He felt so desperate he wept. In the space of ten days, he had lost both wife and son.
Grimly, Philip bounced back and forth between two equally fearful notions: that Mark had been abducted by the ‘Sherman Park Killer,’ who had already claimed two boys his age; and that Mark had killed himself, possibly in imitation of his mother, even more possibly out of the mixture of horror and despair set loose within him by what he had been obliged to witness. The police, being police, were concentrating on the first of these alternatives. They walked through the parks and searched the wooded areas in Millhaven but failed to uncover a body. They also checked the records at the airport, the train and bus stations; they, too, questioned Jimbo Monaghan, his parents, and other teenagers and parents Mark had known. When none of this yielded as much as a suggestion of the boy’s whereabouts, the police released Mark’s information and requested the assistance of the city’s residents. A none-too-recent photograph was sent to the FBI and to police departments across the country. There, for all practical purposes, the matter rested.
Except of course for Philip, who at this pre-Dewey Dell stage could face none of the possibilities aroused by his son’s disappearance: that a psychopath had kidnapped and probably murdered him; that he had killed himself in some location yet to be found; or that he had simply run off without a word. When Philip found himself face to face with this unacceptable series of choices, another occurred to him, and he called his overprivileged, never quite to be trusted brother in New York.
‘All right, you can tell me now,’ he said. ‘I never thought you’d be capable of doing a thing like this to your own brother, but I’m sure you had your reasons. He must have told you a hell of a story.’
‘Philip, you’d better start at the beginning. What can I tell you now, and what do you think I did to you?’
‘What did he tell you, exactly? How bad is it? Did I beat the crap out of him every night? Was I psychologically abusive?’
‘Are you talking about Mark?’
‘Gee, do you think? Why would I be asking you about Mark, I wonder? If my son happens to be there with you, Tim, I’m asking you to let me talk to him. No, I’m not asking. I’m begging.’
‘Jesus, Philip, Mark left home? What happened?’
‘What happened? My son hasn’t been here for three days, that’s what. So if he’s staying in that fucked-up circus of yours on Grand Street, goddamn you, I’m on my knees here. Put him on. Do whatever you have to, all right?’
It took a while, but I did manage to convince Philip that his son was not hiding in my loft, and that I’d had nothing to do with his disappearance. I felt silenced, stunned, baffled.
‘Why didn’t you call me before this?’
‘Because it didn’t occur to me that he might be in New York until about an hour ago.’
Seen one way, Philip and I are alone in the world. We have no other siblings, no cousins or second cousins, no grandparents, no aunts or uncles, no living parents.
I asked him if there was anything I could do for him.
‘Isn’t one of your best friends Tom Pasmore? I want you to talk to him – get him to help me.’
Tom Pasmore, I add for posterity’s sake, is an old Millhaven friend of mine who solves crimes for a living, not that he needs the money. He’s like Sherlock Holmes or Nero Wolfe, except that he is a real person, not a fictional one. His (biological) father was the same way. He solved crimes in city after city, chiefly by going over all the records and documents in sight and making connections everyone else missed, connections you more or less have to be a genius to see. Tom inherited his methods along with his talents and his wardrobe. As far as I’m concerned, Tom Pasmore is the best private investigator in the world, but he only works on cases he chooses by himself. Back in ’94 he helped me work out a terrible puzzle that my collaborator and I later turned into a novel.
I told Philip I would get to Millhaven as quickly as possible and added that I’d do my best to get Tom Pasmore to think about the boy’s disappearance.
‘Think about it? That’s all?’
‘In most cases, that’s what Tom does. Think about things.’
‘Okay, talk to the guy for me, will you?’
‘As soon as I can,’ I said. I didn’t want to explain Tom Pasmore’s schedule to my brother, who has the old-time schoolmaster’s suspicion of anyone who does not arise at 7:00 and hit the hay before midnight. Tom Pasmore usually turns off his reading light around 4:00 A.M. and seldom gets up before 2:00 P.M. He likes single-malt whiskey, another matter best unmentioned to Philip, who had responded to Pop’s alcohol intake by becoming a moralistic, narrow-minded teetotaler.
After I arranged for my tickets, I waited another hour and called Tom. He picked up as soon as he heard my voice on his answering machine. I described what had happened, and Tom asked me if I wanted him to check around, look at the records, see what he might be able to turn up. ‘Looking at the records’ was most of his method, for he seldom left the house and performed his miracles by sifting through newspapers, public records on-line and off, and all kinds of databases. Over the past decade he had become dangerously expert at using his computers to get into places where ordinary citizens were not allowed.
Tom said that you never knew what you could learn from a couple of hours’ work, but that if the boy didn’t turn up in the next day or two, he and I might be able to accomplish something together. In the meantime, he would ‘scout around.’ But – he wanted me to know – in all likelihood, as much as he hated to say it, my nephew had fallen victim to the monster who earlier probably had abducted and murdered two boys from the same part of town.
‘I can’t think about that, and neither can my brother,’ I said. (I was wrong about the latter, I was to learn.)
Forty-five minutes later, Tom called me with some startling news. Had I known that my late sister-in-law had been related to Millhaven’s first serial killer?
‘Who was that?’ I asked.
‘A sweetheart named Joseph Kalendar.’
The name seemed familiar, but I could not remember why.
‘Kalendar became public property in 1979 and 1980, when you were misbehaving in Samarkand, or wherever it was.’
He knew exactly where I had been in 1979 and 1980. ‘Bangkok,’ I said. ‘And by 1980 I was hardly misbehaving at all. What did Kalendar do?’
Joseph Kalendar, a master carpenter, had begun by breaking into women’s houses and raping them. After the third rape, he began bringing his fourteen-year-old son along with him. Soon after, he decided it would be prudent to murder the women after he and his son raped them. A couple of months later, he got even crazier. During his third-to-last foray, on the verbal orders of a persuasive deity, he had killed, then decapitated his son and left the boy’s headless body sprawled beside their mutual victim’s bed. God thanked him for his faithfulness and in a mighty voice sang that henceforth he, lowly Joseph Kalendar, family man, master carpenter, and Beloved Favorite of Jehovah, was charged with the erasure of the entire female gender worldwide, or at least as many as he could get around to exterminating before the police brought a close to the sacred project. In 1979 Kalendar was at last arrested. In 1980 he went on trial, was found not guilty by reason of insanity, and was sentenced to the Downstate Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where
