She’d had the smallest space for doubt to inch its way into—maybe it wasn’t Peter; maybe it was just some mistake, like how she had the wrong man with Hank. But she knows it to be truth now.
“In the filmPsycho”—Christopher seems to have taken her silence as misunderstanding—“Marion Crane is killed while taking a shower.”
He thinks that she doesn’t get it, that it needs explaining. But things are rattling toward her now. Things are suddenly very, very clear.
“Would you wait here, please?” Beverley rushes to the back of the kitchen and opens the pantry door. From behind the tins of soup and packages of spaghetti on a shelf, she pulls out the scrapbook and carries it to the kitchen table. She places it flat, then quickly opens it to the required page.
“This,” she says, tapping on an article. “Does this sound like any movie you’ve seen?”
He leans over and inspects the newspaper article. She knows she is close to unearthing something profound. She can feel it. Her blood knows it.
He looks up at her from the picture of Sarah Gunn, from Beverley’s scrawled notes beside it, and he frowns. “Hanging from a hook…” he says quietly, as if he cannot quite believe what he is saying. “Well, it’s how they find Charley’s body inOn the Waterfront, I suppose.”
On the Waterfront. She knows that movie. Marlon Brando. She snuck in to see it in the theater, remembers the pictures of Eva Marie Saint in all the magazines.
She reaches down and hurriedly turns more pages, her fingers jittery.
“This one.” She reaches a picture of Emily Roswell. “She was found at the bottom of a lake.”
Mr. Appleton inspects the photograph. His shoulders drop.
“Is it from a movie?” she urges. “Is there a movie in which a young woman is found at the bottom of a lake?”
“I—I’m not—”
“Think. Please.”
She is applying too much pressure—she knows it. He’s just some guy who used to work in the movies.
“I’m sorry.”
“A lake. A body in a lake,” she prompts.
He shakes his head again. “I’m sorry. Not that I can think of.”
Then she remembers. It comes at her like a brick through a window.
“Her hands were tattooed.” She can taste the words, the horror of the detail. “Her knuckles.”
“What sort of tattoos?”
“Loveandhate.”
“TheNight of the Hunter.” There’s barely a pause before he answers. “Harry Powell, the killer, a religious fanatic—he hadloveandhatetattooed across his knuckles.”
She cannot believe it. This is the link. This is what they need. This is the killer’s inspiration, Peter’s inspiration.
She tells Christopher about the two other murders. The first, he is able to assign after a while. Cheryl Herrera—strangled, then staked through the eye with an arrow. It leads him to a Sharon Tate film. The star’s big-screen debut.Eye of the Devil, not even released yet. The art from its advertisements includes a skull with an arrow through the eye. The tagline:This Is the Climax in Mind-Chilling Terror. People were excited about it.
Then there was Diane Howard Murray, strangled to death, positioned, postmortem, with her legs dressed in suspender stockings.
Christopher’s eyes land uncomfortably on the floor. It’s an image no one would want to have to imagine. He thinks for a while, shaking his head, scanning the small newspaper article repeatedly. The picture of Diane gazes out at Christopher and Beverley—just a young woman, a life full of potential, so demeaned after death.
“There is a film,” he says eventually. “Mario Bava.Blood and Black Lace. It’s Italian. The killer…” He shakes his head, as if the truth of what he is about to say is too strange even to be considered. “The killer stalks models. There’s a scene in a park where he strangles a beautiful woman and then drags her through the trees. She’s wearing black suspenders. It’s very stylized, very visual.”
“That son of a bitch.”
“Are you saying this killer,” Mr. Appleton quavers, “is some sort of Mario Bava fan? The Tate picture hasn’t even hit theaters yet. This person must know their movies.”
