Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 811 & 812, March/April 2009

Identity Crisis by Maynard Allington

Born and raised in California, Maynard Allington joined the air force after high school and served two tours in Vietnam. Later, he earned a degree in law enforcement, but for many years now he has devoted himself to writing both magazine articles and fiction. His three novels, The Grey Wolf, The Fox in the Field, and The Court of Blue Shadows were all published to acclaim, with the New York Times calling the last “a powerful examination of humanity at its worst and at its best.”

Around four A.M. I put on a beach shirt and bathing trunks and took the fire stairs down to the hotel pool. A breeze off the Atlantic stirred the fronds of palm trees lining the deck and I could feel the night dying overhead on the dimmed circuits of stars.

Even before I dropped into a deck chair, a sense that something wasn’t right crawled into my nerves and wouldn’t let go. For one thing, the pool light was out, leaving a logjam of shadows on the dark pit of water. I spotted a shape trapped among them at the deep end, like an abandoned pool toy, except they don’t make pool toys in human form. I swung out of the chair, looking around for the pool lamp switch. The instant I clicked it on, my nerves absorbed a shock.

The little girl, fully clothed in a pink pinafore, floated facedown in the clear light flooding the green water. Her long hair, yellow as sun on straw, fanned out on the surface, and her arms were spread out in a swan dive of arrested motion. Ribbons of blood lay suspended in the marine sparkle from the underwater floodlight, and in one horrific second I saw that they ran like party streamers from a cut throat. She was stone dead, and not by drowning.

The poolside swarmed with activity — police, a fire rescue unit, exploding flashbulbs. A handful of hotel staff stood behind police tape, and faces peered down from windows. While the paramedics used a gaff to drag the victim in close, a homicide detective showed up to take charge.

The rescue team lifted the child, dripping, out of the floodlit glare. As they turned the body faceup, the group around it drew back. I saw that the figure wasn’t human, but a stunningly perfect replica of a little girl. Even the flesh tones and artificial skin were an eerie likeness. Where the throat had been slashed open, wires and circuitry extruded in a red froth. One of the cops let out a nervous chuckle, more of relief than amusement.

Above the puffed sleeves and lace collar of the pinafore, the girl’s features looked vaguely familiar. Finally it hit me. I’d seen them on a poster in the lobby — a nightclub act featuring a ventriloquist named Karen Palmer and her “protege,” Sara Jane. Both were pictured on the playbill, and the dummy could have been a child-sized clone of the live performer. Gone, I remember thinking, were the days of stringed puppets with hinged jaws and varnished faces. This one was a marvel of robotics engineering. Even the blue eyes, sapped of power, had the vacancy of death counterfeited into them.

“Looks like you got a case of vandalism, and maybe theft,” the homicide detective told the night manager. “Not murder.”

“Then where did the blood come from?”

The detective lacked only a trenchcoat to be a ringer for Robert Mitchum, the actor from those old noir films of the Forties. He sported the same half-lidded stare, and a dent in the chin like a meteor hit. I watched him pick up an object near the chromed pool ladder and hold it up in the light. It was a vial of what looked to be red food dye.

“There’s your blood.” His smile had a wry shadow of contempt, which carried over into his next question. “Who reported the crime?”

“I did.” I gave him my name, Tom Irons, and told him what I knew.

From the start, the vibes were bad between us. He kept staring off to one side and wasn’t concealing his annoyance at being called out at this hour to a bogus crime scene.

“Before you close your notebook,” I said, “you might want to dig a little deeper. Whoever slit the throat and poured a coloring agent into the gash was acting out something more than a prank.”

“What are you,” he said, “a shrink?”

“Forensic psychiatrist,” I said. “Here for a mystery writers’ conference.”

The shrug was Mitchum at the top of his game. Probably he practiced in front of a mirror. I saw he was frowning at my nose. Before med school, I’d boxed in the Marine Corps, and the nose was exhibit one.

“You don’t look like a mind bender.”

“I can hook on some false whiskers,” I said, “if that’ll help.”

“What were you doing out at the pool so early?”

I could tell from his tone that I’d been suddenly elevated from witness to suspect.

“Working on a tan,” I replied.

He gave up on me, turning to the night manager.

“Is the ventriloquist staying here?”

“Yes sir.”

“Okay, let’s bring her down,” he said, tossing a throwaway smile at me like a bone. “She can ID the remains.”

By the time Karen Palmer came out through the glass doors beneath the blue canopy, first light was bleeding off the sky to the east like a cut artery. She wore white shorts, a ribbed sleeveless blouse, and high-heeled beach sandals, and I saw that her legs had a nice tan. The instant she caught sight of the childish figure in the sodden pinafore, she let out a sharp cry and ran over, falling on her knees beside it. Sobs shook her body. They say ventriloquists’ dummies, over time, take on a human persona in the minds of performers. She had breathed life into this one until it had become a part of herself, and now she might have been hysterical over a dead child.

“Any idea who could have done this?” the detective asked.

She raised her head, nodding.

“Someone’s been stalking me for the last two months. He sends me notes.”

“What kind of notes?”

A bloom of color came into her cheeks.

“The early ones were sexually explicit. Lately, they’ve taken on a threatening tone.”

“Did you contact the police where you live?”

“Yes, but they couldn’t identify the person.”

“If I were you, I’d report this when you get back. Might be a connection.”

After the police and fire rescue units had left, Karen remained on the edge of a deck chair, her face buried in her hands. She was clearly distraught, and I felt bad for her. I stepped over to introduce myself and told her I was a forensic psychiatrist.

“I’ve had some experience in the criminal justice system with stalkers. If you feel up to talking about it, I might be able to help.”

She had, I thought, a certain refinement, some imprimatur of class, that made her hesitant to share personal details of her life with a stranger, even a professional. But the strain she was under overrode her reluctance, and she nodded through the film of tears.

We spent a good part of the afternoon together, drinking tea under an umbrella at a table in the sun. She’d appeared on national TV and now enjoyed a minor celebrity on the nightclub circuit. The odd part was, I’d talked to one of the conference speakers who had caught her act in the lounge. He said the show was funny, but spiked with graphic jokes. For some reason I couldn’t picture her on stage using four-letter words to get a laugh. Against the honey sheen of her skin, the blue eyes were deceptively innocent, and as the afternoon slipped away in the splash of swimmers and the lazy swell of voices, I began to sense a shadow of fragility in her on the other side of the well-bred manner. Several times during our conversation she stopped talking and turned her head sharply, and I caught a darting reflex of fear in the pupils, as if they had picked up some danger lurking out of sight beyond the archipelago of tables and deck chairs packed with hotel guests.

“Do you have any of the notes this guy sent you?” I said.

“I got one two days ago. It was left at the desk.”

She fished the folded scrap from her purse and held it out to me. The handwriting had a manic slant, as if some angry violence were backed up in the fingers squeezing the pencil.

“If you want the truth,” she said, “I’m terrified. I think what he did to Sara Jane was a message that he plans to do the same to me. I can feel him out there now, watching us...”

“You did a show last night, didn’t you?”

“At midnight.”

“If he was the one who mutilated your doll, how did he get his hands on it?”

“I suppose he could have got into my room with a duplicate key.”

“Didn’t you have the safety latch on?”

“I don’t know. I’m always worn out after a late show. When I got back to my room, I just took off my clothes and crashed.”

“I guess you can get the doll repaired.”

It was the wrong thing to say. The grief twisted across her face again.

“You don’t understand. She wasn’t just some inanimate thing. She had a piece of my soul. That’s the part that was murdered last night. I’m the target. He’s coming after me.”

By evening she was calm enough to go to dinner with me at a beachfront restaurant. After the meal, she wanted to walk on the beach. The last hemorrhage of twilight lay off the horizon, and screeching gulls soared on the currents of salt air blowing off the surf in the cool dusk. Karen had already slipped off her heels, and now she unpinned the gleaming coil of blond hair behind her neck and shook it loose.

We strolled in the windy silence, lulled by the beat of the surf. A few low dunes, planted in sea oats, vaulted back from the beach. Later, Karen stopped walking, her head bent so that shadows blotted out her features. Then she glanced up in the blue darkness, eyes ablaze, and a domineering smile curled into her lips. Wordlessly, she slid her arms around my neck and ground her mouth viciously against mine. The kiss overheated swiftly on some erotic compulsion. I dragged her arms away, staring at her upturned face in the shadows. It was a stranger’s face, and I said, “Karen?”

“Don’t call me Karen,” she cried. “Karen’s a weak, inhibited fool who plays with dolls. I only let her come out when I feel like it. I’m Eva.”

The combustible heat in the violent eyes was as turbulent as the Atlantic swells flaring in against the coast behind her, and at that moment I had the whole psychiatric picture.

“Why did you attack Sara Jane?”

She twisted her wrists out of my grasp and flung back an antagonistic laugh.

“I warned her. She’s been interfering in our lives for a long time. Trying to come alive. Trying to take my place. Karen would have let her. So I cut her throat and let her drown.”

The contorted smile on her mouth was crazy enough for three people, maybe more. Probably the nightclub performer with the bawdy act was one of them. In my practice, I’d diagnosed only one patient with dissociative identity disorder — multiple personality — though it was a condition criminals often tried to fake. I knew she wasn’t faking.

It took some doing to coax her back to the car, and by the time we returned to the hotel, she’d let Karen come out to say goodnight.

“Thank you for staying with me today,” she murmured, holding out a chaste hand. “I’ll be all right.”

But walking back to my room, I knew she wouldn’t be all right. There was some suicidal ideation in her fragmented personality, along with a lot of anger, and quiet terror in the form of a stalker trapped in her mind.

In the suite, I called the desk and asked for the nearest crisis intervention center.