“Not deep,” I said.
“Not deep. Then he cut off the man’s right hand.” He eyed the cigarette, a gravity-defying tube of ash, and tilted it to the vertical. “Three days later, a reporter at the paper in the victim’s hometown opened his mail and found the index finger, along with some letters and photographs that made it clear what kind of a life the victim had been living in Chicago, and a note suggesting that the newspaper might want to verify the victim’s identity by printing the finger. Clever, huh? The letter went on to suggest that the folks back home might like to read all about it, see what kind of a pervert they’d sent into the world.” He checked the cigarette, too late. “Yipes.” Ash tumbled into his lap.
“If all he sends is the finger, why does he need the whole hand?”
He brushed at his crotch in a panicky way that, in a patient, would have engaged his full attention. “Pardon?”
“Surely it’s easier just to cut off a finger. Why does he take the whole hand?”
Schultz transferred the cigarette to his left hand, holding it Russian-style between his thumb and forefinger. This was an affectation that had once irritated me deeply. “Maybe he’s got a collection,” he said. “That wouldn’t be unusual. You’d be amazed at the things these lunatics keep. They don’t clean out their freezers very often, either.”
“What kind of a note?”
“The new kind, technological anonymity. A laser printer. No way in the world to trace it.”
“He goes to a lot of effort, doesn’t he? First the beating, or kicking, then the hand, then the letter and the finger-”
“And that’s not all. He’s a ball of energy. He gets inside these guys’ houses, inside their lives, before he kills them. He finds out where they’re from, learns that the people back home don’t know they’re gay. He’s probably young, by the way. Not meaning to stereotype, but most of these guys aren’t interested in older men.”
“He’s young,” I said.
“So in a sense,” Schultz said, sounding pleased with himself, “he kills them twice. First he kills them physically, in the big city, and then he sends their remains home and kills their memory there.” A light high on the wall behind him went on, flickered, and went out. That was the second time.
“A bone polisher,” I said.
He paused in the act of lighting a new cigarette off the stub of his old one. “Beg pardon?”
“In Chinese culture, in the old days, when someone died outside China without enough money for his body to be shipped home and buried in the soil of the Middle Kingdom, they’d bury him temporarily wherever he died. Later, when the family had earned enough money, he’d be exhumed and his bones cleaned up to be sent back to China. That was the bone polisher’s job.”
“But that was benign,” Schultz said.
I got a little prickly. “It’s just a metaphor. I’m not claiming perfection.”
“We work in metaphors,” Schultz said loftily, and I caught another glimpse of the man I hadn’t liked. “We take them very seriously.”
“I’m sorry as hell,” I said, “poaching on the linguistic territory of the mental-health profession.”
“Do I really sound like that?” He was dismayed.
“When you don’t sound like a person.”
“Have to watch that,” he said. His eyes went to one of the yarn abstracts, a uniquely ugly affair in burnt sienna and Dijon mustard that might have been meant to suggest baby poop. “Actually, it’s not bad. He’s sending part of them home, isn’t he? Burying their reputations.” He thought about it. “Still, I don’t suppose he’s Chinese, is he?”
“Is being excessively literal also a trait of the mental-health profession?”
“Ha, ha, ha,” Schultz said dutifully. It was his therapy laugh, mirthless as a moan. “The second one was in Chicago, too. An attorney this time, early sixties. He burgled the house, by the way, something he’s done only twice since.”
“Was it an isolated house?”
His eyes went to the paper. “Doesn’t say. You mean, he wasn’t worried about anyone having heard anything?”
“Just wondering. He burgled this one, and he didn’t seem to care if the whole world heard him.” The light went on again, and this time Schultz caught me looking at it and waved a hand.
“That’s Miss Trink,” he said. “My six o’clock.”
It was four-thirty. “She’s early.”
He started to glance at his watch and caught the coal of his cigarette on the underside of the metal desk. “She’s always early,” he said, looking down at the carpet. “It’s part of her problem. Anxiety syndrome.” He ground out the coal with a well-worn suede boot. The carpet around his desk was pockmarked with irregular black holes, and another little moonscape surrounded the chair positioned at the head of the leather couch.
“Anxiety syndrome?” I grinned at him. “Sounds like a catchall.”
“Of course it’s a catchall,” he snapped. “If I knew what was wrong with her, she’d be cured.”
“Or perhaps it’s a metaphor.”
“Am I being helpful?” he asked in a threatening tone.
I sat up attentively. “Extremely. Two in Chicago, you said?”
“And two in New Orleans.”
Christy had been in New Orleans. Spurrier hadn’t mentioned New Orleans, but then he wouldn’t; he’d been trying to persuade me to get Christy to contact him. “When was New Orleans?”
“Earlier this year. January and March.”
Could be. But I knew the man in Max’s house hadn’t been Christy. Christy wasn’t that strong. The light blinked on again.
“Excuse me,” I said, yielding to an impulse. “Bathroom in the hall?”
“Three doors down.” He was bent over the printout.
I went out into the waiting room. Miss Trink was a thin, heavily made-up woman dressed in a long brown skirt and a brown shawl on a day that was well into the nineties. She wore her burlap-colored hair in a ponytail, which she had greased until it stood straight up from the top of her head, like the flame on a candle or a convenient handle for the Rapture. The table in front of her chair was littered with newspapers, and she was busily cutting out a story with an X-Acto knife. Clippings were scattered on the floor in front of her and over the cushions of the couch. She didn’t look up.
“I won’t be long,” I said.
“No hurry,” she whispered to someone who was floating several feet above my head. Then she reached over and pushed a button on the table next to her.
I stood in the hall long enough to make my excuse plausible, and then went back in. She was working on a different story, and she leaned farther over it when the door opened, hiding her face from me. The erect ponytail quivered.
“That woman’s nuts,” I said to Schultz.
“I get a lot of them,” he said. The light did its agitated little blink. He shook his head. “It’s good for her to wait. Being early is a manipulation mechanism, and I’m teaching her they don’t always work.”
“You mean she isn’t really eager to talk?”
“Oh, she’s dying to talk. She keeps badgering me to give her two-hour sessions, but I ask you…”
“You have my sympathy,” I said. “Why the newspaper clippings?”
“She’s organizing the world,” he said. “She cuts up the papers and then rearranges them into some order that suits her. Sometimes it’s geographical, sometimes chronological, sometimes by topic, sometimes by whether they’ve got photos.” He shook his head. “A really boring mania. To tell you the truth, I miss police work. At least the nuts were interesting.”
“You think our guy is organizing the world?”
He leaned back in his chair and inhaled half the cigarette. “Most crazy people are,” he said, giving himself a smoke shawl. “We just don’t recognize the patterns they’re trying to fit it into. This guy certainly isn’t happy about the presence of a third sex. And his assumption that it’s deeply shameful is interesting. I wouldn’t be surprised if he thought that being outed was worse than being killed.”