Moving Targets

by William J. Reynolds

The post office was in the basement of the Ad Building, a fifty-year-old red brick number that was one of the few really academic-looking buildings on campus. The others could just as well have been part of a hospital complex or an office park. A set of well-worn marble stairs took me down to the basement, and once there, there was only one direction to go—along a wide, abbreviated, windowless hallway, one side of which was made up of scores of three-inch-square lockboxes, the other of standard institutional wall tiles.

  At the end of the bank of mailboxes was a postal counter, but its steel rolling wall was down, locked. I continued down to a banged-up blond-wood door, the kind with the big metal plate at the bottom. One of those engraved plastic signs you see everywhere said employees only, but the door stood a quarter of the way open and muted rock music leaked out. Culture Club, I think, but I don’t keep up on the bands much. I never quite got over the Beatles breaking up, you know?

  I put my head through the door and looked into the mail room. It was long and narrow and nearly filled with open gray canvas bags in wheeled aluminum-tube carts and similar bags, closed up tight, on the floor along the far wall. There was only one worker in the room, an athletic-looking boy with short dark hair and rather heavy features. He wore a dark blue sweater over a light blue turtleneck, jeans, and battered tennis shoes with Velcro strips in place of the laces. When I tapped on the door he glanced away from the boxes, into which he had been slipping letters, then back just as quickly.

  “The window closes at noon,” he recited as if it wasn’t the first time. “You’ll have to come back in the morning.”

  “Are you Tom Black?”

  Again he looked, this time for a beat or two longer before he went back to the boxes. “Yeah. What about it?”

  “I’d like to talk to you about Kate Castelar.” I entered the room and pulled out my wallet.

  He studied my I.D. for several seconds, and when he looked back at my face his voice was quieter, lower, and colder. “I heard about her dad. That’s real terrible. But what’s with Kate?”

  He didn’t need to have the whole sorry mess, so I didn’t give it to him. I told him that Castelar’s murder had been extraordinarily hard on Kate, that she had run away, and that I was looking for her. It was true enough, as far as it went. “I was hoping you, or someone else you can think of, would have any idea where Kate might go if she wanted to get away, be by herself, do some thinking.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said breezily, after mulling it over for perhaps as long as three seconds. “Sorry.”

  I said, “It might work better if you thought about it for a—”

  “I don’t have to think about it,” he said testily, slamming a letter home. “I know what I don’t know, and I don’t know anything that would help you. Kate and I aren’t real close.”

  “Oh yeah? Her mother seems to have the impression you and Kate are real close.”

  He shrugged elaborately without turning away from the boxes. “Yeah, well, Kate’s mother kind of lives in her own world, you know?” He made a harsh sound and fired another letter into its pigeonhole. “Funny, isn’t it? The mother’s a space case and the son’s a total asshole and both of the girls are pretty strange, so who gets killed? The old man, the only halfway normal one in the bunch. Funny.”

  “Yeah, it’s a riot. You sure seem to have the family all scoped out—I mean, considering you’re only a nodding acquaintance.”

  He threw his letters onto a narrow shelf that ran below the lowest row of mailboxes, turned toward me, and folded his arms tightly across his chest. “Okay. Kate and I did go together for a while. But we broke up. Last year, before summer break, and we haven’t even spoken to each other since then. All right?”

  “Why’d you break up?”

  “None of your fucking business, is it?”

  “I don’t know. My fucking business right now is to find Kate, and you’re not being very helpful. I’m sorry if she dumped you, but it happens. Don’t let your ego get in the way here. You might not think so, but you could know something that proves helpful to me—to Kate.” I swiped the gist of that last part of the speech from any number of private-eye novels. I’ve never known it to be true, but what the hell, it sounds impressive.

  He glared at me for several seconds and I wondered if he was going to take a swing at me. If he did, I figured I’d just have to take it and leave; I didn’t have any right to be on campus in the first place, much less leaving bruises on the student body. Assuming, of course, it would be me leaving the bruises.

  As it was, it was all academic, so to speak, because when he unfolded his arms it was only to place his hands low on his hips, lean against the unsteady-looking shelf, and sigh heavily, resignedly. “All right. I’m sorry. It’s just … Kate’s kind of a sore subject with me, is all.”

  “No fooling.”

  He smiled ruefully. “Yeah. Well, anyhow, I sure haven’t heard from Kate or anything, if that’s what you’re wondering. You know, if she needed a place to stay or something, she wouldn’t call me, not in a million years. She’d probably call one of her girlfriends …”

  “I don’t think Kate probably would contact anybody; what I’m trying to find out, like I said, is whether she had any special, private place she used to go to, maybe that you and she used to go to.”

  “Well, there was this Pizza Hut out on the highway; you mean like that?”

  I somehow doubted that Jennings and Kate were hiding from the law in a pizza parlor on Highway 36. “Not exactly,” I said. “When I was in college, there was this storage room under the old gym, and I knew how to get into it. So sometimes in the evening I’d go down there, just for the solitude. Sometimes I’d bring a friend with me …” I hadn’t thought of that in ages, and the recollection of it now caused a sudden keen stab of sadness. The “friend” had been Jen, and the hours spent huddled there with her seemed infinitely long ago, seemed to belong to somebody else’s past, not mine; somebody who had a future ahead of him instead of a history behind him.

  Tom was nodding gently, almost as if caught up in the same reverie. “I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “Usually we’d be, you know, together here, in my room. Or at her house, if her folks weren’t around. Or—”

  Suddenly he seemed unusually interested in the dull gray tiles beneath his feet.

  “Or?”

  He brought his eyes up without moving his head. “Well … there was this place we went to a few times, just before—before we broke up. In a way, I suppose it was part of the reason we called it off.” Another great sigh. “See, Kate’s folks have this other house besides the one they live in. I guess they bought another little farm near theirs a few years ago. They rent out the land and all the buildings except for this little three-room farmhouse that was there, and that’s empty—well, except for some furniture and stuff that no one uses. None of the kids were supposed to go down there, but Kate got a copy made of the key one time and, well, like I said, we went there once or twice.”

  That was more like it. Surely the cops would have checked out all the buildings on Castelar’s property as a matter of course, but it never hurt to follow up on these things. I made a note in the little wire-bound pad I carry to augment my criminally unreliable memory and asked Black if he could think of any other similar places Kate might have run to.

  He shook his head, still studying the scuffed flooring. “No. I don’t even know if she’d go there. We had a couple of really bad scenes there, some pretty big fights, stuff I don’t like to think about, but—I don’t know, maybe she doesn’t care.”

  “You said the place contributed to you two calling it quits. What did you mean?”

  He eyed me from under the ribbon of dark hair that slid toward his brow when his head was lowered. “Is it important?”

  I shrugged. “In this business, you never know what’s important until you’ve got all, or almost all, of the pieces together. It’s like … don’t you always do about twice as much research as you need for a term
paper?”

  Tom gave a snort of a laugh, accompanied by a half-smile and an uneasy shifting of his feet. “I suppose,” he said resignedly. “Okay. Well, you know, Kate and I went together for about a year, and most of that time we were … sleeping together.”

  “No fooling. You know, I’ve heard that that happens on campus every once in a great while.”

  “Like I said, usually we’d be in my room here or Kate’s room at home when no one was around. And that was all right, you know, that was cool. But after she got the idea of us sneaking over to the other place—well, then it started getting a little heavy for me.”

  “Heavy?”

  “Yeah … Kate always got off on some shit that was a little, you know, kinky. Which was okay; I thought it was kind of exciting, too, kind of—to tie her up a little, maybe give her butt a couple of slaps, order her around—that kind of stuff. Nothing too serious, you know. Just playing around, doing something different every so often.

  “But then she started to really get into it, and it started getting a little too bizarre for me. Especially after she got the key to that little house. In the dorm, you couldn’t make too much noise because the walls are like tissue paper. And even at her house, you never really knew when someone was going to be coming home. Usually her brother, creeping around the joint like Boris Karloff or somebody. But in the other place, there was no one around for miles, usually, and no chance of anyone walking in. So she kind of went crazy, really got into these elaborate S and M scenes that were just too much for me. At least, as a steady diet.” He made a small gesture with both hands. “Well, that’s it, I guess. She wasn’t interested in normal sex anymore, and she wanted me to be rougher and rougher with her—I mean, spanking her or whipping her with a belt until she cried and begged for forgiveness; real weird shit like that—and I just thought it was getting kind of sick. I wasn’t her daddy and I told her that, and I told her that these feelings of worthlessness or guilt or misdirected anger or whatever they were were getting in the way of our relationship. She had a real negative self-image and it was getting worse, and I thought she should see someone about it. But when I’d tell her this she’d just laugh it off, tell me I was too straight, too uptight. We had a couple of big fights about it, and she said it was just a game, and that if I didn’t want to play it with her she’d find someone who would. And I said that was a good idea. And she said she thought so too.”

  Again he made the gesture.

  “That was back in May, just before the end of the term, and that was the last time I saw her. I mean, except around campus.” Tom hadn’t so much as glanced at me since he began his story; now he raised his head and looked at me directly, something like a challenge in his eyes and in his voice: “Does that help you any?”

  I hadn’t known how to react while he was telling it—I was glad that he hadn’t seemed able to look me in the eye—and I didn’t know how to react now. One of the really swell parts of this crappy business is that you can pick up so much fascinating trivia about people’s private lives; you get these charming glimpses at the skeletons everybody has stashed in one closet or another; you get the intimate, inside story about others’ secret selves, the little quirks and hang-ups that we’d prefer remain hidden from the world at large, and maybe even from ourselves. Sometimes the tidbits are useful, important, even vital to the matter at hand; more often, however, they are not, they are merely the noxious by-product of the investigator’s excavations. Either way, you can’t forecast it before you start digging. Either way, some damage will be done, if only to someone’s self-esteem. Either way, a skeleton is awfully hard to hide again once it’s been dug up.

  And people ask me why I want out of this line of work.

  I didn’t have any answer for Tom Black and I didn’t feel like trying to make one up. I said I was sorry if I’d made him uncomfortable, but I was sure he’d agree that the important thing was to find Kate. He didn’t say anything, but he reclaimed his stack of mail so I figured the audience was at an end. I gave him one of my cards and urged him to call me if he thought of anything else, thanked him for his trouble, and retreated toward the door.

  He stopped me as my hand touched the knob.

  “Just for the record,” he said quietly.

  I turned to face him.

  “I broke up with Kate. Not the other way around. Okay?”

  “Okay.” What the hell did I care?

  Jo Richter, Kate’s best friend, didn’t have much more to offer; in fact, she didn’t have as much to offer as Tom had, and I was slightly grateful for it. Tom’s revelations had left me with a bad taste in my mouth and a sour feeling in my belly—although, let’s be reasonable, either or both could have been due to the lousy coffee that had constituted my only meal thus far today—even if they gave me some insights into the nagging question of what a girl like Kate Castelar saw in a guy like Walt Jennings. If she was possessed of a growing sense of worthlessness or unspecified guilt, then she may have felt that consorting with someone of Jennings’s character was just the sort of thing a rotten kid like her deserved. That Jennings had a professed loathing for Kate’s father, whom she loved, would make it even worse—or better, from her point of view. Finding out that he had a wife, or at least a live-in lover, must have sent her into a masochistic seventh heaven. In fact, she had as good as told me that she was getting what she deserved.

  Having proved to myself that I could churn out half-baked pop psychoanalysis just as well as Tom Black could—maybe even better, since I’d been at it longer—I went in search of the Richter girl and found her exiting her one o’clock class. She had another at two, which gave us ten minutes—about eight minutes more than I needed. Jo and the others in the clique hadn’t seen much of Kate that last semester, because Kate had a new boyfriend—an “older guy,” she told me, and I restrained the impulse to kick her in the shin. Kate didn’t talk to them much about the boyfriend. At least not to Jo, a tallish, chubby girl who had dark hair worn high on her head and low on her neck and the sort of personality that would not encourage you to confide in her. Unless you simply were trying to avoid the expense of renting a billboard. It quickly became apparent that the Richter girl was going to be of no real help, and if Kate’s confidante knew nothing useful, no one else was very likely to either.

  The little hand of my watch was on the two and the big hand was sneaking up on the twelve. I was tired and hungry. Millar College seemed to have afforded all the education I was liable to get there. And the longer I stayed the more I risked attracting official attention, which I did not want. It had been a lot of years since I was called down to the dean’s office; I didn’t care for it back then, and I didn’t see as how I’d like it any better now. So I thanked Jo Richter, quit the relative warmth of the Science Building, and allowed the stiff prairie wind to blow me back to the badly plowed lot my car was in.

  On the windshield was a green ticket, trapped under the wiper and fluttering like a dying bird. It threatened the withholding of my grades until I coughed up for a fifteen-buck parking fine. Such documents may strike terror in the hearts of recalcitrant Millar frosh, but not the likes of I. It went into a ball and to the ice underfoot, where the wind immediately sent it scurrying off.

  Less easily handled were a few alterations that had been made to the vehicle itself.

  Someone had taken an intense dislike to the windshield and had hit at it three or four times with something small and hard and blunt. Maybe a pipe. Angry white spiderwebs spread themselves across the surface of the glass, radiating from small silvery hearts where the blows had fallen. I guessed that whoever was responsible had wanted to smash it in entirely, but you need something with heft and surface area—a brick, a sledge—to do a real number on safety glass.

  Belatedly realizing this, my anonymous pal had taken another approach, touching up his handiwork with a little black paint flung creatively across the starred glass. Then, too bashful to put his name to the work, this automotive-minded Jackson Pollock had
merely scrawled stop across the hood with a half-dry brush or a wadded rag or something.

  Stop what?

  Ordinarily no one tells you to stop something unless you’re doing something. And I wasn’t doing anything. Or, at any rate, I didn’t feel like I was accomplishing anything. If he did, then he was more easily impressed than I am—or perhaps he knew something I didn’t, and something he didn’t want me to know.

  I didn’t for an instant entertain the possibility that I was the hapless victim of random vandalism. For one thing, none of the cars parked nearby had been molested. For another, that faint but legible message on the hood was not along the lines of stop killing whales or stop the arms race or stop abortions here; it was definitely, specifically directed at your humble correspondent.

  Stop.

  Stop what?

  Goddamn. Bad enough I didn’t know what in hell I was doing, now I had some lunkhead telling me to cut it out. If I was on to something, I wished he’d’ve left me some sort of hint. It would have only been polite. I unlocked the car and climbed behind the wheel to get out of the wind, rubbed my dry, itchy eyes, and tried to make some sense of it. Could Tom Black have run out here and done it while I was hunting up Jo Richter? No, not enough time—even if he’d had the paint in his knapsack, even if some eerie supernatural power enabled him to pick out my car from an entire lotful—and besides, why should he have? He hadn’t had to tell me as much as he did; he could have left it where it was when he first told me to go to blazes.

  Who else, then? I thought back over this unnaturally long and still unfinished day. Whom could I have stirred up, whom might I have made nervous …? Well, whom had I met? Kennerly. Banner. Emily Castelar, Vince Castelar. Christina Jennings.

  Christina Jennings.

  The redesign of my car wasn’t the work of a woman. Despite my best efforts, I’m still enough of a sexist to say that while a female hand might have flung the paint, the one that swung the pipe (or whatever) was attached to a man. But the general idea might have been hers. I was the one who found the gun that implicated her husband; maybe she was afraid I’d find something else. She could easily have lined up a friend, a relative, to follow me out here and try to scare me off the—