Darkness on the Edge of Town

by Black, J. Carson

  “You can fuck that.” Lehman picked up his cell phone from the kitchen table and turned away from them.

  It was a short conversation. When he was through, he closed the phone with a snap and slapped it on the table. “Lawyer’s on his way.”

  “Can we at least sit down?” Victor asked him.

  “I can’t stop you, can I?”

  They sat in the breakfast nook. Lehman leaned against the refrigerator, arms folded.

  Victor set his mini-recorder on the table. He spoke into it, giving the time and date and Lehman’s name.

  Lehman ignored him, staring straight ahead, his eyes like two holes in his face. She could feel his rage under the surface—he hummed like a powerline.

  “Did you know Cary Statler?” Victor asked Lehman.

  Lehman didn’t answer. He was in his own zone, his breathing short and rapid. Staring so hard at a spot on the wall she thought he’d go cross-eyed.

  The way he’d tried to bully her…

  “When was the last time you saw Statler?” Victor asked.

  Lehman transferred his gaze to the ceiling.

  “Do you remember where you were the evening Jessica was kidnapped?”

  It went on like that for a minute or so before Victor gave up.

  Usually he could charm people with his easygoing nature, his sympathetic ear. But Lehman was immune.

  Laura looked around the kitchen. Everything was spotless, gleaming. The stove, refrigerator and cooking island were all stainless steel and modern. There was not the usual clutter you’d see on shelves or near the sink; in her house the dishwashing liquid sat next to the sink, but here, the kitchen counter was cleared of everything except a bowl of fruit.

  Not much in plain sight.

  Buddy leaned in the doorway, looking at her. A self-satisfied smirk on his face. Laura ignored him and concentrated on the kitchen.

  Place reminded her of a model home. She thought of the way the bad guy had washed the girl, washed her hair, clipped her nails. This guy was that neat. Would there be trace evidence in the shower? She knew that the probation officer’s search wouldn’t extend there, but if she found something else incriminating, they could get a search warrant.

  What would that be? Dress patterns for little girls?

  Sylvia poked her head in the doorway. “Can I get in here?”

  Lehman shot her a virulent look and launched himself away from the refrigerator like a missile. He went out the kitchen door into his yard, letting the screen door slam behind him. Laura, Victor and Buddy Holland followed.

  Out into the steaming summer heat. Brick patio. Immaculate propane grill. Lehman turned on the hose and began watering the potted plants. The smell of the water mingled with the scent of wet earth.

  Laura knew that Clegg could not do a comprehensive search. She’d noticed how Victor had worked certain words into his conversation with Clegg as they’d walked over here. He asked her if she knew how to sew. Mentioned his own mother’s sewing machine. Asked her about actors, too, what she knew about makeup, wigs, dress-up. How as a kid one Halloween he’d gone as Snidely Whiplash, twiddling his big black mustache.

  Broad hints. Clegg had gotten it.

  Now Clegg spoke through the screen door. “All I have left is the bedroom.”

  Laura glanced at her watch. Victor would have to leave soon; he had Cary Statler’s autopsy in Sierra Vista. She wanted to get out of here, too. She needed to go to Tucson to notify Cary’s uncle about the death in person. The man might know already, although the police had not yet given Cary’s name to the press.

  She glanced at Lehman.

  His intensity scared her. All this time and his anger had not abated. A hard smell to him—could you smell testosterone?—mingling with the smell of water and earth.

  This was Victor’s show. Victor’s and Buddy’s.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said to no one in particular.

  Neither Buddy nor Victor said anything.

  Laura let herself out the gate just as a Lexus pulled up to the curb. An ugly little man in an expensive suit emerged, holding a calfskin briefcase.

  Lehman’s lawyer.

  19

  Tucson-Saguaro Auto & Body, near the corner of Palo Verde and 29th Street, was a cinderblock building with three roll-up work bays, a parking lot surrounded by a ten-foot-high chain link fence, and a corrugated iron shed that served as the office. The traffic here was a six-lane river of cars and SUVs flowing past a median on which a person dressed like a chicken waved a sign for a fast food place called “El Pollo Grande”. Every car window was up, the air conditioning going, people with cellphones attached to their ears. All of them isolated from one another in their speeding steel-and-glass capsules.

  The chicken looked jaunty, even though he must be smothering from the heat—a real trouper. Laura wondered how much he was paid.

  As she stepped onto the curb, she felt that familiar tightening in her stomach whenever she notified people that their loved ones were dead.

  She knew what it felt like. The memory was always close at hand, a penance of sorts. A counselor at the University had explained to her the concept of survivor’s guilt. It ran through her head like film: Drifting off to sleep, her thoughts on Billy and the fun they’d had in Nogales, turtle soup at La Rocca’s, coming home late and not feeling like going to her parents’ house for dinner. Making love, Billy having to leave because he had to be at work early tomorrow. The stutter of the sprinklers outside the open dorm window. The bedclothes smelling of sex. That Last Happy Day.

  Someone knocking on her door. She opens it to two men in suits, who look as if they’ve been lurking in the hallway trying to get their stories straight.

  Knowing right then something is wrong.

  The older one with the florid complexion clearing his throat—

  She walked along the weedy curb to the shed. The heat was like a convection oven. The door to the shed was open and a table fan blew sporadically in her direction. It took her a moment to adjust her eyes to the darkness of the shed after the blinding desert sun.

  “Help you?”

  The man sat at a metal desk facing the door. Graying ponytail, a red t-shirt washed so many times it had faded to pink. Behind him, a Tecate poster of a sweaty girl with a bare midriff and cutoffs was tacked to the faded wall.

  The minute he saw her his smile faded. She realized that he had been expecting this visit.

  “Are you Beau Taylor?”

  There was still a hopeful quality to his expression, as if there was a chance that there had been some kind of mistake. Laura remembered going through the same thinking process when detectives Jeff Smith and Frank Entwistle came to her door. It went like this: As long as nothing was said, you were all right. But the moment the words spilled into the air, there was no way to call them back. So the thing was to try and stop those words.

  “If it’s about the Coupe de Ville—“

  “No sir.” Best to tell him flat out, no ambiguity. “There’s no easy way to tell you this, sir, but your nephew Cary Statler was found in Bisbee yesterday morning, dead.”

  His face crumpled. “I thought it was him. The news said they found a body, but they didn’t identify him.”

  “Why did you think it was him, sir?”

  “Jessica was killed and he disappeared. If he was missing, he was either hitchhiking his way here or someone got him, too. He didn’t show up, then they find a body right near her house. You might as well tell me what happened.”

  She did.

  “Do you think he suffered?”

  She went for the white lie; for all she knew it was true. “I don’t think so. It was a massive head injury.”

  “Poor, sweet kid. He wanted to be a vet. His grades were piss-poor, he dropped out of school, but he was always talking about getting his GED and then trying to get into vet school.” He snorted. “Like he could get through a science degree in college. Didn’t talk about it so much lately, though. I grew up in a time when
drugs were cool, but I tell you, I’ve seen more kids lose their ambition, smoking pot…” He trailed off, looked down at his club-like fingers. “Probably never would have gotten anywhere.”

  “Did you ever hear him talk about a neighbor, a man named Chuck Lehman?”

  “Sure. He and Cary made kites. Kind of strange, a forty-year-old man and an eighteen-year-old kid.”

  And a fourteen-year-old girl, Laura thought.

  “Cary was a funny mixture of a kid. Never could stick with anything, had that attention-span problem, what do you call it? A.D.D.? Plus, he got put off easy.”

  The shack rattled—the thundering whistle of two A-10s from Davis Monthan on final approach. Laura glanced out the doorway and saw one of them over the strip mall across the way, a giant mosquito looking for a place to alight.

  She wondered how Cary’s uncle could stand it, here in the flight path of the A-10s and C-130s—and worse, the F16s—just an iron shed between himself and the stifling heat that killed one or two illegal aliens a day a few miles south of here. He noticed her discomfort and aimed the fan in her direction. Must have been a floor model; it still had the streamers.

  “You said he was put off easily?” she asked him.

  “Say if somebody hurt his feelings, he’d withdraw. I think it was because he was shy. Somebody said one wrong thing to him, he’d just clam up. Just up and leave. That’s why he was always bouncing around between Bisbee and here. He didn’t like being criticized, took it to heart.”

  “He ever get in fights?”

  “Nope. When something bothered him, he’d pack up his stuff and take off.” Beau Taylor stared at the shimmering white heat beyond the open doorway.

  “You’re sure he was friends with Chuck Lehman.”

  “Oh, yeah. It was always Chuck this and Chuck that. Guy knew everything. Nobody else knew shit. But that all changed a couple of weeks ago.”

  “They had a falling out?”

  “Kid wouldn’t talk about it, but you should’ve seen the look on his face when I asked about him.”

  “This was a couple of weeks ago?”

  “Last time he came down here.”

  “Could you pinpoint the date?”

  “I think it was a Sunday. We’re closed Sundays, plus we go to church.” He rolled his chair over to the counter under the window and consulted a greasy-looking desk calendar. “Sunday. End of June.”

  “Did he fight with his girlfriend much?”

  “They had their set-to’s. But he was in love with her and in love with her family—couldn’t say what he loved more. His mother wasn’t worth much, and he always wanted a family.”

  “Cary was eighteen. An adult. How come he wasn’t out on his own?”

  “He attached himself to people. He was needy and a loner at the same time.”

  “Was Jessica a friend of Lehman’s, too?”

  “I’m pretty sure she was. Cary mentioned a couple of times they did things together.”

  “Didn’t it seem strange to you? A man that much older hanging out with kids?”

  “I didn’t have a say in it. As you said, he was an adult.”

  Laura opened her mouth to say that Jessica wasn’t an adult—and that was when her cell phone chirped.

  * * *

  Sylvia Clegg, standing on a chair in the closet, felt hard plastic behind the piles of folded blankets stored for the summer.

  She pulled down a videotape just as she heard the toilet flush.

  The tape was called Pubic Enemy No. 1. The heart-warming story of a gangster who finds love in a hot sheet motel with two vertically-challenged girls.

  “What’s that?” said Detective Buddy Holland from the doorway.

  “Buddy, you didn’t use the bathroom, did you?”

  He held up his hands, gloved in latex. “You gotta go, you gotta go. What’s that? Porno?”

  “You’re in here now, you might as well come and look at this.”

  She held the tape out to him. He didn’t touch; just looked. “What do you think?”

  “Girls could be twenty, or they could be sixteen. Hard to tell these days.”

  “Definitely not little girls, though.” She stepped back up and reached into the closet, pulled out more of tapes.

  Buddy remained in the room, hands on his hips, watching her.

  “Where’s Chuck?” she asked him.

  “He’s still out back, stewing.” He added, “The DPS guy left, has to witness the autopsy.”

  “You really aren’t supposed to be in here.”

  “I know.” He made a slow circuit of the room, peering at things without touching. “Anything besides the porno?”

  “Not that I can see.”

  “Too bad.” Buddy shone his MagLite at the back of Chuck Lehman’s dresser.

  “Buddy, what are you doing?”

  “There’s a gap between the dresser and the wall.”

  “So?”

  He looked at her. “Did you look to see if anything fell back there?”

  Sylvia felt a twinge of embarrassment. “I’m not done yet.”

  Buddy continued to stand over the dresser. He was looking at something.

  Sylvia got down off the chair and set the videotapes down on the floor. “What is it?”

  Buddy pointed his flashlight behind the dresser. She came to stand next to him and peered down. Something there. A cylinder.

  She went and got a videotape, which was just narrow enough to fit behind the dresser. She caught the thing with the corner, scooting it toward her.

  “Bingo,” Buddy said as a lipstick tube rolled across the floor.

  20

  They served the search warrant for Chuck Lehman’s house at six o’clock the next morning, pulling Lehman out of bed. He slept in something that looked like a karate gi, and for a minute Laura wondered if he was going to launch an assault at them. He looked mad enough to bust a brick with his hand.

  Anger boiled out of him, his eyes burning pure hatred, like twin gas flames.

  Nudging the red line.

  A lot had happened since Buddy Holland found the lipstick. Most notably, a partial print on the lipstick matched Jessica Parris’s index finger from the print cards taken by the Sierra Vista Medical Examiner—an eight-point match. Laura, Buddy and Victor had spent most of the night hashing out what they wanted on the search warrant, which Laura and Buddy would get from a judge in Bisbee. It was important they didn’t leave anything out—any area not spelled out by a warrant would be inaccessible to them. And so it became a name game: books, diaries, computer disks, the computer itself. Anything in the sewing line. Makeup, hairpieces, spirit gum and false mustaches. Kites. Indoor and outdoor trash. All cleaning products. Personal grooming products and grooming products for the dog: shampoos, soap, nail scissors, pet-grooming equipment. Financial records, receipts, check books, credit card information. Tools. His car, his yard, his garden shed.

  Victor remained in Tucson, catching up on the paperwork they’d accumulated so far.

  Buddy took the bedroom. Laura started in the living room and moved on to the kitchen.

  The stainless steel appliances would show fingerprints, smudges, if they had not been wiped clean with glass cleaner. She didn’t know if he had cleaned everything recently to cover up Jessica’s presence in his house, or if this was just the way he was. The place had been neat when they’d come here yesterday. Maybe he was just a neat kind of guy.

  She got on her hands and knees, looking for hairs or other evidence. Found several graying hairs and some dog hairs but nothing long or blond. She took them as evidence.

  Now for the refrigerator.

  Lehman favored health foods, green leafy vegetables, white wine. A healthy guy. A neat guy and a healthy guy.

  Expecting to move on pretty quickly, she slid out the crisper.

  A chill crept up her back. The only occupant of the crisper was a screenplay. CANDY RIDE.

  She hunkered down on her heels and aimed the MagLite at the script. Aft
er fixing its position in the crisper, she reached a gloved hand in and lifted it out.

  She felt breathing on her neck. Buddy.

  “Why would he keep a screenplay in the crisper?” Laura muttered.

  Buddy shrugged. “To hide it, I guess. I wonder what’s so bad about it he has to hide it.”

  Carefully, Laura pushed back the cardboard cover and read the first page.

  Buddy, leaning over her, whistled, low.

  The scene started with the abduction of a teenaged girl.

  Buddy said: “Sick fuck.”

  “You could look at it another way.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He hid it in the crisper.”

  Laura stared at the first page, thinking that it could go either way. People wrote what came from their imaginations; it didn’t mean that they did what they wrote about. “Maybe he’s serious. Maybe he’s trying to sell a screenplay.”

  Buddy just stared at her.

  “Are you done with the bedroom?” she asked.

  “I wanted to tell you. Couldn’t find anything in the bedclothes. He changed the sheets.”

  “You sure?”

  “They were black yesterday and they’re blue plaid now.”

  She absorbed this. “He was afraid we’d come back.”

  Buddy looked grim, which prompted her to ask, “What else?”

  “What do you mean, what else?”

  “There’s something else. What is it?”

  “I think he vacuumed the bedroom. Place is so clean it’s sterile.”

  Laura thought about the appliance surfaces. “He could just be a neat kind of guy.”

  “Yes, except I checked his vacuum cleaner. And his hand vac. New bags.”

  “So what he did, the minute we left, he vacuumed.” She thought of something. “Why’d he leave the screenplay in the crisper?”

  “He didn’t think we’d look there.”

  “If it was me, I’d get rid of any evidence of it. He’d have to know we’d look in the refrigerator. He’d have to know we’d be thorough this time around.”

  “How else do you explain it, then?”