I was very meticulous with the police, wanting to indicate that I was statistically sound, and no one could learn anything about Mary Oliphant because either (1) there was nothing to learn, or (2) she wasn’t letting anything out. I, naturally, leaned toward (1).
Well, the police did everything that police do at a time like that, I suppose, such as making out reports and taking fingerprints of which there were a lot, all Mary’s. They studied the broken lock on the kitchen door, then paced in the back and peered in the front and said it must have been some prowler.
“Anything taken?” they barked at me, asking me to look through all the poor woman’s possessions.
“How do I know?” I barked back, having only been in the house once before.
Then they found the safety deposit box down at the bank. Think of it! The many times I’d driven her down to the bank... “to cash a little check,” she apologized, and there was that safety deposit box with a couple of diamonds in it that would knock your eye out. There were some war bonds — not that she was rolling in wealth, but there was enough to keep her in reasonable comfort until she was eighty, which she would never get to be now, rest her soul. I couldn’t help but think what a shame it was she hadn’t gotten those rockers reupholstered in bright red and had fun buying stuff at garage sales.
Everything would go to the State, the police told me. After a decent interval of time, of course, during which they would bend every effort to find some heirs, which I’m sure they won’t do, especially now that I know more than the police.
With everything tied up, like the house furnishings and safety deposit box, it meant the State would have to take care of her funeral and I knew how that would be, so I took care of it.
The whole neighborhood showed up, now that she was a celebrity, kind of, having been murdered and all, including the hostile couple, the parents and all the working couples. And then they forgot Mary. I did not, nor did the police who remembered her in a rigid we-have-our-minds-made-up fashion. What they’d made up their minds to was that the same monster who’d killed those two girls whose bodies were found in the brush, obviously killed Mary in her own house.
They said she’d been sexually molested. Mary Oliphant?
“Those two girls,” I reminded the police, “were young and pretty and plucked off the freeway when one of their cars ran out of gas and the other had a flat.”
How, I asked the police, could they possibly figure the murderer of two girls flung in the brush as the same one who hanged Mary on a chair-back, execution style? But they said how about the Boston Strangler? He killed all different ages and some he left in absolutely awful positions.
I looked away. I had read the book.
Anyway, they rounded up all the sex offenders and came up with nothing and asked me, as Mary Oliphant’s only friend, to help them gather together her possessions. I suppose they had to get the house emptied and put the stuff somewhere as exhibits. Or to be sold by the State after a properly allotted time.
That’s when I riffled through some of those news magazines she had piled up on the floor by a mirrored dressing table in her bedroom.
The magazines went back to the early ’50’s and seemed to be selected copies... twenty five, thirty of them, I thought. In counting them later, I discovered there were thirty-two, the latest issue, the top copy, dated four months previously. I sat there, on Mary’s dressing table bench, in front of her dressing table mirror and leafed through that top copy, wondering why she should keep only certain issues of certain magazines over such a long period of time. And there, in the National News section, I found the first pasted photographed face.
It was shocking. I stared at it, ran my finger over it, strangely appalled by the sight of this cut-out photographed face pasted over the face already there in the magazine picture. I leafed slowly through the rest of the pages, but that one picture in the National News section was the only one altered by a photographic substitution.
I turned the magazine face down and picked up the second one from the pile. There, in the National News section again, same photographed face, carefully cut out — I mean, around the chin and the hair. I glanced at the manicure scissors on the dressing table — she’d used those. The face didn’t quite fit on the body of the woman in the magazine photo. It wasn’t turned correctly for the angle of the shoulders and that made it rather horrible, somehow.
The third magazine. Same thing. A head pasted over another. In each case it had been the same substituted head for the same originally photographed body, in a picture with the same man, so this was not a random game of paper dolls, but a selectively serious study.
Two policement were working in the house, looking through drawers again and packing stuff in boxes to be carted away. This was two months after Mary’s murder and a month after her burial. The house had to be cleared out so the owner could rent it again. I grabbed up the three magazines and took them to the policemen, feeling as if I were right on the edge of something. I laid the magazines open so they could see what I had to offer.
They looked down at the pictures for a second, then up at me blankly.
“They’re Mary’s magazines,” I explained. “She pasted the heads.”
One officer picked up a copy while the other looked over his shoulder.
“Why did she do it?” I cried, my voice rising shrilly. “Who is it? And who did she paste it over?”
One officer shrugged and presented his verdict.
“Psycho,” he said to the other, who nodded knowingly. He tossed back the magazine.
“But it might mean something,” I attempted to argue.
“What would it mean?”
“That Mary was more than she seemed to be—”
The officer smiled.
“—or knew more and was pointing out her killer either as the man or woman in the picture, or the one whose head is pasted on—”
The officer laughed.
“Well look, then, could I have them?”
“Have what?”
“The magazines,” I cried, and together, the officers thought it over briefly, saying why not? They were just magazines. Old issues, and one said to the other, “We catch the guy did those other two killings and we’ll have the one did this one.”
So I took all the clues home and the movers dragged all the stuff that didn’t count out of the house and took it to wherever the police take the stuff of lone murdered people. The police went back to wherever the police go to figure out who killed whom.
Then the owner sold the house Mary Oliphant had lived in to a middle-aged couple.
“I understand there was a murder in it,” the new woman told me cheerfully, “and that’s the reason we got it at such a bargain. Did you know the woman that was killed?”
I shook my head because, with all those magazines piled in my house, I discovered I hadn’t known Mary at all, but I was beginning to find her and once I knew her reason for pasting those pictures over pictures in certain magazines, I was sure I would find her killer.
I missed Mary’s morning phone calls now that they no longer came. I missed her personalityless visits. It was when I reached the bottom magazine, dated early in the Fifties that I found, between its pages, the original photo and supply of stamp pictures made from it, also a newsprint copy carefully cut around the edge so that no headline, no caption was revealed.
The face in the picture began to look familiar. Was that just because I’d looked at it so often pasted incongruously on other pictured shoulders, or had the features begun to poke and pry at a memory?
They say a whiff of fragrance, a trio of musical notes, a line in a book will jog the memory back to forgotten times, and that is true. This carefully cut news photo of a girl’s sweetly empty face topped by a Lily Tomlin telephone routine pompadour, a ’40’s extravaganza, reminded me of Joe when he leaned close in the smoke-filled room to whisper, “She’s jiggled all her brains loose and they’re flopping around in that rolled-up hair.”