The Ninth Nightmare

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,