At First Sight

by Stephen J. Cannell

  I got out of the car and walked around to the front. It was a mess. A broken headlight and frame. A caved-in right front fender. Some of the blue paint was scratched and scuffed. There was blood. Chandler’s blood. Not much, but some. It had seeped into the broken headlight. Shit. I had to do something about this.

  I sat on the hard ground and leaned up against the car to think about it, trying to sort out my options. Without warning, I began to cry. Deep, soul-wrenching sobs choked my throat and constricted my breathing. It wasn’t so much that I was feeling sorry for myself. Although, truth be told, there was some of that. It was more as if I was saying goodbye to the last remnants of who I thought I was.

  No longer could I accept myself as someone who had been put upon by life. No longer could I blame my emotional shortcomings on my dead father’s fucked-up value system, or on my mother or grandma. In truth, they had all helped to form who I was, shallow and transparent as that man had become. But none of that mattered anymore. I now knew I was no longer struggling against the events of an unfair childhood. I was no longer a victim of my father’s death, or my mother’s low-income circumstances. I couldn’t think of myself as someone put upon by the choices and actions of others. Chick Best, the victim, was gone.

  This new Chick had just committed murder. He had killed another man. This new Chick was an aggressor. A perpetrator. This new Chick had taken a human life, parked on a man’s chest and waited for him to die. I’m telling you, it was an impossible idea to come to grips with.

  Being a victim is so much more satisfying. In failure, as a victim your excuse is built in. It’s not my fault. I had no advantages growing up. My father was a cheap, slick asshole. When a victim succeeds, he has heroically overcome adversity, risen above cultural and sociological disadvantages to win bravely in the face of all odds.

  However, there is no heroic rationale for murder. Murder is pure aggression. Murderers are unredeemable psychotics. So I sat and cried for the loss of the man I had been. I cried until my throat was dry and my eyes were swollen. When I was cried out, I sat in silence, my mind aching, but no longer spinning.

  I knew that I had a lot of things to do, and I had to do them quickly. First I had to repair this fucking car. I couldn’t destroy it or ditch it, because the Hertz Rent a Car in New York City would want to know where it was. If a blue Taurus went missing from Hertz and the police got blue Taurus paint off Chandler’s body, a ten-minute computer run would find me and I would end up hosting a shower party in the North Carolina State Prison.

  I had to repair the car so no one would notice. I knelt down and studied the right front fender. It was bent. No large paint chips seemed to have been knocked loose, but the rim was scratched and the paint underneath scraped, so that would need to be straightened and repainted. I had driven over Chandler’s chest with the right-side tires. Can skin and clothes be used to match treads? Did I leave tread marks on Chandler or on the pavement? I wasn’t sure, but to be safe, I needed new rubber.

  How long before Chandler Ellis’s death would become front-page news? With luck, it wouldn’t make the papers until tomorrow evening. Of course, because he was related to the L.A. Times Chandlers, the electronic media would jump all over it, pending notification of kin. That meant it could make the TV news by sometime tomorrow, maybe sooner. So there wasn’t much time, and I had a lot to do.

  I looked at my watch. It was still only 1:35 A.M. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since I’d hit Chandler, but in reality it had only been a little over two hours. I opened my wallet and counted my cash. Eighteen hundred dollars. I always carry a lot of cash when I travel because I sometimes incur personal expenses that I don’t want showing up on my Amex card. Don’t ask, because I’m not going to explain that further.

  I got back in the Taurus and drove all night, heading north. I stopped at a self-serve car wash in Richmond around 5:30 A.M. and scrubbed the front end of the car until I was pretty sure there was no blood left. I bought some dark glasses and a ball cap at a drugstore. The tire store I eventually picked was in Newport News, Virginia. It was in a grungy neighborhood full of low-end businesses where it looked to me like cash would talk. It was seven in the morning when I parked out front of Dale’s Tire Town and shut off the engine. Dale hadn’t worked too hard for his slogan. In red script it read: DALE’S Where the Rubber Meets the Road. Pu-leeze.

  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 toodry 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’ ta 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.”
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br />   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, as promised, 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.

  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 orangetinted 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 w
ith 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?”