Regina's Song (11 page)

“She wouldn’t do that, Doc.”

“Don’t kid yourself. Does the term ‘junkie’ ring any bells for you, Mark?”

“They’re
that
bad?”

“At least that bad—particularly when you’re dealing with a psychotic.”

“Psychotic? Come on, Doc. Renata’s a little spacey sometimes, but she’s hardly a raving lunatic.”

“Oh, really? She comes through the door speaking a language only she can understand, and when she finally becomes coherent, she doesn’t even know her own name. If that’s not psychotic, it’ll do until the real thing comes along. You tell her aunt to lock those damned pills away somewhere Renata doesn’t know about. Let’s not leave temptation lying around in the open. How’s she doing otherwise?”

“It’s a little early to tell. This is only the first week of class.”

“Maybe that’s what’s bringing on these nightmares.”

“Hell, Doc, she’s taking to this like a duck takes to water. She’s only auditing my class, but she’s already writing papers that she doesn’t have to. That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. Plus she gets belligerent every time I offer to give her a lift. She wants to ride that ten-speed of hers no matter what the weather’s doing. I was talking it over with my housemates last night, and one of them’s majoring in abnormal psychology. She thought this sudden outbreak of independence has to do with the time Renata spent at your place. Since a mental patient’s life is pretty tightly controlled, Sylvia thinks that Renata might be going through a little spell of self-assertion to get the taste of that out of her mouth.”

“That might come very close. Your friend there at the house might be useful. Has she met Renata yet?”

“Not so far, but she wants to, and the others are interested as well. We’re all grad students, though, so we sort of outrank Twinkie. I don’t want to intimidate her.”

“Is your group aware of Renata’s situation?”

“In a general way. I gave them a bare-bones synopsis of what Twink’s been through.”

“Maybe I’d better have a talk with the one in abnormal psych—Sylvia, did you say? You’re personally involved with Renata, and this Sylvia can probably be more objective, notice things that you’ll miss. Why don’t you have her call me?” He seemed to hesitate. “Are there any relationships floating around in your group that I should know about?”

“That’s against the rules, Doc. I’m fond of Sylvia, but there’s none of that involved. She’s an Italian girl and sort of excitable, but she
is
sharp.”

“Ask her to call me,” he said again.

“Will do. She knows your reputation, so she might be a little gushy right at first, but she’ll settle down. Meanwhile, I’ve got to hit the books, Doc.”

“Learn lots,” he told me in an amused sort of way.

After supper that evening, Charlie suggested that the guys might want to visit the Green Lantern to get the real story on the Woodland Park incident from his brother. James begged off, though. He was digging into Hegel’s “thesis, antithesis, and synthesis” theory, and it was making him a little grumpy.

Charlie’s brother was sitting at the bar nursing a beer and sourly watching the local TV reporter desperately trying to ride the “Seattle Slasher” story into the big leagues.

“Don’t you get enough of that crap at work?” Charlie asked him.

“It’s the bartender’s set, Charlie,” Bob replied, “and he’s the one who runs the controls. The whole town’s going wild about this ‘Slasher’ business. Do you want to call mom? She’s been trying to get hold of you for the past week.”

“She’s OK, isn’t she?”

“She worries, Charlie. Mothers are like that—particularly when one of the puppies forgets to touch base every now and then.”

“I’ve been pretty busy, Bob.”

“Don’t blow smoke in my nose, kid. It’ll only take you five minutes. Do it. Get her off my case.”

“All right, don’t tie your tail in a knot, I’ll call her. What’s the skinny on this latest rubout?”

“Are you changing your major? Are we yearning to become a TV personality now?”

“Get real, Bob. You couldn’t pay me to take a job like that. Everybody makes a jackass of himself once in a while, but those people do it on camera. No, we’ve got three ladies at the boardinghouse, and all this ‘Seattle Slasher’ stuff’s starting to make them jumpy. If Mark and I can get the straight scoop on what’s going on, maybe we can calm ’em down.”

Bob looked around. “Let’s grab a booth,” he suggested. “We’re not supposed to talk about these things in public.”

We adjourned to one of the back booths, and Charlie and I each ordered a beer.

“If the ladies in your boardinghouse are really spooked about this ‘Slasher’ crap, your best bet would be to arm them with some of those little spray cans of Mace—or maybe pepper-spray,” Bob told us. “If you squirt a guy in the face with one of those, it puts him out of action immediately.”

“We hadn’t thought of that,” I admitted. “Where could we pick up stuff like that?”

“Any gun store should have it,” he said. “I could swipe some for you, but our cans are bulky. The ones they make for ladies are usually attached to a key ring.”

“Convenient. I’ll look into it.”

“They’ll probably never have to use them, but just having them handy should give them a sense of security.”

“So, what’s really happening out there, Bob?” Charlie asked. “All we’re getting from TV is a bunch of dog doo-doo.”

“You didn’t really expect the truth from a TV set, did you, Charlie? Television’s entertainment, not truth. OK, about all we’ve got to go on so far are the similarities between this murder and the one on campus two weeks ago. We’ve got two semiprofessional criminals who got themselves cut to pieces in a parklike area late at night. Muñoz was a real pro, but this Andrews guy was more of a wanna-be. Andrews
did
have some gang connections here in north Seattle, but I don’t think he actually qualified as a member. Lieutenant Burpee’s trying to persuade himself that Andrews was more important than his record seems to indicate, but it won’t float. I busted Andrews myself last year, and he didn’t even come close to Muñoz. He had a day job pumping gas at a filling station, so it’s obvious that his criminal activities weren’t paying the rent. He was a small-time hanger-on who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Are we saying that this ‘Seattle Slasher’ stuff doesn’t float?” Charlie demanded.

“I’m not convinced yet,” Bob replied. “It’s possible we’re looking at ‘trademark’ killings.”

“I don’t follow you,” I admitted.

“It comes along every so often,” Bob explained. “If you’ve got a gang out there that wants to put up ‘no trespassing’ signs on its own personal, private turf, chopping assorted rival gang members into mincemeat would probably get the point across in a hurry. These two killings
might
be the work of a single hit man, or it
could
be a new standard operating procedure. There’s no
real
reason to keep on carving on the carcass after the guy’s dead, is there?”

“Then you think it might just be some sort of advertising gimmick?” Charlie suggested. “Like ‘look what’s going to happen if we catch you poaching’? Is that what you’re saying?”

“It’s a possibility. There’s no other connection between Andrews and Muñoz that we’ve been able to find.”

“Then Burpee’s theory about Cheetah might hold water after all,” Charlie suggested.

Bob shook his head. “This isn’t Cheetah’s part of town. He’s strictly a downtown boy. Far as he’s concerned, north Seattle’s a foreign country. I doubt he even knows how to get to Woodland Park, and if he went there, the trees and grass would spook hell out of him. He comes from a world of cement and telephone poles. What it boils down to is that we don’t have enough to work with yet. Maybe after three or four more of these murders, we’ll have a better idea of who we’re dealing with, but for right now, everything’s still up in the air.”

“You’re expecting more, then?” I asked.

“Isn’t everybody? The whole damn town’s holding its breath in anticipation.” Bob looked at his watch. “I’ve got to run,” he told us. “Call Mom, Charlie. Do it tonight, before you forget.”

“I’ll get right on it, Bob,” Charlie promised.

“
Sure
you will,” Bob said sarcastically. Then he turned and left the tavern.

“What do you think, Mark?” Charlie said. “Should we sound the all clear for the girls?”

“I don’t think so. We don’t know enough to start taking chances now. Let’s stay close to the ladies until this guy moves on.”

“
If
he moves on.”

“If he doesn’t, we’ll just have to rearrange some things. Meanwhile, I’ll hit a gun store and pick up some of those pepper spray key rings.”

“Good idea.” Then he shrugged. “It’s all part of the fun of civilization, I guess.”

“Did you want to take a run at ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,’ sport?”

“ ‘Nasty’ and ‘brutish’ maybe.” He drained off his beer. “Let’s hit the bricks, Mark. I’ve got work piling up back home.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

I was a little foggy during my Milton seminar on Wednesday morning. I don’t function too well that early anyway, and our lecture focused on the religious turmoil during the seventeenth century. Religious squabbles seem to send people off the deep end, and the announcement by some enthusiast that “my God’s better than your God,” almost inevitably sets off yet another war.

I stopped by a gun store after class and bought three of those pepper spray key rings Bob West had recommended. The little cartridge didn’t look very big, but it probably carried enough to disable a single attacker. Our ladies weren’t likely to need something for crowd control.

Then I went back to Wallingford to consider my options on my end-of-term Milton paper. I discarded the notion of a comparison of the early books of
Paradise Lost
to Dante’s
Inferno
almost immediately. The geography and politics of Hell didn’t thrill me very much. Maybe my best course would be to steer completely clear of
Paradise Lost
and concentrate on Milton’s prose works.

Just after noon, I made myself a couple of sandwiches to tide me over until suppertime. Sometimes I think lunch is more a habit than a necessity. We don’t really
need
to eat three meals a day—particularly when we aren’t involved in physical labor. Eating when you don’t really need to eat tends to make you roly-poly, and it’s rapidly reaching the point where it’s easier to jump over the average American than it is to walk around him. Dieting is now a major American industry, but a universal “let’s skip lunch” attitude would put Weight Watchers out of business.

But I make a mighty fine sandwich, if I do say so myself.

I finished eating and glanced at my watch. It was almost twelve-thirty, and I decided to call Mary. It was raining again, and I thought I’d better find out if Twink was up and moving. If she was coming to class today, she’d need a ride.

“She left about ten minutes ago,” Mary told me. “She said she wanted to bike it.”

“It’s raining, for Chrissake!”

“She’s got a raincoat, Mark. Don’t get all worked up.”

“Did she get over whatever it was that knocked her out yesterday?”

“She’s fine—all bright and bubbly. Everybody gets the blues now and then, but Renata bounces right back. I think it’s a good sign, don’t you?”

“We can hope so. Oh, I talked with Fallon about those sleeping pills. He sort of flipped out about it. I guess Twinkie was pretty well hooked on them in the sanitarium. They brought her down easy, but you might want to hide the ones you’ve got from her. Fallon thinks she might be a secret sleeping-pill junkie or something like that.”

“That’s ridiculous!”

“I’m just passing on what he said.”

“Tell him to get stuffed. I know exactly what I’m doing. The only time I hit her with one of those pills is when she starts going around the bend, and that doesn’t happen often enough for her to get hooked.”

“Glad to hear it. Listen, I’d better get going,” I told her. “It’s time to teach up the young again.”

“She’ll be in your class today. Quit worrying so much.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Once I got to Padelford, I checked my mailbox. As I’d expected, there were quite a few dropout cards. I went to my little clothes-closet office and quickly revised my class list. It was definitely getting closer to target. About one more heavy belt would bring it down to a reasonable size.

I hit the classroom door at exactly one-thirty. Since I was going to make a big issue of doing things on time, I thought it might be best to set a good example.

Twink was sitting near the center of the room, and she had a smug smile on her face. I took the roll and called in their papers.

“Now then, ladies and gentlemen,” I began, “it’s time to raise the issue of documentation. We refer to these friendly little messages to the reader as ‘footnotes,’ probably because they’re at the bottom of the page. Documentation is the academic way to justify random pilferage. You can steal any idea you want—if you document in the traditional way. Don’t just come right out and admit that you swiped this idea from Aristotle or Tom Paine. Your professor’s going to
know
that you’re swiping stuff, so you don’t have to rub his nose in it. Follow all the conventional rules, and you won’t disturb him while he’s sleeping his way through your paper. If you get to be good enough at it, you can coast your way to a bachelor’s degree without ever coming close to having an original thought. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? Immerse yourselves in mediocrity, and you’re home free. Originality makes people think, and most of them would rather not.”

I still don’t know what set me off on
that
tack. Maybe it was Milton’s fault. That particular Wednesday was definitely a downer.

I chalked out various footnote formats on the blackboard and generally piddled away the rest of the period. To be perfectly honest about it, I didn’t feel much like teaching that day.

I wanted to have a word with Twink to make sure that she was OK, but she was a little too fast for me, and a couple of suck-ups short-stopped me before I could get to the door. They babbled on and on about how “absolutely fascinating” they’d found my discussion of footnotes, and I had a hell of a time getting away from them.

I stopped by my cubicle to check off the papers I’d collected against my current class list, and about midway through the stack I came across the paper Renata had threatened to drop on me. I knew it was hers because she’d used Twinkie as her byline.

I set the other papers aside and took up hers . . .

HOW I SPENT MY VACATION

By Twinkie

I spent my vacation in the bughouse, listening to the other buggies screaming and laughing just to pass the time away. Normal people can’t seem to understand how nice it is to be nuts sometimes, and that’s very sad. People out there in the world of normal have to face reality every day, and reality is usually flat and grey and ugly, and time only runs in one direction, and doorknobs can’t talk. A true nutso doesn’t have to put up with that. We can make
our
world as beautiful as we want it to be, since it has to do what we tell it to do.

Isn’t that neat?

In the world of nuts, nothing is real, so we can change anything we don’t like. If a day is beautiful, we can make it last for a thousand years; if it’s ugly, we can just throw it away. If the sun is too bright, we can send it to its room, and if the stars are too dim, we can tell them to burn more brightly, and they will, just to make us happy.

That’s what makes the world of nuts so much nicer than the world of normies. Our truth wags its tail and licks our fingers; their truth snarls, and it bites.

Sometimes, sometimes, those of us in the world of nuts think about the world of the normies, and we’ve pretty much decided that it might be sort of fun to visit it once in a while, but we certainly wouldn’t want to live there. It’s just too desperate and ugly, and the normies never seem to get the things they want, no matter how hard they try, and that’s very sad.

People from the world of the normies used to visit us in the bughouse now and then, but they weren’t really very much fun. They always looked so serious and worried, and they almost never laughed. Normies just can’t seem to see the world the way we buggies see it, so they can’t even begin to see how funny it is. They couldn’t seem to relax, and their eyes got all wild when the nutso down the hall started to practice screaming. Don’t they know that screaming is a fine art? In the Olympic games of the world of nuts, a perfect ten scream wins the gold medal every time.

I’ve moved back to the world of the normies now, and I know that I’m supposed to be serious and never laugh, but sometimes—sometimes—I scream a little bit, just for old times’ sake. I make it a point to scream politely, though. It’s not nice to wake the neighbors in the gray world of the normies. A few quiet little screams aren’t really all that disturbing, though, and I always seem to sleep better after I scream.

And when I sleep, I sometimes dream of the world of nuts, and my doorknob sings to me, and my walls hold me tight, and I drift above the sky and look down at the desperate, grubby, ugly world of the normies where everybody is serious and worried, and never, never, ever smiles.

And I laugh.

“Jesus!” I said, gently putting the paper down. Damn! This girl could really write!

I had to find out if the paper was as good as I thought, so I went looking for Dr. Conrad. As luck had it, he was in.

“Are you busy, boss?” I asked him.

“Do we have a problem, Mr. Austin?”

“Not really. I think I just struck gold, is all. If you’ve got a few minutes, I’d like your opinion about this.” I handed him Twink’s paper.

He glanced at the title. “You didn’t!” he said, almost laughing. “ ‘How I Spent My Vacation’?”

“It’s a freshman class, boss. Most of the students are still at the ‘Run, Spot, run’ stage. This one’s a cut or two above average, though. Tell me what you think.”

He read through Twink’s paper. “Dear God!” he said when he finished.

“I felt the same way, boss,” I said smugly.

“Don’t let this one get away, kid,” he told me.

“Not much chance of that. She’s the one I was telling you about a few weeks ago.”

“Then she really
was
in an asylum?”

“Oh, yes. Her twin sister was murdered, and she went completely bonkers for a while. Now she’s auditing my class. She didn’t have to write that paper, but she did it anyway. Every so often she likes to show off. She
is
a sharpie, though.”

“You’ve got that part right. If she stays even the least bit sane, do the department a favor and steer her in our direction. Somebody like this only comes along once or twice in a generation.” He swiveled his chair around and turned on his copy machine. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked.

“Not a bit, boss. I may run off a few dozen copies myself.”

It hadn’t quit raining when I headed back to the boardinghouse, and Milton still hung over me like a dark cloud, but I was suddenly all bright and happy. Twink’s paper had erased the gloom that’d been perched on my shoulder all day.

Not even grading that stack of papers could sour my day.

I went down to the kitchen while the girls were fixing supper. “I’ve got presents for you ladies,” I told them.

“Oh?” Trish said. “What’s the occasion?”

“Charlie and I had a chat with his brother last night, and big Bob suggested something that made a lot of sense. I picked up these neat little key rings for you—which I want you to have with you every time you leave the house.” I laid the three rings on the kitchen counter.

Erika picked one up. “What’s this little doohickey attached to the ring?” she asked me.

“Pepper spray,” I told her. “Don’t play with it, because it’s loaded. You flip that little knob over, and it’s ready to go. If you happen to encounter the world-famous Seattle Slasher, a quick squirt of that stuff will absolutely ruin his day. He’ll be totally out of action for at least an hour—or so the clerk at the gun store tells me.”

“Don’t we need permits to carry those?” Trish asked me dubiously.

“Bob West didn’t say anything about permits, Trish, and he’s a cop, so he knows the rules.”

“I don’t know, Mark,” she said. “I think having that thing in my purse might make me a little nervous.”

“Nervous is better than dead,” Erika told her. “Those spray things make sense, so do as you’re told.”

Trish grumbled a bit, but she did what her younger sister commanded. There was something about Erika that made Trish automatically snap to attention.

“What’s got your clock all wound up, Mark?” James asked me at the supper table that evening. “You’re acting like you just won the lottery.”

“That comes fairly close,” I admitted. “I ran head-on into talent today—in a freshman English class, of all places.”

“Flowers
do
grow in the weed patches sometimes,” he conceded. “Some snappy little
bon mot
, perhaps?”

“Beyond that, old buddy,” I said smugly.

“You
are
going to share this with us, aren’t you?” Sylvia asked pointedly.

“I thought you’d never ask. I just happen to have a copy with me.”

“What a coincidence,” Erika observed dryly.

“Be nice,” I scolded. “My class turned in a paper today, and I found this tucked in amongst all the usual junk.” I handed Twink’s paper to James. “Here you go, partner,” I said. “Wash the sour taste of Hegel out of your mouth with this.”

James took the paper. “How I Spent My Vacation,” he read aloud in that deep voice of his, “by Twinkie.”

“Isn’t that the girl you’ve been baby-sitting, Mark?” Erika asked me.

“That’s her. Go ahead, James. Whip it on ’em.”

He read Twink’s paper to us, and there was a stunned silence when he finished.

“Wow!” Charlie murmured after a moment.

“Yeah, wow,” Sylvia agreed. “I’ve
got
to meet this girl, Mark.”

“Did they actually turn this young lady loose?” James demanded. “It doesn’t seem to me that she was ready yet.”

“She’s just showing off,” I told him. “She didn’t even have to write the paper. She’s only auditing the course.”

“You don’t come across too many people who write papers just for fun,” Charlie said. “Was that why they locked her up in the bughouse?”

“Not really,” I told him. “She had a few other problems as well. And don’t joke about it—her headshrinker thinks she might have to go back inside a few times. I guess that’s sort of standard—like kicking the cigarette habit.”

“Psychosis is addictive?” Charlie asked.

“You heard her paper, Charlie,” I replied. “The world of nuts is nicer than the world of normies. Your doorknob won’t say things to you that might hurt your feelings, and it’s only in the bughouse that you can try out for the Olympic Screaming Team. I showed Twink’s paper to my faculty advisor, and he ordered me not to let her get away. Even if she’s only playing with half a deck, she can still write circles around just about everybody else on campus.”