Savant

2

Elaine Roach needed to find work in the worst way. But even as badly as she needed this job, and as intriguing as it sounded—when she'd responded to the Help Wanted classified ad in the Saturday Star—the idea of calling on a man in his hotel room was anathema to her. She was terribly nervous. While she was coming up in the elevator, her knees started knocking together and she became so suddenly chilled that she feared she'd get violently ill. She nearly punched the lobby button and rode back down, but having to face another Monday morning without employment was a fear as terrifying as this one. She screwed her courage and marched down the hallway, the scrap of paper with Mr. Norville's room number clutched in one of her gloved hands. Even her knock on the door was prim.

"It's open!" a voice screeched from inside. She saw an immense and flagrantly homosexual man seated on the bed speaking into a telephone. "Come in. Be seated," he snapped, the mouthpiece covered so the other party could not hear him, presumably, motioning her toward a chair with a limp-wristed gesture. "I'll be with you in a moment." He turned away and spoke into the phone.

"No—it's someone about the position. All right, I'll see you when I get to the Coast. Yes…Um-hmm…I don't have room for those in my warehouse locally. I'll let you know when we move to the new building. All right. See you in Los Angeles Tuesday evening. Au revoir!" He hung up dramatically. He knew approximately how long the desk clerk usually took to get to the phones at this time of the day. He'd mistimed it slightly, by chance, but his huge paw had covered the mouthpiece when he'd turned and blocked her vision.

"So sorry, my dear. I'm having a perfectly hectic day. My name is Tommy Norville," he announced and swished across the room to greet the woman, who stood up, no longer quite so nervous, but exceedingly puzzled. A 400-plus-pound simpering queen takes a bit of getting used to. They shook hands. He offered a massive hand as if it had no bones in it, and when the woman took it she felt as if she'd grabbed a fat ten-pound perch as he gave her his best impression of a dead-fish handshake.

As usual, he'd sized her up instantly and she was perfect. Utter perfection. The woman was wearing a hat such as nobody had worn in twenty years and white gloves!

"I'm Elaine Roach," she said. "I phoned you about the position in the antique gallery," she told him unnecessarily. An unattractive woman, made more so by a severe hair style—prematurely ugly hair—she was a spinster in her early fifties who could easily pass for Social Security age, due to both her appearance and deportment.

"Yes, Miss Roach, I think your qualifications may do." He turned in a dainty pirouette like an elephant in a tutu, and swished back across the room, bidding her to sit with a limp paw that gestured as if it held a fairy wand. One fear—her greatest, in fact—that of being raped, was no longer relevant.

Norville was dressed flamboyantly, in what she thought of as "sissy businessman" clothing, his hair cut very short on the top and streaked, the twenty-dollar drugstore bifocals down on his nose. They were the kind with the cord attached, and they gave his dimpled face a sort of benevolent and oddly feminine look. He wore a silk shirt, a turtleneck sweater under it that accented his hugely fat double chin, with a loud pocket silk flowing from the pocket of his blazer.

"I haven't worked since I lived in Portland," she said in a quiet voice, her eyes downcast. She was used to being turned down.

"Excellent," he simpered. "Your head won't be filled with wrong work concepts." He was a master at camouflaged doublespeak. After a few minutes in his presence one almost began to make sense out of his utterances, so seemingly connected were the cleverly pseudologic patterns. "Do you have family here?" he asked pleasantly, crossing his legs and almost suffocating as he did so.

"No. Not anymore. Everyone's passed away. My brother and his wife and their two children are all I have, and that's who I was working for when I lived in Portland. If I may ask, what exactly would this position with your antique gallery entail?" She was seated so primly it was all he could do not to walk over and touch her, just to see how high she would jump. Her legs were squeezed so tightly together it was absurd. She held a huge purse in front of her private parts, clasped in a death grip by those hands encased in the stupid white gloves. He couldn't have selected someone more ideal. Chaingang thought he might be in love!

"Of course. Primarily you'd be responsible for keeping our financial records, which are simple in the extreme. You'd open our small amount of business mail that comes in from the periodical auction, cash the checks and so on, and answer the phone. It would not be a demanding job for more than a few days each mouth—the sort of business when things are hectic for a couple of days and then you just sit around idle until the next auction comes up." Consciously, he was forcing his word patterns to match hers. The question that began "what exactly would this position with your antique gallery entail?" was echoed, for instance, in the phrase "the sort of business when things are hectic." He had matched the rise and fall of her speech cadences precisely.

He was also matching his voice and its rhythms to the effeminate clothes, the sissified speech affectations, and the woman's obvious expectations, based on her call—and now on her body language—but he was quite careful not to lay it on too thickly. All he wanted was enough to counterbalance her natural fears, offset his massive size a bit, and give her something to remember him by. He was more animated than usual, and he never allowed his rubbery face to sink into the look it normally wore when in repose.

"There is one other thing I wonder about—and it's something I would pay extra for, in fact considerably extra. A telephone. You know, I was going to break my longstanding rule and install a phone in the gallery itself, but I detest doing that. They're so intrusive! And—no more than we'd use it, I wonder…would you consider renting me the use of your phone for one day each month? Say for an additional two hundred a month?"

"Oh, certainly. I have a private line at my apartment, and you could use it one day a month. Would the calls be local?"

"Um. I wouldn't be using it to call out. We'd be receiving calls on it. I could run the number as our auction line."

"Of course. That would be fine." She shook her head. "I wouldn't charge that much, though. Not just for you using it one day a month."

"I appreciate that, Miss Roach. However I would like to pay it for this reason. Occasionally—I mean, perhaps two or three times a month—I might get a customer inquiring about an item listed in the mail auction. And if you didn't mind, here's what I'd like you to do: You answer the telephone in your normal way, and if they ask if this is the Norville Gallery you tell them yes, but that the director is out, and that I will return their call. Each evening I would give you a call and you'd pass those numbers along to me. You'd seldom get such inquiries, so it wouldn't become a bother. But if you'd be willing to allow the use of your phone in that manner I'd make your salary fourteen hundred a month instead of twelve hundred a month."

"Certainly," she said quickly, mentally counting the financial windfall. They spoke some more about the gallery and what the auctions were like. He'd chosen his person well. Elaine Roach was rather at ease now, evidently pleased by the nature of the work and the pay scale.

"It's done then." He stood up heavily and she got to her feet. "I'll start you on salary instantly, and I'll call you in the morning with your first day's duties." He saw something in her face, sensitive to sea changes as ever. "Monday, rather. I forgot what day it was." He said this in a hushed, prim voice, and she nodded her understanding, She had nothing against a homosexual employer. Perhaps she would find this a pleasant association after all. She mentally made a note to remember to use the word "gay" instead of homosexual.

"So, Mr. Norville, I'll be working out of my apartment essentially, and not at the gallery?"

"Yes. Pretty much so, essentially. You'll make a trip to the bank and post office now and again, but for the most part you'll just stay all nice and cozy, in your apartment." She brightened as he fed her lines back to her. Clearly she was someone who didn't relish being back out in the work force.

The job sounded wonderfully ideal to Elaine Roach, who had not been treated kindly by her fifty-four years on the planet. It was almost too good to be true. She also thought she sensed Mr. Norville's genuine pleasure with her qualifications and it was reassuring that at last she had met someone whose needs she in some way filled.

They said their goodbyes, and he came back inside the hotel room. If she learned at some point that Giles Cunningham was the name on the register as occupant of the room in which she'd met Tommy Norville, it could be explained away in the most understandable terms. Giles and Tommy were roommates. He would wait awhile and Tommy Norville would now cease to be, for a bit, except in print and over the phones.

For the moment, the image that stared back at Tommy Norville in the Hyatt Regency's mirror was one that bore surprisingly little resemblance—size aside—from that of the man who had not long ago occupied Cell 10 in the Violent Unit of D-Seg at Marion Federal Penitentiary. Clothes did indeed make the man. The bleached, newly shorn hair, and such touches as the "seamstress" bifocals, made a remarkable change. But it was his movements, in character, that added texture to the Norville persona.

Chaingang had observed an actor on a television talk show proclaiming what a terrific training ground the daytime soaps were for thespians. He'd watched a few minutes of these programs and found their broadly played, scenery-chewing histrionics laughably inept. Along with his many unique gifts, Bunkowski had the natural skills of a consummate actor: keen powers of observation and mimicry, a predisposition for thorough preparation, the ability to instantly summon up stored emotion, and the feel for a character's center. The acting and reacting he'd seen on the daytime dramas had been ludicrously unconvincing.

He intuitively knew that he'd hammed up the Norville character. If he played him again—and he would—the next time he'd not draw on such a broad stereotype. He filed away a quick critique of his kinesiology and a mental list of suggestions for how he might better locate Tommy's center, when next he came to life.

With that done he shed the character as much as possible. A cap would cover the hair when Giles Cunningham checked out, and he would forget to drop his door opener at the desk. The bellhop who took his bag to a waiting cab would find himself the beneficiary of another oversize tip, with a request to return the key card with thanks. The bill had been prepaid with checkout in mind. The fewer persons who saw Mr. Cunningham prior to his becoming nonexistent, the colder a trail he'd leave behind.

As always, his computer sorted options and retraced movements, calculating the time it would take the authorities to follow his paper trail along the interstate highway. He felt fairly confident that he'd lost his trackers, but for once Bunkowski couldn't have been more wrong.

Blue Springs, Missouri

In the parking lot of a shopping mall down the highway from Blue Springs Antiques Barn, the gigantic killer pulled out photocopies of ads, familiarizing himself with his merchandise, both real and imagined, seeing where the holes were in his presentations.

The first auction would be Wednesday night at six P.M., closing at midnight, Central Daylight Savings Time. By then the results of the first series of letters would have arrived and the collectors wishing to respond could reach Elaine Roach by telephone.

These were memorabilia collectors of one kind or another whose ads Tommy Norville had seen in various publications. It didn't matter what you were looking for, so long as it was shippable, the Norville Galleries probably had it: militaria, clocks, china, cut glass, French cameo, antique firearms, Indian Americana. Name a category and he stocked it in depth. Your top want, in each instance, was the item that caught his expert eye. You were prepared to pay the maximum for X item and he had X item in his next auction—what a coincidence! You could phone your bid in Wednesday night. In some cases, he even sent a Polaroid of the item in stock.

The ideal merch was something for which ten different collectors across the country lusted. By some coincidence again—on those particular items—there would be ten winners! He looked at the ads and computed the logistics of the come-on. First there would be a week while the invoices were mailed out to the winners. Allow another ten days for all those "winning" bidders to respond with their remittances, and he estimated a three—to three-and-a-half-week window between that moment and the time the money was in his pocket.

He was already sending in the ads for the direct priced-sale offering of collectible weaponry that would run more or less simultaneously. Tommy Norville had learned all these fields in the same way he'd learned everything else of a survival nature, and he knew everything from toxicology to locksmithing; he'd force-fed it to his brain.

For the past week, he'd been all over the Kansas City area, driving as far as fifty miles out to visit promising shops and galleries, photographing rare merchandise. Especially weapons. He'd even taken a few illicit shots in museums. The dealer's shops were much more lenient about permitting a would-be customer to "keep a visual record" of such-and such for his files. He'd learned there were dealers called "runners" who used such a technique, finding scarce items, running to find a buyer, then running back to buy the item only if they had a money-in-hand sale.

He read ".69-caliber flintlocks. Beautifully dec. 18th century. Gold-washed barrels and mounts." The rare pair of cased weapons represented an expenditure of $6.50 in gasoline, Polaroid film, and a flashbulb.

"Unique .55-caliber flintlock has solid ivory stock with silver and gilt inlays, enamel niello work and gorgeous cloisonné. Clean, superb, no cracks. Ivory ramrod is original. Fourteen-inch barrel octagonal at the breech. Lockplate has no bridle on frizzen. Ivory stock/carved dragon's head butt makes this a museum-quality flintlock." A gun collector's wet dream. Indeed, it was museum quality, all right. The nearby Patee Museum is where he'd obtained the photo.

The next half dozen with pictures were firearms that could actually be purchased from dealers within ten to fifty miles: an unusual wheellock from around 1600; a Japanese matchlock long rifle from the same time period, dripping in ornate brasswork; a little sterling sash pistol; a sheathed hunting sword dated 1550. Pieces Tommy Norville could actually buy and sell. Weapons with checkable histories to lend credibility to his scam.

The remainder of the auction was composed of fantasies, pure artifacts of the imagination, and scarce goodies with pictures and/or descriptions cribbed from other collectibles auctions.

". 58-cal. cased set of flintlock duellers by Wogdon. Extraordinary presentation set marked 'to the inestimable Conan Doyle from his admirer.' Signed Wogdon. Museum qu. pair of cased duellers. Pristine mint, lavish gilt and sterling inlays on long, slim barrels. Gold-lined b. vents. Set, complete with documentation from the author's estate, accompanied by engraved, gold powder flask rod, and inlaid bullet mold. Rare wood presentation case with brass corners, carved Sherlock Holmes image on lid of case, marked inside, Wogdon, London."

A more experienced weapons buff would have realized that Wogdon was not making cased dueling pistols when the creator of Holmes and Watson was alive, but nobody's perfect.

Fantasy listings would be certain to elicit a few outstanding bids, and they would gain attention for the priced-sale items to be offered at the same time.

When the first week to ten days' worth of remittances from the auction and the sale ads had been banked by the trustworthy Miss Roach, Tommy Norville would have her make a withdrawal. Shortly thereafter, the up and coming antique weapons dealer who ran the auction galleries would cease to exist.

A dissimilar-appearing but equally large man had once hired a nice lady to aid him in much the same type of enterprise, working from a nearby post-office drawer she had rented, and utilizing a bank account and telephone in her name. He'd netted over eleven thousand dollars profit from two sales of "rare regulator and advertising clocks."

When a chief postal inspector and local authorities finally got around to following this paper trail, they'd end up with a perplexed Elaine Roach, whose sissified Tommy Norville description would be somewhat at odds with the tenant of the upstairs office on East Minnesota Avenue, should they even track him to that particular lair. It was all most confusing. Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski was rebuilding his war treasury.

| Go to Table of Contents |