Wallflower (45 page)

For two days after Wallflower was closed he walked the streets of New York. It was the second week of January, the coldest time of year. He felt himself buffeted by piercing winter winds.

On the afternoon of the second day he noticed something in the steamy window of a little antique store on Charles Street. He stopped before it, shivering, hesitated, then walked inside.

A small bell attached to the door tinkled as he entered. A bespectacled old man in a tattered gray sweater glanced at him from behind a battered desk. It was a warm, cluttered little shop, filled with
^-
sparkling objects. Janek nodded to the proprietor, then went straight to the object that had caught his eye. He picked it up, held it in his hand, stared at it, amazed. It was an almost perfect duplicate of the glass Monika had found for him in Venice.

He bought it at the old man's asking price. Surely finding such a glass was a wonderful omen that he must not spoil by haggling over cost. He hurried home, set the glass beside the one Monika had given him, and then peered into the pair as they broke the afternoon light into colors and stars, crystal fire.

The magic of Venice flooded back. In that enchanted city he had found himself a lover; in her arms he had found ecstasy and joy. After Jess was killed, Monika became more than his lover—she became his therapist and adviser too. But when he'd come back from Cleveland and told her of his intention to break Beverly with her mother's picture, Monika had responded coolly. She was a healer, not a wounder, she'd said. She'd told him she didn't think she could help him anymore.

He had gone ahead anyway, done what he had to do, and now that it was finished, he wanted desperately to be with her again. For a week he'd wanted to call her, but he'd hesitated. Would she still be reserved with him? Would she deny him her love?

Now, as he stared at the two glasses and the afternoon waned, he knew the time had come to call.

She sounded cheerful, said she was happy to hear his voice. They exchanged notes on the weather: Hamburg was chilly; that very evening a light snow had begun to fall. She was thinking about taking a week off, she said, perhaps driving down to Austria with some friends to ski. And how was he doing? When she hadn't heard from him, she wasn't sure what she should think.

As her voice trailed off, he began to speak. The Wallflower case was over, he told her. Beverly Archer was dead by her own hand. He wanted Monika to know that he owned up to his responsibility in the matter. He knew what he had done and why. He would not flinch from it; he felt no shame on account of it. Could she, Monika, accept him as he now accepted himself, for the person he was, without reservation or regret?

"Oh, Frank," she said, "how can you even ask?"

Suddenly his tension was eased. He felt he could step out from behind his detective's mask and speak to her as a man. He told her he wanted to tell her a story. He had been out walking that afternoon . . . had passed this little shop . . . had seen this glass . . .
had bought it . . . it was nearly identical. . . .

"You know what this means?" he asked.

"Tell me, Frank."

"It means I want to be with you," he said, his longing for her pouring out through his voice. "Will you meet me in Venice? In three days? In two?"

There was a brief silence before she answered.

"Oh, yes," she said, and, as her words reached him, he imagined the sparkling affirmation in her eyes. "Oh, yes! Yes!" she said, and he could feel the glow of her warming him from across the icy sea.

“
WALLFLOWER
”: Q&A WITH WILLIAM BAYER:

Q
. You've been quoted as saying you don't like writing series character novels. Why this aversion, and if this really is your view, how do you explain your authoring the Janek series?

A
. First you should know that there is fierce pressure from publishers upon crime fiction writers to develop a series character that readers will fall in love with and thus gobble up any book in which the “beloved” character reappears. This, we are told is the route to fame and fortune. Some writers have no trouble doing this, often, in my opinion, with mixed results. There are interesting characters who change and mature over the course of a series, and others who remain boringly the same. Most series don't catch on, and the ones that do seem to go on forever with cleverly reminiscent titles. There's also this feeling I have that writers try to make their series characters interesting by forcing eccentricities upon them . Thus you might get a dwarf private eye with autistic tendencies...or whatever. Also I often I find that even when the first book in a series is really good, it's usually followed by a severe fall-off in quality. As to Janek, I never set out to make him a series character. Though I'd introduced him in
Peregrine
, and fully developed him in
Switch,
I didn't expect to feature him in other books.
 
So when I did decide to write more Janeks, I made a conscious decision to make the books as different as I could. As to why I employed him again, it was the success of the Janek TV movies that changed my mind. They were popular, people liked the character (I felt that Richard Crenna was perfectly cast as Janek), and so I decided to try another Janek. In the end I wrote only two more,
Wallflower
, and the final one,
Mirror Maze
. Meanwhile, there were seven Janek movies.

Q.
Yet even though the wallflower case and the switched heads case are very different, and the wallflower case is far more personal because Janek's beloved god-daughter is murdered, there is more linking the books than just having the same main character.

A.
Yes, because in
Wallflower
there are several references to the switched heads case, and to the fact that a book was written about it and a mini-series was broadcast. This was my way of integrating the successful TV mini-series based on
Switch
(titled
Doubletak
e) and to explain the transformation of Janek from a respected detective into a star detective, a man who has become a legend in the NYPD. I wanted him to carry the burden of having solved a great case. It was something akin to the burden I felt after writing a best-selling novel and then having a highly successful miniseries broadcast on CBS. Also I felt there was no point in writing another Janek if the new case was going to be some sort of ho-hum homicide, or a case that in any way resembled switched heads. I felt I needed a case that would be very different, but also in its own way as complex and “great,” something truly unique.

Q.
At first it seems as if the book is going to be about a serial murders case. Then it turns into something else. Was this your original plan?

A
. Oh, yes! I decided to take that route because I was getting very tired of reading serial murder novels. Thomas Harris did a really superb job with his, and I didn't see any point in re-working that much over-worked territory. So I took an opposite approach, even indulging in a little light mockery of the famous FBI criminal profiling methodology...which, I should add, I respect. In
Wallflower
, Janek and Aaron go to FBI headquarters for a briefing on what the FBI is calling “The Happy Families Murders.” While there they get a briefing which Janek quickly recognizes is a self-aggrandizing snow-job. Plus he picks up on things about the so-called happy families case that signal that it could be something quite different than the FBI believes. I thought it would be really interesting to have two NYPD guys take on the whole FBI apparatus, and have it turn out that they're right. In fact, it's not “happy families” murders, it's “wallflower” murders. To my mind, you see, something as unique as the wallflower killer is a lot more interesting than another inscrutable serial murderer.

Q
. Do you consider your character, Dr. Beverly Archer, the most evil shrink in crime fiction?

A.
Not at all! That crown surely belongs on the head of Harris' brilliant cannibalistic Dr. Hannibal Lecter. I'm not even sure I consider Bev Archer evil in the pure sense of the word. She's certainly psychotic, but I tried to make her understandable by delving into her background. Her murders, remember, are committed by her murderer-by-proxy, Diana Proctor, to avenge past humiliations.
 
Diana is Beverly's “tool,” her creature. Bev makes a plan, waits for years for the right criminal psychopath to come along, finds Diana at the mental hospital where she works, treats her, dominates her, and turns her into her avenging angel...or devil. Beverly conceives of the murders, she has her motives, and then she compels Diana to carry them out and to bring her back a trophy each time. And of course it's those trophies that prove to be her undoing.

Q.
There's another shrink in the novel. What is this thing you have for weird shrinks?

A.
Actually there are two other shrinks: Dr. Monika Daskai, whom Janek meets in Venice, falls in love with, and who plays a major role helping him recover the memory of the very brief glimpse he had of Bev's trophies just before Diana stabbed him. And also Dr. David Chun, the forensic psychiatrist Janek meets at FBI headquarters, whom he subsequently visits at Harvard, and who offers a nihilistic vision of the killings. Even though Dr. Chun plays a relatively small role, I think he's an interesting and quite healthy character. But the real contrast is between the deeply insane Dr. Archer and the very healthy Dr. Daskai. They are opposite in every respect. So, you see, not all my shrinks are weird!

Q.
Was it frightening to enter into Dr. Archer's mind, as you do in the chapter titled “Wallflower?”

A.
When I wrote that chapter I definitely felt the insanity. The chapters that deal with Archer's craziness, the opening, the “mama” chapters and “wallflower” are where I deviate from Janek's story. These are many things in these chapters he couldn't possibly know, and thus can only infer. As such
 
they constitute a second level of narration which hopefully enriches the main story line -- Janek's investigation. I found these chapters frightening to write, and even now find them frightening to reread.

Q.
Are the humiliations that Archer avenges really so horrible?

A.
Not at face value, no, but in her deranged mind they were horrible indeed, the subject of obsession. With an ego is fragile as hers, distorted by her very selfish and glamorous mother, she takes humiliating experiences which you or I might consider just part of the unpleasantness one faces as one grows up and come to know the world, as wounds which can only be healed by the violent death and mutilation of the perpetrators. This is her sickness which Janek must uncover, and which he must understand in depth in order to force a resolution to his case.

Q.
Why do so many of your killers seem to come from Cleveland?