Dreams in the Key of Blue Read online

  THE COLOR OF MURDER

  I pulled the old Volvo to the side of the road at the bottom of the hill.

  So, he has time to play with the girls.

  I climbed from the car into ankle-deep mud. Rain smacked into my face.

  And the girls have time to play.

  I left the car with the driver’s-side door ajar, engine running, interior light glowing, and hiked up the hill through the muck. As I approached the house, I left the road and moved among the trees.

  Music and laughter drifted from the house.

  Did you ever have dreams that sang to you? Mine are blue.

  Death dreams.

  “The girl that keeps touching his arm dies,” I whispered, staring through the window and wondering if I could get off a decent shot.

  Everyone dies sometime.

  I pushed myself up from the muck, wiped the rain from my eyes, and struggled through the scrub growth. I found the road, and hiked the hundred yards downhill to the car.

  If you would like to draw a picture, I have finished with the blue.

  I will be using the red now.

  Books by John Philpin

  FICTION

  THE PRETTIEST FEATHERS (with Patricia Sierra)

  TUNNEL OF NIGHT (with Patricia Sierra)

  DREAMS IN THE KEY OF BLUE

  NONFICTION

  BEYOND MURDER (with John Donnelly)

  STALEMATE

  For Elizabeth Frost Knappman

  the vacant wide October sky

  was my only friend in the end

  when I sleepwalked from the stage

  and spoke my final line:

  my dreams are in the key of blue

  I STARED AT THE WALL, THE SOURCE OF AN INSISTENT scraping and scratching.

  “Mice,” the cop said.

  I resisted the impulse to smash through the ancient plaster that remained in place only through the grace of generations of wallpaper and artlessly applied paint.

  The metallic stink of blood stung my throat and fused with the acrid scent of decay, and the fragrance of citrus fruit.

  When cops work a crime scene, they dust with black fingerprint powder, spray magical mists, shine high-tech blue and black lights into sinks and shower stalls in search of blood traces, hairs, skin cells, semen.

  They do not spray orange-scented air freshener.

  Someone patiently peeled and ate an orange.

  I looked from the wall to the floor, where a dark stain stretched like a four-foot, crimson-black Rorschach blot waiting for a subject’s response.

  A single word nailed itself behind my eyes: slaughter.

  My hands were cold, but I sweated in the overheated space. I grew dizzy with the smells and mind-clouds, and the grating racket concealed behind plaster and lath.

  Citrus consumed, seeds placed neatly on rind, traces of blood.

  The crime scene photographs I was looking through showed a once-attractive brunette, nude, splayed in the middle of the glistening stain. Her throat was sliced—three deep, yawning wounds. Her torso was riddled with punctures.

  Then there was the coup de grâce.

  “Looks like he tried to cut off her head,” the cop said.

  I clenched my teeth and swallowed hard.

  “This one’s name was—”

  “I know who she is,” I interrupted.

  I tossed the glossy eight-by-tens onto the coffee table, crouched, and touched the carmine blemish with my fingertips.

  When life ends, some of us pack ourselves in burnished copper cases for a short descent into the earth, others choose to go quickly to ashes, and some are denied choice—abandoned as waste for cleaning crews to eradicate.

  “I knew her,” I said.

  I DROVE INTO RAGGED HARBOR, MAINE, AND FELT AN immediate sense of déjâ vu.

  The freedom that seemed so illusory to me as a street kid in Boston’s Roxbury section, I discovered south of the city on Nantasket Beach in my teens. I prowled the bay side of my seven-mile peninsula, explored each inlet and cove, examined skate eggs, horseshoe crabs, and sandshark cadavers. Then I shifted my attention to the ocean’s infinite rhythms, and probed seaweed and driftwood, new treasures that arrived with each tide change. I met the resident scavengers and predators; I knew the wildly shifting ocean currents, the indifference of an immense and surging sea.

  I drove Ragged Harbor’s mile-long causeway between mudflats and seawalls, and into the village. The inner harbor on my right was a bay, a haven for water craft. Beyond a cove and a breakwater on the left, the dark Atlantic—my familiar friend—throbbed.

  The smell of dead fish billowed from stacks of crab pots. Great black-backed gulls bombed the rocks along the breakwater with mussels and clams, then dropped from the sky to pick at the shattered shells with their orange beaks. A dory rested upside down on a stony beach.

  Gulls screamed; sandpipers minced ahead of low tide’s bantam waves; terns dove at the cracked shells left behind by the gulls; a cormorant’s head and long neck slipped through the harbor’s placid surface.

  I felt as if I had rediscovered a private paradise, a place where I could continue my lifelong love affair with the sea.

  “Why move to Michigan?” my daughter Lane asked when, years ago, I had announced my imminent departure from Boston. “That’s nearly midway between the two oceans. You said you couldn’t stand the thought of being landlocked.”

  “Well, that guarantees that I’ll be back.”

  Seven years after that conversation, I drove into Ragged Harbor’s village.

  The town lived a divided life. A leaning white church behind an erect white picket fence, the general store, a hardware store with gas pump in front, the post office and police station housed in the municipal building—all indicated an old New England community. “Willy’s Twice-Daily Whale Cruises,” guaranteeing sightings, and “Ragged Ts,” each shirt sporting a jagged neck seam, lured summer tourists.

  I consulted my map, turned left at the second of the two stoplights, and drove into the community’s third identity, the college town.

  Harbor College was small, four hundred women on a hilltop with views of the Atlantic Ocean and the cove that served as safe harbor for dumpy lobster and crab boats, fishing trawlers, and sleek cruisers. The fieldstone and wood college buildings, originally a seminary, dated from the nineteenth century. With religious fervor fading in the 1940s, the seminary closed its doors. Progressive educators approached the board of directors and proposed the creation of a small, student-centered liberal arts college. In 1955, the board ceded the campus to the college.

  Stuart Gilman, my contact at the college, occupied an office in the administration building, but lacked a title. The short, paunchy, balding man was power-attired in reds and browns, and deceptively satin-tongued. Had it not been for his extensive repertoire of nervous gestures, he would have made a well-oiled public relations drone.

  “I’ve heard that Dr. Lucas Frank is a recluse,” Gilman said, bobbing his head. “I was surprised that you agreed to come out here.”

  “The timing of the invitation was right,” I said, feeling not the slightest need to tell him anything more.

  During my years as a practicing psychiatrist, I ministered to the ills of the neurotic and psychotic, the personality disordered, and those who were just plain confused. I quickly tired of the “same stories, different faces” routine. Then, when the faces suddenly looked the same, I felt like I was drowning in a mad scientist’s genetic sink. It did not help when managed-care companies insisted that they would set my fees and grab quick peeks at my files whenever the spirit moved them.

  My work was never interesting or challenging enough, so, on the side, I developed personality profiles of ki
llers, rapists, and any other purveyors of mayhem who drifted my way. Charming, no?

  Police detectives became my best customers, as they sought new insights into the crimes and criminals they were charged to investigate. Their municipalities did not pay well, but the work was far more satisfying. Unlike HMOs, cops did not demand monthly reports in triplicate, written in a jargon that sounded like glossolalia emanating from one hell of a Pentecostal bingo night.

  But even that work was not enough. I felt compelled to chase the bastards down. Whenever I grew impatient with law enforcement’s investigative or interrogative techniques, I developed my own. Most of the time I operated within the law. Sometimes I considered it necessary to… improvise. A serial killer doesn’t recite a Miranda warning before slitting your throat and disposing of you in six counties. Why should I bother with the law?

  There was never any slowing down for me, not until I said goodbye to craziness and said hello to my retreat at Lake Albert in upstate Michigan. I quit the business, took up bass fishing, listened to music cranked loud enough to crack plaster. I confined my communication with the world to a fax machine that my daughter, Lane, a homicide detective in New York City, gave me and insisted I plug in.

  In the past few months, I had begun to feel as if my half dozen years of retirement were years spent on the run. Before I agreed to teach a course on gender and serial violence in the women’s studies program at Harbor College, I was bogged down in a slough of depression. I had turned my back on the demons that haunted my professional life, and in retaliation they crept up on me, nipped at my backside, invaded my dreams. I was restless, not sleeping well, and suffering from a world-class case of anhedonia—a total loss of interest in the pursuits that I most enjoyed. Translation? I was bored to the brink of a vegetative state. The time had come to declare myself unretired.

  “Are you on the faculty, Mr. Gilman?”

  “It’s Stu. I’m the liaison between MI and the college. Harbor is the primary recipient of the educational grants that MI awards each year. I don’t think it’s exaggerating to say that this place would fold without our financial support. In addition to the cash we provide, we also own several buildings in town, including the house where you’ll be staying. MI is paying your stipend and expenses, of course.”

  Gilman was not gloating. His tone and attitude suggested that he disapproved of the arrangement. I doubted, however, that he objected to his office, a virtual showplace of the finest leathers and woods, albeit dusty and appearing unused.

  “I’m afraid you’re way ahead of me, Stu,” I said. “What is MI?”

  “You’ve never heard of Martin International?”

  I shook my head.

  “Huh,” he grunted. “It was Melanie’s idea to invite you.”

  “You may as well tell me who Melanie is while you’re at it.”

  Gilman’s head wobbled and his shoulders jerked. “Melanie Martin is Martin International. She’s the company’s founder, principal owner, and CEO. We’re a small firm, but easily one of the most successful and powerful enterprises of its kind in the world. Melanie insists on serving as a board member here. She monitors the meetings by phone.”

  Five years ago, Gilman continued, Martin International was nothing more than a $200-perhour consulting firm specializing in organizational development for a dozen American companies. Melanie Martin was fresh out of Harvard Business School and possessed by a single obsession: to build the most powerful consulting network in the world. The company’s operations in Mexico and Canada were natural moves after GATT and NAFTA. Europe always made financial sense. Countries in the Far East, the Pacific Rim, transformed Martin International into a multibillion-dollar power broker for the politicians who regulated the moves and mergers of Martin’s former corporate clients.

  My quick read was that the company had done the sideways slither from business to politics.

  “Our clients don’t close deals on anything without MI’s… input,” Gilman concluded.

  I was not sure, but I had the feeling that he had wanted to say MI’s “approval,” then yielded to a late surge of restraint.

  Without any effort, I had managed to never hear of a company with the kind of money and influence usually reserved for a Nike or a Disney. I knew what GM and Wal-Mart were, but Martin International was a mysterious Goliath.

  I had also never heard of Melanie Martin. She obviously knew who I was. I decided that was unfair and would have to be rectified.

  GILMAN INTRODUCED ME TO JAYCIE WAYLON, A MEMBER of my seminar, who escorted me to Bailey’s Silo, the building that housed my classroom. The red, barnlike structure loomed at the north end of the oval drive.

  “It really was a barn,” Waylon said. “When this was a seminary, they kept horses there.”

  “Why did the seminarians need horses?” I asked.

  We walked in silence for a moment, then Jaycie looked up at me. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe they just liked to ride. Nobody ever asked me that.”

  “They should’ve been reading their Bibles,” I muttered.

  Jaycie laughed. “You have an unusual way of looking at things.”

  She was a senior, an attractive young woman whose brown eyes laughed when she did.

  We wandered on oiled hardwood floors through the hallways and found the room that Gilman had assigned me. Faculty members stopped and introduced themselves—Ted in tweed and English Lit, shaggy-haired Molly in history, Steve Weld in tie-dye and communications. Most of them struck me as psychologically institutionalized, wondering how students simply drifted through on their way somewhere else, somewhere in the real world.

  The students smiled, nodded as we passed each other in the hall, but were not driven by the same compulsion to share names, shake hands, and tell me how many years they had been “on the hill.”

  My classroom featured fifteen-foot ceilings, dangling light fixtures, radiators that clanked and hissed, a black slate chalkboard, and a wall of windows that offered a view of the harbor islands. The desk-chair combinations were vintage 1950s, branded with the carved initials of subsequent generations.

  As we entered the room, Jaycie whispered, “I’ll find out why they kept horses.”

  I was impressed with the students in my seminar. Dawn Kramer, who resembled Sinead O’Connor in her bald period, came to class armed with a copy of June Stephenson’s Men Are Not Cost-Effective. Like many of her peers, she dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and fleece vest.

  “Why should I pay taxes and fees to fund jails and courts and police departments at the same rate you pay?” Kramer asked. “Women are responsible for only four percent of corrections department expenses.”

  Kramer got no argument from me. The human male’s evolution clearly has lagged from when the first Neanderthal stood outside his cave, picked up a rock, gestured in a menacing manner toward his captive spouse, and said, “Cook.”

  In addition, the male-dominated criminal justice system has developed a lexicon of excuses for women who do engage in aggressive behavior. Even if the courts were to hold women accountable for behavior typically excused as premenstrual, menstrual, post-partum, or menopausal medleys of hormones and emotions, I doubted that women would achieve criminal parity.

  Jaycie Waylon, my guide and equestrian researcher, was a tall, slender brunette, a business major who intended to pursue a graduate degree in organizational psychology. “Aggression fascinates me,” she said. “I’ve read about the things that people do to each other and I don’t understand them. I’ve read Konrad Lorenz and some of the other ethologists, but I don’t see how we can generalize from instinctual animal behavior to human atrocities. There has to be some other explanation.”

  “Tigers might get into an occasional territorial tiff,” I agreed, “but they don’t prey on one another. With the exception of some fish, we’re unique in that regard. Hell of a claim to fame, isn’t it?”

  Amanda Squires was raven-haired and dressed in jeans and a red flannel shirt, the latter unbut
toned to reveal a Patti Smith T-shirt. “I read your last book,” she said. “Harry Tower, Stanley Markham, George West. Except for the victims, there weren’t any women in it. Aside from references to male sexual pathology, there was very little about gender.”

  “It’s an issue that I’ve thought about over the years,” I said. “I haven’t done much with it. I have a few ideas that I’d like to explore with this class, but I hope that the group generates some ideas of its own. Did you want some background on the subject?”

  A few heads nodded.

  “Researchers have found evidence of varieties of abuse, often sadistic, in the histories of men who behave violently,” I began. “They estimate that as many as seventy-five percent of all violent offenders were maltreated during childhood. The theory is that these men experience their pain, then inflict suffering on others.”

  “Vengeance,” Waylon said.

  “Or, they’ve learned violence as a way of dealing with the world. There are many more men who experience trauma and don’t become aggressors. We don’t know why. Each clinical discipline seems to have its own theory. The general belief about women who kill is that they have turned their trauma inward, and that childhood incidents in which they were trapped, helpless, and repeatedly preyed upon, especially by someone they trusted, caused a fragmenting of personality. Men and women dissociate, or split off, feelings and experience. With the predatory male, the splitting seems to assist him in his violence. Women are perceived as candidates for multiple personality disorder, which DSM-IV, the psychiatric bible that metamorphoses nearly as fast as the phone book, has relabeled dissociative identity disorder.”

  “The man takes his pain and lashes out,” Waylon said, smiling at my editorial comment, “but the woman collapses inwardly. Both are coping, but managing to survive only in ways that are destructive.”

  I nodded. “That’s a succinct and effective way to put it. I want to add that this gender distinction is a popular view, but I don’t necessarily subscribe to the theory.”