cracked open those cabinets and seen what I saw. But no one ever had. Not that anyone would have believed it.
There on little pedestals carved out of driftwood was an array of intricately carved shells, the craftsmanship remarkable, the artistry incredible, like nothing I’d ever seen. And the subject matter, too, was like nothing I’d ever seen…
…two beautiful girls hanging by their heels from rafters with their bodies slashed, delicate paint-brush red touching each wound…
…a lovely girl spread-eagled in pornographic detail as she lay with wide eyes and bulging tongue and a nylon knotted around her throat…
…a lovely blonde similarly arrayed but on the edge of the beach, with the carving catching the curl of the waves half covering her body as she too stared upward with wide dead eyes…
…and that same blonde, Sharron Wesley again, the only subject who had rated two miniature masterpieces, slung over that statue of a horse with hair hanging like Lady Godiva and her once lush bottom in the air with pin pricks of the carver’s artistry to indicate the decay.
And there were seven more scenes, seven other tableaus of murder, victims from somewhere, from who knew where, but all lovely young naked women, dead by murder, strangulation or the knife, in assorted grisly artistic variations.
On a bottom shelf was a sketchbook. I reached for it with a trembling hand. The cover was black and hard, like a library book, and it did not look new. This belonged to an artist who had used it for a while.
In that book were pencil drawings as skillful as they were horrific, scenes sketched at murder sites for the carver to take home and work from at his leisure. Some were not violent at all, rather scenes of victims taken from afar, as his subjects sat at outdoor cafes or went swimming or (framed in their bedroom windows) undressed. He had stalked his prey and prepared for his art, but for every exquisite carved shell of horror there were half a dozen sketches from various angles, capturing moments of stark terror in the faces of his “models.”
And among the preliminary sketches of those models, among the life studies that the artist prepared before the death studies to come, were half a dozen sketches of Velda. In some she was with me (though my face was barely sketched, of no interest to this Michelangelo) as we ate, or strolled on the beach, or when she sunbathed alone or…
I slammed the book shut.
And when I opened the other cabinets, I was not surprised to find neatly stacked, an assortment of clothing of the type females like those coeds, Doris Wilson, and, yes, Sharron Wesley might have worn. But also the feminine clothing of seven other, as-yet-unidentified, victims.
Little Poochie the harmless. Little Poochie the victim. Little Poochie the beachcomber, the dimwit, the idiot savant.
Little Poochie the homicidal maniac!
I rushed out of the shack onto the beach and the moon was gone, clouds had drowned it, and nothing was left but a gray shadow-torn stretch of sand and an ocean whose raging waves were the color of gun metal, foaming like a rabid animal.
Where had the bastard taken her?
My eyes searched the outside of the shack for a clue. I understood the rowboat now-he had strangled Sharron Wesley, then stuffed her in his patch-up rowboat and gone out as far as he dared, which had not been far, and dumped her. Then when she washed up a week later-on this same beach where he scavenged for shells and driftwood-he had taken the opportunity to create another artistic masterpiece using the same model. He had stuffed her bloated body, like the carcass of a mermaid flung to shore, into that old wheelbarrow and rolled her down the quiet, pre-season beach to where the park provided him with the perfect possibility for an artistic subject.
Lady Godiva by Stanley Cootz.
Goddamnit, if I’d only had the foresight to ask Pat to run a check, who knew what that name would have brought up?
But Poochie was too smart for me. He knew just how to hide. He created this moron persona and became a sort of invisible man.
How many beachfront communities had he drifted into, to take up residence in a shanty and play nonentity, while he stalked beautiful women and pursued his psychopathic art?
How many unsolved murders out there bearing his distinctive flourish of a signature would we discover in the aftermath?
But this was not the aftermath.
Right now we were very much in the midst of Poochie’s grisly artistry. Somewhere this minute he was staging a ghastly tableau with Velda as his model, his subject, and I didn’t know where the hell he had taken her!
Then I noticed it. The clouds slid by and revealed the moon and the moon revealed that thing that is the hardest of all to notice: an absence of something.
The cats.
Where were those sickly, scrawny cats? Those cats, one of which had torn my pant leg and the flesh beneath, were nowhere to be seen. They must have followed their master to the scene of his next artistic triumph.
And then I remembered: back at the Wesley place, those cats scrounging around those garbage cans; I’d seen them when I pulled into the drive and went after Dekkert. The mansion had been dark but the cats had been lingering around the edge of it, scavenging like their owner, waiting for him to finish.
I ran as fast as the sand would allow, skirting the dead boxer that had been mean to Poochie’s cats, getting its neck broken like its mistress, and then cut up through the trees and toward the house, where dead men sunned themselves in the moonlight, and a safe full of money sat with its door yawned open and nobody giving a damn, the coppery scent of blood in the wind with a cordite chaser and the acrid after-stench of bodies that had soiled themselves as the sorry souls within had left this world.
The big colonial house loomed before me, a hulking dark shape like a crouched beast about to strike. No lights on. No sounds. Then the screech of one cat protesting the actions of another sent me scurrying closer, staying down, 45 tight in my fist. The felines were skulking around outside the garage now, fighting over the remains of some week-old bony half-eaten fish.
The garage door, I remembered, was the roll-type and it made a certain amount of noise. So I opened it slowly and eased it up just enough to throw myself under, rolling to a stop near the parked Cadillac. Sharron Wesley’s fancy private ride.
I stayed silent, waiting for a reaction-a light to go on, a shot to be fired, a shout, anything.
Nothing.
I got up and leaned against the hood of the car and it was hot. As if I’d touched a stove, I brought my hand away, knowing that this vehicle had been recently driven, and noticing that it faced with its tail to the garage door.
And when I had seen it a few days ago, the Caddy’s nose had been pointing that way.
Now a puzzle piece slid snugly into place. Chief Chasen at Wilcox had said of the two missing coeds: they had been seen “piling into a fancy car…”
And Poochie, the ragged little next-door neighbor in the shack down the beach, the nuisance who spent way too much time around the Wesley grounds, would be in a perfect position to keep track of the comings and goings of Sharron Wesley. Likely her trips to the city were in the company of Deputy Dekkert, and her “fancy car” had been left behind.
Sharron, remember, had a habit of leaving the keys in the glove compartment. That’s where they’d been the other day and that’s where they were now.
And Poochie could drive all right. Just because he was a “dimwit” beachcomber, that didn’t mean he couldn’t handle a vehicle. Hadn’t he told me that he helped Sharron Wesley’s party guests get their cars out of the sand, for tips? And that sometimes he wasn’t strong enough to push, so he would get behind the wheel and they would push?
He sure as hell hadn’t used his trusty wheelbarrow to haul Velda over here. He had grabbed her out of that phone booth, slugged her or chloroformed her or some goddamn thing, and brought her over in that Caddy, the very
