At nine-fifteen, a man who turned out to be Dale himself drove in and opened up. I waited until a few employees arrived, and then, wearing the sunglasses and ball cap, pulled up to one of the tire bays and got out. Dale was a speed-thin southerner with a skinny neck that looked like it was made up of gristle and rubber bands.
“Cha’ need?” he slurred at me through tobacco-stained teeth the same color and texture as a grape-stake fence.
“New tires,” I said, forcing a smile through my own too-dry pearlies.
Dale squatted down and looked at the rear tires on the Taurus, then he got up and checked the front pair. He rubbed his chin like he was preparing to shave. Of course there was still over a half-inch of good rubber all around, and that turned out to be what was bothering him.
“Zis a feckin’ joke? You one a them TV consumer guys with a hidden camera, tryin’ to see if I’ll sell ya tires ya don’t need?”
“No … no. I, uh … I don’t like the way these tires are riding. I’m gonna throw ‘em in the trunk and put ‘em on my wife’s car.” Even to me, this sounded more like an excuse than an explanation. Or was it just my guilty conscience revving?
An hour later, I paid for four new Firestones. They were identical to the ones Dale had just taken off the car, minus the unique identifiers that could be used to match the tread marks on Chandler’s chest and send me to prison. Dale threw the old set into the trunk. They didn’t all fit, so the last one we rolled onto the floor behind the front seat. I muttered some nonsense about my wife’s car, paid with cash, and left.
As I pulled out I glanced in the mirror and saw Dale watching, shaking his head slowly. This bubba’s definitely gonna remember me, I thought.
“Yessir, Officer. Yankee in a suit. Guy came in here, swapped a perfectly good set of Stonies for a set of new ones. Didn’t make no damn sense ‘tall.”
When you watch this stuff on TV or in the movies, it seems pretty simple. It’s another thing altogether when you’re actually trying to cover up a murder yourself. Everything you say or do has repercussions. Trying to wipe a trail clean is no simple task. A tiny mistake is like a pebble thrown into a still lake; the circles of ripples roll out, but it’s still pretty easy to judge where the stone originally landed.
I parked by a body of water about ten miles away, went through the bushes, and found a good place to ditch the tires. I rolled them into a lake I didn’t know the name of and watched while they sank.
As I was doing this, I started to rehearse the story I was planning to tell at the auto body shop. I needed to find somebody who could fix this car immediately—somebody who had the right Taurus parts in stock—the headlight frame, the glass lens, and the correct color of paint so the rental agency wouldn’t spot the damage. I couldn’t be hanging around in a broken-up blue Taurus while the cops two hundred miles away were finding pieces of Taurus blue paint on Chandler’s body. They’d put out a TV story and a four-state bulletin and I’d be toast. I needed to get this done fast and get outta here before the police lab found anything. I needed to fly under the radar.
I drove north again. The further away from Charlotte the better. I had already decided that Newark, New Jersey, would be the best place. It was close to New York, where I would fly out. Big city, lots of auto repair shops. This time, I figured the bigger the auto body shop the better. The more work they got, the less likely they were to remember my little headlight and fender repair job.
As I drove north on the interstate, I kept my mind off Chandler Ellis—the sound his body made thumping under my wheels, the sound of his whispery voice.
“Chick, help me.”
Instead of focusing on that I went over my new story … Driving at night … Hit an animal … Damn thing ran across the road. Deer. Are there deer in Virginia? Had to be, they’re everywhere … Hit the deer, it veered and ran on. Never saw if it was hurt … Stopped, tried to find it. Walked around looking—following the trail of blood, so I could try to help it, but—
No. Too much. Don’t overdo it. Make it boring, so they’ll forget it. Just hit the deer. It kept going. I kept going … like that.
I picked an auto repair shop called Top Hat Auto Repair. A cartoon of a man wearing a tuxedo and top hat, holding a wrench and screwdriver, graced the chain-link fence out front. Underneath it advertised: Body Repair—Parts Center.
This time I bought a pair of drugstore reading glasses to go with my ball cap and went inside without my suit coat.
The estimator checked out the damage while I mumbled my deer story. He didn’t seem to be listening or to care. His uniform identified him as Lou, but everybody called him “Wheezy.” “Hey, Wheezy, we got the new parts sheets in from Holbrook Supply yet?” “Hey, Wheezy, you gotta phone call on six.” Wheezy seemed to be the guy everyone asked questions of—a manager-type who still wasn’t quite managerial enough to keep from wearing his name over his pocket.
After checking the damage, he rocked back on his heels and looked at me. “Cost you around a thousand dollars and ‘cause we’re busy, gonna take about two t’ four days.”
“Two to four days? See … the thing there is, I’m due in Montreal in ten hours, and I was wondering if there was any way you could get on it right now?”
He shook his head. “No way. If you can’t wait, best thing is get it done once you get home:’ he said.
“Except, it’s my son’s wedding,” I replied. Desperation and panic seeped into my routine like flop sweat on a bad comedian. “We’re using this car for the wedding,” I continued implausibly. “I sort of don’t want to have to pull up in front of the church with a bashed-in fender.”
“Rent something else,” he said.
I looked shocked. “What makes you think it’s a rental?” I was going for indignation but only achieved petulance. He pointed to the windshield. There, pasted on the back of the rearview mirror, was a Hertz decal. Great … I might as well have left my confession pinned to the front seat.
“Look, Lou. Wheezy. I’m sticking with this car. There’s gotta be a number that gets it done this morning.”
I peeled two hundred dollars off a roll of fifties and put them into his hand, thinking, even as I did it, This is stupid, Chick. No way is this guy going to forget you now. But I was desperate. I couldn’t be trying to fix this car once it was on the news.
“How long you got?” Lou asked, putting the cash in his pocket. “I really need to get moving. Why don’t we start by you telling me how long it’ll take?”
Lou looked at the front end again. “Well, providing we got all the parts and paint, we gotta hammer this out and Bondo it. I’ll hafta use fast-dry body filler, then I gotta paint the fender, put it in the paint oven for at least an hour or two to dry—still gonna be a little tacky. Then I gotta reattach the new headlight rim and lens. Two o’clock at the earliest, maybe three.”
I nodded my head. I didn’t trust my voice to speak. I was starting to shake.
Of course, Chandler’s death made the late morning news. I sat in the waiting room at Top Hat on a cracked leather sofa, trying to read tire literature as the 11:00 news, with Ken and Barbie, came on. This pair of vinyl cupcakes had too-sprayed hair and too-white teeth. Their padded shoulders were almost touching as they told the viewers that Chandler Ellis, nephew of the late Otis Chandler, of the Los Angeles Chandler publishing family, was found dead in a supermarket parking lot, the victim of a hit-and-run.
They put up a press picture of Chandler in his football uniform from Georgetown University, right arm cocked back, helmetless and handsome, ready to rifle a pass to a streaking wide out.
His copper ringlets and hero looks made his death all the more distressing to Barbie, although she didn’t put it in quite those words. “Chandler Ellis, who was graced with looks, athletic skill, money, and social prominence, forsook a modeling career after college to work with learning disabled children. He also headed the Ellis Learning Foundation, which sponsors research into all forms of learning problems in children. He
will be missed:’ was the way she phrased it, but you could tell that, given the chance, she would’ve boned the handsome bastard in a heartbeat. I sat numbly, pretending to read an old Motor Trend magazine.
The repair work took until four o’clock, but Lou had rushed it, aspromised, and the paint and Bondo were both a little tacky when I got the car back.
“Hertz will never know you bent it,” Lou grinned.
I paid the bill with cash and drove out, leaving Top Hat Auto Repair in my good-as-new Taurus with the traitorous, Hertz-stickered rearview mirror. Obviously, I was not born for a life of crime.
The rest was relatively easy. I returned the car to Hertz in Manhattan and put the charge on my credit card. The girl walked around the car looking for dings. Nobody touched the almost-dry paint. Nobody noticed the repair job.
I left New York on an eight o’clock flight to Los Angeles. All the way there, my stomach churned. Something told me I was never going to get away with this.
But throughout it all, one thought kept popping up. I’d knock it angrily back down, but unexpectedly it would bounce up again like one of those blow-up clowns with a weight on the bottom—grinning, red-nosed, and ridiculous. One positive thought in this ocean of negativity.
Want to hear it? Get ready, because it really sucks. What I kept thinking was:
At least Paige Ellis is a widow.
PART 2
CHICK & PAIGE
Chapter 11
OF COURSE PAIGE DIDN’T KNOW THAT RIGHT AWAY.
After Chandler left for the drugstore, she sat in the front room of the wood-sided house on Lipton Road and tried to work on a seascape she was painting, but the pain from an extruded disc in her back, which sometimes kicked up after long runs, was killing her. She was getting ready for the Boston Marathon, pushing her distances out, and was experiencing more pain than usual. She wondered how she could have let her medication run out in the midst of her marathon training. Luckily, she reached Dr. Baker before he went to bed. When her back flared up, he normally prescribed Percocet, but that drug was a federally controlled medication, and because she had let it lapse, he said he couldn’t prescribe it again without an office visit. As a temporary substitute he prescribed Darvocet. Not as potent, he’d told her, but it should do the job until he could see her. The doctor phoned in the prescription to Walgreens, and Chandler had rushed out to get it. But that was almost two hours ago. Now she was worried. It wasn’t like Chandler to leave and not come back without calling.
The room was getting cold, so she went into the bedroom to put on a sweater, her lower back throbbing painfully with each step. Her MRI showed a slight extrusion at the S-7 vertebra. Dr. Baker had advised her against long-distance running, but when pressed, he admitted that the damage was already done, and said that in due time the disk extrusion would be absorbed. If she could withstand the pain, it probably wouldn’t get worse. She decided to keep training and treat it with painkillers. She loved the feeling she got when she was pushing it. Five or six miles out, her endorphins kicked in, her spirit soared, and her body never felt more precious to her. So she kept early-morning runs in her schedule and endured the discomfort.
She returned to her easel and worked for a few minutes longer on the painting, which depicted the sandy Maui beach where she and Chandler had walked each evening at sunset. Several photos she had taken were clipped to the side of her easel. The two distant cone-shaped mountains of Molokai rose majestically from the turquoise-and orange-tinted ocean. Chandler joked that her painting looked like Madonna’s leather concert bra.
Hawaii had been a time of immeasurable love. Except for a few dinners with the Bests, she and Chan had been mostly alone. They had walked the beaches holding hands. They would talk until midnight, lying on the beach chairs on the balcony of their room, listening to the distant surf and the sound of palm fronds rattling in the breeze. Then they would strip out of their clothes and screw like bunnies, laughing and holding each other for hours until she would finally suggest they go to bed, knowing they wouldn’t.
“Eat me,” Chandler would tease.
“You first,” she’d giggle, and then, likely as not, they would start all over again. Hawaii had been the happiest time of her life.
Paige loved having sex with Chandler. He was an emotional but tender lover, willing to take her to undreamed-of heights, then hold her up there letting her ride the edge of ecstasy just short of orgasm. She couldn’t seem to get enough of him and saw no reason to stop trying.
It was after twelve when she decided to call the drugstore to see what had happened to Chandler. Maybe he’d had car trouble. His cell was in the charger on the desk. Nobody picked up the phone at the drugstore. The answering machine finally clicked on with a message about store hours. They had closed at midnight.
Now she was really worried. Where was he?
A few more restless tries at getting the burnt sienna right on the underneath tips of the billowing clouds at sunset. She was tense and was botching it, layering it on too heavily. She set her paints aside and closed the tops on her oils, then spent another forty minutes pacing.
When the phone finally rang, she jumped at it, snatching it up so’ fast that she fumbled it out of its cradle.
“Hey, babe, where the hell are you?” she almost shouted.
A slow, drawling voice said, “This is Robert Butler. I’m parked outside your house calling on a cell phone. Is this Mrs. Ellis?”
“Yes … Robert who?”
“I’d like to see you if I might,” the voice continued softly. “See me?”
“Yes ma’am. It’s a police matter. If I might, I’ll go on up to the front door and ring. See you in a second.”
“Police? What police?” she said, but he had already hung up. Dread and fear now choked her.
She rushed to the door and fumbled for the latch chain with numb fingers, swinging it open to face a thin, middle-aged man with narrow shoulders. He was wearing khaki pants and a wrinkled blue blazer. His saltand-pepper hair was cut into an old-fashioned, fifties-style flattop, which framed a sun-creased, friendly face. He was holding a badge in one hand and a Bible in the other.
“What is it?” she said, her voice shaking with anxiety.
“Could we step inside?” he inquired gently.
“What do you want?” she implored, taking a step backward as he followed her in and closed the door.
“I regret to inform you, ma’am, that your husband was run over by a car in the Walgreens drugstore parking lot. They didn’t stick around to report the accident so it’s a hit-and-run.” He said it fast—gave her the bad news in two sentences, as if practice making these kind of calls had taught him not to draw it out.
The words staggered her. This narrow-shouldered, plain-looking man had just hit her with a sentence more powerful than a fist. Her knees went weak and she found herself reaching for a chair.
“That’s absurd,” she heard herself say.
“The paramedics who picked him up listed him as ‘death imminent.’ That’s the classification they use until the docs at County Hospital can make it official.”
“He’s dead?” she said dumbly, feeling the blood draining out of her head. She suddenly felt sticky and wet, white with fear. Her voice was disembodied, and although vaguely familiar, seemed shrill.
“Yes ma’am, I’m terribly sorry. He was dead at the scene. But like I said, the doctors at the hospital have to be the ones to pronounce him.”
She felt an agonizing sense of grief sweep over her. Suddenly, her legs buckled and she sank to her knees, falling forward, banging her head on the carpet.
Detective Butler rushed to catch her, but he was a split second late and she went down anyway. He helped her to her feet, then led her to the sofa in the living room.
“Where’s the kitchen, ma’am?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. She had her head in her hands and could hear herself moaning—long, wailing, groaning sounds that she didn’t even recognize as her own unt
il she realized they stopped each time she took a breath.
Robert Butler turned away and went toward the back of the house. She heard water running, but all she kept thinking was, death imminent? A two-word phrase so immense she was still unable to comprehend it.
Seconds later, Bob Butler was back at her side, handing her a glass of water. She took it and looked at it, not sure what he wanted her to do.
“Drink,” he said softly, and she obediently sipped the water, her hands trembling before her eyes.
“Mrs. Ellis … I’m sorry to have to do this now, but if we want to catch this perpetrator, time is of the essence.” She didn’t answer, so he continued. “I’m going to have to ask you a few questions. Is that going to be okay?”
She nodded her head but still couldn’t speak.
“Could you tell me why your husband went to the drugstore so late at night?”
“Pills for my back,” she finally managed to say. “He was picking up a prescription for me:’
“You’ve been here the whole time? You didn’t leave the house?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Can anybody confirm that?” She shook her head. Then he leaned back and studied her carefully. He seemed to make a decision, then continued on. “What I want you to know, Mrs. Ellis, is I’m not going to let this hit-and-run go unsolved.” He waited, then added, “That’s a promise. Me to you.”
Somebody hit Chandler and drove away, leaving him to die alone? The idea was preposterous. Chandler was … He always seemed so … Charmed.
“My own wife was the victim of a hit-and-run, three years ago,” Robert Butler was saying. “So while most people won’t understand what you’re going through right now, I want you t’know I understand exactly how you feel:’
She looked at him, not really processing much of this. They were just words that buzzed in her anguish. The detective was looking at her with sad understanding, as if they shared a secret.
at First Sight (2008) Page 7
