“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.”
