Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  But Clay knew these were foolish and crazy ideas. First and foremost, he didn’t have the nerve to kill someone. Knew Digger didn’t possess that kind of nerve either. Didn’t matter who they were. Second, Earl would hear their voices right away, and he’d come in there guns blazing. Clay didn’t want to survive only for his own sake. He needed to rescue his brother from whatever delusions he now possessed, and because he felt it was his duty to stop this crazy man who had killed the waitress. He knew—in his heart of hearts—that he hadn’t seen the last of Earl Sheridan’s killing streak, and he knew that by the end of it one or all of them would be dead.

  Clay Luckman lay there beside his brother. He started whispering something.

  “Ssshhh,” came the response from Digger—abrupt and direct. “You wanna get us killed, you damn fool?”

  Clay wondered what would happen, and as he wondered he became more afraid than he could ever have imagined.

  He believed then that he would die before a week was out, perhaps before the end of the next day. More chilling than that thought was the possibility that Digger’s loyalties might be turned to such a degree that he would do nothing to protect him.

  They were brothers, but they were different. Different fathers, different blood, different legacies. It was said that a child growing without a parent would always have aspects of their personality that they could not account for. There were things going on inside that were sourced someplace unknown, and Clay Luckman wondered about his own father, and he wondered about Digger’s, too, and the more questions he asked of himself, the less answers he seemed to find.

  He did not sleep. He listened to his brother as he snored. He shivered in the darkness and contemplated the end of his short and bitter life.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When Bailey Redman was ten years old she realized her mother was a prostitute. She also realized that she’d been pretty dumb not to see this earlier. She’d told herself that her mother simply had a lot of friends, all of them men, all of them visiting at irregular times and just for a short while. Perhaps it was something she had learned at school, a conversation she’d overheard, a comment made by someone in the street, but her awareness shifted suddenly, almost imperceptibly, but sufficiently to understand that the things going on in the back bedroom of their small house in Florence, Arizona, were not games of pinochle and twenty-one. The games her mother played with her gentleman callers involved an absence of clothes and the exchange of money. It was in that moment that a great deal of other things became understandable, and a great deal more questions arose.

  When Bailey Redman was twelve her mother told her the truth about her father. His name was Frank Jacobs, and when Elizabeth Redman had last seen him (which was in fact the night of Bailey’s conception), he was an itinerant shoe salesman working out of Scottsdale. He was a good-looking man, unmarried, well mannered, and no, she did not have a picture of him, and no, she did not know whether or not he was still an itinerant shoe salesman working out of Scottsdale. Sorry, kid, those are the breaks.

  On her thirteenth birthday Bailey Redman walked into town and visited the library. She found a telephone book for Scottsdale, wrote down the numbers for two F. Jacobs, one Frank Jacobs, and one Franklin Jacobs.

  She called each of them in turn and asked them if they had ever slept with a prostitute called Elizabeth in a town called Florence back in January of 1949. Try to remember, she said. It would have been about the same time as President Truman was inaugurated.

  Both F. Jacobs hung up the phone, as did Frank Jacobs. Franklin Jacobs paused however, and when he asked the caller’s name, her age, and whether or not her mother knew what she was doing, Bailey knew that it was her father’s voice she could hear at the other end of the line.

  Bailey waited a week and then she took a bus all the way from Florence to Scottsdale, all of sixty-something miles, and with a shred of paper in her hand, the address of Franklin Jacobs neatly copied from the telephone book, she waited outside a narrow house with a stoop and a window basket.

  When he came out of the house and walked down the street she knew. When he paused to open the door of his car, an Oldsmobile that had seen better days, she knew even better. She tucked the slip of paper in the pocket of her skirt and crossed the street.

  When she stood ahead of him, just looking at him, neither smiling nor frowning nor anything else, he said, “You’re the girl who called, aren’t you?”

  “I am,” she said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Bailey Redman.”

  He did smile then, and he held out his hand. “I’m Frank Jacobs,” he said politely.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Bailey replied.

  “I think I better give you a ride home and talk to your mother.”

  And so it was, the evening of Wednesday, October 17, 1962, that the closest Bailey Redman would ever get to a family was reunited in the front yard of a small house in Florence, Arizona.

  “How did you know it was me who got you pregnant?” was the question Frank Jacobs wanted to ask Elizabeth Redman. “I mean, considering your line of work an’ all, I was just wondering how you knew to tell your daughter my name.”

  “It’s something we just have,” Elizabeth told him. “It’s one of those things that women just know.”

  Frank Jacobs didn’t question the issue. He had slept with Elizabeth Redman in January of 1949. The girl who had tracked him to Scottsdale looked so much like him it was unnerving. But she was beautiful, like her mother, and he did not resent the truth that had been presented to him.

  He wanted to know if Elizabeth was secure, financially speaking, and if there was anything she needed.

  “I didn’t give you the problem, Frank,” she said. “Not then, and not now.”

  “I understand that,” he said, “and I appreciate it, but things have changed now.” He looked at his daughter. “I’m a father now it seems, and a father has certain responsibilities.”

  “You’re taking all of this very well,” Elizabeth said. “I can’t imagine there’d be many men who would take something like this in their stride.”

  Frank Jacobs, his hat removed, his top shirt button undone, seated there on the end of the couch in the small parlor, smiled ironically.

  “I’m thirty-nine years old,” he said. “I’m not married. I do not own a business. I am still working for the same people that I was thirteen years ago, still selling the same shoes for the same feet. All I know is types and colors of leather, cordovan wing tips, loafers, dress shoes, and sandals. I eat the same things from the same places. I go to see a movie once a month. I smoke the same brand of cigarettes as I did when I started back in 1940. Everything about me is predictable, routine, and regular. Now I am not so predictable. Now I have something that is neither routine nor regular, and I kind of like it.” He looked at Bailey. “When Bailey called I knew she was my daughter. Don’t ask me why. I just knew, same way that you knew that I was the one who got you pregnant. Now we’re here, and we all have something to do with what has happened, and I’m asking whether you’re okay, whether you need any help with anything, you know? I’m not a wealthy man, but I make a living, and I have no vices to speak of. I don’t drink and I don’t gamble, and as far as our rendezvous is concerned … well, I did that kind of thing maybe a dozen times in my life, and it’s not something I’ve done now for the better part of ten years.” Frank Jacobs hitched the knees of his pants and edged forward on the settee. “So that’s where I am. Those are my cards on the table. I’m here if you need me, and if you don’t then I’ll go away again. I don’t wish to bring you any trouble, and I don’t think you want to deliver any up for me.”

  Elizabeth Redman smiled. “I recall you as a gentleman,” she said, “and I’m never wrong about such things. I’m not going to ask you for money, but I get the idea that Bailey would like to get to know you, you being her father an’ all, and if you have no disagreement with that then you can cover the cost of whatever she needs to c
ome up on the bus and visit.”

  “That would be just fine,” Jacobs said, and then he turned to his daughter. “Bailey?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Seems a hell of a shame we’ve missed thirteen years.”

  “These things happen,” Jacobs said. “Everybody does what they do, rightly or wrongly, for good reason, and no one has the authority to judge another human being for their decisions.”

  “So it looks like you got yourself a father,” Elizabeth said to Bailey, and Bailey smiled, and she tried not to cry, and when she leaned across to hug her father there was a moment of awkwardness between them that they both knew would pass with time.

  Bailey fell into a routine. She visited with her father for a full weekend each month for nearly two years. By this time she was approaching fifteen. She was bright, she read voraciously, and had reconciled herself to the fact that she would never be normal. Her parents were a prostitute and a shoe salesman. She was an oddity, an idiosyncrasy, and there was something about this that she found immensely appealing. She loved storms. She loved angel food cake. She loved almost-ripe peaches, where the flesh was firm and bitter and the color had not yet come up fully. And though she was slightly afraid of cats, she could not help but love them too. Even if from a distance. She loved freckles on children, the smell of dark coffee. She loved corn and butter and the sensation of chocolate melting between her fingers, though she had experienced such a sensation only twice in her life and had yet to determine if it was the sensation itself, or the promise of chocolate itself as it was so rare. She loved old people with stories of youth, the sound of nibs on paper, the inky smell of new books, the rumble of three or four bass fiddles playing in unison. Most of all she loved being a girl, because a girl could love a boy, and boys were the best of all.

  Frank Jacobs loved Bailey. He believed he’d never loved someone so much in all his life. He didn’t tell her for fear of embarrassing her, but he felt it in his heart and his eyes and his head and in the moments of solitude when she wasn’t there and he wished she was.

  And it would stay that way until Elizabeth Redman died.

  Bailey understood the word that her mother used—cancer—but she didn’t understand how or why she had it. Frank tried to explain it, but Frank was not the kind of man who was used to explaining much beyond grades of leather and discounts.

  For a while the world appeared as if through aged, heat-blemished glass.

  Elizabeth would find Bailey standing by the window, lantern-eyed and open-mouthed, as if to attract moths and then swallow them. She tried to console the girl, tried to make her see that things were never always simple.

  “But why so complicated?” Bailey would ask her, and her mother would be unable to give an answer because she didn’t know what the answer was.

  A priest came by one time. It was a month or so after the news had come.

  “If you are honest and forthright you will always meet challenges,” he said. “The devil does not tempt the weak and the vain. They are already lost. The devil works hardest on those who are righteous.”

  “But my mother is a prostitute,” Bailey told him.

  “I know,” said the priest, and he saw in her expression that this child was many years beyond her given age. Life had forced her to grow up fast. It had made her smart, but it also made her challenge him in a way that made him uncomfortable.

  “Prostitutes aren’t righteous, not in the eyes of the church and the Bible and whatever,” Bailey said.

  “Child, everyone is righteous in the eyes of God.”

  Bailey believed the priest to be uncertain and shallow. He looked like a man who doubted himself, doubted his faith, but kept on trying to convince himself and the rest of the world that he was right and God was just.

  After a shock of such magnitude, some found solace in silence and solitude. Others craved noise and people, as if the insignificant collisions of smaller lives would be sufficient to distract them from their pain.

  Bailey sought neither solitude nor noise. She sought understanding, but did not find it.

  Once the priest had left, Bailey and Elizabeth lay side by side on the bed where Elizabeth had entertained so many gentlemen callers, and they said nothing.

  Elizabeth Redman died on the morning of Sunday, November 15, 1964. Bailey was beside her when she passed away. The last thing that Elizabeth told her daughter was that she should listen to no one but herself, that her heart would always tell her the truth, and that if you started lying to yourself then you were screwed.

  Bailey kissed her mother, and then pulled the sheet over her head. She walked out to the corner and called Frank.

  “She’s dead.”

  “I’m on my way,” thinking that had it not been a Sunday he would have been on the road. Now he was responsible for his daughter. There was no one else. He was scared, excited, sad, a little confused. He drove twenty miles an hour over the speed limit and no one stopped him.

  The funeral was held in Oro Valley, just north of Tucson on Sunday, November 22. The church was called the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church. Outside there was a sign that read God’s Math: One Cross Plus Three Nails Equals Four-given.

  Bailey didn’t cry. She figured she’d done all the crying she was going to do earlier. Frank asked her if she wanted to say anything. What was she going to say? And who was she going to say it to? The only people in the church were herself, her father, the priest, and the undertaker who waited at the back for word that the coffin was ready to be interred.

  Frank paid for everything. There was a little reception in a bar a block and a half away. They had sandwiches made up, some corn dogs and potato chips. Frank drank root beer because he had to drive. Bailey drank Coke.

  “We have to go back to Scottsdale,” Frank told her. “I don’t know what to do about things …” He shook his head. “The house where you lived was rented. We just have to empty everything out and turn it back to the landlord.”

  “Leave it all there,” Bailey said.

  “What?”

  “Leave everything there. I don’t want any of it.”

  “But your clothes, your books, everything that belonged to your mother—”

  “Leave it, Frank. Leave it all behind. I don’t want to carry that stuff around with me forever.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Bailey didn’t reply. She didn’t need to. Frank knew enough of his own daughter to recognize what he was hearing. She was willful, no question. It was a good trait. The kind of trait that would help her survive alone.

  They stayed the night in a cheap motel somewhere off of the interstate. Frank slept on the floor. He gave Bailey the bed, but she could not sleep. She went out in bare feet, in jeans and a T-shirt, and she stood at the back of the cabin and looked into the dark. Whoever told you that the night was silent wasn’t paying attention. You heard more in half an hour of darkness that any span of daylight. The furrows of the darkening field like the nap of corduroy, the moon appearing as a hole in the black sky through which another universe could be seen. She could hear dogs howling in roundelays, echoing, reechoing, that final sound traveling out to wherever the land ended, and there to be swallowed by the sea.

  The end of one thing, the beginning of something else. She didn’t know what to expect, and thus expected nothing. She was unaware of Clay Luckman, of Earl Sheridan, of Digger Danziger. Had she known how their paths would cross she would not have believed such coincidence possible. She had once heard that old line “Coincidence is when God wishes to remain anonymous.” Perhaps it was the same for the devil.

  DAY THREE

  CHAPTER SIX

  The sun rose early. The light was as pale and clean as the face of a fresh-cut apple. Clay had fallen asleep listening to Earl curse. Fuck. Shit. Cocksucker. Son of a bitch. The man had spent his life taking wrong turns and had wound up in a cul-de-sac. The thing Clay saw, the thing he now understood, was that the darkness of man was not an illusion. Men and women—the bold and the brave
, the anxious, the timid, the poor, the wealthy, the sincere and the shallow—all hoped that evil was an illusion, but it was not. Earl Sheridan stood as testament to that.

  As Earl rose, as he oriented himself to where he was, as he removed the chair that he’d wedged beneath the bathroom door handle, Bailey Redman was elsewhere, even in that moment preparing herself for her mother’s funeral. How her path would cross with that of Clay Luckman and Elliott Danziger was not yet known, and could not have been foreseen.

  “Breakfast,” Earl said. “And then you pair are gonna stay right beside me while I check out a few things in Phoenix.”

  Earl possessed the kind of calm stillness that people had just before they did something truly crazy. And, unbeknownst to him, his parents—his disciplinarian father, his puritanical mother—were now receiving a dozen telephone calls a day. Without variation they were all from strangers asking after their son. When had they last seen him? How did he seem? How was he as a child? Did they ever consider he would become a criminal and a murderer? A whirlwind of federal people had descended on Hesperia. The world wanted to know all about Earl Sheridan, about the boys he’d taken hostage, about Agents Garth Nixon and Ronald Koenig, about how a condemned man could escape the confines of the justice system with a bad attitude and a comb. They were looking for him south of Anaheim and Palm Springs. They believed he was headed for Baja, California. The might of the federal government could be brought to bear, and was being mobilized even as Sheridan’s parents fielded the incessant calls, but even the might of the government was nothing in the face of the entire continental United States. Sheridan was one man. Even with Luckman and Danziger in tow, this was only three. There were delays, misunderstandings, photographs that didn’t replicate so well in the printing and reprinting. Earl Sheridan became unrecognizable as his image was dispatched time and time again to all the officers and individuals that possessed an interest in his identification and arrest. Most folks who had a mind to care just wanted him dead. It would save the state and the county the trouble of another trial for the killing of Chester Bartlett, the expense of feeding a maggot like Sheridan all the way through the arraignments, pretrial motions, the jury selection, the eventual incarceration on death row. Hell, it would even save the handful of bucks’ worth of rope they’d use to hang him, perhaps the few cents of electricity that they might smash through his body like an errant hurricane if they had a mind to change the method of execution. Someone somewhere had to foot the bill for such things, and that someone could well do without the burden.