The bar was on the first level of the Renaissance Center. It was a slow night. The bartender and all but two of the patrons were engrossed in a televised Tigers game.
The Peytons sat, hunched over drinks, in the dim red glow, remembering seven years ago…
Lieutenant Peyton recalled a young blonde, nude on a morgue slab. Her face was like the wholesome farm girls on the cover of his folks’ American Magazines, except for the lump on her head and the gash across her throat.
An officer read from a notebook: “Her name was Helen Dunn. Twenty-three years old. She was a barmaid.” He named a bar near Wayne State University. “Her boss was emptying out some trash, right after opening up, when he found her body behind some cans.”
“Had there been any trouble recently?”
“Nothing in particular; but you know how barmaids are.”
Yeah.” He replaced the sheet, wondering how to say what he had to say without revealing too much. He decided it was impossible. “I want this to have top priority. I want to know who works there, who drinks there — everything.”
“Something special about this, sir?”
“Maybe I just don’t like to see twenty-three-year-old girls die.”
He was not fooling the officer. He did not care.
The “something special” was a printed note now in his desk drawer: “Helen Dunn begins her beauty sleep tonight. It’s going to be a long one. Mephistopheles…”
Anyone can write a note, blame a personal killing on a fictional psychopath. The police investigated the murder with more than usual diligence, but spread no alarms.
Peyton dismissed the note as a blind a week and a half later, but spent the next two months going through his mail on the brink of cardiac arrest.
He had just stopped fearing postal deliveries when the second note arrived: I’m afraid Tracy Huggins won’t have much time for studying from now on. But that doesn’t matter. She’s never going to graduate. Mephistopheles.”
He shut off his feelings and scoured the day’s reports, then called every Huggins in the phone book.
He went home with no idea who Tracy Huggins was—
The next morning, during coffee, someone tapped him on the shoulder.
It was another detective. “Weren’t you the one who was looking for Tracy Huggins?”
“Yes.”
“Her folks just reported her missing. She hasn’t been seen since leaving a late class at Wayne two nights ago.”
Six days later, a deputy sheriff on horseback found her behind some bushes in Hines Park…
Wayne State was on its guard. Patrols, curfews, inspection of credentials, hot lines to a special task force — there was no way this character could strike again.
As long as he confined himself to WSU.
One April night, Debra Meredith, twenty-four, divorced, went to a singles bar in Farmington. She left, according to witnesses, about twelve-fifteen.
She was found the next morning in the driver’s seat of her car in an Oak Park shopping center. This time, the note was on her lap: “Debra Meredith was looking for action. She found it. Mephistopheles.”
The investigation was soon statewide; but there were few leads, all false, by that early morning in June when a priest at the University of Windsor found Julie McKinnon, of Toronto, in some bushes.
The Windsor police received a note the next day: “Julie McKinnon felt so safe on this side of the water. Now she feels so sorry. Mephistopheles…
That was the end of it.
Until now.
The whitewashed walls of Dr. Whitney Larsen’s office were decorated with framed degrees, including a Ph.D.; professional-looking photographs, taken by the doctor himself, of breathtaking landscapes (“I won’t shoot anything warm-blooded, even with a camera”); and numerous paintings, portraits and abstracts and everything in between, of dogs (“I like dogs. My dogs have lasted longer, and pleased me more, than all my marriages”).
Dr. Larsen’s build resulted from another hobby: fine food. He was not fat yet; but it was a distinct possibility. He was a tall man with black, curly, thinning hair. His hazel eyes studied Jimmy Peyton, who haltingly detailed his fantasies about Lucy Welch.
The doctor realized he was expected to say something profound. “Was she good-looking — uh, as corpses go, that is?”
“Mrs. Welch had been an attractive woman in her lifetime.”
Larsen chuckled. “Could it be, if you’d jumped her bones, that really would’ve shown Daddy?”
“I don’t know.”
Conversation stopped. Jimmy studied the plaques and pictures while Dr. Larsen studied him.
“Jimmy,” said the doctor finally, “I get the feeling you’re not all here with me. Like there’s something really bugging you; and all this stuff about having the hots for a corpse is just your way of sidestepping it.”
He did not prod. He had learned the reluctant revelations were often the most significant, and that no patient was obliged to make them.
“When we got back to headquarters, there was this envelope on my father’s desk…
“So now,” said Dr. Larsen, “he’s back; and you’re going to deliver him to Daddy as a Father’s Day present—” he glanced at his 1984 calendar — “two months late.”
“Not exactly.”
“Then, what exactly?”
Jimmy laid a folded piece of paper on the desk. “This is the note.”
Dr. Larsen’s face soured. “Anyone ever tell you you watch too much television?” He read the note, his expression grim, then became haughty. “Ziss fellow iss obviously overzexed; but zen, aren’t ve all? Ven he vas a kinder, hiss mama locked him in ze closet ven she caught him vearing her undervear — hoo-ha! — undt ven he vas in dere, he seen papa t’rough da keyhole makin’ nice-nice mit a floozie.” Jimmy’s expression was granite. “Seriously, if you don’t already know as much as I could tell you about this guy — maybe, if you don’t know even more — I’d be worried about your future as a cop.”
“Think he wants to get caught?”
“Hell, no. Any more than you want to break your neck when you go on one of those super coasters at Cedar Point. I mean, besides hating women — which, I hope to God, you’ve already figured out — he likes excitement.”
“But why did he stop for seven years, then go back to it?”
“One sure way to find out.”
“What?”
“Have him make an appointment with me.”
Judy Franklin was Lucy Welch’s sister. Lieutenant Peyton could see a resemblance muddied by drink and fat Her brown, boy-length hair was flecked with gray. Her face was cosmetically embalmed.
She had a Georgia accent. “That wimp she married didn’t kill her, that boyfriend did.”
“We have them under observation, ma’am.”
“You should have their rear ends in jail.”
“Why?” Her body tightened with rage. “I mean, what makes you suspect them?”
He took his notebook from a drawer, placed it open on the desk, and poised a pen over it.
She relaxed a little. “I only met Welch once, back in 1977, when Lucy brought him home for a Fourth of July picnic. They weren’t married yet, think she just met him. Didn’t like him then. Every time I turned around, he was hangin’ around her; or he wasn’t far away, watchin’ her.
“And the way he watched her. I been in enough bars to know when a man watches you that way, you don’t want no part of him.
“Couldn’t understand what she seen in him till I found out he had money.” Some of his feeling about that must have shown in his face. “Well, you didn’t have to live on what was left of your daddy’s paycheck from his ladies and his drinking.”
“So you met him only once; and you’re basing a murder accusation on that?”