The Bone Polisher

11 ~ Killing Them Twice

Norbert Schultz had teeth like a mouthful of yellow paint chips. He’d been steeping them in coffee and nicotine for thirty or forty years, and they’d finally achieved the rich and variable patina of long-buried bones. In his work as a psychiatrist, he bared them frequently on the mistaken assumption that a smile made him look friendly. What it made him look like was someone who gargled with urine.

He was showing them to me now, without even knowing he was doing it, letting me know how happy he was to see me. We’d met under difficult circumstances when he was under contract to the LAPD, lending his expertise in the case of a lad who found meaning in life by setting people on fire and had decided to target me. Schultz was back in private practice now, but he still had a pipeline to the Department, and I was taking advantage of it.

“Five of them,” he said without consulting the bulky LAPD printout on the desk in front of him. We were in his office on the ninth floor of a peeling, half-deserted medical high rise at the corner of Pico and Bundy, south and west of West Hollywood. The office was done in the Jung Moderne style favored by psychiatrists everywhere: industrial furniture, a battered leather couch, and spiky seventies abstracts on the wall. Some of them seemed to be made of stretched and pasted yarn, a medium that, for me, at least, ranks right up there with tempera on black velvet.

Friday afternoon had rolled around at last, bringing the promise of a more than usually stifling weekend, and the office’s unwashed windows offered a daunting view of traffic clogging both streets in all four directions. Dirty sunlight highlighted Schultz’s really remarkable nose as he ran a finger down the page to check his memory and then glanced up at me. “This is between us, right?”

“Right.” I’d assured him it was confidential four or five times when I’d called him the day before, as soon as I was sure Spurrier was gone, but Schultz was a cautious man.

He went on being cautious. “Who’s your client?”

It was a good question. I’d turned down the five hundred dollars Christy had offered me to go talk to Max, and no one had mentioned money since. “I suppose you could say I’m working for the victim.” Another freebie for Max.

He nodded automatically, glanced down at the list, and then heard what I’d said. His head stayed down but his eyes came back to me. “How’s he going to pay you?”

“Think of it as pro bono. And don’t worry about it. It doesn’t have anything to do with keeping this talk confidential. Treat me like a patient.”

“Might not be a bad idea,” he said, keeping a lemon-yellow forefinger in place on the page. “A little introspection might do you some good.”

This was getting to be a familiar theme. “I’m not interesting enough to think about for any length of time.”

“You have no idea,” he said, giving me the teeth again. Fluorescent light gleamed on his skull. “You’re a locked box, Simeon, and that’s not healthy.”

“Five, you said?” I asked, trying not to sound impatient.

Schultz looked disappointed. “Counting the man here, the new one. I’m assuming they were all killed by the same person.” He drummed his fingers on the desk and then realized that the gesture had cost him his place. “Why aren’t you married?” he asked, searching for it.

“Norbert,” I said, “there’s already a small caucus working on that issue. Is there any reason to think it might not be the same person?”

“Always a possibility,” he said. “But there hasn’t been much press on this guy, so a copycat isn’t very likely.”

“Why hasn’t there been much press?”

He stabbed the paper with the yellow finger and made a grimace of distaste. “A good reason and a bad one. The bad one is that the press isn’t much interested in what happens in the gay community. The good reason is that this clown wants press. And the kind of press he wants, most papers don’t want to give.”

“Tell me about it. I’ve had enough enigmatic this week to last me a year.”

“Well, he’s essentially trying to kill them twice.”

“Norbert, are you getting metaphysical on me?”

He opened the desk drawer and took out a pack of Benson amp; Hedges to replace the empty he’d just tossed in the wastebasket and tapped it twice against the back of the hand splayed across the page. “Nah. It’s perfectly obvious. First he kills them the conventional way, always by beating, followed by an amputation with something sharp-” He paused to pull at the cellophane with his teeth.

“A carpet cutter,” I said.

His eyes came up, looking interested, and then he went cross-eyed as he lit up. “Could be. Sharp but not very long. That’s indicative right there because it means he carries his tools with him, the mark of a real obsessive. Not that there’s much doubt about that, considering the amount of effort he expends.”

“You were telling me about that.”

Schultz blew smoke at me without thinking about it, and then fanned it away apologetically. “He set the pattern with the first one,” he said over a stream of smoke. The printout claimed his attention. “This is a little more than two years ago. Victim was in his fifties, a college teacher, living in Chicago. They all live in big cities, all come from smaller ones. All leading, as novelists used to like to say, double lives. At home, they’re straight. In the city, they’re openly gay.”

“How many cities?”

“Three. Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles.”

“You said there were five.”

He showed me his lower teeth this time, the worst ones, drawing them over his upper lip. It made him look like a shrunken head. “We’ll get to that. Anyway, he killed the guy, although that’s an understatement. First he kicked him to death, and then he cut him open from groin to sternum. One swipe, clean as a razor.” I thought of the sound the cutter had made as it slit the blankets, and something small and cold stirred in the pit of my stomach. “In fact, they thought it might be a razor at first.”

“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.”

“Is he gay?”

The eyebrows went up, making wrinkles like tiny rice terraces all the way to the top of his bald head. “He’s not acting out.” He listened to what he’d said and blinked twice. “I mean, murdering people certainly qualifies as acting out, but I’d be surprised if he engaged in physical homosexual acts. My guess is that he leads his victims on, learns as much as he can about them without giving them what they want, what he thinks they want. The murder is the consummation. Of course,” he added apologetically, “this could all be bunk.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

“Whenever we hate something deeply,” he said, “it’s almost always something we recognize in ourselves. Remember, when you point at something, only one finger points away. The other three point back at you.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Can I use that?”

He grinned, a flash of cheddar yellow. “It’s not original.”

“What about a cop who beats up on gays?”

“You mean methodically? Singling them out? Without cause?”

“He’s infamous for it.”

“Oh, dear. He needs help. And he’s not likely to look for it.” The corners of his mouth went down, making him look like a man fighting stomach cramps. “LAPD?”

“Sheriff,” I said.

He looked relieved. “Don’t know much about them.” The light flashed again, signaling Miss Trink’s finger, or perhaps her ponytail, on the button. “Damn that woman,” he said.

“The healing attitude.”

“Feh. You’ve got to be tough to heal crazy people. I’ll bet our boy is burning to talk. I’ll bet he’s keeping a diary.”

“You think so?”

“He’s on a crusade,” Schultz said. “He’s cleaning up the world, making it safe for the heterosexual middle class. He sees himself on the side of the angels.”

I got up and walked across the office and removed the baby-poop yarn construction from the wall. “Who on earth does these things?” I asked. “And why?”

His face stiffened. “My wife.”

I hadn’t even known he was married. He had the sloppy fussiness that often descends on single men in middle age. “It’s certainly an unusual medium.”

“She works with children,” he said severely. “Yarn therapy is a good way to get them to externalize. Gradually, she began to do it herself.”

I replaced it on its nail. “It’s very…” I began, and then hit a wall. I had absolutely no idea where to go.

“It’s calming,” he said.

“Does she need a lot of calming?”

“I mean for my patients. It calms my patients. Some of them look at it throughout the entire session.”

“It suggests childhood,” I said to mollify him. “Infancy, in fact.”

“Well,” he said approvingly. “There you are.”

“The two killings in Chicago,” I asked. “Were they consecutive?”

“Could you straighten the assemblage please? Up a bit on the right. I was wondering when you’d ask that. Yes, they were. So were the two in New Orleans. So you see the pattern.”

“He’s going to do it again here.”

“In two to three weeks,” he said. “If the pattern holds.”

“Will it?”

“That’s another reason I wish I were back working with the cops,” Schultz said fretfully. “These patterns always hold.”