The Will to Kill Read online

  When he swung the shovel, I wasn’t really surprised, or not enough so that I didn’t duck back and protect the gun-in-hand he was going for. What I hadn’t anticipated was how quick and savage he could be, leaping from the trench and swinging the shovel wildly, the blade swishing, its owner banshee-wailing. Off-balance, I fired the .45 but the slug caught the descending shovel blade, punching a hole in it that a laser beam of moonlight shot through.

  He kept swinging and screaming, wildly cutting the air, and was almost on top of me, my back to the rear outer wall of the carriage house, when my next round took off the thumb of his right, clutching hand. It flew off and arced through the air and planted itself in the soil. His scream had pain in it now, and red geysered out of the thumb stump like a hose watering his twisted garden.

  But the pain sent him into a frenzy, and I was just about to send one through his brain when that shovel blade finally caught me, the flat part thank God, a one-handed swing now, but the scrawny son of a bitch had enough power that my .45 got knocked to hell and gone.

  That made him laugh. He laughed through the pain, his eyes crazed and bulging, his teeth bared like something feral, his shrill shrieks ripping the night, the cry of some wild creature in the woods either killing or getting killed.

  I caught the handle of the shovel in both hands and yanked it out of his grasp. He stood there with a look of astonished dismay and disappointment on that crinkly, jut-jawed face, a child whose toy had been taken away by a cruel parent.

  I had to step to one side to do it, but in batter-up mode, I swung the thing, and that shovel end, the backside of it, smashed him in the face. All it took was that one blow. The sound was a different crunch than his digging had made, more like stepping through a rotted board, lots of little bones and some big ones, too, cracking and snapping, and when I drew the shovel back, the face was pushed in, nose flattened, mouth open on jagged things that used to be teeth, and he wasn’t jut-jawed any more. With the tip of the shovel point, I gave him a little nudge and he stumbled and tumbled backward into the shallow grave.

  He’d already been dead, of course. The bones of his nose had smashed into his brain and ended his miserable excuse for a life. He should have suffered more, but you can’t have everything.

  Quickly I went to the squirming duffel bag. I undid the ties at its top and loosened the aperture, widening it, tugging the rough canvas gently down over a naked young woman. Hands duct-taped before her, ankles, too, her legs having been brought up in a fetal position, her mouth slashed with tape, she was dirt-splotched and bruised here and there; and cigarette burns dotted her flesh. But she had been lovely before the terror, and would be again, a dark-haired, dark-eyed doll who I cradled and rocked.

  And best of all she was alive.

  But I had to wonder how many like her were already buried in this garden. Missing girls soon to be tragically found.

  The duct tape gag came off in one swift tug, and she looked up at me in hope that could switch to horror if I turned out to be another madman, and after all I’ve been accused of that.

  But I kept my voice soft and soothing as I said, “You’re going to be fine now. Fine.”

  She nodded.

  “Is your name Linda Cohen?”

  She swallowed and nodded, and nodded, and nodded.

  “I’m going to get you back to your folks, honey,” I said. “Don’t you worry now.”

  Into my arms I lifted her as she shivered in nakedness and shock, and I carried her to the house, where Dorena was already at the back kitchen door, on the little open porch there, a number of lights on in the house now. I eased Linda onto the ground to see if she could stand; she could, but she held onto me.

  In her sashed robe again but with a nightgown peeking from beneath it, Dorena rushed toward us, barefoot on the cold ground.

  I said, “This is one of the missing girls. In the papers?”

  She nodded. She knew at once what I was talking about, and anyway this was no time for explanations. Admirably businesslike, she slipped an arm around the Cohen girl and said, “Let’s get her inside and cleaned up.”

  The girl swung toward me, squeezing my arm, looking up in terrible fear with the biggest brown eyes you ever saw. “There’s another one! You have to stop the other one!”

  Dorena asked, “What’s she talking about?”

  I said, “I think I know. I think maybe I’ve always known. Or anyway I should have.”

  Already walking the girl toward the short flight of stairs up to the kitchen door, Dorena looked back at me wide-eyed. “Mike, what are you…?”

  “Give her some tender loving care, and find some clothes for her. She looks about your size.”

  “All right. And I’ll call the police…”

  I shook my head. “Not just yet. Tend to the girl here.”

  They were up on the little porch now, Dorena gazing at me curiously, an arm around the teeth-chattering girl’s waist. “No police?”

  “No. When I come back, I’ll handle that.”

  “Back from where?”

  “I’ll be close by. Right here on the grounds. Just something that needs attending to.”

  I was heading off into the dark when Dorena called out again: “Mike!… What sick monster did this to her?”

  “Willie Walters. He was sick, all right… so sick he died of it.”

  * * *

  I stood at the foot of the shallow grave that Walters hadn’t been able to finish before he filled it with himself. On his back, the sprawl of his arms and legs only partly in the hollowed-out rectangle, he stared up at the sky with his caved-in face frozen in dismayed surprise.

  Those puzzle pieces weren’t swimming now, not tumbling or turning, either—they were falling into place, clicking together, fitting nicely into a clear if bizarre image.

  I stuffed a Lucky in my lips and fired it up. I let a ghostly stream of smoke seep through my teeth.

  “Talk to me, Willie,” I said.

  And he talked to me. He didn’t say a word, of course, there on his dead back with his crushed jaw and his broken teeth and his flattened nose and his blank eyes. But he spoke to me, ever so eloquently.

  When I’d listened to everything he had to say, I tossed the Lucky sparking into the night, got the .45 out of my waistband again, and went around to the side door of the carriage house. The door was unlocked, as it always seemed to be, and between the comfy chairs facing the TV a small floor lamp cast muted yellow light onto the rec room. I wandered across the braided rug to the bookcase for a glance at the sexy paperbacks on display there. Those and the stack of well-thumbed Playboys on a shelf hadn’t belonged to Jamison Elder, after all. Seemed still waters hadn’t run deep.

  The .45 led me up the circular wrought-iron staircase where the two doors awaited. I tried the one to Willie Walters’ room and found it unlocked. On first glance, the cramped space illuminated by moonlight through a window presented nothing of much interest—a twin bed made with military precision, a single nightstand with reading lamp and a few dirty paperbacks, a mirrorless dresser with a portable radio on it, another comfy chair.

  But in the closet I found three padded sportcoats tailored to fill out the shoulders of somebody skinny like Willie. Only I didn’t think the sportcoats were his. Nor did I think the several pairs of elevator shoes were Willie’s, either.

  On the upper closet shelf I found a box of .22 slugs and a hip holster that a revolver of that caliber might fit; but it was empty.

  Back on the little landing, I faced the door to the bedroom opposite and, with my left hand, tried the door. Unlocked, if it even had a lock. I went in.

  The childish bedroom took on a surreal quality, the moonlight streaming through a window, everything ivory tinged blue, much as the ground outside had been. The model airplanes hanging from the ceiling in silhouette were like strange prehistoric creatures; the tee-pee in one corner lurked in darkness, though its geometric shape was discernible.

  I positioned myself at the foo
t of the wagon-wheel bed, toward the right. The Lone Ranger bedspread was bunched at the bottom. Under only a sheet and light blanket, he was sleeping on his side, or pretending to, with his back mostly to me, his head deep in a fluffy pillow. The little angel.

  “Here’s a bedtime story for you, Chickie,” I said.

  He made the slightest movement, or perhaps that was the covers rustling from the nearby open window that cast its shaft of moonlight across the lower bed.

  “Once upon a time a man had a son,” I said. “He loved that son very much, but before long, when the boy was very young, the father discovered that the boy had no interest in playing with other children. But who knows? Maybe the boy was just shy. He did have hobbies, this boy—he particularly liked to torture and kill small animals, squirrels, ducks in a pond, cats, the family dog. I’m only guessing now, but he probably also liked to set fires, even burning down buildings… possibly including his inventor father’s workshop… and he almost certainly lacked any remorse after, for that or any other antisocial behavior he displayed. Like lying or stealing. And he showed no warmth to his family members, this boy. In my experience, children like that often are beaten or abused by parents who don’t realize that this behavior is a kind of sickness. That the lack of human feeling and emotion and understanding of responsible behavior made it as if a child like this had been born blind.”

  The covers rustled, but Chickie said nothing.

  “But this boy, this very special boy, was luckier than most of his ilk. You see, his father had been a policeman in a big city and had seen a lot in his years on the force. He recognized the danger signs in his son. He knew that he had a budding sociopath on his hands, who might possibly even grow into a homicidal maniac one day. So he controlled the boy, kept him young, pampered and protected him, and the boy knew no other way to live and went along with what was a very unusual approach to child-rearing. Though an ex-cop, the father was now very wealthy, and could afford to hire help to look after his son, and… contain him. He lied to the world, even to some members of the family, that the boy was retarded or autistic. And he hired a good man named Jamison Elder to be the boy’s handler… his companion, his teacher. The boy liked Jamison, as far as it went—the man was kind, helpful, and understood the boy’s affliction. Then the boy got older and perhaps less easy to handle, so the father hired an ex-prison guard to be a kind of jailer for his son.”

  Movement, or wind, shifted the sheets.

  “This proved to be a tragic mistake. You see, by terrible happenstance, the jailer had a similar sickness, and eventually he and the boy formed a pact, a kind of partnership. My thinking is that the boy promised the jailer money, one day… or perhaps the boy had access right now to the fifty thousand dollars a year his trust fund generated. I’ll get back to how that’s possible, but right now let’s just celebrate a remarkable friendship—the jailer and the prisoner who became a team. Who shared a singular hobby.”

  Chickie said nothing.

  “You see, things really changed for the boy when he hit puberty. He had new feelings surging within his somewhat childish frame. He had new interests, new… desires. It’s very likely he became a voyeur, window-peeping on the two beautiful women who lived in the main house, likely making use of that old-fashioned spy glass over there. And so, with his friend the jailer, he undertook a new interest, a new hobby that beat drowning ducks all to hell. He put on a coat with the shoulders padded and wore elevator shoes that made him look older and more, well, normal. He was basically a good-looking boy, after all, and had a natural charisma when he unleashed it. He’d seen enough TV to know how to behave with people. The boy, with the help of his jailer friend, went trolling through the clubs and resorts here in the Catskills and lured lovely young women into his clutches… corny way to put it, I know, but so very apt… and brought them somewhere, possibly somewhere on the grounds here, and pursued his new hobby. Torture, rape, and worse… How could anything be worse? How about burying these girls, once they’d been used, in that garden out there? Burying them alive.”

  Chickie said nothing, though the cover shifted slightly. The gun missing from Willie’s shelf—was it in Chickie’s hands, under those covers? That would be fine. That would make it self-defense.

  “Things went well with the new hobby, for several years, but then the boy’s other companion… the one who’d been so close to him, so good to him, the family servant, his teacher, his friend… learned something he shouldn’t have. He became aware, to what extent we’ll never know, of the hobby the boy and his jailer cohort pursued. And this good man panicked and fled, knowing he was in danger. He had to get away from this place, from these grounds, and he lied and said he had a sick sister he had to go see, and he got away from this horror, with only the vaguest plans about what he’d do to fix the problem. Oddly, he loved the boy, like the late father… who the boy had also killed, playing on his caring parent’s heart condition to do so. This family servant considered the boy a freak of nature whose evil inclinations were no fault of his own. This he was sorting out as he drove into the night, rushing to an appointment with an ice floe.”

  Chickie said nothing.

  “Getting back to that fifty thousand a year that the boy may have had access to, I admit I am speculating. Of course, much of this is speculation, but I’m confident doors to terrible rooms will soon be flung open by the authorities and others. One such door may well open on another of the boy’s friends, a lawyer who controlled the estate, who perhaps had been dipping into the funds himself and could use a new friend, like the boy. At his discretion, the lawyer could give the boy his yearly fifty-grand stipend. But I think more was going on than just that.”

  The sheets, the thin blanket, rustled.

  “I think a second alliance, between the lawyer and the boy—possibly not involving the jailer at all—led to attempts on the lives of his siblings. This would clear the way to an even greater fortune one day. This scheme included framing a sister-in-law for the murder of one brother, and—revealing the boy’s ability to protect himself, when a snooping detective threatened to upset things—also framing the other brother… for the murder of the family lawyer, who might have objected to some of the boy’s more outlandish machinations of late. A lot of clever little touches accompanied these efforts—the punctured brake hose, the broken studio step, gunshots in the night, even lying and saying a sibling who showed no previous interest in him had come around to watch TV with the boy, and of course tried to gas him to death. That detective I mentioned got conned by the jailer into checking on the boy, who had turned the gas on himself, shortly beforehand.”

  The sheet flipped a little. That was the wind. Wasn’t it?

  “The boy knew it would be unwise to add his nice sister to the list of deaths and murder frame-ups. But he could handle her. Maybe he liked to watch her, when she didn’t know it. Anyway, he knew one day he would be able to fool the doctors, too, and he would break out of this prison of an endless childhood imposed upon him by the father he had so gladly murdered. That was probably the final tip-off for me, champ—that you did not have a photo anywhere of your beloved late father. For all your talk of heaven, you just don’t feel a thing, do you? You never have.”

  Slowly I walked around the bed.

  “But, Chickie, despite your New York Times crossword smarts, you really are just a dumb kid at heart. Sending me those show-off taunting letters is a good example of that. You’ve improvised too much these last few days, and the police will find you out. What bugs me is that you probably will be considered crazy or mentally deficient, and wind up in some hospital where one day you can bluff your way out. That I can’t allow. Because here’s where your luck ran out, Chickie my boy—I’m a killer too.”

  I came around and thrust the gun toward the sleeping boy… but he wasn’t sleeping, was he?

  Yes, he was on his side and peaceful, his expression placid.

  But a pillow, used in part as a makeshift silencer, lay on the floor with a s
corched hole in it, from having been pressed into the sleeping man/child’s face and a gun fired into it. The bullet had gone in clean in his forehead, a small round black-red puncture, but that fluffy pillow his head was buried in would conceal the larger jagged outlet in the back of his skull through which a gory jelly made from his once-clever brain had been spewed.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Corporal Jim Sheridan got to the Dunbar estate in about thirty minutes, but the Monticello cops beat him by half of that, with an ambulance from the local hospital on their heels. The morgue wagon came flying in, too, as if that mattered.

  By the time Bullard of the B.C.I. got there, the moonlight circus was in full sway—uniform and plainclothes officers sweeping the grounds, the lights atop squad cars painting the night red and blue, a photographer recording the garden while Willie’s remains were still on display, then doing the same with Chickie and his bedroom, flash-bulbs strobing the carriage house second-floor windows like indoor lightning.

  Sheridan and I shook hands. Even in the middle of the night, the tall, rugged trooper looked crisp in his gray uniform and purple-banded Stetson.

  I walked him into the Dunbar kitchen and got him a cup of coffee while he called the Cohen girl’s parents to give them the mostly good news—whatever hell that poor kid had been put through was eclipsed by her surviving it. He advised them (they were still staying at Kutsher’s) to go directly to the hospital in Monticello, as their daughter was about to leave by ambulance for there.

  After he hung up the phone, Sheridan said to me, “You know, Pat Chambers has a hell of a friend in you. It’s going to mean a lot to him, you clearing all of this up.”

  Dorena was sitting over at the kitchen table, looking catatonic. I’d told her, when the cops were on the way, that Chickie had been killed, possibly by Willie Walters. And she’d got the picture from Linda Cohen that Chickie and Willie had been the girl’s tag-team tormenters.