The Ninth Nightmare

TEN A Night to Dismember

Walter wedged himself into his usual corner booth in Rally’s, smacking his hands together in anticipation of his triple cheeseburger. Outside the sky had grown even darker, and raindrops began to patter against the windows as if somebody were throwing handfuls of raisins at them.

Netta their waitress came over to take their order. She was four feet ten and as squat as a Munchkin, with fraying gingery hair and a swiveling cast in her right eye which always made Walter feel seasick. ‘Hi, big feller,’ she greeted him, taking her notepad out of her red checkered apron. ‘Guess you want your usual?’

‘You got it, sweet cheeks. But maybe today I’ll go for the loaded fries.’

‘The loaded fries? With the Cheddar cheese sauce and the ranch dressin’ and the bacon bits?’

‘Those are the very babies I had in mind.’

‘You do know that a single regular-sized serving of loaded fries contains nine hundred eight calories, which is almost half your recommended daily intake?’

Netta’s right eye was fixed on the clock on the wall, as if she were timing how much longer he had to live.

‘Is that all? Sheesh! In that case, you’d better fetch me the jumbo-sized serving.’

Charlie ordered a plain hot dog, no bun, mustard only, no ketchup, and a Diet Coke.

‘I don’t know how the fuck you can live on that, Charlie,’ said Walter. ‘You need calories. Calories are very much maligned. They make your brain work, among other parts of your body. And do you know what they put in hot dogs? Chicken’s feet.’

Charlie looked across at him with total seriousness. ‘Believe me, Walter, if I thought that eating a triple cheeseburger would help me to understand how Maria Fortales got out of her bedroom, I’d order one, same as you. And the loaded fries.’

‘We need to ask Mossad,’ said Walter.

‘Mossad?’

‘You know, the Israeli secret service people. They whacked that Hamas dude in his hotel bedroom in Dubai, didn’t they, but they left his door locked from the inside, with the chain fastened, even. Now, how did they do that? I don’t have a clue. But it must be possible because they did it.’

Netta brought their drinks over. As she set down Walter’s Gatorade, she accidentally knocked his glass and spilled it. Walter grabbed two handfuls of napkins from the dispenser and frantically dabbed at the spreading soda to stop it from pouring across the table top and on to his pants. He didn’t want to spend the rest of the day looking like he’d peed himself.

‘Netta, for Christ’s sake!’ he blurted out, but he managed to bite his tongue before he said, ‘Why don’t you watch what you’re doing?’ He didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

‘I’m real sorry, Walt,’ said Netta. ‘I’ve been as clumsy as a ox all mornin’. I haven’t been sleepin’ good.’

Walter wiped up the last of the Gatorade. ‘You need a man to share that lonely bed of yours, Netta. That’s what you need.’

‘A man? What good would a man do me? I need to stop havin’ them nightmares more like.’

‘What nightmares?’

‘Them circus nightmares. I’ve been havin’ them every single night for weeks and weeks and they always wake me up and I’m shakin’ and sweatin’ like nobody’s business.’

‘Circus nightmares?’ asked Walter. He felt a crawling sensation down his back, as if a cockroach had dropped into his shirt collar. ‘What kind of circus nightmares?’

‘Oh shoot, you don’t want to know about them. Probably some psycho-mological thing from out of my childhood. I’ll go bring you another soda.’

‘No, wait up,’ said Charlie. ‘Tell us what they’re like, these nightmares.’

Netta shrugged. ‘I always have them round about the same time of night, about two a.m. I’m walkin’ up this grassy hill and it’s rainin’ cats’n’dogs and I can hear this music playin’ like all off-key. Kind of music you used to hear when a carnival came to town, only all the notes are wrong.’

‘Go on,’ Charlie encouraged her.

‘Right at the top of the hill I see all of these tents, and they’re all black, with red lights hangin’ off of them like shinin’ drops of blood. And I walk between the tents and there’s trailers and animal cages all covered over with black tarps and the music’s still playin’ but I can’t work out who’s playin’ it or where it’s comin’ from.

‘In The Good Old Summertime, that’s what it sounds like, only like I say it’s all off-key and none of the notes are right.’

‘Is there anybody else there, in your nightmare, apart from you?’

Netta shook her head so that her jowls wobbled. ‘Not to begin with, but when I carry on walkin’ between the tents I see shadows runnin’ hither and thither and I can hear people mutterin’ and coughin’ and some people whinin’, too. Then I always turn this corner and there’s a row of trailers and I see this small critter go scuttlin’ across the grass from one trailer to another and he goes scamperin’ up the steps more like a rat or a groundhog than a person, but he’s wearing a coat like a person and this weird kind of hat.

‘I try to call out, hey, where am I? I’m lost! But somehow the words won’t come out, like somebody’s got their hand pressed over my mouth. And this small critter stops at the back of the trailer and starts jabberin’ at me like five different languages all at once.’

‘Can you remember what he says?’ asked Charlie.

Netta frowned. ‘Only a couple of words. Somethin’ that I guess sounds Frenchish, like “prennay guard”. Then some stuff that’s all mixed up and don’t make no sense at all. “Coop sign pianos.” And “may go wordy”. And “gang up you start”. That’s what it sounds like, anyhow, but he says it over and over and over, that’s how I remember it so good. He says it over and over and over.’

‘OK, so he spouts all this gibberish,’ Walter prompted her. ‘Then what?’

‘He opens the door and disappears inside the trailer, and I’m left out there all on my ownsome, and it’s still rainin’ cats’n’dogs and the music’s still playin’. I’m about to turn around and go back the way I come but then I hear a woman sobbin’ her heart out. I follow the sound of her sobbin’ and it’s comin’ from inside of this little black tent.

‘I push my way into the tent but there’s no woman inside it, only a man in a black suit and he’s standin’ with his back to me. I say excuse me, sir, but at first he don’t answer. I say excuse me again and then he turns around and he has this clown face and he’s grinnin’ this greasepaint smile at me even though his real mouth ain’t grinnin’ at all.

‘He says somethin’ to me but I don’t understand what it is and I’m so darn scared that I fight my way back out of that tent and I run and I run in between the tents and the trailers and down the hill and that’s when I usually wake up.’

Charlie said, ‘That’s some nightmare, Netta.’

‘Every night, too. Every night the same. For weeks and weeks and I don’t know how to stop havin’ it. And I don’t know why I’m havin’ it, or what it’s supposed to mean. Like, dreams are supposed to have meanin’s, aren’t they? Like you dream about a pigeon poopin’ on your head and that means you’re goin’ to win the lotto.’

‘This clown you see, what color is his make-up?’

‘His face is like gray but his lips are shiny green.’

‘And he has long gray hair?’

Netta fixed him with her good left eye. ‘How do you know that?’

‘Because I know a whole lot about clowns and I think that this particular clown is called Mago Verde, the Green Magician. Part clown, part conjuror. And you heard that rat-person say “may go wordy”, right? “May go wordy” — that could be “Mago Verde”.’

‘Hey,’ said Netta. She was impressed. ‘That’s exactly what it sounded like, Mago Verde.’

Charlie said, ‘“Prennay guard”, you’re right, that’s French — “prenez garde” — and that means “beware”. Sounds like this rat-creature was telling you to watch out for Mago Verde.’

‘How about “coop sign pianos”? What does that mean? And “gang up you start”?’

‘I don’t have a clue,’ Charlie admitted. ‘But give me some time, and I’ll work on it.’

Netta said, ‘Guess you think I’m losin’ my reason. It’s the stress, probably. My brother Kyle lost his job at the Brook Park engine factory last September and he and me have been strugglin’ to make ends meet ever since.’

Walter took hold of Netta’s piggy little hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. ‘You’re probably right. Maybe you should talk to your pharmacist — ask him for something to help you sleep more heavy.’

When Netta went off to refill Walter’s soda glass, Walter leaned across the table and said, ‘How about that? Netta’s been having the same goddamned nightmares as Maria Fortales. The same — in every detail. How in hell’s name can that happen?’

Charlie pulled a face. ‘It’s not totally unknown for strangers to share the same dream. Some psychologists think that dreams are like an alternate state of reality, rather than an alternate state of consciousness.’

‘Meaning exactly what, exactly?’

‘You know, like that Second Life thing you can do on the Internet — turning yourself into a sexy-looking avatar and leading a double life in some tropical fantasy world. And Carl Jung believed that the entire human race shares a collective unconscious.’

‘Oh, yeah? Carl Jung must have gone to see that last Mel Gibson movie. The whole audience was collectively unconscious, including me.’

Netta brought them their food. Walter immediately picked up his triple cheeseburger in both hands and took a large bite; but Charlie said, ‘Were you ever scared of clowns, Netta, when you were a kid?’

Netta shook her head. ‘Clowns? No, never. I loved clowns. They used to make me laugh.’

‘You never had a scary experience at a circus, or a carnival?’

‘I was sick as a dog once on the Tivoli Spin-out Ride at the Ohio State Fair. But then so was most everybody else. But I don’t know. Maybe somethin’ bad happened to me when I was a kid and I got some kind of horrible memory that’s just comin’ out only now.’

Walter flapped his hand at Charlie and said, with his mouth full, ‘Eat.’ At that moment, however, his cellphone rang. He picked it up and said, ‘What? I’m on my lunch break.’

But he listened, and then he said, ‘Where?’ and at the same time he slowly lowered his triple cheeseburger back on to his plate.

‘Something wrong?’ asked Charlie.

Walter nodded. ‘That was Skrolnik. He had a call from the School of Law where Maria Fortales was studying. There was blood dripping out from the bottom of her locker.’

‘Jesus. Did they open it?’

‘Of course. They thought that she might be locked up inside of it, and still alive.’

‘But she’s not?’

Walter turned to Netta and said, ‘Hey, sweet cheeks, the call of duty calls. Could you put this burger into a box for me, so that I can take it out?’

He waited until she had taken his plate back to the kitchen before he turned to Charlie and said, ‘They found her arms, that’s all.’

‘Only her arms?’ Charlie looked down at his hotdog and pushed his plate away.

‘Maybe that was the sawing noise that old man Yarber said he could hear.’

‘But there was no blood. How do you saw off a girl’s arms without spraying a whole lot of blood around?’

‘Search me, Charlie. Let’s go take a look for ourselves.’

It was raining even harder by the time they turned into the parking lot outside the George Gund Building, where the School of Law was housed. An ambulance was parked there already, its red lights flashing, as well as two squad cars and a black Grand Voyager from the Cuyahoga County coroner’s office.

Officer Skrolnik was waiting for them underneath the slabby concrete entrance.

‘Sorry about your lunch, detectives,’ he said, although he didn’t look sorry at all, only tired.

‘When did you get the call?’ asked Walter.

‘Only about forty-five minutes ago. One of Maria’s friends was trying to slip a note into her locker when she noticed that there was blood seeping out of the bottom of the door. She went to find the co-director. The co-director called nine-one-one and then she had the janitor cut off the padlock.’

‘OK. Lead on, MacSkrolnik.’

Officer Skrolnik ushered them into the shiny marble lobby area, which was arranged with pale turned-oak sculptures that looked like gigantic doorknobs and chess pieces. Then he led them along the corridor where the students’ gray steel lockers were lined up.

One of the locker doors was wide open, and bent almost double, and three police officers and two CSIs were gathered around it, as well as a paramedic and a bored-looking deputy coroner. Walter and Charlie joined them, with a few desultory ‘hi’s’ and ‘how’s it going’s?’ One of the CSIs was taking pictures, so that whenever his camera flashed, everybody appeared to jump two inches in the air.

Walter went up to the locker and looked inside. ‘Ah, shit,’ he said. ‘I had a feeling this was going to turn out bad.’

In the locker’s top compartment, two human arms were folded over each other, almost as if they had been patiently waiting for somebody to open the locker door and find them. Above the elbows, both arms were heavily smeared and spattered with congealing blood. Below the elbows, they were dusky-skinned, with sprinkles of tiny moles on them.

‘Would you look at that?’ said Charlie. ‘He didn’t even bother to take off her jewelry.’

Twisted around the left wrist was a silver Mexican bracelet with red-and-green flowers enameled on it; and on the third finger of the left hand there was a latticework silver ring. On the third finger of the right hand there was a ring with a single topaz in it. The nails of the right index finger and the right middle finger were both bitten right down, almost to the quick.

‘Look here,’ Walter told him. ‘More clowns.’

Scotch-taped to the back of the bent locker door there were dozens of photographs of Pierrots and augustes and saltimbanques, including three nearly-identical pictures of Mago Verde. There were a few other pictures, too — Emilio Zapata and Carlos Santana and Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico — but most of the pictures were of clowns.

One of the CSIs came rustling up to them in her blue Tyvek suit, a fortyish woman with a sallow face and unplucked eyebrows and very pale blue eyes, as if all the death and mutilation that she had seen during the course of her career had leached most of the color out of them.

‘Both arms were sawn off approximately eight centimeters below the shoulder,’ she told them. ‘We’ll have to take them back to the lab, of course, but I’d say that the perpetrator used a regular garden-variety handsaw.’

‘Any way of telling if she was still alive when he took her arms off?’

‘From the copious bloodstains on the upper part of the arms, I’d say yes. But with any luck she may have been sedated.’

Walter looked around. ‘Find any blood trails?’

‘Unh-hunh. Not a drop outside of this locker.’

‘Are we sure that this is Maria Fortales?’

‘We’ll be taking prints, of course, and DNA. But Ms Lipschitz ID’d her jewelry.’

‘Ms Lipschitz?’

The CSI nodded her head toward the opposite side of the corridor. Officer Skrolnik was talking to a stocky woman with cropped gray hair and circular spectacles and a thick plaid skirt. When he saw Walter and Charlie looking their way, he beckoned them over.

‘This is the co-director, Naomi Lipschitz,’ he said. ‘Ms Lipschitz — this is Detective Wisocky and this is Detective Hudson.’

‘We’re very sorry about what happened here, ma’am,’ said Walter. ‘It must have come as one heck of a shock.’

‘Who could have done such a thing?’ asked Ms Lipschitz. Tears were crowding her eyes and dribbling down her cheeks like the rain that was dribbling down the window. ‘Maria — she was such a vivacious young girl. And such a hard-working student. Everybody liked her.’

‘You’re absolutely sure that it’s her?’

Ms Lipschitz nodded. ‘The bracelet, and the rings, I don’t have any doubt. And I was always scolding her about biting her nails.’

‘You say that everybody liked her. Maybe you can think of somebody who didn’t like her quite as much as all the rest?’

‘No — nobody that I can think of. Our students are all very competitive, believe you me, but they’re far too busy to waste their time on personal feuds and petty animosities. All of the ground floor here — this is the Milton A. Kramer Law Clinic Center. The students here get involved in real-life court cases, so that they can gain practical experience, and their workload is highly demanding.’

‘Was Maria Fortales involved in any real-life court cases?’

‘Of course. Every student is given a caseload of several court actions at once. Maria Fortales was currently involved in three, so far as I know. One was an action for disability benefit; the second was a DUI; and the third was a case of domestic violence.’

‘OK,’ said Walter, ‘we’re going to need details of all of those. And every other case she’s ever been involved in, going right back to when she first enrolled. You never know — one of her clients may bear a grudge against her for some reason.’

‘I can’t imagine why any of them should. But, very well, detective, yes, I’ll make sure you get them.’

She started to turn her head to look behind her, but Walter laid a hand on her shoulder and restrained her. ‘Give it a couple of minutes, OK? You don’t want to see this.’ The CSIs had wrapped up Maria Fortales’ arms in clear polyethylene and were stowing them into a black zip-up body-parts bag, the type they usually used for torsos and severed heads. The arms looked to Walter as if they had been detached from a storefront mannequin.

‘Do you think she’s dead?’ Ms Lipschitz asked him.

Walter shrugged. ‘We can’t tell for sure, ma’am, but I think I hope so.’

‘How could anybody do anything so cruel? How could they?’

‘I don’t know the answer to that. I wish I did. Or then again, maybe I’m glad that I don’t.’

He turned to Charlie and said, ‘OK… what we need to do now is talk to all of Maria’s fellow students, and all of her professors, and most of all we need to find out who was the last person or persons to see her alive. We also need to discover if she had any boyfriends that nobody knew about.’

‘I think I should be running some background checks on Mago Verde,’ said Charlie.

‘Huh? What the hell for?’

‘I still have this very strong intuition that Mago Verde is the key to all of this.’

Walter tried his best to sound patient. ‘Charlie,’ he said, ‘listen to me. You’re not supposed to have intuitions.’

‘But you do. You have them all the time.’

‘I know I do. But that’s because I have a very short span of attention. You — you’re not supposed to have intuitions. You’re supposed to be procedural, get it? You’re supposed to collect all of the available evidence, and carefully analyze it, and then come to logical conclusions that will stand up in court. It’s not your style, jumping to conclusions and then screaming at people until they’re prepared to admit that they’re guilty, even if they’re not. That’s my job.’

‘I understand that, Walter. But Maria Fortales disappeared from a locked room, and that was just like some kind of conjuring trick, right? And she’s had her arms sawn off, which is just like another kind of conjuring trick. If anybody could pull this off, it’s a conjuror, which is exactly what Mago Verde is.’

Walter took a deep breath. ‘OK, then, what exactly do you propose to do, o intuitive one?’

‘First off, I think I ought to find out if any local clowns have been making themselves up as Mago Verde recently. I should check out any circuses or carnivals within a fifty-mile radius at least, and any children’s entertainment agencies. The yellow pages, too. If none of that gives me anything, I’ll need to check if Mago Verde appeared in any circuses or carnivals in Cleveland in the past thirty years at least; and if anybody ever got arrested for any kind of felony while wearing Mago Verde greasepaint, and what that felony was.’

Walter stared at him for a long time with heavy-lidded eyes. He looked like a lizard basking on a rock. Eventually, however, he tugged at the end of his nose and said, ‘OK, you win. I guess what you’re saying makes some kind of sense, although I don’t exactly know what. I’ll call the captain and have Burrows and Gysin come out to do the routine questioning.’

Charlie said, ‘Trust me, Walter. I know it sounds wacky but I genuinely think I’m on to something here. After I’ve checked out Mago Verde I’m going to do like you said and read all the way through Maria Fortales’ diary. I don’t believe that it was any kind of coincidence, Netta having the same nightmare that she did. I’m also going to try and work out what that rat-character was supposed to be saying.

He took out his notebook and flipped it open. ‘“Coop sign pianos” and “gang up you start”. I’m sure it means something.’

‘Sure it does,’ said Walter. ‘“A bird in the hand makes it really difficult to blow your nose.”’

Walter returned to his apartment well after eleven p.m. that evening, and he was exhausted. He hung up his trench coat in the narrow hallway and then went through to the kitchen. This morning’s half-empty coffee mug stood on the draining board by the sink, next to a plate that was covered in yellow semicircles of solidified egg-yolk.

He went directly to the fridge and took out a Miller, which he popped and swallowed straight out of the can, loosening his necktie with one finger. Then he went through to the living room and collapsed backward on to his sagging brown corduroy couch. He switched on the television and it was Shatner’s Raw Nerve, William Shatner interviewing Rush Limbaugh, a repeat, so he switched it over to Nightline, although he kept the sound muted.

He lay there for a while, trying to relax, but grisly images of Maria Fortales’ severed arms kept jumping into mind’s eye, like pictures from a flicker book, with that Mexican bracelet and those silver rings.

He was deeply troubled by the Maria Fortales case. It was like a jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces seemed to belong to two different pictures, or even more, and he had the feeling that even if they managed to complete it, they wouldn’t understand what he was looking at, like Washington Crossing The Delaware all mixed up with American Gothic, with maybe a bit of wallpaper from Whistler’s Mother thrown in. The perpetrators he usually collared fell into one of four predictable categories. They were either creepy psychotic stalkers with halitosis who tortured and killed people to compensate for their own personal inadequacies; or moronic blue-collar bullies with tattooed necks and the temperament of pit-bull terriers; or equally moronic members of the Folks or the Latin Kings or the Waste Five gang who felt it was a matter of honor to stab or shoot anybody who disrespected them; or gray-suited office-workers who had simply cracked under the strain of everyday life — losing their jobs, or losing their children in some heartbreaking custody settlement.

But whoever had taken and dismembered Maria Fortales had much more obscure motives than any of these. He and Charlie hadn’t been able to get any kind of handle on how he had abducted her, let alone why. To begin with, he had been skeptical about Charlie’s intuition that Mago Verde was somehow involved, but in truth he had a nagging suspicion that Charlie maybe on to something. This was no ordinary missing persons case. This was all about nightmares and circuses and conjurors and clowns. And what about Netta? Netta had experienced nightmares that were almost identical, but of course there was no apparent connection between Netta and Maria Fortales. One was a trainee lawyer and the other was a hamburger waitress with screwy eyes, and so far as he knew they had never met. All the same, Walter felt that he had been deliberately given a very forceful nudge. How, or by whom, he couldn’t begin to understand. But just like Charlie, he was beginning to feel that the circus was coming.

He jolted, and opened his eyes. He had been dropping off to sleep.

Walter heaved himself upright. As he did so his cellphone rang. He rummaged in his pocket until he found it, and then he snapped, ‘What?’

‘Sorry, Walter, didn’t mean to disturb you. It’s Charlie.’

‘What’s up, Charlie?’ he asked him. ‘Don’t you ever fucking sleep?’

‘I was lucky… I think I got a rough translation of what that rat-thing was saying to Netta.’

‘You’re kidding me.’

‘No. I was talking to some of the guys at the station and one of them speaks Spanish. He said that “pianos” sounded like “piernas” which is Spanish for “legs”. So “coop” could be French for “cut” and “sign” could be German for “sein” meaning “yours”. So the whole phrase could be a multilingual mishmash that actually means “cut off your legs”.’

‘Come on, Charlie, that’s stretching it a bit, don’t you think?’

‘Maybe so, if the context was different. But what we have so far is “beware Mago Verde, he will cut off your legs”. And that makes sense, doesn’t it, considering what happened to Maria Fortales—’

‘OK, OK, I’ll go along with it just so far as it goes. What about the other bit? “Gang up your start” or whatever it was.’

‘I was lucky there, too. Detective Smit overheard us, and he still speaks pretty good Dutch. He said that “gang up your start” sounded like “gang op uw staart”, which means “walk on your tail”.’

‘So what this rat-thing was saying to Netta was: “Watch out for Mago Verde because he’s going to cut off your legs, and you’ll be walking on your tail.”’

‘Exactly.’

‘You realize this could be total bullshit, and it doesn’t mean anything like that at all?’

‘It makes sense, Walter. What else could it mean?’

‘You need to remember who said it, Charlie. A creature that looked like a rat, from out of some waitress’ nightmare. It’s not real. It’s Alice In Fucking Wonderland.’

‘A recurring nightmare, Walter. A nightmare she’s been having so often she can actually remember what the rat-creature was saying to her.’

Walter suddenly thought of the popcorn that he had smelled, as he dozed off on the couch, and the off-key music, and the thumping of the circus tents in the wind that blew across the meadow.

‘OK,’ he said, grudgingly. ‘Let’s talk about it in the morning. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we need to go on a clown hunt.’