Wallflower j-3 Page 6

  "Ever take any pictures of Jess?"

  Gale ran his tongue across his lips. "A few. Want to see them?"

  If they were anything like the kinky picture over the fireplace, Janek didn't think he did. He stared at Gale.

  "I'll ask the questions, Greg. You'll answer them. Let's start off easy. What did you do to her in the park?"

  "What?"

  "You heard me."

  "Hey! Are you for real? I want you out of here. Now!"

  When Janek smiled, Gale looked confused. A slight vibrato in his upper lip showed that he was feeling fear.

  "I know who you are. You're the detective she was always talking about."

  Janek offered no response.

  "Okay," Gale said, quickly adjusting his manner to eager-to-please, "you want answers. I don't know anything about the park. I didn't lay eyes on her the last seven weeks. We quarreled, and she kicked me out of her life. Naturally I feel real bad about what happened, but I don't know anything about it. That's all I'm going to say."

  Real bad-shit! "Not good enough, Greggy boy." "I want you to go."

  Janek shook his head. "Not till I'm satisfied." "Don't try to bully me, Detective!" "Think this is bullying?" Janek laughed. they stared at each other. Then Gale made a move toward his phone.

  "I'm calling the police."

  He picked up the receiver, but his trembling betrayed his fear. Janek walked over to him and casually held out his hand. Gale paused, then surrendered the receiver. Janek set it down. He lightly pushed Gale into a black wooden chair bearing Columbia University's coat of arms. He pulled up a matching chair and sat down close, so close he could see a quiver in the young man's eyes.

  "All right," he said, "here's how it's going down. We're going to have a polite conversation in which I ask the questions and you give me truthful answers. The alternative is you get mad and try to punch me out. That's an attack on a law officer, felonious assault, which yields your basic five-year sentence. Not to mention the fact that then I'd have to hit you back, which would probably cost you your teeth.

  If I had a pretty face like yours, I don't think I'd like that very much. Your choice. I can handle it either way. See, I'm mad. My goddaughter was murdered. So basically I don't give a shit."

  Gale lowered his eyes. "I told you-I don't know anything.

  "Let's get more specific. Jess rejected you?" Gale nodded.

  "You resented her for that?"

  "I don't know if I'd say 'resent.' I admit I was pretty upset. But-"

  "Yeah, yeah-you don't know anything. Now tell me about the sex club?"

  Gale screwed up his face to convey perplexity. "What are you talking about?"

  Greggy's not too good an actor, Janek thought as he tutted and shook his finger. "No questions, just answers."

  "I don't know anything about any sex club."

  "Your little clique. The ones who watch while the new kid fucks blindfolded." "You know about that?"

  Janek reached forward and slapped Gale lightly across the face. "I ask. You answer. Last warning. Okay?"

  "Okay, okay. But it's not a club. It's more like… a group of friends." "How many 'friends'?" "Nine or ten, depending on who wants in or out." "Percentage of women?" "Half and half." "Who started it?" "My idea originally." "You recruit new people?" "Sort of. But it isn't exactly-" "You brought in Jess?" "Yeah. But-"

  "You planned to bring her into the group from the moment you started dating her. You weren't interested in her as a girlfriend. You just wanted another body, right?" Gale shook his head. "I want a straight answer."

  "Well, maybe that is what I had in mind."

  "Damn straight it was. From the start, right? But you never told her, did you? You waited till you thought she was ready. Then you proposed it, in a slippery kind of way like 'I know this great group of kids, they're really far-out, but I think you'll find them interesting."'

  Greg lowered his eyes, resigned. "Maybe that's what I did." Then he looked up. "But she was a big girl. And she went for it.

  Believe me, she enjoyed it. The moment I broached it to her, her eyes lit up. Probably hard for you to hear this, but Jess liked sex. I mean she liked it. And there's nothing wrong with that.

  We played safe, took precautions, used condoms. That's why we formed the group in the first place, so we could have some variety and still play safe. The whole idea was to make it fun. Not nasty like you're trying to make it seem."

  "Did I call it nasty?"

  "It's your tone. Your whole approach. You want to make me feel like a worm."

  That much was true, but Janek wanted to define his own attitude. "I don't think sex is nasty. But I think someone who uses the guise of romantic involvement to entice a girl into that kind of thing is fairly low-grade slime."

  Gale twisted in his chair. He couldn't take contempt. "That's pretty close to what she told me, too," he whispered. Janek was grateful to hear that. "She dumped on you?" "I already told you." "You must have resented her." "I'm human. Wouldn't you?" "Resented her so much you stalked her, stabbed her, and after you killed her, you attacked the part of her that mocked you the most, that mocked your manhood."

  Gale jumped up. "What're you talking about. What part of her?

  Jesus!"

  "The part you couldn't satisfy. The part that made you feel inadequate."

  "I don't understand." He paused. "You mean, my cock? Is that what you're talking about?" Janek smiled. "Not your lousy little cock, asshole. A part of her. Jess!" Gale was still confused. "What part of her?" "You tell me." "Are you saying she was-that someone did some thing to her? God! I didn't know! It wasn't in the papers. Jesus!"

  Gale sat back down, then began to sob. At first Janek was certain he was faking. But as the sobbing turned to gagging and then to heaving, he began to believe it was for real.

  He helped Gale into the bathroom, then stood beside him as he fell to his knees and retched into the toilet.

  "It's okay, son," he said. "Don't hold back. Let it out, let it out."

  When finally Gale was finished and turned to him with a grateful smile, Janek knew he had broken through. The bond was forged. The interrogator had become the friend. And now the truth would emerge.

  "I was crazy about her, Janek. I swear to you." they were back in the living room in the university chairs, but Janek sat farther away this time. No need to sit close and apply more stress. All he had to do now was listen with sympathy as Gale, impelled to talk, regaled him with his story.

  "… you got it right, I recruited her. Just like I recruited the others. And it was always a kind of victory for me, too. I'd pick a girl out, walking across the quadrangle, or sitting alone in a lecture hall, or jogging, or laughing, or coming out of one of the dorms. I'd pick her because she looked good, had a great body, moved a certain way, had a well-packaged butt, her lips were sexy, or there was something, you know, about the way she laughed, her mouth, her tits, whatever. Then it became a game. Get her name. Get a date with her. Kiss her. Get her into the sack. After that it was usually pretty easy to lead them to the point where, you know, they thought it was their idea. Then came the victory part: putting the blindfold on them, leading them into the room, telling them to strip while everybody watched. We never told anybody who they were going to do it with. That was the game. Everyone liked it.

  Everyone wore the blindfold. The guys, too. Including me. That was the fun of it, to wear the blindfold, to strip and stand there until the selected person came forward, stood before you till you could hardly stand it anymore, then slowly reached forward and made contact. Fear and anticipation and the idea you were on display. Wondering who the person was, trying to guess, but preferring not to know because it was easier to let yourself go if you didn't. Plenty of time later to find out who and laugh about who you thought it was. to perform like that, be the object of so much attention-I loved it. Everybody did.

  Jess, too. You gotta believe me when I say this, Janek. She found it incredibly exciting.

  "But,
see, there was the problem, because when I watched her play with the others, a funny thing started to happen. It bothered me. I didn't like it. And I'd never felt like that before. So I said to her: 'Let's not do this anymore. Let's just go out as a couple.'

  She laughed, called me jealous, made fun of me 'cause I couldn't take it. 'You got me into this, Greggy,' she said. 'You created a monster. Now you'll have to live with it.' "Over the summer we went separate ways. I had a half-ass job at my father's brokerage firm and was out in the Hamptons most weekends. Jess was with her folks up on Martha's Vineyard, so we didn't see each other at all. I called her a lot. She never called me. The few times I managed to catch her home she told me she didn't feel like talking.

  Then in August she went to Italy to some special fencing school. I wrote her, but she didn't answer. So okay, I figured when college started up again, we'd see each other and have a chance to talk. But come September she had a whole new attitude. Now all she wanted was to fence. She had ambitions, wanted to become an Olympic competitor. Her Italian coach had told her she had the potential for it but she'd have to give it everything she had. 'That's what I want,' she told me. 'I want to go all the way. I don't want to waste my energy anymore, dating people I don't care about or smoking pot and playing games with your chums.' 'Well, okay,' I said, 'that's fine.

  I'll go along with that. Let's start over, just the two of us.' But that didn't interest her either.

  "We had a big fight. She told me she didn't care if she ever saw me again. She called me all kinds of stuff. 'Shallow.' 'Spoiled.' 'No backbone.' 'No integrity.' 'User.' 'Pimp.' And she was right. Maybe that's why it hurt so much. She saw through me clearer than anyone ever had. She saw me for what I really am, which is just what you're looking at now, Janek. Yeah, I think you see me pretty much the way she did. As a jerk. A zero." And with that he gave out with a forlorn little whelp and then a droopy self-pitying smile.

  A nicely executed mea culpa, Janek thought, but he still had to be sure Gale hadn't gone after Jess in revenge.

  "Okay, Greg. Pick yourself up. No law says you gotta be slime.

  That's a choice you don't have to make."

  As Gale peered at him, searched his eyes for sympathy, suddenly Janek was sick of him. He was tired of people who made their confessions, then looked to him for solutions to their lives. What had he said to Monika that night in Venice? That he did what he did to gain wisdom, to comprehend the numerous varieties of human evil. But Greg Gale wasn't evil, at least not to a degree that mattered. He was smailtime-fuckedup-rich kid spoiled, and who gave a shit anyway? But somehow, some way this kid's life had touched Jess's, so no matter how sickening Janek found him, he still had to play out the string.

  "You see yourself as decadent, but underneath you're pretty soft. "

  In return, as he expected, Gale gave him the wann, grateful, amazed look-the one Janek always got at this point in an interrogation-the look that said: "Thank you for understanding me so well." "So you were hurt by her. She was a great kid, but she was capable of hurting. You don't decide to become an Olympic-class fencer if you haven't got some pretty hard stuff inside. In my experience women are tougher than men. Easy to forget that when they cry. But they can ream you out and backwards when they feel like it. Isn't that the truth?"

  Still caught up by Janek's magical insights, Greg nodded solemnly.

  "You were angry. It's okay, Greg. Admit it."

  "Well, sure. Those things she said-"

  "Made you feel like a wortn. Pretty hard to take a beating like that without getting mad about it, wanting to hit the girl back."

  Gale shrugged. "I didn't want to hit her. All I wanted was for us to, you know, hold each other."

  "She rejected you, made you feel awful."

  "Yeah…" The spell was still holding; Gale was in a kind of dazed, suspended state.

  "If she wouldn't go out with you, who would she go out with? You were jealous of what she did with the group. How about people you didn't know, sex you wouldn't be able to watch?"

  "I didn't want to think about that."

  "Of course not. You'd go crazy if you did. But how could you be sure? Unless there was some way to… close her off. Prevent anyone else from getting what you couldn't get. That's when you thought of it, right?"

  He looked into Gale's eyes, but all he could see there was confusion. No anger, no rage, no word forming to come out or being throttled so it wouldn't. This boy didn't know anything about glue; of that Janek was certain. Greg Gale hadn't stabbed Jess, and he hadn't mutilated her. He was lost in a reverie of his inadequacy as a man, not in a fantasy of stabbing and gluing up a woman.

  Janek stood. "I don't know what to say to you. You messed around with my goddaughter's head. I'd like to think you couldn't help yourself, but still, it's hard to forgive. I'm not going to try. I think you've been honest with me. I appreciate that. No need to get up. I'll let myself out."

  But then, before he could turn, Gale stood up. He wanted to show Janek his photographs of Jess. Janek dreaded looking at them; he didn't want sordid images of her etched upon his mind. But he waited anyway while Gale dug the pictures out, and then he was surprised.

  Gale's photos were not posed tableaux like the mistress/slave picture over the fireplace. Rather, they were superb black-and-white action shots of Jess fencing in tournaments, ongarde, thrusting, making parries and ripostes and lunge attacks against her opponents.

  He looked at them all carefully, admiring Gale's abilities as a photographer. Then he came upon a shot of Jess so fine, so powerful, he could not tear his eyes away. Gale had caught her just at the moment of a victory. Having scored, ripped off her mask, she met the gaze of his camera with a great broad, beaming grin of triumph.

  Gale watched him as he examined this picture. "Like it?" he asked. Janek nodded. "Take it. No, I mean it. I want you to have it." And before Janek could protest, Gale placed the print in a protective cover and presented it to him as a gift.

  Clutching this image of Jess as he rode back to his apartment, Janek knew', no matter what anyone said, that he would have to find out who had killed her. The little girl he had nurtured had grown into the magnificent women in the photograph-and now she was dead. The wound this time was not just upon society, nor was it only upon Laura and Stanton. It was also upon himself, and it would not be closed for him until he had hunted her killer down.

  Oh, Jess, he thought. Jess.

  That night, his second since his return from Europe, Janek finally got a full ration of sleep. But it was total exhaustion, not peace of mind, that closed his eyes. His last thought, before falling off, was that Jess seemed to have been at a crisis point at just the time she was killed. was that significant or merely a coincidence? He posed the question, then collapsed into a spiral of fatigue.

  It was Laura Dorance who set up his appointment the following morning with Jess's shrink.

  Janek arrived before the first-floor office entrance of a converted two-story carriage house on East Eighty-first. He pressed the bell, gave his name to a disembodied voice, and was buzzed in. He found himself in a hall. Through an archway to his left there was a sparsely furnished waiting room. He entered, took a seat, thumbed through an old copy of Psychology today, while a small radio, tuned at low volume to a classical station, yielded a gentle flow of Mozart.

  At precisely eleven o'clock Dr. Beverly Archer appeared in the doorway. A very short, fortyish butterball of a woman, she welcomed Janek with a sympathetic smile. Warm and friendly eyes, slightly rouged cheeks, curly, dull reddish hair, she had the kind of bland features one often associates with people in the mental health field.

  But her voice gave her away; it was throaty, low-pitched, intense.

  "Please come in, Lieutenant. I have forty minutes before my next appointment."

  He followed her into a comfortable consultation room. A desk, two easy chairs, an analyst's couch, and bookcases filled with psychiatric texts.

  On one wall hung a reproduction of van Gogh
's sunflowers; on the other, a cluster of diplomas.

  "Now what can I do for you?" Dr. Archer asked with a formal smile, after motioning him to one of the chairs.

  "I'm sure Mrs. Dorance told you-"

  "She said you were Jessica's godfather and that you're a New York City detective. But I must tell you from the start I'm most reluctant to discuss the contents of Jessica's sessions. Many people don't realize this, but the confidentiality of the therapist's office transcends even the patient's death."

  Janek paused. The woman was more authoritative than he expected. He understood he would have to tread gently if he was going to get any information.

  "Yeah, I've heard that, Dr. Archer, but her mother, her legal heir, has given consent."

  Dr. Archer nodded. "So she told me. But you have to understand, there's a principle involved. If I make an exception, violate my pledge of confidentiality, then where do I draw the line?"

  She smiled. "My oath binds me to silence. Unless, of course, I learn that someone is about to commit an act of violence. And that I'm afraid, is not the case here."

  Oh, shit! A real hard-ass! "I notice you call her Jessica," he said. "That was her name."

  "We all called her Jess." "So did 1, Lieutenant. But I'm not speaking to her now. I'm speaking about her, and as you can probably tell, I'm feeling just a little uncomfortable about that."

  Dr. Archer, Janek noticed, pursed her lips into a little smile at the end of every sentence. It was a nervous habit, not unattractive or disconcerting, but he found it slowed him down.

  "If it will make it any easier for you, Doctor, I already know a lot. We have her diary. We know about the sex group. I've already spoken with Greg Gale, and he's confirmed everything she wrote. If it's a question of protecting Jess's reputation, please believe that's foremost in my mind. I'm not going to repeat anything you tell me, and her diary won't be leaked. I guess what I'm saying is I hope you'll reconsider. My first priority, which I'm sure you share, is to find the person who killed her."

  As he spoke, Dr. Archer nodded along. "Yes, yes, that's true, that's certainly true. And I shall certainly think the matter over." She paused, smiled. "Now why don't we start by talking a little about your own relationship with Jessica? I think that would help me to better understand your interest."