by Ed Gorman
If he'd had a bullhorn, he would have sounded like a cop talking a killer out of a building.
"What a jerk he can be," she said, red daubing her cheeks suddenly. "I'd better go back inside." She dropped her gaze and then suddenly raised it again, looking right at me. "Oh, hell, I may as well tell you. I had a fantasy about you, just like I said."
"I hope it was a good one."
"It was a great one!"
"Joanna! You heard me! Get away from that car and go back inside!"
She glanced at me and smiled. "I'm so proud to be married to him sometimes."
Then, just as her Daddy had demanded, she went back inside.
7
That spring, one of the talk shows came to the prison—THREE LIVE SHOWS FROM THE MOST DANGEROUS PRISON IN AMERICA! as the announcer kept saying all week—and guess who one of the inmate-guests was?
He certainly hadn't volunteered. Indeed, he hadn't even wanted to do it . . . but when the TV lights came on in the big storage room where an impromptu stage had been set up . . . there he was.
The show itself way pretty bland. They even gave the cons fake names, to "protect" them. The host mostly wanting to know if any of his six inmate-guests had ever had sex with another inmate. The guy looked pretty faggoty himself, truth to tell.
The only other topic the guy with the TV grin and the TV mousse expressed any interest in was "the hole." What happened to a fella when they put him in "the hole." The isolation. The fear.
So it went, the show that day, taped in interminable four- and five-minute segments so dozens of commercials could be dropped in later.
Only near the end did the host say anything interesting. He raised the subject of how a number of beautiful women had recently "married" men in prison, even men on death row, despite the fact that the women knew they'd never be able to consummate their marriages.
The host then clicked through snapshots of these women with their inmate-husbands. Some of them really were gorgeous. A few of them even proved to be wealthy. Weren't they throwing their lives away, wasting their prime years on men who could not reciprocate real love?
"I mean," said the host, "look at what just happened in Los Angeles. You have this woman on the jury who convicted this guy of rape and murder . . . then she starts writing the guy in prison . . . and ends up marrying him while he's still behind bars." Then he looked at his guests and said, "What is it you guys have got in the sex-appeal department, anyway?"
The inmates snickered and smirked, and all the guys in the audience started cracking up.
"We'll look at this topic more closely tomorrow," the host said. "But for now we're out of time."
Taped three shows in one day, a ball-busting schedule.
By the time the taping was done, he was exhausted and irritable. The photos of the beautiful women had undone him. He lay on his dark bunk in his dark cell and clung to his cock like a drowning man at sea. He wanted one of those beautiful, beautiful women for his very own. He would show them a kind of sex they'd never known before, a kind of sex that would rattle and alter their very existence, and then he would show them other things, so many other things, too.
For the first time in all his prison years, he wept that night.
"Hey, man, you all right?" his cellmate said deep into midnight, the cell block all coughs and cries and furtive grunts of sex, the nightly cacophony of prison life.
"Yeah."
"Seein' those chicks make you lonely?"
"Yeah."
"Me, too," his cellmate said.
"I wonder what those women get out of it."
"The chicks who marry guys in stir?" his cellmate said.
"Yeah."
"You heard what the faggy host said," his cellmate said." 'A pathological need to nurture.' I ain't even sure what that means."
"Which one you like best?"
"The redhead in the green sweater. God."
"She was somethin', all right."
"How about you?"
"Dark-haired one, I guess. Just somethin' about her."
"Great legs."
"Yeah. But not just that. Something—" And then he remembered. She reminded him of a high-school girl he'd followed home from an ice-cream store one night. She made the mistake of walking by these woods. He just couldn't help himself. Raped and then killed her with his hands, and then raped her one more time.
His cellmate yawned. "I'm wasted, man. Gotta get some sleep."
Two minutes later, his cellmate was snoring.
But not him. Oh, no, not him.
He stayed awake all night, dreaming, dreaming.
8
It's crazy what you can get sentimental about sometimes. For me, on this particular day, it was field glasses. I hadn't used this pair of Swarovskis since leaving the FBI.
I sat six car lengths down from the McNally house. Through the field glasses, I watched a man pacing back and forth in the side window, approximately where their dining room was, as I recalled. He was big and looked like he might have been tough once, before the beer caught up to him.
I assumed this was McNally. I also assumed, because of his frantic movements, that the McNallys had not gotten their daughter back. I tried not to think of what that finger in the box had looked like.
He slapped her.
She'd suddenly appeared inside the window frame with him, shouting at him, face raw with tears and fear and rage, and then he'd slapped her the way one man slaps another, enough to move her back at least a foot. Then he slapped her again, backhanded this time, and then she disappeared from the window frame.
In the small town where I grew up, there had been a young married couple famous for their battles. In the early years, he'd given her a few cut lips and a black eye or two. A little later, he started giving her broken arms and legs, once a broken nose. You know the rest, how one night, the sixth year of their marriage it was, he slammed her head too many times into an old-fashioned radiator and killed her before the ambulance arrived. She was twenty-four years old when she died. She was also my cousin. I still had the occasional dream of looking the sonofabitch up when he got out, and slamming his head into a radiator thirty or forty times. See how he liked it.
He came fast out of his house, McNally did, going around the far side to his garage. A minute later, he backed out of the driveway in a new gray Dodge. If he noticed me parked there at the curb, he gave no hint.
He headed west. I waited a minute and a half, then headed west, too.
Following people in a small town is difficult. Following them in the country is nearly impossible.
Fortunately, after only three or four miles, I sensed where he was going. He was headed in the right direction for it, anyway, and I had this feeling—I'll spare you the lecture on "hunches" that law-enforcement officials always like to give civilians—I had this feeling that he knew something about Nora's murder last night.
I dropped back, giving him a two-mile advantage.
I drove slowly past farms, remembering what it was like to attach milker units to cows' teats at a frosty 5:30 A.M.; and what it was like on a sweet warm Indian-summer afternoon to rake the corn I'd just chopped up onto a conveyer belt leading to the silo; and what it was like to lie on the sun side of a summer hill and have five tiny kittens and two tiny rabbits crawling all over you and making you giddy with the pleasure of it. We'd been going to have kids someday and live on a working farm, Kathy and I, but of course it had never happened—not in reality anyway, though sometimes I could fancy it so vividly I'd swear it had actually taken place.
I pulled up on top of the hill overlooking the deserted farm where the blue Caddy had sat last night. The river, sparkling blue, ran behind the farm.
In sunlight, the once-white farmhouse was scabrous, and the ancient red barn almost comical in the way it leaned, and over all was a Poe-like pall, an unnatural silence where human life had been taken with obscene enjoyment. No animals, no flowers prospered here.
I left the car on the shoulde
r, grabbed my trusty binoculars, and walked down the dusty gravel for a better angle.
McNally had pulled his car down into the barn so it couldn't be seen from the road. He had yet to emerge from the cool shadows inside.
Far down the road ahead of me, I saw a car hidden inside a great rolling wraith of gravel dust traveling fast toward the farm. Of course, it might well go right on past the farm and then right on past me. But, as I'd expected, it started slowing down when it got within a quarter-mile of the farm, slowing down and using its blinker to signal a left turn.
This car was a blue Toyota four-door, the family model.
The driver did the same thing McNally had: pulled straight into the barn, failed to reappear. I hadn't had any look at all at his face. I was damned curious.
I went back and sat behind the wheel of my car and turned on the radio to a news station.
No sense in making myself any more obvious than necessary. Sitting in your car was obvious enough. Standing out in the road with binoculars was pointing a bright red arrow at yourself.
They went fifteen more minutes, and still there was no sign of them. They could be doing all sorts of things in that barn, but I guessed it would have something to do with McNally's daughter. He might be a drunk and a wife beater, but even scum care about their children in their own scummy way.
In the interim, a big gravel truck roared by, rocking my ancient jeep; a long vented truck filled with squealing pigs rumbled past; then a motorcycle with a young helmetless kid raced by; and finally two big bays ridden by two young girls clopped onward, leaving road apples of a curious iridescent green.
I mention all this so you'll know why I was numbed into indifference when I heard the next car come up behind me. Figured it was just another local pilgrim hastening on to farm or co-op or babbling brook.
Only when I heard the door chunk shut behind me did I realize that the car had stopped and pulled over to the side of the road.
Only when I heard gravel crunch and pop did I realize that somebody was walking through it directly toward me.
By the time I got the window rolled down, she was there. She put her nice arms on my door and leaned in and spoke to me. She wore a sweet innocent perfume.
"You doing a little bird-watching?" she asked.
"I didn't think you were speaking to me."
"I shouldn't be, actually. I should be arresting you."
"For what?"
"For what? C'mon, whatever-your-name-is, for withholding evidence."
"What evidence?"
She sighed. She looked sexy in her blue uniform and dark, dark shades. "So are you going to tell me?"
"Tell you what?"
"What you're doing at the scene of the crime?"
"This isn't the scene of the crime."
"It's very close."
I was tempted to just tell her. For one thing, I liked her. For another, she would eventually find out anyway. But I had given the McNally woman my word that I'd keep her secret. Given the stakes, her daughter being kidnapped and all, it was a promise I certainly meant to keep.
"How about if I buy you dinner tonight?"
"Are you trying to bribe an officer of the law?"
"You bet I am."
"I don't know why I like you."
"I'm just glad you do."
"Maybe I'll seduce you tonight and get the information that way."
"I think you're serious."
She shrugged. "Maybe I am. Or maybe I want to do both—get to know you and find out everything you know."
"You wouldn't hear me object."
She sighed again. "Actually, I hate coy stuff like that. I shouldn't have said it."
I smiled. "I thought it was kind of sweet."
"I grew up in a very strict household, so I guess I've still got some hangups about sex."
"Most of us do."
"You?"
"A little, I suppose." I smiled. "But I don't let it get in my way." I looked at her a long moment. "I'd tell you what I know, but somebody may die if I do that. So right now I have to keep silent. I don't expect you to understand what I'm talking about, but I am telling you the truth."
She took her own long look at me. "You know what? I believe you. But I'm still kind of mad."
"I know. And I don't blame you."
She looked down the hill at the ancient shabby outbuildings and the ancient shabby house, and shook her head. "It's always different in the daylight—crime scenes, I mean. You always wonder how people can be such animals. But people seem to be different at night. They change, somehow." She looked back at me. "You could help me, you know."
I was tempted again but said nothing.
"What kind of meat do you like?"
"How about if I bring a cheese pizza over?"
"Are you serious?"
"Sure. Why should you have to cook? You work a full-time job."
"You wouldn't mind a cheese pizza?"
"Huh-uh."
"I could make us some kind of dessert."
"You don't have to make us anything. I'll bring a pizza and a six-pack of a good imported beer, and we'll just enjoy ourselves."
She smiled. "Now if you'd just tell me why you're sitting out here."
"Maybe tonight."
"Now you're the one who's being coy."
"Yeah, I guess I am."
She was still leaning in and looking at me and didn't see them, McNally first, his friend second, backing out of the barn, backing down the driveway and then heading off quickly in the opposite direction, lost in a gravel dust storm of their making.
"Maybe I'll follow you back to town."
"I'm not headed back to town," she said. "I'm going back to the farm."
"For what?"
"See if we missed something last night."
"You're thorough."
She smiled. "No, egotistical. I want to make sure that I do a very good job so that all the cynics in this town will know that a woman can do a very good job as a peace officer."
"Is it all right to tell you that I like you?"
"Only if that thought is accompanied by your real name." She stood up and smiled. "I'll see you about eight tonight. With your cheese pizza."
She gave me a little salute, walked back to her patrol car, got inside and drove down the hill, giving me a blast on her horn and a wave as she reached the farm driveway.
But by this time I was preoccupied wondering who McNally's friend was and what they were doing in the barn together. I turned the car around and drove back two hills where, with my field glasses, I could watch Jane walk around the farm. She stayed twenty minutes.
When she was done, she left, and then I drove over for my own look.
I spent the next fifteen minutes peeking through shattered windows into empty farmhouse rooms littered with gray-and-white pigeon droppings, and with empty Bud cans and empty Pepsi cans and empty red Trojan wrappers that looked like lurid autumn leaves.
I had just stepped inside the barn when I heard the tires of a heavy automobile crunch through gravel.
I stood in the barn watching as Jane walked up to me. "Thought you were going back to town."
I smiled. "Thought you were, too."
"Now'd be a good time to tell me who you really are." If she was kidding, she wasn't kidding much.
I looked back into the barn. I wanted to scout around but not when Jane was here.
I checked my watch. "Well, guess I'd better head back."
"Not going to finish checking out the barn?"
I laughed. "And give you all my trade secrets?"
She walked me back to my car. She was going to make sure that this time I left.
"Maybe I'll see you later," she said.
Just then she looked tired and melancholy and I wanted to give her a hug but I knew better. You didn't hug women when they were wearing badges and holster rigs.
"I hope so," I said, and drove off. This time I really did go back to town.
9
By the time
I got back to my motel, I was ready for some lunch, after which I planned to go visit Mrs. McNally.
A woman in a pink polyester uniform was sweeping the walk in front of my room, the sparkling dust motes getting to my sinuses immediately. When she saw me, she said, "Your friend's in there waiting for you."
"My friend?"
She shrugged. "That's what he says. Your friend."
She went back to her sweeping.
The scratched-up metal door and the rusted window screen and the dusty curtain behind it took on a sinister aspect now. My heart started hammering. This was like the old days in Cairo and Barcelona and Cannes. I loved it and hated it at the same time.
I went over, grabbed the doorknob and pushed the door inward hard enough to bang it against the inside wall.
The room was shadow. He sat in the armchair with the dark blue slipcovers meant to hide cigarette bums and wine stains. A narrow beam of sunlight exposed him.
He looked like the world's youngest successful banker; snow-white hair and quick gritty blue eyes and a dark blue suit that must have cost a few thousand dollars. The face was the only thing that didn't go with the clothes. He had to be sixty, but he didn't look much older than forty-five or so.
"You're Hokanson?"
I nodded. "And you're Tolliver."
"Yes."
He got up and walked over and we shook hands. He shook hands firmly, but without any theatrics. "Could you use a sandwich and a cup of coffee, Mr. Hokanson?"
"I sure could."
In the sunlight, what with his crow's feet and the sorrow lines at either end of his mouth, he looked a little older but not much, still giving the impression that he was an impostor of some kind, kid face appended to adult body.
We'd been here twenty minutes now, and thus far he had told me the following, which I had written down dutifully in my little black book:
1. He had no daughter.
2. He had had a son, but he'd died at age 25.
3. Ten years ago, a woman who had pretended to be his wife broke into his home and stole several credit cards and ran up bills of more than $50,000 before the cards could be canceled.
