Paint It Black

Chapter Forty-two

The rain beat down on the windows. Louis and Emily sat silent at the table, both lost in their own thoughts.

Wainwright hung up the phone and looked at Louis. “I told Horton what you said. He wants us downtown immediately. And there’s something new. They found Heller’s truck abandoned in a canal east of the airport. No body, no Heller.”

Wainwright got up and left the room.

“He might have skipped,” Emily said.

Louis was silent.

“If he goes underground again, we could lose him until he resurfaces,” Emily said.

“Shit,” Louis muttered.

Wainwright came back, carrying a computer printout. “Horton sent over Heller’s sheet. He’s got a history. Manslaughter conviction, 1979, Broward County, Florida. Served three years.”

“We need more,” Louis said.

“I’ll call over to Broward,” Wainwright said, picking up the phone.

“We may not have to,” Emily said.

They looked over at her. She was standing over the box on the table, holding a file. “He’s in here,” she said.

Wainwright stared at the file in her hand. “How did we miss it?” he asked.

“It was in the stack of black suspects,” she said.

“We put them aside after Roscoe Webb, after we decided we were looking for a white man.”

She flipped it open and sca

“It’s the first case,” she said. “Heller’s first murder—his own father.”

“Jesus,” Wainwright said.

“It’s from the Pompano Beach PD,” Emily said. “It’s where Heller was born, just north of Fort Lauderdale.”

She adjusted her glasses. “In 1979, when he was eighteen, Tyrone Heller stabbed his father four times. He fled, and the father died hours later. Heller was charged with manslaughter.” She paused. “Listen to this. His public defender wanted to plead him out on diminished capacity and got him a psych exam.”

“Is the medical report in there?” Wainwright asked.

Emily nodded. “Here’s the family history. Heller’s mother was white, father black. They weren’t married and Heller’s father denied paternity and abandoned the family. Heller was raised by the mother, whose three other children were white. He was the youngest. Here’s what the psychiatrist wrote: ‘As child, subject was target of emotional abuse and isolation by mother and siblings. Subject expresses rage against absent father and displays extreme episodes of depression and self-loathing.’ ”

She paused, looking up at Louis and Wainwright.

“Like he should’ve been scraped from his mother’s womb,” Louis said.

“All through his teenaged years, Heller tried to locate his father,” Emily went on. “He finally found him living in Fort Lauderdale, but the father again rejected him. That’s when Heller attacked.” She looked up. “They found the body in a bathtub, with the faucet ru

“In water,” Louis said.

Emily let out a sigh. “There’s quite a bit from the psychiatrist here,” she said. “ ‘The subject, Tyrone Heller, exhibits reaction formation and confabulation. ’ ”

“Translate, Farentino,” Louis said.

She looked up at them. “Reaction formation is a kind of defensive mechanism, a way of dealing with negative and unacceptable feelings by substituting thoughts or behaviors that are completely opposite of the bad feelings.”

“I don’t get it,” Wainwright said.

“Normal people, healthy people, can cha

“So to Heller the unacceptable fact is that he looks black?” Louis asked.

Emily was nodding, remembering something. “It’s why he asked me what Lynch said about him. It’s why he asked me if Lynch said he was black. I think Heller truly believes he is white.” She paused. “It explains his racism toward his black victims.”

“And why Roscoe Webb was so certain he heard a white man talking to him when Heller called him a nigger,” Louis said.

“What’s confabulation?” Wainwright asked.

“Lying,” Louis said.

Emily hesitated. “Not really,” she said. “It’s more like filling in the gaps in your memory with unconscious fiction. It’s making up stories to cover up the fact that you don’t know the truth. Alzheimer patients do it to hide the fact that they can’t remember things they know they should be able to.”

Wainwright shook his head. “But you said Heller really believed he was white. So was he was kidding himself? Is that what confabulating is?”

“In Heller’s case, I’m guessing that the unacceptable fact of his black side caused him to suppress many of his memories about growing up and he has invented a more acceptable past—and identity.”

“As a white man,” Louis said tightly. He got up and went to the window, his back to them.

They were silent. The rain pounded on the windows. Wainwright was watching Louis but finally he turned back to Emily.

“Anything else in there we need to know?” Wainwright asked.

Emily sca

“Jesus, he isn’t one of those multiple personalities, like that Sybil woman?” Wainwright said.

Emily shook her head. She slipped her glasses back on. “I think I know what set him off—Lynch,” she said quietly.

“Lynch?” Wainwright said.

“Lynch told me he was retiring after the fishing season was over. Tyrone Heller probably knew that. And Lynch was Heller’s acceptable father figure.”

Wainwright was staring at her. “Bullshit,” he said softly. “Some people are just born bad and this asshole is one of them. I don’t buy it.”

“I do,” Louis said, turning.

They both looked at him.

“Heller was raised by people who told him that being black was inferior,” Louis said. “He grew up believing it, believing that being black was less than . . . that it was garbage.”

He paused. “His father was gone, his black side was gone. He wanted to be accepted, but to do that he had to change the one thing he couldn’t change—his skin. In his mind, he became white.”

Louis paused. He realized he was clenching his fists. He turned away, flexing his fingers.

Wainwright glanced at Emily.

“Louis,” Emily said quietly, “go on. Please.”

He didn’t turn. He didn’t speak.

Wainwright cleared his throat. “Why did he kill his father then?” he asked.

“Abandoned children sometimes kill out of rejection,” Emily began.

Louis turned. “Heller didn’t search for his father because he wanted acceptance. He searched for him—hunted him down—to kill him. When he realized the world wasn’t going to accept him as white, he blamed his father. He saw his father as something that had infected him.”

He came back toward the table and sat down.

“Is that why he cut Farentino?” Wainwright asked. “Was he trying to infect her with his black blood?”

Emily looked at Louis. When he didn’t say anything, she shook her head. “Heller might have moments of reality. I might have been there for one, and he might have been trying to make me feel his pain.”

“It still doesn’t explain why he killed those men,” Wainwright said. “Or why he painted them. What? Is he trying to show the world that they deserve to die just because they’re black?”

Emily thought about that for a moment, then shook her head. “I think his victims are symbolic fathers. Heller stabbed his father but he never actually saw him die. Maybe the paint is his way of trying to erase him over and over again.”

Louis had fallen quiet again. Emily looked over at him.