Dreams in the Key of Blue (29 page)

IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT WHEN I SLIPPED THROUGH
the door into the Mellen Street apartment building.

Amanda Squires had attended the memorial service with Wendell Beckerman. Gretchen Nash knew Becker-man. I wondered if Nash knew Squires.

As I climbed the stairs, the door squealed and clicked shut behind me, and the old wood groaned beneath my feet. I was gambling. Gretchen Nash could be out or asleep. I tapped softly on her door.

The scream from inside the apartment startled me. “You open that door and I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

I stepped back and to the side and leaned against the railing. “Ms. Nash, it’s Lucas Frank. We talked a few days ago.”

“You’re changing your voice,” she shrieked, her voice vibrating with terror and rage.

As I considered what to say next, a largecaliber gun exploded in the apartment. An entire door panel shattered into the hall and showered me with wood slivers. I dove to the floor as the gun discharged a second time and demolished the molding.

“Gretchen, for chrissake,” I yelled.

“Prove who you are or I’ll keep shooting.”

“How can I do that?”

I lay still in the silence, surrounded by rodent droppings and two fat, gray barn spiders.

“What kind of tea did you drink when you were here?”

“Oh shit,” I muttered.

She had offered me several herbal teas, and something else… what was it? It was in a yellowish package. Twinings? “Earl Grey,” I called.

This pause was shorter. “Stand in front of the door and open it.”

“Gretchen, I don’t want to get blown away.”

“If you’re who you say you are, I won’t shoot.”

“Who the hell else would I be?”

“Amanda,” she screamed.

The hallway went silent again.

“Just do what I told you,” Nash said, with meanness and determination in her voice.

I pushed myself up. “Gretchen, I’m trusting that you won’t shoot me,” I said as I walked to the door, twisted the knob, and shoved.

Gretchen Nash stood in the center of her studio-room. Both hands gripped a .44 Magnum aimed at my chest.

“It’s you,” she gasped, lowering the weapon. “That woman was my friend. She slept here, for chrissake.”

“Amanda Squires,” I said, but Nash paid no attention.

“Nights that she was afraid to be home alone, she curled up on the floor in my sleeping bag. Then she shows up and goes fucking postal. I’ve got a bullet in my shoulder.”

“Let me take a look at that,” I said, examining the wound high on her right shoulder.

A burn that had to be painful surrounded a narrow flesh wound. The bullet had grazed her arm. The bleeding had slowed, almost stopped. I found a box of gauze in her
bathroom cabinet, formed a compress, and applied pressure to the small crease.

“We should get you to a hospital. That has to be cleaned.”

“You made it hurt. It didn’t hurt until you did that.”

“Sorry,” I said, relieving her of the gun. “When did you last get a tetanus shot?”

She sighed deeply, shuddered, and sat on the edge of her bed. “Hospital smells make me sick,” she said.

Nash seemed to be in a mild state of shock. She was not in medical danger, so I decided to wait until she was ready to seek treatment for the wound.

“She killed Mr. Dorman,” Nash said.

“Amanda?”

I’d been nearly convinced that Martin was Dorman. Squires as Dorman? What the hell was going on?

“Beckerman was stoned that night, but he thought he heard her voice, or thought he was talking to her, something. It was late, he said. I didn’t pay any attention to him because he’s always so fucking out of it. Now he’s dead, too.”

Nash sobbed quietly to herself. “She was here that afternoon. We hugged, sipped tea, drank wine, had dinner, listened to music, talked. Jesus.”

I tried again to get confirmation. “Amanda Squires?”

“We were friends for… a long time. That night, I told her I was going to Barry’s installation. She always called Barry’s sculpting ‘soup cans in sexy poses.’ We joked about the show giving Jesse Helms shit fits. Amanda looked at my sketches. She asked me about the limo lady.”

Nash gazed at the space vacated by her headless woman. “Amanda was here a couple of times after I put that up. She never noticed it. I told her I had to rush, just to leave the dishes in the sink and lock up when she left. I trusted her. I never had any reason not to trust her.”

Nash turned to look at the shattered remains of her feng shui mirror. “The bullet must have hit there,” she said. “My chi flow is screwed up.”

“When I talked to Wendell Beckerman, he thought he might have heard a woman’s voice in his room the night of the murder.”

“He had his Bose really cranked,” she said. “I figured he was tripping. He usually is. Was. When I talked to him the next day, he asked me if I’d been in his apartment. Every time he hears a woman’s voice like that, when he’s taken acid, he thinks it’s his mother. She died a few months ago. I told him I was out, and he said it must have been Amanda. I called her after I talked to him. I was freaked. The cops had just gone. Somebody was murdered here in the building. I wanted to move out. So I called my friend. Makes sense, right? I called the fucking murderer. Woke her up. I told her what happened and asked her what time she’d gone home. She said, ‘I haven’t been home in years.’ Crazy. I told her to make some coffee.”

She winced and gazed at the wound on her arm. “This stings.”

ON THE SHORT DRIVE TO THE HOSPITAL, NASH SAT
huddled in silence.

I signed the register in the emergency room and joined her on a row of orange and green fiberglass chairs. We were alone in the waiting area.

“There isn’t any hospital smell,” she said.

I detected a faint odor of isopropyl alcohol. Otherwise, Nash was right.

The E.R. receptionist walked in carrying a cup of coffee, glanced at the register, then sat at her desk. “Nash?” she inquired.

We joined her as she fired up her computer and prepared to record the admissions information. Her name tag identified her as Mrs. Hackett. The brusque, permed, fiftyish woman wearing a laundered pink smock was a model of impatient efficiency. I looked behind me to make sure that the ill and injured were not arriving in droves and tripping over their crutches.

“I don’t have insurance,” Nash said.

Mrs. Hackett pushed herself away from the computer console.

“Visa okay?” I asked.

She accepted the card and rolled her chair into keyboarding position. “Are you the father?”

“Friend,” I said.

When she reached the section that required a description of the illness or injury, I explained, and suggested that she call Detective Norma Jacobs.

Hackett whipped the forms from her printer and ushered us into a curtained area. “Dr. Kent will be with you,” she said, and bustled out.

I stood, and Nash sat on a gurney.

“When I talked to Amanda the day after Mr. Dorman’s murder, she said she left the building right after I did. She was just so cool about it. Like, ‘Don’t worry. The cops will figure it out.’ Then she said, ‘People die,’ as if it was no big deal. Jesus. I don’t think Mr. Dorman planned to do it so soon. I asked her if she was coming over. She said she didn’t have time. She had some errands to do.”

Her errands probably took her to Ragged Harbor, I thought.

WHEN DR. KENT HAD TENDED TO THE WOUND, HE SAID
that Detective Jacobs was on her way.

Nash wanted to wait outside. “Guess I don’t like hospitals,” she said. “It isn’t just the smells. Sound is so muted. I feel like I say something and the walls suck it up.”

We stepped into the chill night air. “What happened tonight?” I asked.

She sighed and said, “I wish I had a cigarette. I feel like I’m acting in a horror movie. They always smoke when they’re talking about what the monster did.”

Nash took a deep breath. “Amanda came by late,” she said. “I was cleaning my work area, putting away tools. I figured it was one of those nights when she was afraid to stay at her place. She was jumpy. Amanda has nightmares. She never said much about them, just that they were scary, and that she didn’t want to be alone. Anyway, she was staring at my painting. Out of the blue she said, ‘I killed Harper Dorman.’ I looked at her, but she wasn’t looking at me.”

As if she were reciting something that she had memorized, Amanda Squires had told Nash that she had waited in Beckerman’s apartment, then walked downstairs after two
A.M.
Dorman’s door had been open. She had looked in and seen him asleep, sprawled half on his cot and half on the floor.

Nash paced the E.R. ramp, sliding her hand over the rail as if for guidance, not stability. “Dorman had a bottle of Jim Beam. That’s what he always drank. Amanda called it ‘Mr. James Beam.’ She said, ‘Mr. Jim smells like blood and beatings.’ I didn’t know what to say. She said she wanted Lily Dorman to see her tormentor sprawled and stinking, but that she always puked at the sight of blood.”

I pictured Squires-as-Dorman in an abreactive state, all the horror from her past erupting with its original intensity in the present. Then I dismissed the image.

You can’t have it both ways.

You can’t be fragile and fragmented, and weave elaborate schemes that span years.

“It took me a while to figure out that she didn’t have somebody else with her,” Nash said. “She was talking about herself. She’s two fucking people. Or more. She stood over Mr. Dorman with a gun and said, ‘My dreams are in the key of blue.’ What the fuck does that mean? That’s crazy. Then she shot him.”

I listened to Nash’s words and imagined Dorman shudder—a quick, jerking motion, like one of his many spasms when he pleased himself under his daughter’s backside.

“She kept shooting until the gun was empty.”

Squires told Nash that she remembered Lily Dorman screaming, the metallic stink of blood, the illusion of faces in red rainbows, and the roar of blue rage.

“Maniac talk,” Nash said. “She told me that she used Beckerman’s phone to page her driver, Edgar, then waited on the street. I didn’t know she had a fucking driver.”

Squires was with the other students when the Volvo nearly drove them off the road. She had not peered through my windows; she was in my house. Nothing made sense.

Nash spun from the rail. “She said that she killed another man… Stanley.”

“Markham?”

“I don’t know. I listened to her, but I was scared shitless. I told her that she couldn’t have killed Mr. Dorman. Today’s paper had that article about what the killer did to him.”

“I didn’t see it,” I said.

“One of those ‘unnamed sources’ called the murder a ritual killing. I know what that means. He was mutilated. Parts of him weren’t even there. God. I gave Amanda the newspaper, like I was going to prove to her that she
couldn’t have done something like that. She kept saying, ‘Oh no,’ and holding her head. She said she didn’t remember any cutting, that she certainly hadn’t done anything like that. Then I thought she was saying ‘Lily’ again. She wasn’t. She was saying ‘Lilith.’ She staggered around the room muttering about Lilith. That’s when she pulled the gun. I dove across the bed and grabbed my Magnum. I don’t know how many times she shot at me. I fired once, and she ran out.”

NORMA JACOBS PARKED HER UNMARKED CRUISER IN
the E.R. lot. I made the introduction and gave Jacobs a brief description of what Nash had told me.

“I’ll need a formal statement from you about what happened tonight, Ms. Nash. We can do that at my office. Then I want to have a look at your apartment. Have a seat in the car. I’ll be right with you.”

Nash touched my arm. “Thanks for everything, Dr. Frank.”

I nodded and watched her walk to the cruiser.

Jacobs turned her attention to me. “I interviewed Amanda Squires a couple of days ago. She has a place on Danforth Street.”

The address was the same building where Katrina, Harper, and Lily had lived for the first two years of Lily’s life.

“Hers is the only apartment that’s occupied in that building, which is strange with all the students around here. The art school and the museum are right up the hill. Same outfit manages her place. Paul Crandall for MI. Still haven’t caught up with Crandall.”

“What did Squires tell you?”

“Said she was in Nash’s apartment the day that Dorman got it,” Jacobs said, pulling at her jeans.

“Average height, slender, black hair, usually jeans and a flannel shirt.”

“That’s her. She couldn’t remember times. Said she got there early and left early. She said she knew who Dorman was, but never spoke to him, and didn’t see him that night. Now she’s telling Nash she did it?”

“Nash will tell you the whole story, but that’s the essence of it.”

“Squires is a strange duck. I asked her if it worried her to think that she might’ve been in the building at the same time as the killer. She said no.”

Jacobs agreed to call Jaworski at the Holiday Inn for me. “Tell him it counts as me checking in.”

“He’s got you on a short leash, does he?”

“Jasper is certain that I’m guilty of being insufferable, and possibly guilty of obstruction.”