Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

She related how one day under the bridge, after Topsy had provided food for herself and the babies, the wind had brought a chill; the sun was setting and he worried she had no sweater. He gave her the ascot to wrap about her neck. Amaryllis loved its shininess and golden teardrops and kept it to wrap around her Box of Saints. She never gave it back. In a separate matter, she said there had been visitors to the St. George suite — but ones she had never mentioned and was unsure she ever would. They were unspeakable.

Lani conveyed all this to the detective, who put her in touch with the defense — it was the CASA’s feeling that she could get the girl to testify to as much in court. The attorneys were concerned it still wasn’t enough to clear him; the testimony of a combative child, diagnosed as “labile and hypervigilant” and “with flight of ideas,” currently being weaned from Effexor, Neurontin, Ativan and Cogentin, was not the most convincing.

At this juncture, as it is wont to, a deus ex machina explained all.

Samson Dowling was awakened by an early-morning call from Jerry Whittle, a coroner’s assistant whom he had known for years. Whittle was a funny, meticulous eccentric who, at the age of forty-nine, still lived with his mother in San Marino. He visited the detective regularly after he got shot, and made Samson laugh and forget his pain awhile. When he was discharged, the odd couple went to ball games and barbershops together, and had the occasional steak and martini at Musso & Frank’s. Whittle aspired to writing but could never settle on a niche: he liked the idea of creating a mystery series based on a coroner’s assistant, a kind of bush-league Kay Scarpetta, but also had a mind to tackle a book of ruminative essays in the Death to Dust or How We Die mode, or maybe even a precious memoir along the lines of the one by that well-known fellow who called himself a “mortician poet.”

Whittle had been the first from the coroner’s office to arrive at the scene of the Kornfeld homicide. He took tissue samples and scrapings — it was he who had discovered the ascot in the throat, drawing an excited parallel to the pupae similarly found in The Silence of the Lambs —and snapped photos of the deceased, which he added to his collection (he’d flirted with publishing a volume of Weegee-type photographs, getting someone like DeLillo or Ellroy to write the text).

“I’m telling you, Sam, I’m looking at both sets of photographs. Now. As we speak.”

“What are you saying?”

“The knots , Sam, the knots are the same.”

“The knots in the ascot?” He was still foggy.

“No, Sam! There were no knots in the ascot — Jesus, what kind of detective are you? The knots in the sheet the woman was strangled with. They’re manropes —”

“Manropes?”

“Manropes. They’re one and the same.”

“The same as what ?” asked Samson testily. He’d been dreaming so pleasantly only minutes before.

“The same as the knots in the tie of the guy who killed himself.”

“ Which guy, Jerry? Who are you talking about?”

“The suicide , on Carroll Avenue — George Fitzsimmons!”

In fact, Mr. Whittle was correct; the knots were unique. †A macabre death-scene photo of the former DCFS worker, on the floor of his Victorian parlor, was shown to the frog-like Korean manager of the St. George, who quickly affirmed the deceased had indeed visited Geri Kornfeld more than once and during said visits tied a maimed dog to the sidewalk’s rusted-out newspaper rack. The attorneys of Marcus Weiner (for that is how the defendant was now addressed) obtained an order from the court to draw DNA samples from the body of Fitzsimmons, which had not yet been (and never would be) claimed.

A few expository things happened “offstage” that will never be known by the players in our drama but should be passed on for the sake of thoroughness — it is hoped that for even the less curious reader the by-product may give a parenthetical frisson. The man who had once thought of himself entirely as William Morris (and still did, to a much smaller degree) was a naïf incapable of imagining the horrors that might befall a child, while the once honorable Geo. Fitzsimmons, late, great and faded pride of the Department of Children and Family Services, was capable indeed. His eyes had seen too much. When he first met Amaryllis at the 4th Street Bridge encampment, he saw things in hers that had mercifully eluded the gentleman who hailed from Merton Abbey on the River Wandle. He saw she was on her way to being half dead, and that he might rescue her as he had his own four-legged beauty. So he befriended her mother and gave Geri money to sleep with him; and did not begrudge himself enjoyment of that act. Now, because he suspected but had no proof, and because Geo. Fitzsimmons (ever professional) must be certain, he eventually solicited the woman to let him have the daughter to himself for an hour to do what he liked. He named an amount, and after token protestation, she took the money — a princessly sum of ten one-dollar bills. He asked if she’d ever made such arrangements before, and she was reluctant to say, but was forthcoming after Fitz withheld the pipe. There was a lady, she said with playacted hesitation, to convey that while she wasn’t at all happy about what she had been forced to do to survive (to put food and crack on the table), that while she wasn’t happy, at least it was a woman —no offense to Mr. Fitzsimmons, because she could tell he would not hurt her girl. He was not a pervert, she said — then asked, Was he? She would be in the room with them anyway, she said, now flaunting her motherly instincts. That, she said, was “non-negotiable.” But the thing she was telling him before (her daughter with the woman) was the only time. And her daughter was stoned, she said she made sure of that, so as not to know what was happening or even remember if she did. What a humanitarian . He withheld the pipe some more — and when she told of the others who had had the girl, some for what Fitz determined was less than a lungful, he choked the life from her with a bedsheet of cinches he’d learned from his father, so that in this instance it can never be said that any sins were passed on. Then he surprised himself by sodomizing the body — and that was the moment he married Death. For he suddenly knew in the same way that Jane Scull had when she lay with Please-Help.-Bless that his life was done and that he was three-quarters gone; the demise of his dog made it whole.

Louis Trotter found her strolling the far side of the Saint-Cloud property near the cutting shed. When she saw him, Trinnie smiled warmly — she was losing a mother, but he was losing a friend and lover of half a century. She kissed him, and his face, an odd mask of worry and resignation, looked mildly electrified. She thought he had come to speak of Bluey, soon to be transferred to the Motion Picture and Television Hospital; shrieking by night and by day, she had entered the phase caregivers euphemistically call “fecal play.” It was nearly too much for the hired hands, and simply too much for Winter and the household to bear.

“She’ll be much better once she’s settled, Father, you’ll see. And I’ll be there all the time, looking after the garden. It’s my garden,” she said, smiling some more. “Remember?”

“That I do! That I do. Katrina — I don’t know how to say this.” She saw how troubled he was, and her concerns about Bluey were quickly supplanted by the irrational terror that something had happened to her son. As she opened her mouth in a gasp of inquiry, he said, “We found Marcus. He was arrested …”