"There's another occupational hazard,” he said, pointing to the shrine to the mysterious Maria. “You can't just mow over them. I mean, you could, but it wouldn't seem right. I mow around them until the grass gets too high. Then I stop, pull them out, mow, and stick them back in. A real pain."
The cross was taller than I'd judged from the Polaroid, almost four feet high. The picture at its center, which was enclosed in a dime-store frame, was a five by seven. The print's quality was so poor that it might have been done on a Xerox machine, but it didn't appear to have been altered or doctored in any way. It certainly didn't resemble any image of the Blessed Virgin I'd ever seen. That it might have been a high-school graduation picture was suggested by the subject's age and the appealing openness of her smile and her wide dark eyes.
"I might never have noticed the duplication if I hadn't taken the time to trim around this one,” Halleck was saying. “They all look a little alike, these cross things. But the picture of the girl caught my eye. She's a real cutie. A Mexican beauty, as the song says. It'd be a shame if she was really dead."
I asked Halleck why he thought she might not be.
"It's got to be a fake, right? You can't die in five different places; I don't care how bad the wreck is. When I finally got around to noticing that there was an identical cross on the other side"—he pointed toward the eastbound lanes, which were cut off from view at that point by a grove of trees—"I thought, okay, she died on the median and the trees make that a bad place for a memorial, so her family put one on each side. Or maybe her papa uses this road to commute and he wanted to remember her coming and going.
"But then I mentioned them to Bud Bishop, who mows down on I-465, and he told me about the one down there. He'd gotten a little sweet on Maria himself, seeing her picture every couple of weeks. That started me hunting around. By the time I found the fifth cross, I knew something else was going on."
A little convoy of trucks passed just then, interrupting Halleck. Or giving him the perfect opportunity to pause for added suspense. I could tell he had a theory he was dying to impart. When the truck noise died away, I asked him about it.
He removed his sunglasses, revealing blue eyes surrounded by relatively undamaged skin. “I think little Maria's got herself a stalker. I think some guy who's hot for her, maybe some guy she's dumped, is setting these things up where he knows she'll see them. Like threats, you know. Come back to me or it's RIP. The trouble is, the jerk didn't blow the photo up big enough. They're so small you can't really make out the face from the highway. Maria could be driving past them every day and still not know the danger she's in.
"What you have to do is run Maria's picture in the paper. Get her to come forward so we can talk to her. Warn her, I mean."
I noted the “we” and wondered if Maria might be well on her way to having a second stalker. I knew how Boxleiter would react to the idea of running a dating service, so I took the conversation in a new direction by asking Halleck when the white crosses had first appeared.
"Not all that long ago. This one wasn't here back in the early spring when I was having to cut this stretch every week. And then I cut around it for a while before I climbed down that first time to move it. So it might have been put up four weeks or so ago. Around the end of June."
Even that vague date would be useful in identifying the fatal accident, assuming, as I did, that Halleck's stalker theory was wishful thinking. He gave it another try after I'd thanked him and told him I'd be in touch.
"Take a good look at that picture. That's a girl men fall in love with. If you talk to her, remember I saw her first."
I was on my way back downtown to sift through accident reports when I decided instead to get off the highway at Shadeland Avenue and visit the only shrine to Maria that wasn't on an interstate. Not that I saw any significance in that. I was only looking for the visit to delay some tedious desk work. As it turned out, it eliminated that step completely.
The Shadeland cross was stuck in a weedy island of grass that divided the avenue's three badly paved northbound lanes from its three equally cracked southbound lanes. I parked on the apron of a defunct Shell station and approached the cross on foot. Even before I'd reached the safety of the median, I could tell that Halleck's photo hadn't lied. This shrine was an exact duplicate of the one I'd just left, right down to the bouquet of white plastic flowers in its vase.
I was trying, idly, to identify those flowers when a police siren, blaring out behind me, almost shot me into the northbound traffic. Then a Marion County sheriff's department cruiser slid to a halt beside me, every light flashing.
The woman who climbed out was in such a hurry she had trouble settling her Canadian Mountie-style hat on her head. “Hold it!” she shouted, and then, “Damn."
The last comment was a sign of recognition. Like most reporters, I knew my share of policemen and women. I knew Deputy Sheila Gilkey all too well. She was an avid marathon runner whose opinion of the press was even lower than her percentage of body fat.
"I should have known you'd sniff this out sooner or later,” she said.
I accepted the compliment graciously, not mentioning all the sniffing done for me by Alan Halleck. I was thinking that Gilkey knew all about Halleck, that he'd sent a duplicate set of his Polaroids to the sheriff's department. The question she asked next told me this wasn't the case.
"Who's onto this besides me and you?"
I told her the Star Republic had been tipped by an alert reader and showed her the five photos. She examined them at length, ignoring the traffic backup created by her parked cruiser.
"Your nosy reader missed one,” she finally said. “On Post Road just south of Pendleton Pike. It was the first one I saw. I'd been going out there almost every day on one of my regular cases.” Gilkey worked in the county's domestic-violence unit. “I had every inch of that route memorized, including a white cross with Maria printed on it. Then I'm down on the south side near 67, on my way to take a deposition, and I see an identical cross on I-465. Couldn't believe my eyes. Had to drive back up to Post Road to make sure the original one was still there."
She went on to explain what I'd already guessed: She'd made an off-duty tour of the city, searching for other white crosses. It was surprising that she and Halleck hadn't crossed paths.
"Have you IDed her?” Gilkey asked, pushing her Mountie hat back to reveal a little of the bowl-cut brown hair that matched the brown of her uniform shirt so exactly she might have been dyeing it to departmental specs. I could tell by the look in her slightly protruding eyes—also regulation brown—that she had identified Maria. I could also tell that she was dying to tell someone, even a troublesome reporter. And I understood that. The more interesting the story, the greater the pressure to give it away.
"Her name is Maria Felez,” Gilkey said. “I won't tell you how many of my free evenings that cost me. I spent them going through accident reports looking for Marias and then tracking down photographs. It was a break from dealing with molesters and abusers, anyway."
She made it sound like one of Hercules's tougher assignments. I asked her how many Marias could possibly have been killed last spring.
"Last spring? Maria died in 2003."
Five years earlier. My next dumb question involved the crosses themselves. I asked which of the half-dozen actually marked the site of Maria's accident.
"None of them. She was killed out on the west side. She was a senior at Ben Davis High School out there. I found her picture in the Ben Davis yearbook.” She pointed to the frame on the cross. “That very one. A couple of weeks after her graduation she was T-boned by a drunk driver at the intersection of Girls School Road and Tenth Street.
"I'll save you a drive out there. There's no cross at the intersection. No nothing. And here's something else to chew on. Her family moved away right after she died. They hadn't been in Indy very long when it happened and they decided they didn't like the place. Can't say I blame them.
"I spoke with her father
, who's out in Phoenix now. Nice guy. He said he didn't know anything about any memorials. The only person he could think of who might be putting them up is a boyfriend she had at Ben Davis. Mr. Felez couldn't recall the kid's name, but he did remember that he didn't like him. Said he was into gangs."
She paused to let that detail sink in so long it got all the way to my shoes. I asked the question she was obviously waiting for: What did gangs have to do with the crosses?
Gilkey said, “I think these memorials may be some kind of gang sign. See those white flowers? When I first found these things, they all had pink flowers hanging on them. Identical plastic bouquets. Then overnight they all were switched to red flowers. Now they're all suddenly white. Why? Why change plastic flowers at all? I think it's some kind of code. Some of the gangs are into drug smuggling. The different colors may be advertisements for different shipments or a way of letting couriers know it's safe to come in.
"I think Maria's old boyfriend dreamt it up. Maybe he's still sentimental about her or maybe he just had her picture handy. What do you think?"
I thought that Deputy Gilkey needed a break from domestic violence cases so badly she'd created a new assignment for herself out of thin air. But I didn't say that. I asked instead why she had been staking out the Shadeland cross.
"It's the closest one to my apartment. I'm keeping watch on my own time. If I can catch the guy who's changing the flowers, I can find out what this is all about. I thought I'd caught him just now. Instead..."
She'd caught a reporter. Now that the impulse to tell her story had been satisfied, she was regretting giving in to it.
"Listen. What I told you just now is off the record. I mean, it's part of an ongoing investigation."
Neither of those claims had much going for it. Before she could invoke attorney-client privilege or the seal of the confessional, I promised her I wouldn't write anything about gangs or drug shipments.
This time I headed downtown and actually made it. At the newspaper's offices, I bypassed my desk and went straight to the library—formerly the morgue—where back issues of the Star Republic were kept, some on newsprint, some on microfiche, and some on disk. I asked a librarian named Glenda to do a computer search on Maria Felez. After killing two minutes telling me how I could be doing the search myself at my own terminal at my own desk, Glenda typed a few keystrokes and printed off three articles from three different 2003 editions of the paper.
The first described Maria's fatal accident. The second was the girl's very short obituary, which had been supplemented by her yearbook photo. The third article, the one I was really after, reported that the drunk driver who'd killed her, a twenty-five-year-old mechanic named Wallace Ristine, had pled guilty to vehicular homicide and been sentenced to ten years.
What had gotten me thinking of Maria's killer was a discrepancy between Alan Halleck's story and Deputy Gilkey's. The deputy had told me that Maria had been killed five years earlier, but Halleck had been certain that the memorial crosses hadn't appeared until June. Why the five-year gap? If Gilkey was right and the shrines were gang alerts dreamt up by Maria's old boyfriend, the gap wasn't hard to explain. The boyfriend simply hadn't needed the scheme or thought of it until now. But another, likelier explanation was that the designer and builder of the shrines had spent those five years behind bars.
I called a contact in the Indiana Department of Corrections, and he confirmed that Ristine had been released in early June, after his sentence had been halved for good behavior. My informant was more reluctant to share Ristine's current address, but in the end he did. The ex-con had an apartment on Post Road, not far from the first cross Sheila Gilkey had noticed.
I drove out to Post and established that Ristine wasn't at home. Then I had what was either a late lunch or an early dinner. Following that, I settled in to wait.
The man I was after showed up around four. He was overweight and seemed to carry the bulk of the load below his waist, but that impression might have been the work of his outfit: baggy tan cover-alls with the logo of a motor oil company displayed on the back. Ristine's red hair was thinning and his skin was very pale. I had the feeling it would have been just as pale no matter where he'd spent the last five years.
He turned when I said his name, and I saw that he was trying to grow the kind of goatee then called a “soul patch.” His eyes were very tired, which, like his pallor, may or may not have been a temporary condition.
"What do you want?” he asked.
I wanted an interview. I decided the best way to get one was to jump right in. So I showed him my press card and asked him why he was setting up shrines all over town to the woman he'd killed.
He blinked twice and then corrected me. “Not all over town. Just on the routes I'm allowed to drive. I'm still on a restricted license. I can only drive to and from my job and to visit my mom and my sister. I work at a truck stop out east on Mount Comfort Road. My mom's in a place just off Shadeland. My sister lives down on Kentucky Avenue."
Otherwise known as State Road 67. That accounted for all the crosses. Ristine had volunteered a lot of information. People often did that when they didn't want to answer the one question put to them. I repeated my unanswered question for the mechanic, just in case he'd forgotten it.
"Why am I doing it?” He passed his tongue over his lips. “Come inside and I'll tell you."
He led me into a second-floor efficiency whose plaid furniture and imitation oil paintings were surely also rented. Spread out on a dinette table were the makings of more Maria shrines: lengths of wood, white paint, frames, vases, sheets of reflective letters. Ristine hurried past the supplies, opened the refrigerator door, and took out a sixteen-ounce bottle of Coke. He drank half of it off, and it seemed to steady him.
"I'm an alcoholic,” he said.
I thought he was dodging my question again, but he wasn't.
"Right now, right this minute, I'm dying for a drink. After killing someone and spending five years in prison for it, I still want one. I've tried everything to make it go away, but it never has. I can't go an hour without thinking about it. I can't get into a car without wanting to drive to a bar or a liquor store.
"The only thing that stops me from taking a drink is thinking about Maria, the girl I killed.” He drained the bottle and hurriedly added, “What I'm saying is, I never want to hurt anybody again.
"Thinking about Maria—about how I took an innocent life—helps me, but it got so it wasn't enough. One day I noticed this wreath of flowers somebody had set up by the side of the road, and I thought, Maria should have one of those. Next thing I knew, I was making one. And then another and another. I put them up on my normal routes, at spots where I caught myself thinking about a beer. I look up now and I see the white cross and her picture and I don't want the drink.
"That's the whole sick story. I'm sorry if you were looking for something more, but that's the big secret. Just a lousy drunk trying to stay dry."
Not a religious protester or a mad stalker or a gang leader with a penchant for floral codes. All those stories had been wrong. But I decided, watching Ristine try to suck more cola from his empty bottle, that his story was wrong, too. Or at least incomplete.
For one thing, it didn't explain the characteristic of the shrines that had so fascinated Deputy Gilkey. I asked Ristine why, if the shrines were just reminders not to drink, he changed the artificial flowers so regularly. He licked his lips again and said nothing.
Playing a hunch, I asked him if he'd mind showing me his wallet. He stared at me for a long time, his pale skin looking even more like the shaded side of a fish. Then he took out the wallet, opened it up, and handed it over.
He'd opened it to display a clear plastic sleeve intended to protect a photograph. Behind the plastic was Maria Felez's yearbook photo, cut from the pages of the Star Republic. I'd encountered the portrait over and over again, but this was by far the clearest print I'd seen. She really had been a beautiful girl, bursting with the hope and happiness that
made most people her age attractive. But there was something more to her beauty than just youth and a nice smile. It was the promise in those dark eyes of a person as beautiful as the face.
"I cut that out of the paper,” Ristine said. “I don't know why. Should have been the last face I ever wanted to see. When I was inside, I had it on the wall of my cell. The other guys thought she was my girl, and I let them think it. After a while, I started believing it myself. Why not? Her life was over and so was mine. Wasn't like either of us was ever going to have anybody else."
Maria was a woman men fell in love with, Halleck had said. It was certainly true for Wallace Ristine. I handed back his wallet. Then I reminded him that his life wasn't over. And I said that I couldn't believe Maria Felez would want him throwing away all the years he had left.
He was shaking his head before I'd finished. “I'm not throwing anything away. I'm atoning. Who knows? Maria and I may meet again someday. May really meet. I want to be ready. If there's just one chance in a million, I want to be ready."
(c) 2008 by Terence Faherty
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Fiction: THE BLONDE TIGRESS by Max Allan Collins
When we asked Max Allan Collins to write something for the return of Black Mask we left the period—contemporary or historical—up to him. It was no surprise, however, when this story, set in Black Mask's hey-day, arrived. For its author is the inventor of the “historical P.I.” tale, in which a real crime is unwound by a fictional P.I., and this story's P.I., Nate Heller, is perhaps his most popular character. Mr. Collins's latest books are the CSI tie-ins: Serial and Bad Rap .
EQMM, June 2008 Page 12
