Valentine, page 21
His new identity, he thought. Yes. It’s time. Now.
One day, a month into his parole, he went to the Pittsburgh branch of his bank in Mill City. The eighty thousand he’d left there thirteen years before had nearly doubled: he figured he could well afford what he was going to do now. He then went back to the prison to visit his friends, Eric and Benny. Sitting on the other side of the bulletproof glass panel from them had been odd, downright embarrassing, but he needed information that only Benny could supply. Benny had, in more than thirty years in prison, become a living encyclopedia of useful criminal information: he told Victor where to go and what to ask for. Victor thanked his friend, lied that he would visit again soon, and returned to Pittsburgh.
At the end of seven weeks of stockroom work, when the parole officer had relaxed surveillance and was looking the other way, Victor Dimorta left the rooming house one morning, walked two blocks west to Chatham Center, and entered the taxi waiting there for him. He was driven to a private clinic on the outskirts of the city.
Twelve weeks and three operations later, he was no longer Victor Dimorta.
He was Valentine.
He emerged from the clinic’s post-op facility on August 23, three and a half years ago, and began what felt like his longest wait. He waited for months, living in a motel in a small town near Pittsburgh. In this time, he finally lost his virginity—with a vengeance. He employed the two prostitutes who worked out of the motel’s bar and grill, and took them to his room. There, he asked them to teach him everything they knew, everything that pleased a woman. Every way to make her tremble at his touch. He spent entire weekends in bed with them, sometimes singly, sometimes both at the same time, until they both assured him that he was no longer merely having sex with them: he was making love to them, and extremely well, too.
He made frequent pilgrimages to his home in Mill City, now an abandoned shell in a row of ramshackle houses on the hill above the dying town. He had to be careful approaching the house, because the state police were looking for him. Still, every few weeks he found himself there again, sleeping in his childhood bed and eating at the rotting table in the dusty dining room. In the years since, he’d been drawn back there again and again, often living there for weeks at a time, alone and unseen. It was his home, the only home he’d ever known. And now that his parents weren’t there, it was perfect.
He spent a great deal of time inspecting himself in the full-length mirror inside the door of the upstairs bathroom. He would stand before it naked, drinking in this handsome, powerfully built new person he had become. This sexy, friendly animal who could excite women with his grin and satisfy them with his body.
He was Valentine.
And he was going to kill the four Elements. Every last fucking one of them.
On January 26, three years ago, the waiting was over. He flew to Los Angeles. He rented a room in a quiet part of town. He rented a Mercedes. He went to Rodeo Drive and bought a new wardrobe. Then he drove to Sharon Williams’s apartment complex and began to watch her.
The waitress shuffled over with fresh coffee as he remembered the picnic in Los Angeles, and the second meeting, a year later in Boulder. He smiled.
The next one on his list, Cass MacFarland, was the most difficult of the four to find. She was not in Montclair, New Jersey, anymore. Taking a tip from the relocated Belinda, he’d decided to locate Cass in August, a full six months before Valentine’s Day, and it was a good thing he did.
He went to Montclair and began his search. For three days, he checked out every place near her old home where he thought people might know her. He asked every neighbor on her street and came up empty. He asked bartenders and waitpeople in every restaurant and tavern in a two-mile radius. Nothing. Finally, on a hunch based on their major at Hartley, he went into the nearest bookstore to her childhood home.
Bingo. The middle-aged couple behind the counter knew Cassandra very well. They’d watched her grow from a girl to a woman. She’d always been one of their best customers. Read all the time, probably because she. wanted to be a writer. She used to come in with her husband, before the divorce. She left Montclair then. Where did she go? he asked. Well, they didn’t know where she’d moved to—but David would. David was her older brother, an actor who lived in New York City, and he and Cass were very close. So sad about his disinheritance, the wife observed. He’s gay, you know. . . .
There were only two David MacFarlands in the Manhattan directory. He got him on the first try. He was an old friend of Cass’s from Hartley, in town on business. How could he reach her?
The brother surprised him. Well, I can’t just tell someone that on the phone, he said. But if you’ll give me your name, I’ll mention it to her the next time I call her. . . .
Victor slammed down the phone: he hadn’t been expecting that. Cursing his luck, he left Montclair and went straight to the address on West Forty-fourth Street in New York.
David MacFarland was either a tall, lanky, handsome man with black hair or a slightly shorter, equally good-looking blond with a mustache. The blond man was obviously ill, and he walked slowly, painfully, with the help of a cane. He watched them coming and going from the building a couple of times. They lived in the basement apartment of the four-story brownstone.
It was easy. He’d learned all about lockpicking from Benny, the old lifer. He’d studied fundamentals of electronics in one of his brownie-point courses. A quick trip to a shop on Broadway and he was all set.
He checked into a fleabag around the corner, went back to David MacFarland’s building, and waited. That evening, the two men came up the steps to the street and hailed a cab. Both were holding brightly wrapped birthday gifts. Wherever they were going, he reasoned, they’d probably be a while. He waited until the cab turned the corner before bounding down the steps.
There was a deadbolt on the door. He stood there, frustrated and furious, casting his gaze around for some other means of entry. Then he laughed and put his picking device back in his pocket. The window next to the door was slightly open: someone had forgotten to close it.
The first thing he did was look for an address book, or anything in the apartment that might have the address, or even a phone number. The leatherbound Filofax he found in the bedroom obviously belonged to the roommate, and there were no Mac-Farlands listed. So, plan B. In ten minutes, the bug was in the phone receiver and he was in his room around the comer, setting up the tape machine. Then he went out for a steak dinner.
He spent the next three days exploring Wonderland, this beautiful, exciting city he’d read about and seen in movies. He went to museums and Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building and Macy’s. He saw his first Broadway musical. New York was such a perfect place to get lost in, to be anonymous in. He knew, before those three days had passed, that he was going to live here. He’d find a place—but first . . .
On the evening of the third day, he came back to the room and played the tape back. In the two previous days, he’d heard mundane conversations between the roommate, Rick—apparently the blond with the cane—and his mother, who called every day to be sure he was taking his medication. Then David, the tall one with the black hair, would get on with her and assure her that Rick was okay, that she needn’t come to New York yet. He’d heard David talking to a woman who was apparently his theatrical agent. No calls this week, she said, whatever that meant. He’d heard calls from friends, men and women inviting them places and chatting aimlessly and always, always asking after Rick’s health.
This evening, he got lucky. He recognized Cass MacFarland’s voice immediately. She spoke to her brother, confirming an already-made plan for tomorrow. David was getting his car out of the garage on the corner at one o’clock, and the two men were driving to New Jersey to stay with her for a couple of days. How’s the cabin? David asked. Cozy, she said. Take the Holland Tunnel; it’s faster.
The next day, he checked out of the hotel, threw the tape recorder away, and went to Hertz Rent-a-Car. Then he parked near the garage on the corner near David’s home and waited. At precisely one o’clock the two men appeared and went into the garage, emerging a few minutes later in a green Volvo.
He followed them through the tunnel and along miles and miles of the New Jersey Turnpike. They drove for nearly two hours. Just when he was beginning to think that New Jersey couldn’t possibly continue much longer, the car ahead went onto an exit ramp.
The smaller, secondary highway led to a tiny town surrounded mostly by hills and forest. David turned right at the main intersection in the center of the village, and took off down a small road. Victor waited a while at the intersection: from now on, tailing them was going to be tricky.
He followed. The road went through the woods, and there were lots of curves. He caught a glimpse of the other car once, on a long stretch, far ahead of him. Then it turned on a curve and disappeared in the trees. He sped up a little.
After a few miles, he realized that the car was no longer in front of him. He stopped, turned around, and drove slowly back the way he’d come, scanning the few turnoffs, all of which had mailboxes. Long driveways, apparently: there were no houses visible from the road. The third turnoff on the left had a bright, shiny new mailbox, and the name neatly painted on it was C. MACFARLAND.
He ordered apple pie from the waitress, smiling. Smiling at the memory of his own ingenuity in tracing his third victim. Smiling at the glorious memory of his Valentine’s Day liaison with her six months later.
Cass MacFarland was a pleasant surprise. In college, she had always been with the other girls, one part of the four-headed monster that was the Elements. Now, fifteen years later, she was a quiet, dignified, serious woman. She never spoke with her parents, she would tell him shortly into their brief relationship, and she’d lost contact with all her former friends. She’d been married for six years to a man she’d grown up with, a college instructor who’d eventually run away with one of his students. The only person she kept in constant touch with was her brother, whom she obviously adored. Her dark red hair and her easy smile had made this third task a pleasant one.
But first, he’d had to make initial contact. And the way he did that was clever, as clever as anything Valentine had ever done. He knew—and who would know better?—that people who isolated themselves from society were particularly susceptible to kindness.
There was a little restaurant in the town where she went by herself for dinner every Saturday night. He’d moved to New York by now, but he came out to this remote part of New Jersey every now and then in the following months, to keep an eye on her. He watched her alone in her cabin, and he noted the careful dress and makeup she affected on her Saturday-night trips into town.
He would watch through the window as she sat, always alone and always at the same table, chatting with the waitress and the busboy. Once or twice the proprietor, a portly, middle-aged man, joined her for dessert and coffee. Before leaving the restaurant, she would go up to the bar near the front for an after-dinner drink, and she would laugh and joke for half an hour with the bartender. Then, with smiling farewells for all of them, she would go out to her car and drive slowly back to her house in the woods.
He watched this routine every Saturday for six weeks. Other than that, she rarely left the house, except to go to the supermarket or the drugstore, and she would always linger there, talking with the checkout girls or the pharmacist. Once, he followed her to the town’s tiny movie theater. She bought her ticket for the film, a romantic love story that had been highly praised, according to the posters outside. Then he watched through the glass front doors as she had a long conversation with the girl who sold the popcorn.
Cass MacFarland was lonely.
Meeting her in the restaurant was easy. One Saturday night, four weeks before Valentine’s Day, he sat at the next table in the nearly empty dining room and struck up a conversation. By dessert, she’d invited him to join her.
I’m a writer, trying to write a novel, he said, but the city is too noisy. Friends said to try way out here on weekends. Amazing! she cried: I’m a writer, too! No kidding! he said. I’m staying at the little hotel down the street on weekends. Would you like to have dinner next Saturday night . . .?
He’d added the new embellishments with Cass: the anonymous cards and flowers. He’d spent the three weeks before Valentine’s Day—when he wasn’t dating her—watching her in the cabin from the nearby forest. (After he’d smothered her, in retrospect he found that he derived more pleasure from watching her than from eventually killing her. He would remember this with Jillian.)
Cass was writing a novel, and she’d used her divorce settlement and part of her trust fund to buy this isolated cabin. The rest she’d given to her brother, she told him, to take care of his lover, who was dying. She had deliberately removed herself from the world to make a serious attempt at a book. She’d been attempting to write novels ever since her college days, but she had yet to complete one. Six years of trying to make a go of the relationship with the philanderer had put her further off course. Now, at thirty-six, she felt it was time to accomplish what she’d always set out to do. She’d smiled when she said this, adding that it was time for her to meet her true destiny.
Yes, he agreed. It was.
When the cards and the flowers appeared, she immediately figured it out. She told him about Victor Dimorta, the creepy freshman who had assaulted her and her girlfriends. She never once mentioned the prank that had gotten him to the room that night. She tried to contact her friends at old addresses, which is how she learned from Sharon’s mother that Sharon had vanished two years ago. She never traced Belinda, and she never mentioned Jillian Talbot, giving him the odd impression that she did not consider Jillian to have been part of the practical joke. Even so, she was worried enough to buy a gun to protect herself, and she actually showed it to him.
Don’t worry, he assured her. I’ll be here with you on Valentine’s Day.
And he was.
Every time he thought about the burning cabin in the woods, he became sexually aroused. He’d read about it in the papers back in New York. The photos of the ruined cabin. The devastated brother. The search for a tall, dark-haired man thought to have been dating her in the last three weeks of her life. He’d used the name he’d first given to Sharon Williams with Cass and at the hotel, and that was the name the hotel proprietor gave the police. The man who never was, he mused, smiling.
It was so brilliant, he reflected. Sharon Williams had been buried. Belinda Rosenberg had fallen to her death from a great height. Cass MacFarland had been immolated.
Earth.
Wind.
Fire.
And now, in the diner, he thought, it’s your turn, Jillian Talbot. Water, the fourth element. You can run, but you can’t hide. Not from me. Not from Valentine. I know how to find you.
But first, that detective. Barney Fleck, the big guy on West Twenty-fifth Street. He went to the police the other day, and they searched the building across from her. Yes, the detective . . .
He hummed his favorite time to himself as he stood up and went over to the cashier. “My Funny Valentine.” He caught a glimpse of his own image reflected on the mirror-paneled wall behind the girl at the cash register. Yes, he told himself again, that analyst had to go. Reconstructive surgery could only do so much. Jillian had been the least self-absorbed of the four Elements: sometimes, he thought she had been the only one of them who’d really looked at Victor Dimorta. If her memory were jogged, she’d see right through the minor alterations. She’d look at him and remember, and that must not happen. Not yet.
He smiled at the cashier and went back to the table to leave a large tip, happy with the world. He was thinking about her again.
She was going to be his masterpiece. He would do this one perfectly. And in his mind he spoke to her.
Are you frightened, Jillian? Are you afraid of Valentine? Have you ever felt such fear, such terror, in your whole stupid, privileged, lucky life?
My dear Jillian, the terror has just begun.
Water
10
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10
She woke to the sound of birds. The small, soft chirping noises slowly coaxed her from sleep, and it was several moments before she realized where she was. When she did, she stood up, yawned and stretched, and went over to the door of the little log cabin. Outside, the air was crisp and cold, and there was a swirling blanket of thick white mist hanging among the evergreen trees and above the still, gray water of the lake.
Jill took a long, deep breath: fresh, clean air, tinged with salt from Long Island Sound, which lay some four hundred yards in front of her, beyond the massive sand dimes on the other side of the retreat. The twelve cabins were nestled in the forest around the main house, the biggest structure nearest the lake, where Gwen and Mike lived. Her cabin, number 12, was the farthest one from the lake, back among the trees. It was the most isolated, and the most quiet.
The main room was long, with doors at either end. A barracks: that was the word. In her mind’s eye, she saw the rows of bunk beds against the two longer walls, accommodating perhaps seven little boys or girls and one counselor. At present, there was just the one big, comfortable four-poster, an overstuffed armchair, a braided area rug, and a desk and chair against the wall under the window that, if opened, would face the lake. On one wall hung a large, old-fashioned pendulum clock that chimed the hours. Gwen’s touches, of course. The windows were cabin-style, top-hinged wood things that had to be swung out and propped up with sticks to remain open. Now, in February, they were closed and latched. The bathroom in one comer was a recent innovation: the camp had utilized now-vanished latrines and shower houses, not to mention a mess hall with industrialsized kitchen that had also been torn down. She smiled, trying to imagine Mike and Seth, the ancient handyman who apparently came with the place, installing fixtures and septic tanks. They must have been busy for months.
