He said, “Did he treat you okay?”
Katherine Magary didn’t answer. Stahl turned to her. She was blushing.
“Was he weird to you, Katherine?”
“No. That’s the point. He couldn’t . . . you know . . . he came on like a big stud and then he couldn’t . . . so instead, we—he . . . I really don’t want to incriminate myself.”
“You won’t,” said Stahl.
She remained silent.
He said, “He was impotent so he concentrated on packing his nose.”
“Like a pig. He wanted me to use, too, but I didn’t. Honest. At that point, all I wanted to do was get some sleep, but I was nervous. Because when he couldn’t, he got real jumpy—restless, pacing around. And the coke just made it worse. I finally calmed him down by giving him a massage. That’s my other skill, I’m a certified massage therapist—real massage, not you-know-what. I rubbed him down real good, and he relaxed. But something about him—even when he slept he was uptight. Grinding his teeth, he had this real . . . unpleasant look on his face.”
She squinted, jutted her lower jaw, strained.
“Uptight,” said Stahl.
“When I met him, he was totally mellow, loose. Real easygoing. That’s what I liked about him. I’ve had enough stress in my life, who needs bad vibes.” She shrugged. “I thought his vibes were good. Guess I’m stupid.”
Stahl’s thigh, where her hand rested, had grown hot. He patted her fingers lightly. Removed her hand and got up.
She said, “Where are you going?”
Alarm in her voice. Stahl said, “Stretching.”
He moved closer to the bed, stood by her.
She said, “When I woke up—when you woke me up—I was freaked out to learn he was gone. How am I supposed to get back to my place?”
Stahl said, “I’ll take you.”
She said, “You’re really cool.” Reached for his zipper, pulled it down very slowly.
“Nice,” she said. “Nice man.”
Stahl let her.
44
I put the photocopies down. “It’s pretty obvious.”
It was 10 P.M. and Milo had dropped by to show me the end-of-year summaries Elizabeth Martin had pulled from Shull’s faculty file. When I scanned the material, bloated paragraphs jumped out at me. Phrases bunched together like Tokyo commuters. Disorganization, pomposity, lack of grace. Shull could plot and carry out murder with cleverness and decisiveness, but when faced with the written word, his mind lost traction.
He’d proposed a course he wanted to develop. “The Cartography of Dissonance and Upheaval: Art As Paleo-Bioenergetic Paradox.”
I reached into my file box, found what I was looking for: the SeldomScene review of Julie Kipper’s show penned by “FS.” There were the words: paradoxical, cartograph, and dissonance. I searched further. When FS had picked Angelique Bernet out of “la compagnie” he’d raved, “This is DANCE as in paleo-instinctuo-bioenergetic, so right, so real, so unashamedly erotic.”
I pointed it out to Milo. “He recycles. Limited creativity. It’s got to be frustrating.”
“So he’s a hack,” he said. “So why couldn’t he just write for the movies instead of killing people?” Muttering, he circled the matching phrases with red pen.
“Now that we know it’s him,” I said, “I’m getting a new slant on his victim selection. Until now, I’d been thinking along purely psychological lines: capturing stars on the ascent, swallowing their identities before they became corrupted.”
“Psychic cannibalism,” he said. “I was starting to like that. You don’t, anymore?”
“I do. But another factor is the disconnect between Shull’s inflated sense of self and his accomplishments. The grand artiste who’s failed at music and art. He hasn’t killed any writers, so he probably still thinks of himself as a viable writer.”
“The novel he talks about.”
“Maybe there is a manuscript in a drawer,” I said. “The bottom line is, Shull’s a good bet for bitterness and pathological jealousy, but that’s only part of it. I think he’s being practical: Murder someone really famous, and you bring down big-time publicity and persistent scrutiny. Pulling off something that grandiose would be tempting for Shull, but at this point he’s smart enough to be deterred by the risk. So he lowers his sights, targets not-quite-celebrities like Baby Boy and Julie Kipper and Vassily Levitch. Their stories don’t make the papers.”