Twisted

“A cop?” he said. “What’s his name?”

“Detective Robert Lucido.”

The guy who’d been hanging near the bulletin board. “Pencil mustache?”

“That’s the one,” said Klara. “I didn’t know anyone but John Waters wore those anymore.”

“What did Lucido want?”

“He said he was carrying out a routine security investigation of LAPD volunteers because of some new September 11 regulations. Wanted to know what kind of person you are, who you hang out with. Then he got downright unconstitutional: what books you checked out. Of course, I declined.”

“How’d he get to you?”

She eyed the door. “He came to BioStat first and they told him you spent most of your time doing research in the stacks. His story- a routine investigation- is it baloney?”

“Probably.”

“What’s really going on, Isaac?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s the truth. I was just over at the station and they changed the locks. Maybe it’s because their captain got murdered- ”

“I heard about that- ”

“Or it really is terrorism-related.”

“That,” said Klara, “would scare me. You know how open our campus is. Are you sad about the captain?”

“I didn’t know him well.”

“Cheating on his wife,” said Klara. “One must be careful who one fucks. And who one fucks with.”

She dropped one hand and Isaac readied himself for another goose. Instead, she held his hand. He felt leaden. So many unanswered questions, but his erection hadn’t flagged. Down, you little bastard!

“And Lucido just left?”

“Maybe ten minutes ago,” said Klara. “I made sure he didn’t follow me when I came here.”

“Thanks,” said Isaac.

“Thank me with a kiss.”

He complied.

She said, “Yum. You’ve got serious potential, but first things first. The main reason I’ve been trying to reach you isn’t Lucido. It’s because I finally came up with something on those June murders.”

“What?”

She pressed herself against him, positioned his hands on her rear. Pressed down and made him squeeze. When she spoke, they were so close her lips grazed his.

“I do think I may have solved your mystery, Isaac.”

CHAPTER 45

Klara left first, exiting the building to make sure Lucido was gone. Isaac waited in the hallway and moments later she stuck her head in and gave him the thumbs-up sign. Enjoying the adventure.

They walked back to Doheny, blending with student traffic. A girl in shorts and bikini top lay on the lawn of the five-story building reading philosophy. A couple of male students hurried by wearing sweatshirts that read “LSU Sucks, Te

Klara wore a beatific smile.

Once they were inside, instead of descending to the subbasement, they climbed two floors.

The Rare Book Room. A series of locked chambers and brief, hushed corridors. Klara had all the right keys.

Inside, the central reception area was cozy, hushed, paneled in new, beautiful oak stained oxblood, discreetly lit by milk-glass lamps and chandeliers that hung from a white, coffered ceiling bordered with turquoise. Green leather chairs, oak tables. Off to the left side, a few administrative offices.

No one in sight. Lunch hour?

Klara led him to a room marked “Reading.” Inside was a medium-sized conference table, a photocopy machine, a small desk sided by an armchair.

“That’s for the student monitor,” she explained. “Someone sits and watches when you read the really rare material. I told her to take an early lunch.”

“I spent some time here,” said Isaac. “Researching Lewis Carroll for an English class. Pencils, no pens, white linen gloves when necessary.”

“We have a wonderful Carroll collection. Sit. We’ve got an hour.”

He pulled up to the table, expecting her to leave and return with something. Instead, she settled next to him. Unclasped her purse.

Out came a book- a booklet- brown-paper cover printed in rough black lettering. Wrapped in a zip-sealed plastic bag.

She said, “I was a very bad girl, taking it out of here. I did it just in case that Lucido person was still skulking around and we were unable to return.”

He took her hand and kissed it.

She laughed, smoothed out the plastic, removed the booklet carefully. “Talk about esoteric. I found it in the Graham Collection. It wasn’t even cataloged in the main collection. It was in one of the appendices.”

Out of her purse came a pair of soft, white gloves. “Speaking of which,” she said, rotating the booklet so the title faced Isaac.

He gloved up. Read.

THE SINS OF THE MAD ARTIST

AN ACCOUNT OF THE HORRIBLE DEEDS

OF

OTTO RETZAK

RECOUNTED BY

T. W. JOSEPH TELLER, ESQ.

FORMER SUPERINTENDENT OF THE MISSOURI STATE

PENITENTIARY

AND PUBLISHED BY HIM IN ST. LOUIS

A.D. MCMX

The brown cover was cardboard, acid-burned brown at the borders, brittle. Isaac lifted it gingerly, flipped, began reading.

After covering a single paragraph, he turned to Klara. “You’re brilliant.”

She beamed. “So I’ve been told.”

Otto Retzak was the son of Bavarian immigrant farmers who’d come to America in 1888 and ended up on a scratchy patch of rock-strewn land in the southern Illinois region known as Little Egypt. The sixth of nine children and the youngest son, Otto had been born on American soil.

Born June 28, 1897.

One hundred years to the day, before Marta Doebbler’s murder.

Isaac’s hands started to shake. He steadied them and hunched over the crudely printed text.

Retzak was eight when his drunkard father abandoned the family. Considered extremely bright but uneducable due to “a frightfully overactive and heated temperament,” Otto displayed a precocious ability to “wield charcoal stubs in a way that created faithful images.” His artistic talent went unappreciated by Otto’s drunkard mother, who routinely beat him with switches and kitchen implements and left him to the mercies of his older brothers. With great enthusiasm and teamwork, the elder siblings sexually abused the boy.

At age nine, the illiterate Otto burgled a neighboring farm of twenty-nine cents hidden in a flour jar and a “plump laying hen.” The money was traded to another farm boy for a rusty clasp knife. The bird was found off the pitted dirt path that led to the decrepit Retzak homestead, gutted, its eyes scooped out, its head yanked off manually.

When confronted, Otto admitted his guilt “with no sense of childish shame, on the contrary, he boasted.” Beaten by his mother with special severity, he was turned over to the neighbors, who added their own lash-work to his tender back and worked him as a barn-hand for a month of fourteen-hour days.

The day after returning home, Otto stabbed his younger sister in the face without apparent provocation. As Superintendent T. W. Joseph Teller recounted: “A cold eye, even a sly smile, he did present to all those in attendance as the girl shrieked and wept and bled.”

The local sheriff was called in and Otto was locked in a cell with adult miscreants. Two months later, the boy, bruised and limping, was brought before an itinerant magistrate who warned him about “substantial characterological degeneracy” and sentenced him to five years in a state reform school. There, Otto claimed to have learned that “mankind is not glorious nor good nor fashioned in God’s image. Rather it is a dung-heap of stink and sin and hypocrisy. The hatred that was to drive me for the entirety of my accursed life took hold and was fed in that dark place. The outrages that were done to my person and mind in the name of spiritual cure were of benefit to me in a ma