The Delilah Complex

Fifty

He had only slept for four hours, and fitfully at that, because he was anxious. The New York Times was always delivered to his apartment door at five-thirty. Would there be another article this morning? Another mention of the last murdered man? Another criticism of how long the police were taking to make any headway with the cases?

He padded into his kitchen in his Frette terry-cloth robe and turned on the kettle. While the water boiled, he took out a Limoges cup and saucer, a silver teaspoon and a box of loose black tea. He filled a bamboo basket with the tea leaves, pinched a sprig of mint off the plant on his windowsill, rinsed it and dropped it in the cup just as the kettle started to sing.

As he poured the water, he heard the thud of the paper on his doormat and left the tea to steep while he retrieved the Times.

Sitting on the couch, the cup on his coffee table, he scanned the front page. Nothing. It took about five minutes to search through the National section and the Metro section, looking for any press about the Scarlet Society murders.

Nothing.

This was going to ruin his day. Was going to make the low-level depression he never escaped escalate to midlevel.

No. He couldn’t give in.

Abandoning the paper, he returned to the kitchen, heated up the water again, toasted an English muffin, slathered it with raspberry jam from Fauchon in Paris, and took his breakfast back into the living room. He knew what to do. He’d done it before and it had helped.

Half of the muffin in hand, he stood in front of the wall of articles and, beginning with the very first, reread them. He didn’t skip a word, and paid even more attention to the sentences he’d underlined with the red marker. Some particularly pleased him; others annoyed him.

He had read each of these articles dozens of times by now, but it still never got boring. He loved seeing the black type on the newsprint, the way the serifs bled into the paper, the way the lines marched like soldiers up and down the page, in perfect formation. More than once, he lost the meaning of the words, forgetting that each connected to the next to make a phrase, which added to the next made a sentence, which added to the next made a paragraph. Instead, he saw the straight lines and curved forms, the dots and dashes and negative spaces between them. He ran his finger over the designs, seeing the patterns in the way the margins broke and how the indents made holes. And there was the abstract design of his marker-the only color amid the monochromatic type. An artist, he appreciated the way he’d slashed through the colorless information with red, marking all mentions of when the loved ones had last seen the victims alive and what the mood and manner of the men had been. He’d also highlighted direct quotes from the police-specifically Detective Noah Jordain. No matter how well he couched what he said, it was all too clear to Paul that Jordain really had not made any inroads in identifying a suspect or discovering the whereabouts of any of the bodies.

Paul had starred-again in red marker-every instance in which the reporter had hinted at what the connection between the men was. It was very subtle. He wondered how many people had picked up on it. Had the police?

“The scarlet numbers on the bottom of his feet were…”

In each article, Betsy Young had referred to the color of the markings that way. It was always scarlet. Not red, which would have been a much more obvious choice. Or vermilion, which probably would have been the choice of anyone educated in the study of color. Not bloodred, which would have been slightly flowery for the New York Times, but a possibility considering the crime.

No. She had used scarlet as her adjective of choice.

Who was she, and what did she know?

He thought of going down to the Times offices and meeting her. Trying to trick her into revealing her knowledge of the Scarlet Society.

But how?

He resumed rereading.

There was one section he’d accentuated for entirely different reasons. He looked at these two paragraphs now, focusing on them, wondering yet again about this sexpert and how smart she really was.

Dr. Morgan Snow, a sex therapist who works at the Butterfield Institute and who was instrumental in solving the recent Magdalene Murders, said that there are signals in photographs the paper has chosen not to run that these might be crimes of a sexual nature. In one, an unseen photographer shot directly between the victim’s legs. There is black-and-blue bruising on the victims’ wrists, ankles and testicles. This, said Dr. Snow, strongly suggests a sexual component to the crimes.

“Black-and-blue discoloration often indicates S & M. Restraints can heighten both the sense of control and submission in sex play,” said Snow.

He liked Dr. Snow’s observations. He’d heard about the Butterfield Institute but he hadn’t been there yet. In his search for the right doctor to help him, the institute had been next on his list. Maybe it was time to go there. He had reason enough with his personal problems. He could make a convincing case that the purpose of his visit was other than to discover just what Young had shown Dr. Snow, and what she really believed about the motivation of the killer. He was desperate to hear someone describe the photographs to him in person. To listen to the soft and hard sounds of the words that would detail the malevolent restraints and the defiled bodies. To actually have someone talk to him about the black-and-blue marks and what they suggested about how painful and humiliating the abuse was that these men had suffered before they had been killed.

Walking back into the kitchen, Paul heated the water once more. The next cup of tea was even weaker than the last. Too much caffeine too early wasn’t a good idea. He hadn’t taken his medication yet. He had another fifteen minutes before he would open the amber pill bottle and spill the poison into his palm. The calm would be welcome, the dullness would not. Every day he teetered on the edge of not taking the pills. Occasionally he didn’t. Those days he was not himself. Or he was more himself than on the other days. His dick could get hard again if he didn’t take the pills. It would swell and rise up and remind him of what it felt like to be in control of his own body. But his mind would rebel. His head would explode. He would want to lie on the pavement on the sidewalk and have women walk all over him with their high heels. He would want to wipe out every other man who got in the way of him and those women. He would be on fire with wanting and hurting. And then he would crash. The depression would overwhelm him. Rob him of any desire to eat or sleep or stand or walk or go to the bathroom or make an effort to dress himself.

It was all too much. It was all enough.

Abandoning the inadequate tea, he opened a cabinet and pulled out the thick New York City phone book. Flipping through the thin pages, he found what he was looking for, and using the bright red marker that he took from his bathrobe pocket, he copied down the address and phone number of the Butterfield Institute.