The Killing of Bobbi Lomax
Page 4
Outside the Gudsen home there was nowhere to park. The family and friends’ cars were lined up along the street and in a cluster outside the overflowing drive. Marty hated being near the bereaved, couldn’t bear to hear their questions of why, see their tears, their shaking hands and heaving hearts. It made him remember and he didn’t want to have to remember.
‘What do you want me to ask?’ Al said, half turned towards him, left hand still on the wheel.
‘The usual. But right now, she’s a possible suspect, so let’s see how she reacts when you suggest there might be another woman in her husband’s life.’
‘You think it’s a case of find the lady?’
Marty smiled. ‘It’s a good possibility.’
‘You’re not going with Big Tex’s theory?’
‘I want to hear all the theories, you know that.’
‘We got a lot of witnesses to the Houseman bomb.’
‘Contradicting Big Tex, most of ’em. And until Houseman’s out of a coma we won’t be able to hear what he’s got to say about any of it.’
‘There’s been no more bombs.’
‘It’s ten in the morning.’
‘You waiting for another boom, Marty?’
‘Yeah, but I’m not praying for one. In the meantime, let’s see if we can beat the ticking clock.’
Marty flicked the car door open. ‘See if you can find out from the widow Gudsen about their lifestyle, particularly the luxe. Anything they might be spending their money on or where they might be hiding it, instead of putting it in the bank, out of sight of the IRS and out of the reach of the investors.’
‘You think it’s fraud? The money thing?’
‘Could be. I’d sure like to know how a property company suddenly collapses owing a million to several thousand investors, before it’s even built one house.’
‘I’ve already subpoenaed all their financial records.’
‘Good. Make sure you get a copy of any wills. Or get the name of the family lawyer. See if it’s been updated recently.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Ask if she’s ever heard of anyone called Hartman. But let’s see what the widow might say right now, a day into the rest of her life.’
‘Hopefully something that might help us find the bomber.’
‘Or help find the next victim before the bomber does.’
‘Let’s hope that clock’s not ticking too fast, man.’
‘Let’s hope. C’mon, let’s see what the temperature’s like in here.’
*
Inside the hallway a group of young people stood quietly drinking fruit punch. Marty could smell its familiar sticky sweetness from a few paces. A baby-faced boy, his face covered in peach-fuzz, led them through into the living room, Al following behind him, Marty bringing up the rear. Inside, a large group of adults were in various stages of productivity. In the open-plan kitchen several ladies were desperately making quiet small talk whilst cutting, chopping, baking and juicing. A group of young men, members of the Faithful, stood in a line like watchful crows, murmuring quietly next to a telephone awaiting its inevitable ring. On the couch, a pretty brunette in her thirties sat hand in hand with a Faith Father, his black suit and tie his recognizable garb, not just for mourning. On the large armchair next to them an elderly man sat staring blankly into the TV’s dark screen, a large white handkerchief crumpled in his hand.
A few paces ahead of peach-fuzz boy, a curvy redhead in Kelly-green slacks and a pale chiffon blouse was moving toward the kitchen area carrying a heavy-looking earthenware dish, its contents smothered by tin foil. Her figure-hugging slacks marked her out as an outsider and when she spoke, in a heavy Brooklyn accent, Marty smiled knowingly to himself and heard her with one ear whilst listening to Al introduce them to the widow Gudsen with the other. Green slacks woman was Marion. She was a neighbor. Opposite. She explained to the women that she’d been over yesterday to give her condolences to Betty. How shocking it all was. Here of all places. Him of all men. Overnight she’d made this pumpkin pie. It was Little Peter’s favorite.
Marty figured Little Peter must be one of the deceased’s four kids, whose professionally framed pictures took up most of the wall at the opposite end of the room. He recognized the other kids from the hallway. Suits and all. He looked around the room: no signs of ostentatious wealth. A few inexpensive ornaments and a large crystal vase, but that was about it. As his eyes scanned the room Marion walked past him. Marty noticed she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Big house, the one opposite, for a single woman. A divorcee abandoned in the desert? Or perhaps she had done the abandoning and was looking to get as far from Brooklyn as possible. If so, she’d picked a good spot. Marty thought he’d knock on her door right after. He knew from experience that men don’t always confide in their spouses, especially if what they had to impart was detrimental to the family and to their own status within it. If the neighbor was a curvy redheaded divorcee she might well be a pleasurable shoulder to cry on. In a place where everyone knew everyone else from birth and beyond, the New York divorcee might be the best secret-keeper in town.
Al was sitting down now, next to the widow, taking out his notebook and pen. The Faith Father remained, resolute and unmoving, on her other side. As Marty backed away from the couch he heard himself saying, ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry for your loss,’ and something along the lines of, ‘We’ll find whoever did this. The detective will just ask you a few questions.’ His back to them now, he heard her say, ‘I don’t know who would want to do this terrible, terrible act, Detective. Peter was a man of God, a good man.’
If only he had a dollar for every time he’d heard that.
8
Clark’s Den, Houseman Residence
It was starting to sting now, bad, as he ran it under the workshop tap, cold at first, growing steadily hotter until it was scalding. Clark bit his tongue as sweat popped out of his pores and ran down his forehead.
Trying to hold his hand still under the tap, he crouched down under the sink, reaching blind into the back of the cupboard for the first-aid kit he knew was there somewhere, unused, amongst all the other things he kept there, most of them hidden from anyone that might breach the lock on the door and find themselves in his workshop. Edie knew not to come in here. Ever. But it didn’t stop her from trying. Knocking on the door, day and night, trying to entice him to open up with offers of refreshments of all kinds. And sometimes even without the pretence, just to ask simply: ‘What are you doing in there, Clark?’ It was almost a game now. The only time she’d been in the cellar was when they’d viewed the house and back then the vendor’s boxes of junk had been piled so high around the room you could barely see the walls. That was four years ago.
His searching hand hit the familiar cold steel of his electro-plating machine. Over the twelve years he’d owned it, his second, it had made him a lot of money, but so had the first until it had burnt out. He was thankful Americans still loved their coins. And even more thankful that they were still relatively easy to alter in order to take something barely worth the metal it was printed on and make it worth hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars. Last week, as he’d slid the machine back into its hiding place after using it to alter a common 1912 penny he’d already sold to a New York collector as its far more valuable and rare cousin, he’d seen the Target-branded first-aid kit behind it. Now his fingers landed on its plastic carry handle and he yanked it up and out from behind the electro-plater.
Twenty minutes later he was back at the sink, looking for a cloth to clean up the mess he’d made. He looked down at the bandage. The bleeding had taken a while to stop and now little pinpricks of blood were appearing through the gauze and heavily spun bandage. He’d sunk four painkillers with a flat Dr Pepper chaser slugged out of a can that had sat on his work counter for a few weeks, but it was still hurting like hell. He looked down at where the bloodied tweezers sat in the sink surrounded by splashes of blood. He’d pulled two fragments of the glass out with those and it
didn’t feel like there was any more in there. He’d go to County in the morning, but his amateur job would do for tonight. Tonight he didn’t want to wait hours for a few stitches and a morphine shot. He just wanted the pain to go away. Now. Upstairs, he hadn’t felt any pain, not until a few minutes after Edie had shook him out of whatever place his brain had ventured to. Perhaps if he could mesmerize himself now, not accidentally but intentionally, he could get the pain to go away again. Even just until the painkillers kicked in. It was a process, he knew that. A process that had structure and order. It wasn’t called a routine for nothing. He’d witnessed Dr Mesmer’s routine and upstairs with Edie he’d somehow managed to put himself into some kind of trance. To repeat that surely he just had to figure out what the elements were and in what precise order they worked. Clark smiled to himself as he thought that the one element he shouldn’t forget was a control word to wake himself up out of whatever altered state he might get himself into. It had been a trip, but he didn’t want to be hypnotized forever.
He pulled a sheet of paper out of the notepad on the desk he’d made from an old door and a couple of tea-chests and wrote a list:
Contact/connection with subject/self.
Voice. Commanding. Alluring/beguiling and V. Imp: monotone.
Suggestion.
Distancing from the everyday.
Control word.
He read the list again, adding ‘But not too far’ to Number 4: ‘Distancing from the everyday.’ When he was on his calling in England for the Faith, he had snuck away from the fellow Follower who shadowed him everywhere, met a girl in a Bath pub and dropped acid with her in the back of her father’s Mini. It took him a week to recover from that most spectacular of trips. He knew where the mind needed to go. Far, but not too far. He didn’t want to be sprinting naked around Mission Square.
He could make it work, he knew he could. After all, order and control were already the fabric of his life. He made another list.
Tape deck.
Blank cassette or one to record over.
Microphone.
Earphones.
Batteries, in case of power out.
Mesmerizing lullaby.
He had numbers 1 to 5 not so far from his desk.
Number 6. The mesmerizing word-lullaby might be the stumbling block.
He was sure that it was the music and staring into that spinning vortex that had somehow worked together and mesmerized him. He considered replacing number 6 with music, but didn’t think he had anything in his hidden stash of rock music tapes that would cut it. He would have to make up the words himself. Write them and record them and leave a gap of at least five minutes blank on the tape and then put the control word at the end of that time, partly to make sure he would be able to snap himself out of it, but also to ensure that he left five minutes for a short trip to who knew where.
He’d spent ten awkward one-handed minutes assembling everything he needed, including a short, hopefully hypnotic few minutes of self-spoken ‘lullaby’ that would cover numbers 2 to 5 of his first list. It was all he could do to stop himself laughing as he recorded it, as low and beguilingly moody as he could muster with the pain in his hand racing into overdrive. He sat and waited quietly for five minutes, as the tape whirred noisily in the player, then added the control word once and then, for safety’s sake, again with emphasis. Numismatic. Numismatic. He figured he needed a word that wasn’t in everyday use. He didn’t know enough about hypnotism to put his faith in a common word. Didn’t want to be accidentally put under by the checkout guy in Wal-Mart, making polite small talk as he eagerly tried to win employee of the month and a set of steak knives.
He added a number 7 to his second list. ‘Vortex.’
He started in the centre of the page and drew out from the point where his marker pen dug into the page. Around and around and around until the entire page was filled with a circle that looked like a snail shell.
He listened as the tape noisily spooled back to the beginning, put the earphones in his ears and hit play.
9
The Divorcee
He’d waited thirty seconds before he’d followed her. And now he stood on the doorstep waiting for her to answer his knock. He didn’t look over his shoulder, but he knew the hacks gathered in a small tight pack near the cruiser were watching him, curiosity probably killing them. He’d seen the patrolman’s hand stay them as he moved past. He’d ignored their shouted questions, which only made them shout louder.
Behind the door, the click clack of high heels on a parquet floor.
‘Who is it?’
‘Police, ma’am.’
‘Oh.’
The door swung open.
‘I’d just like to ask you some questions.’
She looked at the badge. And then at him. She smiled a sad, inevitable kind of smile.
‘About Peter?’
‘Peter Gudsen. Yes ma’am. Detective Sinclair.’
‘Please.’ She swung the door wide open and watched as he over-wiped his feet back and forth on the doormat. He followed the flow of her hand towards the back of the house as, behind him, she softly closed the door.
He sat at the kitchen table in what looked like a suburban spaceship, all white, chrome and glass. Futuristic, he guessed some might call it. She stood at the counter, a cross between the spaceship’s glamorous captain and a kind of domestic Barbarella. ‘You have a lovely home, ma’am,’ he offered as he took out his notebook and searched his pockets for his pen. Or a pencil.
‘Thank you . . .’ He could tell she was deliberating over what to call him. ‘Would you like a coffee, Officer? Is it Officer?’
He smiled. ‘Detective, ma’am. Thank you, coffee would be great.’
‘Coffee coming up.’ She almost sang it. She already had one of those Turkish coffee pots on the stove.
He’d found a pen. ‘Your name, ma’am. If I may.’
‘Marion Rose. Mrs. Do you take creamer?’
‘No thank you, ma’am. Just strong and black.’
‘I’m divorced, but Ms just sounds far too radical for around here.’ She laughed as she put the coffees down, pushed the sugar bowl towards the centre of the table. He didn’t take any. Instead, he watched as she plonked three cubes in her pale coffee and stirred it almost endlessly.
Marty wasn’t one for taking notes. But he liked to have the notebook open, the pen out, lid off, ready. People expected you to take notes, but he preferred to watch them talk. How could you make or break any connection between the speaker and their words with your head buried in a notebook? ‘And this is 2346 Kenner Avenue?’
‘It is.’
‘Did you know Mr Gudsen well?’
‘Him and Betty. His wife. Their boys play over here all the time. I have two of my own, Zach and Michael. The age of their middle boys. Especially after Peter started working from home, before he got that office, the one where the bomb . . .’ Her voice trailed off and she stared down at her coffee, stirred it again a few times before looking back up at him. Marty was glad for her that she hadn’t seen what he’d seen that day. ‘We’ve got a hoop out the back. I told them they could come over any time. Keep out of their dad’s way.’
‘When was that, ma’am?’
‘Please, Detective, call me Marion.’
‘When was that? When he started to work from home?’
‘Oh, the summer. August sometime. Right after August thirteenth. The day my divorce got finalized. Who said the thirteenth was unlucky?’ She smiled at him. It was hard not to smile back.
‘Did you socialize with Mr and Mrs Gudsen, Marion?’
‘Not that much, mostly through the boys.’
‘Mr Gudsen, did he come over here often?’
‘Over here? Peter? What on earth for?’
Marty let her find the answer.
‘What are you suggesting, Detective?’
‘I’m just trying to build up a picture is all, ma’am.’ He averted his eyes back to his empty notebook.
‘So, you think she was unhappy? Mrs Gudsen?’
‘Unfulfilled, more like.’
Marty thought they might be one and the same.
‘How did her husband feel about that? His wife being unhappy?’
‘Do you think husbands notice when their wives are unhappy, Detective?’
He was tempted to look back down at the notebook.
‘Do you think Mr Gudsen didn’t notice?’
‘Peter was a good man, a thoughtful man. But if you’re looking for a reason why someone went and blew a loving husband with four kids to pieces I don’t have the answer for you. Look.’
She reached out to the windowsill where a bunch of cookery books were piled up high. From beside the pile she took a small leather-bound book, the edges of its pages unevenly cut.
‘He bought me this. Just the other week.’
Marty took it from her, opened it up. It was written in some language he couldn’t read. He must have looked blank.
‘It’s Hebrew. The Old Testament.’
He let her continue.
‘We’re Jewish. It was a thoughtful gift. It’s pretty old I think. A beautiful little book. They wanted to thank me for looking after the boys over a weekend last month when Betty’s father was rushed into the hospital down in Phoenix. Are you married, Detective?’ She looked at the wedding ring on his finger.