Murderabilia Read online

  Copyright Information

  Murderabilia © 2019 by Carl Vonderau.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Midnight Ink, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  As the purchaser of this ebook, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

  Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First e-book edition © 2019

  E-book ISBN: 9780738761701

  Book format by Samantha Penn

  Cover design by Shira Atakpu

  Midnight Ink is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Vonderau, Carl, author.

  Title: Murderabilia / Carl Vonderau.

  Description: First edition. | Woodbury, Minnesota : Midnight Ink, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019008871 (print) | LCCN 2019012474 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780738761701 () | ISBN 9780738761305 (alk. paper)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3622.O675 (ebook) | LCC PS3622.O675 M87 2019 (print) |

  DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019008871

  Midnight Ink does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

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  Acknowledgments

  So many people encouraged and assisted me in making this a better book. Jim Filley and Gary Hassen, of the San Diego Police Department, helped me with a tour of their offices and provided details of arrest processing. Randy Mize and Matt Brainer educated me on the law and how an arraignment and a separate in-chambers consultation with a judge could work. Mark Hayes walked me through processing and housing at the San Diego County Jail. I’m sure I didn’t get all of this right, but it is more accurate because of their coaching.

  Many people generously gave their time to look at and evaluate earlier versions of the manuscript. Terry and David Brown, Martha Lawrence, Mark Clayton, and Bob Lowe read and helped with earlier drafts. Jackie Mitchard worked with me for more than two years. She suggested so many improvements and even came up with the moniker “the Preying Hands.” Among other things, she educated me on pacing, backstory, structure, and the opening. The book is so much better because of her insights. Lastly, my writers’ group has evaluated every scene in this book and many that never made it to the final version. They have helped me see the deeper parts of the character and get rid of the boring parts. A huge thanks to Eleanor Bluestein, Peggy Lang, Louise Julig, Suzanne Delzio, Barbara Brown, James Jones, Lawrence Saul, and Walter Carlin.

  People in the book publishing industry believed in this book. My tireless and fabulous agent, Michelle Richter, kept pushing until we found a publisher. Terri Bischoff and Midnight Ink saw the strengths in the manuscript and put their time and money behind it. Sandy Sullivan, my editor at Midnight Ink, seems to know the book better than I do. She helped me correct so many things to make the manuscript better. Dana Kaye and Sami Lien of Dana Kaye Publicity, as well as Ellen Zielinski Whitfield at JKS Communications, have helped with great marketing ideas.

  Lastly, a great thanks to my wife, Rachel Mayberry, for patiently suffering through the years it took me to finally get published. Without your support, this never would have happened.

  1

  I manage secrets. Sometimes my clients take years to reveal them—hidden trusts for mistresses and drug-addled kids, weddings held up for months or years because someone’s beloved refused to sign a prenuptial agreement. Once I helped a dying business owner design an estate plan that forced his first wife’s children to be civil to his second wife or they’d lose their inheritance. Over the years I’ve learned that my biggest value is not my expertise, but my discretion. The clients at our bank count on me to stay in the background but always be close at hand. They appreciate that I buy my suits at Macy’s and drive a Camry instead of a BMW or red sports coupe. Of course, there are the usual loan requests—but any banker can handle those. Even the twenty-six-year-olds who honed their sales skills by hawking magazines can get loans approved for the families I work with. But only a special banker can protect a client’s secrets.

  Our bank sits discreetly on the tenth floor of a modern building, but our offices are designed to look like an old house that one wealthy descendent has passed down to the next. Oil paintings cling to the damask wallpaper beside antique sconces and handmade stands that hold wooden umbrellas and canes. The conference rooms have couches with throw pillows. Coffee table books of Impressionist painters lie open on vintage tables. When our clients visit us, they’re supposed to feel as if they’re chatting up the kind of trustworthy and cultured friend who would never need their money.

  My career—my life—was carefully constructed to appear normal. Until two years ago. That’s when a simple cell phone call unraveled the layers of my facade. When I answered, I was standing beneath the glass cupola in our bank’s main hallway.

  A voice distorted beyond recognition said, “William McNary. That’s not your real name, is it, Tex?”

  I pushed my palm against the wall to steady myself. “Tex” was my childhood nickname when we lived in Illinois. The name my father gave me.

  “Do you ever think about hands? He thought about hands a lot, your daddy did. Right, Tex? You there?”

  An electronic warble could have been a laugh.

  “Who … who is this?” I asked.

  “Your brother. The only one who really knows you.”

  The line went dead.

  I don’t have a brother.

  I stumbled down the hallway toward the bank’s reception area. I could go down the elevators and get some air. But instead I turned and lurched the other direction, toward the fake French doors that led into the banking department. Passing the rows of offices inside, I was aware of Ambrose Hines pitching on the phone, her index finger jabbing each benefit in the air. Everyone else was out seeing clients. I ducked into the cover of my own office. With my door shut, I sank my head into my hands.

  The whole country knew of Harvey Dean Kogan, but no one suspected that I was his son. My boss and clients would be shocked. Why didn’t you tell us? What about the bank’s reputation? But worst of all was what this might do to my kids. No child should grow up knowing that monster was part of their family.

  I grabbed my briefcase from the floor and stuffed a leather notebook inside. When I reached the garage I saw something jammed under my Camry’s wi
per. A plain white envelope. At first I thought it was a notice of new parking fees. But nothing was stuck to any other car’s windshield. My breath coming faster, I wrenched out the envelope and hit the button for the automatic door locks. I leaned over to check the back seat. Only then did I climb into the driver’s seat and open the envelope. A drawing lay folded inside. Or rather, it was a printed copy of a drawing … of hands.

  I kicked the underside of the dashboard and shouted. I crumpled the paper and whipped it against the car’s windshield. For thirty-one years I’d dreaded exactly this. Someone would find us. Someone would torment us. I just never knew how. Or when.

  Everyone has seen that drawing. In the Dürer pen-and-ink sketch, two grayish-blue hands reach out from sleeves folded over into cuffs, the fingers straight and touching in prayer. Only the praying apostle’s hands and sleeves are visible, as if his forearms have detached from his body to hover in the air. It’s universally known as The Praying Hands. In the version that appeared on my car, black words stood out on the light blue background: Repent and accept your savior.

  I peeled out of the garage. Fifteen minutes later my Camry sat wedged in traffic, San Diego’s drought-stricken hills rising like brown hands around me. I had to calm down, to shape-shift into the unruffled father my family knew. I had to stop gulping air.

  By the time the traffic released me, I’d stopped sweating. Our neighborhood was full of hundreds of modest ranch-style houses constructed in the 1960s. In front of ours was a honeysuckle hedge. I’d grown it high for privacy from the neighbors and the street. But now I wanted to see behind it. From the driveway I could make out the garage and our miniature, water-starved front yard. My sister Polly and my kids dipped what looked like a hula-hoop into a vat of soapy water. They lifted it into the air and blew out an enormous bubble. I took a long, relieved breath.

  Only Polly would show up in the middle of a drought with a toy that required liquid. But her water came from the rain she’d trapped in her cistern. Polly consumed less city water than anyone I knew. Today she’d donned a pirate hat and eye patch and threaded her black tennis shoes with striped green and yellow laces.

  Garth and Frieda had their own pirate hats. As the bubbles’ rainbow colors vibrated in the air, all three jumped up and down with toy cutlasses in their hands. Polly was so petite that she looked like one of the kids. Jill, long and willowy, sat by the orange tree and oohed and ahhed. I didn’t want to say a word. The soap bubble floated to the yellow and brown grass, popped, and disappeared.

  My seven-year-old ran to the spot where the bubble had vanished and beat the ground with his toy sword. After the sixth whack, Jill pushed herself up and draped her arms around him. Garth froze but didn’t look at her. For a moment, I worried more about our unusual child than the phone call and the drawing.

  Jill saw me and waved. Garth returned to beating the same stretch of dried-out grass.

  “Hey, banker man,” Polly yelled.

  Jill and Polly deserved to know what had happened, but not with the kids there. As I skirted the palm tree, Polly asked, “Did you bring me something nice from the bank’s vault?” When I was silent, she said, “Any hot new bankerettes I should meet?”

  I tried to muster a smile. Frieda, my five-year-old, ran to me, her mop of brown hair cut short like her Aunt Polly’s. She grabbed my suit and pointed to Polly’s soapy water. “Millions and millions of drops in the bubbles,” she shouted. “Million” was her new favorite number. I hugged my little girl a bit harder than usual.

  Jill stared at me, a question in her eyes. Why was I home so early? “Okay, my pirates,” she yelled. “Time to wash off the monster slime.”

  Garth broke into a gap-toothed grin. I’d been only one year older when an army of FBI agents yanked away my father.

  Our kids galloped inside and Jill followed. She turned back and squinted. Cocked her head so her blonde locks hung down lopsided from the Padres cap. Once again I was grateful for my strong wife. If anyone could withstand this, it was Jill.

  Polly stayed outside with me. She pulled off her pirate hat and patch. The skin around her eyes furrowed into spidery creases. She and I shared too many secrets to hide anything from one another.

  “Someone knows who we are,” I said.

  Polly’s whole body tensed. She knew exactly the kind of sicko I was talking about. “Did he say his name?”

  I shook my head. “He called me Tex. He said he was my brother.”

  Her hands bunched into fists. “Fuck, fuck, fuck …”

  Polly’s fury always sucked the air out of mine. I dug the copy of the Dürer drawing out of my suit pocket.

  “It’s like him,” I said. “It’s like he escaped from prison.” But he couldn’t have. It would have been on every news site and TV station.

  My sister turned her spotlight stare on me, her spiky brown hair sticking out. “As if prison could ever hold the devil.”

  The devil. Harvey Dean Kogan. My father. Everyone had heard of him, but few had studied his history as much as I had. He’d killed his first victim more than forty years ago in a suburb outside Chicago. Bonnie Sendaro had berated a clerk and yelled at another woman’s child inside a Montgomery Ward Department Store. Kogan decided she needed to be punished. It was ten o’clock at night, and no one else wandered through the store’s parking lot when Sendaro walked outside. He knocked her out with his wrench and laid her on the torn back seat of his van.

  Harvey Dean Kogan didn’t possess Sendaro through torture or rape. In the ten minutes it took to strangle her, the Dürer drawing he’d seen at the library flashed into his mind. “That’s when I became an artist,” he later told a journalist. In an abandoned park, he severed her arms with a hacksaw and scissored off the sleeves of her blouse. Super Glue held her hands together in prayer. He used the same glue to attach the turned-up blouse sleeves to her arms. Kogan mounted his creation on a tree limb with baling wire.

  In that darkness, Harvey Dean Kogan must have set up a tripod and adjusted the camera to a wide aperture. Maybe a fifteen-second shutter speed. A cable release would have stopped it from shaking. In the final image, a big part of the tree stood in an otherworldly haze of light, as if he’d shone a flashlight on it during part of the exposure. The Chicago Sun-Times received that black-and-white photo. Bonnie Sendaro’s praying hands seemed to float palely between two dark branches, the stars and moon slightly blurred in the black expanse behind them. There was no sign of blood; blood would not taint his art. The press recognized the reference to the Dürer pen-and-ink drawing and began to call him “the Preying Hands.”

  He made that photograph when he was nineteen, seven years before I was born.

  2

  Inside our bedroom I slipped off my banker’s clothes: the shined shoes and pressed suit, the gold cuff links. Home was where I pulled on jeans, an old work shirt, and beat-up running shoes, where my children’s cleansing voices seeped in from the rest of the house.

  I joined them in the kitchen for dinner. Opposite me, Polly had changed into another black T-shirt and Doc Martens. She’d slipped on her silver bracelets and watch, the crystal so big you could tell the time from across the room. Polly followed more issues than most people could keep track of. Tonight she ranted about counterfeit natural foods and the evils of antibiotics, then the sins of families with three cars. “And why does everyone have to flush toilets every time?” she yelled. “We’ve got a drought, people.” My kids started to giggle and she slapped palms with them.

  Next to Polly, Frieda opened her fairy-tale coloring book. Her brown bear, Micky Marvin, was snuggled beside her. On the other side of Polly, Garth landed his plastic space ship, his jet engine shushing through the gap in his teeth. As usual, he’d lined up half the cutlery drawer in careful rows in front of him. Garth was the largest kid in his class, the one his playmates picked after the girls for their teams.

  Neither child had any ide
a who Harvey Dean Kogan was. But I’d always known that someday … someday some stranger would bend down and smile at them in the park. “Do you know who your grandpa is? I’ll bet you’re just like him.”

  Jill was picking at her pasta. She said something beside me, but I was still churning through my thoughts. “Did you hear anything I said?” she asked. “Anything at all? Some of the rest of us had an awful day too.”

  I wrenched my mind back to Jill. Her eyes looked tired. “What happened?”

  She turned to the kids. “A half hour of TV. That’s it. I mean it.”

  Garth and Frieda scampered to our bedroom in the back of the house. When the door slammed shut, Jill said, “They suspended Elizabeth.”

  Elizabeth Morton taught at the same elementary school as Jill. One of Elizabeth’s fourth graders had stuck out his foot and tripped her. They both fell. When Elizabeth got up, she yanked the boy up as well. The next day, he showed up at school with his arm in a sling and his mother beside him. She clutched a lawyer’s card.

  I was actually relieved to talk about someone else’s nightmare. “He was in a sling,” I said. “What choice did the school have?”

  Both women slowly turned to me. How could I be so tone deaf? This could be the end of Elizabeth’s teaching career.

  “It’s terrible,” I said.

  Jill swept her eyes over Polly and me. She lifted some plates and noisily rinsed them in the sink. When she returned to the table, she said, “What’s going on with you two?”

  Polly chose that moment to take a drag from her asthma inhaler. She fumbled with one of the diamond studs in her ear.

  When you tell someone about a disaster, it doesn’t really matter where you start. As I talked, Jill’s frown slowly tightened. She and I had fastidiously kept Harvey Dean Kogan out of what our friends knew about us. We’d tell Garth and Frieda about the Preying Hands when they were teenagers, when they could separate themselves from the Preying Hands’ abominations. Jill didn’t worry about being outed as much as I did. She hadn’t lived through what a small town could do.