The Ninth Nightmare

SEVEN Locked Room Mystery

Detective Wisocky closed the file he was working on, tossed down his pen, and said, ‘That’s it, Charlie. Time for nourishment. Rally’s, for a triple cheeseburger. And you’re buying.’

Detective Hudson looked up from his desk and said, ‘Come on, Walter — I picked up the check for yesterday’s lunch.’

‘Sure you did, Charlie. But yesterday’s lunch was chow fun noodles, right, and chow fun noodles is Chinese, right, which is a totally different ethnic cuisine from cheeseburgers, which is domestic. The last time we ate cheeseburgers I paid, and the next time we eat Chinese I’ll pay for that. But you can’t go confusing your different ethnic cuisines on a financial basis, otherwise we won’t know where the hell we are.’

‘Well, to tell you the truth, I feel like Mongolian.’

‘You goddamned look Mongolian, too. What does that have to do with lunch?’

They had almost reached the door when the phone rang on Walter’s desk.

‘You going to answer that?’ asked Charlie.

‘What? No. Absolutely not. It’s trouble.’

‘How do you know it’s trouble?’

‘It’s trouble because it’s going to postpone the moment when I can open my mouth and take my first bite of a Rally’s triple cheeseburger.’

‘You should answer it, Walter. Really. I got a hunch, that’s all.’

‘You and your goddamned hunches. You got more hunches than Quasimodo.’

Charlie raised one eyebrow, and when the phone went on ringing, and ringing, Walter eventually went back to his desk and scooped it up. ‘Wisocky,’ he snapped. ‘What?’

‘Officer John Skrolnik here, detective. We got called out to a house on Corydon Road, reports of a young woman screaming.’

‘Screaming? What was she screaming about?’

‘Nobody knows, because she disappeared.’

‘What do you mean, disappeared?’

‘She’s not here. The owners of the property heard her screaming upstairs in her apartment but when they went up to find out what was wrong she wasn’t there, even though they never saw her leave the house.’

‘Who was she?’

‘A student. Her name was — hold on — Maria Fortales, just twenty years old. She was studying law at CRWU.’

‘I thought all the Crew students had to live on campus, in a dormitory or a sorority house or something.’

‘Only for the first two years.’

Walter took a deep breath. ‘Maybe she went out for lunch. That’s what I’m trying to do, believe it or not. Go out for lunch. Why don’t you go out for lunch, too? What’s the matter with you? You never hungry?’

‘Her landlord said that she was screaming like somebody was killing her. He said he never heard nobody scream like that before, never.’

‘But there’s no sign of her?’

‘None. That’s why I called you. Don’t you remember, the last time we had a missing persons case, you said I could always call you?’

‘OK,’ Walter admitted. ‘So I did. How sweet of me. Corydon Road, what number?’

‘Twenty-four eight hundred.’

‘Roger that,’ said Walter. ‘Give us ten minutes.’

He hung up the phone. Charlie was standing right next to him with an expectant look on his face. ‘You and your goddamned hunches,’ said Walter.

‘What is it? What’s happened?’

‘Apparently some young girl was yelling her tits off like she was being murdered and then she took a powder and nobody knows where she went. And for that I have to forego my lunch.’

‘I don’t know, Walter,’ said Charlie. ‘As soon as that phone rang — for some reason it gave me this incredibly strong feeling that something seriously bad is going to happen.’

‘You bet your ass it is. My stomach’s going to start rumbling, and you’re going to have to listen to it.’

They parked behind Officer Skrolnik’s white squad car, and climbed out. It was starting to rain, quite hard, and the rain came rustling down through the rusty-colored trees like an expectant audience waiting for the arrival of a great concert pianist.

‘Had to fucking rain, didn’t it?’ Walter complained, and by way of punctuation there was a loud bang of thunder from the direction of Cleveland Heights.

Corydon Road was a quiet suburban avenue less than a half mile from the university campus, and many of its residents let out rooms to students during term-time. Number 24800 was a small green-painted house with a gray-shingled roof and a veranda, with a sagging 1969 Buick Riviera parked in the driveway.

Officer Skrolnik was waiting by the front door. Inside the hallway, his partner was talking to an elderly man with white hair and a baggy gray cardigan. Officer Skrolnik was very tall, with a prominent larynx that bobbed up and down like a Halloween apple whenever he spoke.

‘Thanks for coming so quick, detectives. The landlord and his wife are really spooked.’

‘What’s the landlord’s name?’ asked Walter.

Officer Skrolnik flipped open his notebook. ‘Richard Yarber. His wife’s name is Maude. They said that Ms Fortales came back very early this morning, around five thirty, after spending the night with some of her college friends. Around eleven forty-five they heard her screaming but the door to her room was locked and they couldn’t get in to find out what was wrong. Mrs Yarber went across the street and asked one of their neighbors to help them — Mr Herman Eisner, he’s a retired fire marshal. He managed to kick the door open but the room was empty. No sign of Ms Fortales or anybody else.’

Walter sniffed. ‘Couldn’t she have climbed out of the window?’

Officer Skrolnik shook his head. ‘It used to be their grandson’s room and the windows all have childproof bars. Apart from which, it’s a sheer twenty-foot drop down to the side of the house.’

‘Well, très mysterious. Let me talk to them.’

He entered the hallway and Charlie followed him. He showed Mr Yarber his badge and said, ‘Detective Wisocky, sir, and this is Detective Hudson. Sounds like you’ve had a kind of a weird experience this morning.’

‘I’ll shay,’ said Mr Yarber, with his false teeth clicking. ‘Shcared the living Jeshush out of ush.’

‘You heard Ms Fortales screaming?’

‘Never in my life heard nothing sho terrible. More like a pig being shlaughtered than a human being. And shomething elsh, too. Both of ush heard it. Like a shaw, if you know what I mean. A rashping noish, like a shaw.’

‘A rasping noise like a saw? But when your neighbor broke into Ms Fortales’ room, you didn’t see a saw?’

The young officer who had been talking to Mr Yarber had to cover his mouth with his hand to hide his grin.

‘No,’ said Mr Yarber. ‘No shign of a shaw anywhere.’

‘OK,’ Walter told him, laying a reassuring hand on his steeply-sloping shoulder. ‘Do you mind if my partner and me took a look at Ms Fortales’ room?’

‘Shure. Go ahead. Be my guesht. It’s upshtairs, shecond on the left.’

Walter and Charlie climbed the narrow, beige-carpeted stairs. The staircase was wallpapered with faded brown roses, and twenty or thirty photographs of the Yarber’s sons and daughters and grandchildren were hung higgledy-piggledy on either side, not one of them straight. The house smelled sweetish and musty, as if the windows hadn’t been opened in years, and there were dead blowflies lying on the window sills.

Walter carefully pushed open the door to Maria Fortales’ bedroom. The Yarbers’ neighbor Herman Eisner had kicked the door so hard that he had split the side of the frame and the tarnished brass knob was hanging at an angle. Walter eased himself inside.

On the left, against the wall, there was a single bed covered by a rumpled pink candlewick bedspread. It had three purple cushions on it and a small collection of soft toys — a floppy-eared rabbit, a bright green frog, and a pale green hand-knitted gnome.

Under the window stood a pine desk, with an Apple laptop on it, a half-empty coffee mug, and a thick red notebook bound with five or six elastic bands. A white home-knitted cardigan was drooping over the back of the chair. As Officer Skrolnik had told them, the windows were fitted with horizontal metal bars, so it would have been impossible for Maria Fortales to have climbed out.

On the right-hand side of the room there was a cheap plywood clothes-closet, painted cream. One side of the closet was plastered with dozens of cut-out pictures of circuses and clowns. Almost in the center was a large photograph of a gray-faced clown. He had wild staring eyes and tangled gray shoulder-length hair and dark green lipstick which was curved upward into a maniacal grin, even though his real lips were curved downward.

‘Somebody sure likes the circus,’ said Charlie, crossing over to take a closer look. ‘This fellow here is Mago Verde, the Green Magician.’

Walter sniffed again, took out a crumpled handkerchief and loudly blew his nose. ‘How the hell do you know that?’

‘I did a study of clowns at the Police Academy.’

‘That couldn’t have been too difficult. The whole place is run by clowns.’

‘No, there’s a distinct deviant psychology based around clowns. A lot of killers and criminals are inspired to dress up as circus performers, like John Wayne Gacy, for instance.’

‘Oh, you mean Pogo the Clown.’

‘That’s right. Gacy made himself up as a white-faced harlequin, didn’t he, a family entertainer. But he ended up raping and murdering at least thirty-three young men and boys around the Cleveland area and over half of their bodies were never found.’

Walter came up behind him and peered at Mago Verde over his shoulder. ‘I never liked clowns, when I was a kid. They always scared the crap out of me.’

‘An irrational fear of clowns — that’s called coulrophobia,’ said Charlie. ‘But this particular clown you’d be well advised to be very afraid of. He’s what the Venetians call a pagliaccio diabolico — an evil clown.’

‘Oh, yeah? What’s so evil about him, apart from the fact that he looks like Jack Nicholson in drag?’

‘Mago Verde always plays cruel and sadistic tricks on his audience. For instance he might produce a small guillotine and show a volunteer that when he sticks his finger in it, and trips the switch, it looks like this really sharp blade is coming down but he’s completely unhurt. So the volunteer willingly copies him, and crunch! he gets his pinkie chopped off.’

‘Hilarious,’ said Walter.

‘You know what Lon Chaney Junior once said about clowns? “There is nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight.”’

‘There is nothing funny about clowns in any kind of light, period, and especially in the dark. But what I would dearly like to know is, why did this Maria Fortales have a picture of this freak stuck up on her closet?’

Charlie was scrutinizing the pictures even more intently. ‘Mago Verde isn’t the only freak here. Look — here’s a picture of Prince Randian the Human Caterpillar and Johnny Eck the Half-Boy. They were both in that Tod Browning movie, Freaks.’

‘Yeah, I saw it,’ said Walter. ‘That guy didn’t have no arms or legs, did he? But he still managed to roll a cigarette, put it into his mouth and light it.’

They both frowned at each other, baffled. Then Walter abruptly opened the closet doors, as if he were trying to surprise whoever was hiding inside it. All that it contained, however, was a row of wire hangers, with dresses and skirts and two short coats, one tartan and the other brown suede.

Walter yanked out the three drawers underneath, but one of them was only a snakes’-nest of thongs and bras and pantyhose, while the other two were crammed with sweaters, purple and crimson and marigold yellow.

‘Smell that?’ he said, lifting up one of the sweaters. ‘She sure liked her vanilla musk.’

Charlie bent over and lifted the side of the bedspread so that he could check under the bed. There was nothing there but a large gray suitcase and a grubby red backpack. He dragged out the suitcase and opened it up but it was empty except for some travel brochures for Mexico and a sewing kit from the Hacienda San Miguel Hotel in Cozumel.

Walter meanwhile went over to the desk. He opened the laptop and switched it on, and when the screen saver appeared it was a picture of the same clown, Mago Verde, standing in a grassy field wearing an ankle-length green coat. In spite of his dark green painted-on smile, his expression was one of unmitigated rage, as if he were furious at having his photograph taken. The sky above him was gray and swollen with rain, and behind him there was a sinister collection of black circus tents and assorted marquees.

Beside one of the tents, half hidden behind its entrance flap, stood a small boy with a washed-out face, almost as gray as Mago Verde in his make-up. He looked both frightened and sad.

The rain sprinkled against the window. Walter picked up the notebook and rolled off the elastic bands. When he opened it he saw that it was Maria Fortales’ diary. It was written in purple ink, in rounded handwriting, which was so diminutive that he could barely read it. Every page was full to the last line, and some extra sentences had even been written vertically up the margins.

He turned to the last page, which Maria Fortales had written yesterday.

‘What’s that?’ asked Charlie.

‘Diary,’ said Walter. ‘Listen to this: “Last night the show was all packed up and ready to leave for Waterloo, Idaho. It rained and rained and it never stopped, and all of the meadow was churned up into thick black mud. I was cold and shivering and even the bears looked miserable. I went to BJ’s caravan for warmth even though BJ scares me so much. BJ never stopped ranting and raving although I could hardly understand a word he was saying. Then Natasha came and found me and warned me that The GF was growing impatient and that I should be very careful and have eyes in the back of my head especially where MV is concerned. I don’t know what to do. I am so frightened but I don’t know how to escape.”’

Walter turned back a few pages. ‘Here we are again. “Tonight only seventeen people turned up for the show and MV said that The GF was very angry. He wants to move on but two of the trucks are still out of commission and we have to wait for them to be fixed before we can leave here.”’

He flipped back again, and read some more, and then flipped back again. ‘Jesus. She has dreams about this circus every single night. Every single goddamned night. No wonder she’s obsessed.’

Charlie said, ‘I guess “MV” is Mago Verde. But who’s “The GF”, I wonder? And “BJ”?’

Walter closed the book, snapped the elastic bands back around it, and handed it over. ‘There. Take it home and read it from page one. Maybe you can work out who they are, and why she’s so scared of them. You’re the clown expert.’

Charlie took the diary and looked around the room again, as if he were half expecting to find her hiding under the candlewick bedspread, or standing completely motionless in one corner so that he hadn’t noticed her. ‘OK. But it still doesn’t tell us what’s happened to her, does it?’

‘Well, take her laptop, too. Have Morrie go through it, in the lab. My guess is that she’s simply gone wandering off someplace without telling her landlord about it.’

Walter lifted the home-knit cardigan off the back of the chair and rummaged in the pockets. The cardigan smelled of vanilla musk, too. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Look at this.’

Out of the right-hand pocket he produced a brown leather purse, with Mayan decorations on it, a souvenir from Mexico. He opened it up, and there was Maria Ynez Fortales, frowning at him from her driver’s license. A pretty round-faced girl with wavy black hair and pouting lips and a beauty spot on her left lip.

‘Well, at least we know what she looks like.’

He went through the rest of the contents. Twenty-seven dollars in cash, a library card, a Visa card, and a business card from Alphabet Cabs. Also, a student identification card from Case Western Reserve University which carried another photograph of her, this time smiling and wearing a green silk headscarf.

‘She wouldn’t go out without her purse, would she?’ said Charlie. ‘So where the hell is she?’

‘She’s not here, for sure, but I don’t see any evidence of abduction, can you? If she went, she went without kicking over the furniture or pulling down the drapes.’

‘What about the screaming?’

‘Who knows? Maybe she was screaming at her boyfriend or something, on her cell.’

‘And the sawing noise?’

‘Pff,’ said Walter, dismissively. ‘If you ask me, the old man’s hearing-aid is on the fritz. My mom’s hearing-aid used to make a noise like a flock of Canada geese.’

‘But the door was locked from the inside. The key’s still in it.’

‘There are ways of doing that.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. Don’t make complications. Think Occam’s Razor. The simplest solution is always the most likely.’

They looked around the room one last time. ‘Maybe we should get a sniffer dog up here,’ said Charlie.

‘Yeah, maybe you’re right. But let’s give it twenty-four hours before we start treating Ms Fortales as a missing person. Like I say, she probably went out without the Yarbers seeing her. The best place for us to go now is CWRU, to see if she’s there, or if any of her friends know where she is.’

They went back downstairs. Mr Yarber was still standing in the hallway, with Mrs Yarber close behind him. ‘Well?’ said Mr Yarber. ‘She well and truly vanished into thin air, didn’t she?’

Walter gave him what he hoped was a reassuring smile as he headed out the door for the car. ‘Don’t you fret, Mr Yarber. She’ll turn up. There was no foul play carried out in that room, I can assure you.’

‘Now, are we going to Rally’s or not? My triple cheeseburger is getting cold.’

Charlie didn’t start up the engine. ‘How did Maria Fortales get out of the room, Walter? Just explain that to me.’

‘It’s obvious. She wasn’t in the room in the first place.’

‘So how did she lock the door from the inside? And how come her purse was still on her desk? She wouldn’t have gone out without her purse, would she?’

Walter slumped his head forward in defeat, so that his double chins bulged out. ‘She evaporated, OK? That’s how she did it. She just fucking evaporated.’

‘Did you ever see that happen before? Somebody just vanish like that?’

‘No, but this business is all about the inexplicable, isn’t it? We’re not here to explain anything. We’re here to find Maria Fortales and/or anybody who did her any harm. That’s all.’