by Ed Gorman
"So after that you and your father didn't get along?"
"Oh, we tried, both of us, we really did, gave it our best effort. But basically my father and I have never liked each other—there's always been some tension there, if I believed in Freud I'd say we probably wanted to get into each others' knickers—and so he'd give me very strict hours and I'd break them, and he'd buy me new cars and I'd smash them up, and he'd pack me off to boarding school, and I'd run away. I'm sure you've heard of girls like me before."
I thought of the quiet, anxious, pretty woman who sat on my couch last night. I would not have deduced from her looks, her manner or her language this wild background she was portraying.
"Then there were all the usual problems with drugs and alcohol," she said. "I have to admit I really put him through hell. No doubt about that."
"Why is he so against you hiring an investigator for your daughter's murder?"
"He thinks I'm the same unhappy, foolish girl who used to come in after curfew all the time and then throw fits when he confronted me. He's very sorry that Maryanne died, but he thinks I'm just wasting my money and my time by not letting the police handle it. 'Pathetic' was the word he used just the other day."
"I'm going to do my best, as I said."
"I appreciate that. And I apologize again for being so—"
"—peevish."
She laughed again. It was a nice, sweet sound. "I'll give you a phone service where you can leave messages for me. I'll get back to you as soon as I can. And I'd appreciate hearing from you every few days."
"You will. I promise."
"Well, we'd better check out now. I have to go down the hall to Vic's room and pound on his door till he wakes up. He could sleep through a bombing raid."
"I'll talk to you soon."
Crayfish, shrimp tails, chicken entrails, hog melts, worms, night crawlers, live and dead chubs, coagulated blood, sour clams and frog pieces were all in my bait bucket when I went fishing that afternoon.
Figured this would be my last chance for a time, so I took advantage of it, doing a little bit of what they call drift fishing, wading out to the middle of the stream and staying there a couple of hours.
I saw yellow birds and red ones and blue ones, I heard dogs and owls and splashing fish, I smelled the rich dark spring mud of the riverbank and the piney scent of the woods and the aroma of hot sunlight on the denim of my shirt. I was on a gentle leg of the river that was almost a cul-de-sac. A doe stood in a clearing and watched me for ten full minutes and a water snake at least two feet long slithered up from a muddy hole, looked around, and vanished back into the hole again immediately, apparently not liking my company. A cow with cowy brown eyes and swinging cowy tits appeared in the same spot the doe had and took up the watch, trying to figure out just what it was this two-legged creature was doing out there in the middle of the gentle blue river.
Easy to imagine the time when the Mesquakie Indians had laid claim to all this rich land. See the gray of their campfire smoke against the soft blue sky, hear the pounding messages of their drums echo off the limestone cliffs to the north. As a boy I'd combed these hills for buried arrowheads, almost obsessive in my search. In all those summer days I'd found only one. I still had it in my bureau at home. Kathy had always referred to it as "the start of my Indian museum."
I got home just at dusk, just when the invisible birds in the trees were making enough noise to awaken every Mesquakie laid to rest in the burial ground three miles to the west.
I got inside and turned the light on and said, "Damn."
We've seen it in the movies so many times that we should be used to it: how a house looks after thieves have gone through it, trashing everything in their search for hidden treasure, your living quarters a jumble of scattered papers, neckties, overturned chairs, emptied desk drawers and magazines that had been riffled through and then tossed on the floor like so many dead splayed birds.
I had a good notion of what my visitor had been looking for and it wasn't treasure. Not of the monetary kind, anyway.
He'd wanted something germane to the investigation of Maryanne Conners's murder.
I worked my way through the house room by room. By nine I had everything pretty much fixed up, shoving a stack of paperbacks under the end of the couch where he'd broken the leg, putting all the classical CDs that had been Kathy's back in their proper slots, wondering in a bemused moment what he thought of all my underwear and socks that had been worn down to little more than holes with elastic banding at the top.
I felt raped, and for all the coolheadedness I'd just bragged about to Nora, I wanted to get my hands on the bastard.
Six hours later, deep into the night, the cats snoring at my feet, the phone rang.
I picked up.
"Leave it alone, Mr. Payne. Just leave it alone."
Perfectly androgynous voice. Perfectly.
"You understand, Mr. Payne?"
And then he-she hung up.
I lay back down in my bed of shadows.
Knowing that I was now lying on my back, Tasha took the opportunity to walk up my body and lie on my chest, which she had found a most inviting bed.
I hadn't had to ask what the caller wanted me to leave alone.
8
Cellmate the first year is a fifty-one-year-old farmer named Renzler. Frank Renzler.
Frank, who has told him this story so many, many times, was a farmer with a wife and two kids. Bank foreclosed on him after two bad droughts in a row, so Frank couldn't help it: one day he just picked up his hunting rifle and drove into town and blew away the banker. Took maybe one-eighth of his head off with two shots.
He cries, Frank does. No, check that. Not merely cries. Sobs. Lies on his bottom bunk and just goes nuts.
Talks about his wife. His kids. How much he loves them and misses them and all he ever wanted to be was a farmer like his old man and his grandpa and why did the bank have to foreclose on him, anyway, why did they have to, huh?
He's also the one with the bowel problems. Guy must have diarrhea three times a day. Just sits there on the crapper, no more than four, five feet away from the top bunk, and cuts away.
In the spring, Frank finds the puppy.
Nobody can explain how it got inside the prison unless it was a stowaway on one of the potato trucks that come in here twice a month.
But there one day in the machine shop where he works, just all balled up in a pile of rags, is this sweet little puppy.
And Frank (as Frank tells it) just starts bawling like a little kid. Proclaims his discovery a miracle. "I know God put the little stinker there so I'd find her, so I'd have somebody to love till they let me out of here." (That's another thing: Frank is serving life without parole, but is always pathetically alluding to the "day they let me out of here.")
All of which is too good to pass up.
He lets Frank go six weeks always keening and blubbering on about what a sweet little puppy Angel is (that's what Frank calls her, Angel, her being an emissary from God and all), and then one day late, just as everybody is leaving the shop, he sneaks in there and does it.
Understand something.
He knows exactly what he's doing.
When he was a kid, he used to do stuff like this all the time.
Used to find neighborhood puppies and take them down in the storm sewer (the one place he was expressly forbidden to go) and then he'd experiment with puppies and kittens.
Cut off one leg and see if they could hobble around. Usually start with one of the front legs.
Then he'd take the opposite leg in the rear. See if they could limp around that way.
Of course all the screaming and thrashing about and all the blood—
Well, that was part of the fun, too, not just the crippling.
So in the machine shop, with the help of a knife his two-thousand-dollars-a-month bodyguard Servic got for him, he works over the puppy real good.
In the morning, Renzler finds Angel (he hears about all th
is later from other cons) and falls on the floor and goes into some kind of seizure.
They never seen nothing like it before, except one con who once saw a sixth-grade girl at Catholic school have an epileptic fit.
The guards come running and they see Renzler there on the floor, and it takes four of them to hold him down.
Finally, finally, he stops screaming and throwing himself around.
Then he gets real quiet, tears streaming down his cheeks and he looks at one of the guards and says, "You gotta loan me a knife so I can kill her."
The guard looks over at Angel there on a pile of bloody rags. Some bastard has cut all her poor little legs off. Amazing that she's still alive.
The guard, this big thick German not known for sensitivity, has tears in his own eyes looking down at the obscenely maimed animal, and nods, and takes out this big-ass pocket knife, one of those gizmos that have a dozen different blades on them for opening cans and wine bottles and stuff like that, and he hands Renzler the knife. It's certainly up to the job. The blade is six inches long.
And Renzler gets down there with Angel and he kisses her sad scared little face and he says a couple of parts of a couple of different prayers and then he rolls her gently over for a better take on her heart and then he kills her.
And then he sits down right in the middle of the floor and he picks Angel up like she's his little baby or something and he starts rocking her back and forth in his arms and he's crying these really eerie quiet tears and kind of singing some lullaby he remembers his mama singing to him and the big German guard hasn't noticed as yet that Renzler hasn't given him the knife back and then—
And then it's too late.
Because Renzler picks up the knife, the blade still shiny with poor little Angel's blood, and he brings the knife up to his right eyeball and drives it deep into his eye socket, right on through to his brain.
He screams, but not for long.
And then there's two of them dead: Renzler flat on his back now, his foot twitching crazily, little Angel hugged tenderly to his chest.
Eight days later, he gets a new cellmate.
Hard-core criminal, this one.
Killed a man in a 7-Eleven stickup.
Brags so much about his sexual conquests, he quickly gets marked as a latent fag.
But what a relief to hear about stickups and dangerous guys his new cellmate has known and all the girls he's bopped—
Certainly preferable to slow, sad Renzler, whining about his farm and his fantasies about getting out of here someday and how little Angel was sent to him directly by God.
Oh, yeah, this new cellmate is a lot better.
1
I reached New Hope next morning, just in time to see an Amish couple in a horse-drawn wagon irritate the hell out of a nice-looking young mother in a shiny new van. She had her kids with her and was obviously in a hurry. The wagon wasn't about to go any faster, there was too much oncoming traffic for her to pass, so all she could do was crawl along at 10 mph and glower a lot.
As I would soon find out, this little drama was sort of a metaphor for life here.
Yes, New Hope was one of those beautiful old Iowa towns that had sprung up along with the railroad back in the 1870s, a town square complete with bandstand and Civil War monument; huge oaks and elms forming a natural canopy on the main drag; and striped awnings on all the proud little businesses that lined the four-block downtown, the men's haberdashery, the supermarket, the ice-cream store, the tobacco shop.
This was the bucolic New Hope, the New Hope that existed in the secret heart of everybody who had ever grown up, like me, in the small-town Midwest, all long, lazy sunny afternoons fishing, and chilly football Friday nights out at the ramshackle old stadium, and Christmas carols on the loudspeaker as you jostled for gifts at the town's one-and-only department store, which was basically four big rooms with a lot of different stuff piled into it. And the Amish, of course, their horses clopping hollowly down the asphalt roads, the pretty women peering out from beneath their dark bonnets, the men in coarse gray beards and inscrutable eyes.
The old New Hope.
The new New Hope was McDonald's and Burger King and Motel 6 and the video stores with lurid sexy posters in their windows; Wal-Mart and a four-screen movie theater and what was formerly a furniture store converted into SOCIAL SERVICES.
Where the old New Hope belonged to the people who lived in town and worked at one of the three local factories, the new New Hope, its homes built in the hills surrounding the town itself, belonged to the married couples in their thirties and forties who drove their BMWs and Audis and vans to Cedar Rapids, where they worked, rubbed shoulders with as much modern culture as you could find there, and then escaped every night to live out their fantasies of Andy and Opie and Barney and Aunt Bea.
There were inevitable clashes, the nastiest, I'm told, coming when two members of the school board pronounced themselves "born again" and proceeded to list twenty-six novels, including The Great Gatsby and Catch-22, that had to be stricken from the high-school curriculum. If nothing else, this move got all the young professionals interested in the governance of the small community where they lived. They announced that two years from now at this time, they would be fielding their own school-board candidates, and they sure as hell wouldn't be people who found Mark Twain "sinful."
Welcome to New Hope, located in the northeast corner of the state, pop. 14,683.
There was a motel right downtown, a good base to work from, pretty much equidistant between the old New Hope and the new housing developments in the hills surrounding it.
The drive had been four hours, so I needed food and coffee. I decided to try the downtown to get a human sense of the place. The downtown of any place, no matter its size, is where you can get your quickest sketch of a town's sociology.
I had two eggs, basted, two pieces of wheat toast with raspberry jam, one glass of orange juice, and three cups of coffee.
I ate these at the counter of a tiny place called Dickie's Diner where, nearing noon, most of the customers were male, roughly half of them dressed in the kind of suits and sports coats you get at Sears, the other half dressed in uniforms of denim, khaki, cotton, all bearing the caps and sew-on badges of gas companies and electric companies and bug-spraying companies. Mixed in with these folks were farmers, all weather-lined faces and big knuckly hands wrapped around chipped white coffee mugs. Not a single young professional in sight.
The talk, as I picked it up in snatches, was about a new state sales tax the legislature was proposing and what a bunch of worthless idiots that legislature happened to be, and how bad most of the National League teams looked this year, and—this from the businessmen—how the young professionals thought they were too good to shop in downtown New Hope. "They do it all in Cedar Rapids. Not one goddamned bit of support for us!"
Near the end, just as the third cup of coffee was starting to put a little twitch into my fingers, I heard a name that sounded familiar.
"Eve McNally find that husband of hers yet?"
A snort of laughter. "Not unless she knows how to crawl through sewers."
"How a man can do that to a woman like Eve sure beats me."
"I really thought the last time he went down to Iowa City to dry out, he'd be all right."
"Lasted two months. Two damn months is all. Then he was back to the bottle."
These were two of the suits sitting at the counter. McNally was one of the men mentioned in Mike Peary's letter as a possible suspect. They had me curious. He appeared to be missing, presumably on a drunk. From Mike's profile, a man who drank a lot—maybe to suppress the memories of what he'd done—would fit perfectly.
I paid my bill and went outside and stood on the corner for a few minutes, enjoying the spring air.
There was a phone booth across the street. I walked over and looked up the name McNALLY, RICHARD.
I got the address and drove out there. The town was laid out on an extensive grid broken only by the pu
blic square downtown. Railroad tracks cut north-south.
The houses were eclectic, everything from small Queen Annes to what they used to call "Corn Belt" homes, square white clapboards of two stories with the inevitable squeaking swing on the inevitable front porch. The pastel prefabs that came in after WWII looked a lot older than the houses built eighty, one hundred years ago.
The McNally place was a small white clapboard sitting in the middle of a green, green acre with a windbreak of shade trees and an aged but sprightly red barn in back. It was out on the north edge of town. The yard was carefully mown and well-tended, magnolia trees and apple blossoms charging the air headily.
I knocked. Inside a dog barked, and then a soft voice shushed it. And then she was there, framed in the glass of the storm door. She looked to be about my age, and probably not quite at her ideal weight, maybe five, six pounds over on a very slight frame, with silken dark hair and silken dark eyes, the left one spoiled by the fading remains of a black eye. She looked scared and miserable but even so, appealing in a kind of sad way, the sort of woman you try hard to make happy because you suspect she's never been happy before.
Of course, unhappiness was a tradition among pioneer women out here. Despite all the macho cowboy movies, women pretty much kept things running on the frontier. Sure, the men had to plow and till the fields and hunt the meat, but study up on pioneer women, and you'll see why the suicide rate was so high among them—eighteen-, twenty-hour days seven days a week during which they did everything from making dyes for coloring cloth from barks and berries and roots; making clothing on a loom; making all meals; tanning hides and cutting patterns out for shoes; washing, ironing, mending; taking total responsibility for a brood of kids that probably ran to seven or eight; giving her man sex on demand; being priest, doctor, teacher; and in her "spare time" pitching in and helping with the planting and, later on, the harvest.
