to talk.

It was out of his hands now. It was between the Archers. Nothing for him to do but wait. He went home, ordered in some Chinese, watched a hockey game on TV, and then retired early to bed. He did not sleep well. He tossed and turned, worried that Beverly would not take his bait, worried that if she did Monika would forever think less of him, because, as she'd put it, he'd gone for blood.

In the morning he spoke briefly with Aaron, who'd spent the night watching Beverly's house. Nothing yet, so Janek set to work methodically cleaning his apartment. He mopped his kitchen, vacuumed his rugs, waxed his furniture, and scrubbed his bathroom floor on his knees. He didn't clean up the place very often, but this day he did so with a vengeance. Perhaps, he thought, it was a way for him not to think about Monika, not to deal with the feelings she'd conveyed, the way she'd distanced herself after he'd revealed his plan.

A little after ten he received a call from a young lawyer, an associate at Stanton's firm, who was representing him on the Rusty Glickman assault suit.

"
Glickman's got no case and Streep & Holster know it," the attorney said.
"
I told them: All you've got is a bunch of phony charges brought by a man Janek put away years ago. Unfortunately there wasn't any give, so my strategy now is to go into court and move for summary judgment. It may take a while but I'm pretty sure we'll get it. Then the whole miserable business will be done with."

Janek thanked him. The moment he set down his phone it rang again. He snatched it up.

It was Aaron. "Something's going on here, Frank. Beverly's not seeing her patients."

"What do you mean?"

"They show up on time, go to the door, ring, and stand there a while. When nobody answers the intercom, they sort of droop and slouch away."

"You're sure she's there?"

"Positive. I would have seen her come out. I tried to call her a minute ago. All I got was her answering machine."

He thought of what Monika had said, about the possibility Beverly could be shocked into psychosis. Maybe, just maybe, the portrait was having its effect.

"I'll be right over," he told Aaron. "Better get a police locksmith there too."

H
e would never forget the scene that confronted them when they finally got inside the house. The painting he and Aaron had delivered, at least what was left of it, stood in tatters in the front hall just inside the door. The image had been desecrated. The eyes, the cruel scheming eyes, had been stabbed straight through the pupils. The selfish mouth had been slashed across so that the lips hung in loose folds. The breasts, too, had been assaulted with a scissors or perhaps a knife. But by far the worst and most fiendish violations had been committed against the area between Victoria Archer's legs. That portion of the picture bore numerous stab wounds,
"
a pattern of fury," as medical examiners refer to a configuration of knife thrusts so rapid and vigorous that all vestiges of the reproductive organs are obliterated.

Janek and Aaron rushed up the stairs. At the bedroom door they stopped. The spectacle before them was so stunning and bizarre they could only stand before it and gape.

The room was bathed in reddish light. The original portrait, removed from its niche, lay flat across the great four-poster. Beverly, in the same scarlet dress her mother had worn in both paintings, lay upon the picture very still. There was blood on the canvas and the bed.

"I think she's dead, Frank," Aaron said. "It looks like she slit her wrists."

Janek walked forward and touched Beverly's forehead. The skin was cold as ice. He tried to lift her arm to check for wounds, but found he could not move her. Then he understood. She was stuck to the painting. She had glued herself to it.

"Jesus!" Aaron said. "Maybe she was trying to screw the picture. Do you think?"

Janek shook his head. He was sure that that was not what Beverly had been trying to do when she opened her veins, then glued herself to her mother—pelvis to pelvis, hands to hands, breasts to breasts. What she had attempted, he felt certain, was a
terminal
act of bonding. But then, perhaps in her last moments, she had writhed against the image, engaging in a final failed life-and-death struggle for release.

He circled the bed, and, when Bev's face came into view, Janek felt his rage subside. Her frozen expression, a mixture of panic and yearning, filled him with pity and terror.

He turned to Aaron. "Call the morgue," he said.

After Aaron went downstairs, Janek spotted an ivory-handled knife, blade open, on the floor. He picked it up, clasped the blade shut, then pushed a chrome button on the side. The blade sprang forward in his hand. It was the knife Bev had used to kill herself Jess's knife, the knife that had haunted his dreams.

He looked back at Beverly, met her dead eyes head-on.

"What can I do for you?" he whispered.

The moment he heard his own voice, he knew the answer. He would use Jess's knife to cut the dead woman loose.

He imagined her screaming: "Cut, Mama! No!" But to cut them apart, he knew, was the only way. He straddled Bev, then sliced into the picture. How appropriate, he thought, that he was now separating her from the phony image she had worshiped. The painting was thick but the knife was sharp. The canvas parted before the blade like silk.

Beverly had been mad, of course, functional but mad, perhaps as far back as her girlhood. Confronted finally by the true nature of her mother, her madness had engulfed and destroyed her.

He waited until the medical examiner arrived, waited until the assistants carried Bev's body out. He sat alone for a while in the strange dark bedroom. And then it was time to leave.

Downstairs Aaron was standing before the damaged second portrait in the hall.

"Funny, isn't it, Frank, how now the two pictures look almost the same?"

Janek understood. The cuts he'd made in the idealized version upstairs matched almost perfectly the cuts Beverly had made in the cruel version before him.

"Too bad she killed herself," Aaron said. "It would have been a hell of a trial." He paused. "I wonder if she would have confessed in the end."

"She did confess," Janek replied.
"
She just didn't do it with words."

Aaron grinned at him. "Well, you got her, Frank. You nailed
her."

"Yeah . . . ."

"Do you think Kit would say you did it straight?"

Janek shrugged. "Sometimes, when they're as crooked as this one," he said, "you have to use a slightly crooked nail."

T
here was, at first, a feeling of fulfillment. Having broken and destroyed the monster, he was no longer possessed by anger. There was the satisfaction, too, that came with understanding another person, adding another quantum to his store of knowledge of human beings and their mysterious capacity for evil.

But these good feelings fled quickly. The letdown descended within a day. It was like the Switch case: as soon as it was over, the passions that had fueled the quest began to die. And then he was left with himself, to ponder the meaning of his life—to wonder what Wallflower had meant to him, and whether it had cost him Monika's love.

He knew the case had changed him. He would never forget his horror as he felt the steel plunge into his throat, would never forget his conviction that he was going to die. But as he reexamined that moment, he recalled that it was not fear of death that had seized him, but a terrible frustration that he did not know who was attacking him or why.

Now that he had solved all that, he was left with his grief for Jess, a grief he knew he would always carry with him, though hopefully without the intensity of the past few months.

Redemption?
He wasn't sure he'd achieved it. The seeds of his melancholy had been planted years before. There would be times throughout his life, he knew, when he must harvest their bitter
fruit. And if
,
as he believed, he had driven Beverly Archer to suicide . . . well, he would have to live with that.

His cases always haunted him. Sometimes he felt as though his mind was filled with overlapping images from old homicides and the echoes of confessions of killers he had tracked and caught through the years. Now Wallflower, too, would become part of that montage. To be haunted, he understood, was the price he must pay for daring to explore the back alleys of tormented souls.