"Safe, if you don't count a dead monkey in a suitcase," Cora said.
"The room I had in mind is the one with the Burberry coat."
"Professor," Vinnie said, "one of us should go with you. Just to be extra cautious."
"Being cautious is good," Conklin agreed.
Balenger watched them open the door. They tested the floor, even though it had supported them earlier. Their lights went into the darkness.
Balenger put a hand against the balcony's wall. Satisfied that it was sturdy, he slid down, sitting with his back against it. Even if he wasn't relaxed, the illusion of resting felt good.
Rick and Cora slid down next to him. They looked as exhausted as he felt. Well, that's what adrenaline does to you, he thought. Eventually, it wears you out.
"Might as well use the time." Balenger reached for the file folder he'd dropped when Cora shouted.
POLICE REPORTS.
"Want some reading material?" He gave pages to Rick and Cora, keeping the most recent one for himself.
It was dated August 31, 1968. As the professor had explained, that was the year the hotel stopped receiving guests. Balenger expected that the file would be dominated by reports about thefts, the most common crime in a hotel, but what he read was far more serious.
An inquiry about a missing person. In August, one week after a woman named Iris McKenzie stayed in the Paragon, a police detective arrived, asking questions about her. No one had seen or heard from her after she paid her bill and left the hotel. Someone who worked for the Paragon made detailed handwritten notes about the conversation with the detective.
Iris McKenzie lived in Baltimore, Maryland, Balenger learned. She was thirty-three, single, a copywriter for an advertising firm that collaborated with big agencies in New York. After a summer business trip to Manhattan, she went to Asbury Park and spent a weekend in the Paragon. At least, the phone reservation she made indicated that she intended to stay for a weekend. Arriving Friday evening. Leaving Monday morning. Instead, she checked out on Saturday morning. Balenger had a suspicion that she realized how misinformed she was-that Asbury Park was no longer the place to go for a peaceful weekend getaway.
The person who took notes about the detective's inquiries (the handwriting seemed masculine) indicated that he showed the detective the reservation card and the receipt that Iris McKenzie had signed when she paid her bill and checked out early. The phone charges to her room showed a 9:37 a.m. long-distance call to a number the detective identified as belonging to Iris's sister in Baltimore. The detective indicated that the sister's seventeen-year-old son answered the phone and told Iris that his mother wouldn't be home until dinnertime. Iris told the boy to tell his mother she'd be returning to Baltimore that night. Iris then took a cab to the train station and got a ticket for Baltimore, but she never arrived at her destination.
Awfully talkative detective, Balenger thought. He volunteered way too much information. Ask questions. Don't provide details. Let the person you're talking to provide the details.
The hotel had no idea what might have happened to Iris after she left, the document indicated. It then went on to note that a month later a private investigator arrived from Baltimore, asking the same questions. The hotel representative who summarized the inquiries gave the impression that he was keeping a record in order to make sure everyone understood the hotel wasn't at fault.
Balenger felt his pulse quicken with the sudden thought that perhaps Carlisle himself had written the document. As darkness hovered beyond the balustrade, he concentrated on faded ink that was almost purple. His flashlight's beam went through the brittle yellow paper and cast a shadow of the handwriting onto Balenger's hand. Was there a hint of age in the handwriting, an imprecise quality in the letters that might have been caused by the arthritic fingers of someone in his late eighties?
Vinnie and the professor returned. As Conklin put the plastic bottle in his knapsack and zipped it shut, Balenger asked, "Was Carlisle's diary handwritten?"
"Yes. Why?"
"See if this looks familiar." Balenger handed the report to him.
The harsh lights made Conklin squint through his spectacles. The degree of his concentration was obvious. "Yes. That's Carlisle's handwriting."
"Let me have a look," Vinnie said. He surveyed the handwriting as if it posed a riddle. Then he passed the document to Rick and Cora.
"Makes me feel a little closer to him," Rick said. "You told us Carlisle had a… How did you put it? An arresting physical presence because of the steroids and the exercise. But what was his face like? His manner? Was he attractive or homely? Charming or overbearing?"
"In his prime, he was compared to a matinee idol. His eyes were the color of aquamarine. Sparkling. Charismatic. People felt hypnotized by him."
Rick gave the missing-person report back to Balenger and indicated a yellowed page from a newspaper. "I've got one of the murders. The thirteen-year-old boy who took a baseball bat to his father's head while he was sleeping. Hit him twenty-two times, really bashed his brains in. Happened in 1960. The boy's name was Ronald Whitaker. It turns out his mother was dead and his father sexually abused him for years. His teachers and the kids he went to school with described him as quiet and withdrawn. Moody."
"A common description of sex-abuse victims," Balenger said. "They're in shock. Ashamed. Afraid. They don't know who to trust, so they don't dare talk to anybody for fear they might blurt out what's being done to them. The abuser usually threatens to do something awful-kill a pet, cut off a penis or a nipple-if the victim tells anybody what's going on. At the same time, the abuser tries to make the victim believe that what's happening is the most natural thing in the world. Eventually, some victims feel everybody's an abuser in one way or another, that the world's all about manipulating people and they can't rely on anyone."
Rick pointed at the document. "In this case, the father took Ronald to Asbury Park on the Fourth of July weekend. A so-called summer treat. A child psychiatrist tried for several weeks to get Ronald to talk about what happened next. Eventually, the words came out in a torrent, how Ronald's father accepted money for another man to spend an hour alone with the boy. The stranger gave Ronald a ball, bat, and cheap baseball glove as a bribe. After the man left, the father came back to the room drunk and fell asleep. Ronald found a use for the baseball bat."
"Thirteen years old." Cora was sickened. "What happens to someone like him?"
"Because of his youth, he couldn't have been tried in a regular court," Balenger replied. "If he'd been of age, he'd have probably been found innocent by reason of temporary insanity. But in the case of a minor, a judge likely sent him to a juvenile facility where he received psychiatric counseling. He'd have been released when he was twenty-one. His court and psychiatric records would have been sealed so that no one could learn about his past and use it against him. Then it was up to him to try to move ahead with his life."
"But basically, that life was ruined," Cora said.
"There's always hope, I guess," Balenger said. "Always tomorrow."
"You sure know a lot about this." Rick studied him.
Is he questioning me again? Balenger wondered. "I was a reporter on a couple of cases like this."
"This hotel soaked up a lot of pain," Vinnie said. "Look at this report." The aged paper rustled in his hands. "The woman who owned the suitcase with the dead monkey in it. What was the name on the suitcase tag?"
"Edna Bauman," Cora said.
"Yeah, it's the same. Edna Bauman. She committed suicide here."
"What?"
"August 27, 1966. She took a hot bath and slit her wrists."