by Ed Gorman
"I meant what I said," she said.
"You mean about the double cheese or me being a jerk?"
"Both," she said, and was gone.
3
I decided to walk two blocks to the pharmacy where the town's only newsstand could be found.
As I reached the end of the motel driveway, I turned left and saw the auxiliary deputy who liked me so much.
He was leaning against a car, a cigarette dangling tough-guy style from his chubby mouth. He looked pretty comic, so comic in fact that I felt a little sorry for him. This guy was obviously suffering from a terminal lack of self-esteem.
"You never seen a car before?" he said.
"A blue Toyota sedan."
"Somethin' wrong with that?"
The mercury vapor lights gave his face a chilly aqua gleam.
"Just passing a remark."
"You know somethin' about this car?"
"Nope."
"You think there's somethin' weird about this car?"
"Nope."
"You know who it belonged to?"
If I hadn't, his use of past tense would have given me a big hint. I glanced across the street, in the front window of a diner. It was one of those strange May winds you get in Iowa sometimes, May but smelling of autumn somehow. The people in the diner looked very contented and very snug.
"Guess I don't."
"Him."
"Him?"
He shook his head as if I were the biggest pea-brain who had ever lived. "Him. The dead guy. You know, Lodge. The guy in your closet."
"Oh."
"That's all you're gonna say? 'Oh'?"
"What else do you want me to say?"
He shrugged. "You sure don't act very shook up. Most folks would be goin' crazy, findin' a dead guy in their closet." He looked at me sly, from the corners of his beady eyes. " 'Less, of course, they happened to have killed the guy themselves."
I wanted to give him a little grammar lesson, about the parts of speech and how singular has to agree with singular and so on, but I hate people who do stuff like that so I kept quiet.
He was just about to say something else when another auxiliary cop suddenly appeared on the edge of the motel driveway and called, "Chief wants you. Better get up here."
"Damn," he said.
"Don't blame you for hating crime scenes," I said, figuring I should be friendly, given what I was about to do as soon as he dragged himself away from here.
"Ain't that. It's the smokin'."
"Smoking?"
"Yeah, she won't let me smoke around her."
"I see."
"A man, he'd let you smoke."
"He would, huh?"
"That's the trouble with havin' a woman chief of police. I mean, she's smart enough and all, but she sure has a lot of rules."
He pushed away from the car, dropped his cigarette on the sidewalk, and then crushed it to tatters with the toe of his cordovan Texas boot.
"You be around in case she's got some questions for you?"
"I'll be around."
"I'll tell her."
Before he left, he added an accouterment I hadn't seen before, one of those Western-style hats I call a junior Stetson. I believe Matt Dillon wore one like this in the old Gunsmoke. Unfortunately for my friend here, the hat dwarfed his small head and only added to the roundness of his cheeks. He looked like the meanest ten-year-old on Maple Street.
He gave me the sort of hard, measuring glance that men about to have a gunfight give each other, and then he strolled off, ready to slap leather.
I pulled out the pair of rubber surgical gloves just about the time he reached the motel drive. I carry the gloves for just such opportunities as this one. Plus you can put them on your fingers and make funny animal shapes. If you know how, that is. Not everybody does.
When he was gone from sight, I tried the back door of the Toyota. It was locked. I tried front door, passenger side. Locked. I tried front door, driver side. Locked. I tried rear door, driver. Unlocked.
I worked quickly, constantly watching front and back windows for sight of any casual strollers. They would certainly remember, later, seeing me going through the dead man's car.
Nothing, nothing, nothing was what I found until I came to the glove compartment, in which rested several envelopes held together with a wide rubber band.
Being the sort of inquisitive guy I am, and fully planning to give back every single thing I took—having years ago taken the Boy Scout pledge, I mean, and having lived my life accordingly ever since—I then, given my suspicious nature, started groping beneath the front seats. People often hide things there, apparently figuring that most crooks are so stupid they'll never think to look there. Your standard crook, of course, having graduated from a certified crook school, knows enough to look under the seats right away.
I found nothing.
Soon as I could, I walked around to the rear of the car, glanced up and down, right and left, found the sidewalks momentarily empty and went to work, picking the lock as quickly as I could.
I was in and out in less than a minute, finding absolutely nada, unless you counted a spare tire and a pair of jumper cables.
I closed up the trunk and started walking slowly back to my motel, enjoying the clean, clear cold. May in Iowa usually encompasses several seasons, including winter at least three or four of the thirty-one days. Sweater weather, the locals call it, evoking images of a blazing fireplace, a very hot hot toddy and a beautiful girl whose eyes dance with the reflection of the fire. I hoped my night with the high sheriff of New Hope would offer at least a few of those pleasures.
So Samuel Lodge was the man who'd met McNally at the Brindle farm this afternoon. Presumably, anyway, since it was definitely his blue Toyota I had seen entering and exiting the barn.
And now Samuel Lodge was the man who'd been murdered in my room and stuffed into my closet.
These two thoughts kept me occupied as I walked back to my room.
I was engrossed enough in them that my mind didn't register the scene in the steak-house window until I was several feet past it. Then I did a sort of double take—a subtle one, of course, nothing that Laurel and Hardy fans would like—and turned around.
I walked back down the street and looked in the window, which had a skin of moisture on it from the cold, and there they were.
The good reverend and two of his flock, namely Kenny Deihl and Mindy Lane.
None of them looked especially happy to see me.
I went inside, told the cashier I was only popping in to say hello to a few good and true friends, and then wended my way through tables of older people sawing steaks and inserting pieces of them into their mouths, all that time gabbing, smiling and turning A-l bottles upside down.
"Mind if I have a cup of coffee?" I said to the reverend.
"Would Jesus deny you a cup of coffee?" he responded.
I wanted to point out that, strictly speaking, I hadn't been addressing Jesus, I had been addressing the reverend, but I sat down and ordered my cup of coffee anyway.
Mindy looked exceptionally pretty in a low-cut white blouse with an oversized lace collar and her hair pulled up dramatically from her face. This, I assumed, was the Religious Mindy, the fleshy sexuality only hinted at in the somewhat sullen mouth and the dozy but shrewd green eyes.
Kenny Deihl offered everybody at the table a nervous smile, as if hoping to effect some sort of truce between all of us. In his Western shirt and empty handsome face, he was the perennial B actor whose purpose in the movie was to learn some tough lessons in life from a sardonic John Wayne.
Then there was the reverend, funereal in blue suit and blue shirt and muted red tie. There was too much gold in his watch and cuff links for him to ever be a true friend of the Lord's but he tried to make up for it in the almost-oppressive piety of the gaze and the somnolent platitudes uttered by his TV voice.
The waitress took my order for coffee. But she wasn't going to give up on me as a customer. "We've got so
me good meat loaf tonight," she said, and God, how good it sounded—but I didn't figure that the high sheriff of New Hope would appreciate my chowing down right before our date.
"Sorry," I said.
I looked around the restaurant briefly at all the husbands and wives of so many years, some of them brides and grooms for sixty years, I imagined, and I sensed such peace and belonging in them that I felt cast out, to suffer in the darkness with these three who seemed, each in his way, profoundly troubled.
"I understand that the body was found in your room," the good reverend said.
"Yes, unfortunately."
"Did you know him?" Mindy asked.
I shook my head. "No, not at all."
She smiled. "He had a mighty sweet tongue on him, that one."
The Reverend shot her a look of instant displeasure.
"What I remember about him," Kenny Deihl said, "was that letter he wrote the Clarion about us not getting a tax exemption."
"It's no time to be speaking ill of the man, Kenny," the Reverend reminded him, straightening his left French cuff. "He was possessed of the Devil when he wrote those words. Maybe he got right with God before he passed on. You need to consider that, Kenny."
"He didn't get right with God," Kenny said. "Not that cynic. No way."
I already wanted to get up and run screaming from this odd trio. Maybe they were laying out all this bad dialogue for my sake—but it was even worse to think that they actually talked in this skin-crawling way when they were alone.
Not bothering to hide her amusement, Mindy said, "Sam didn't think that religions should be given tax exemptions. He said the state had too many bills as it was and needed to raise all the taxes it could."
"He especially disliked religions such as ours," the reverend said. "Where we take our ministry to the people rather than praying to false gods in crystal cathedrals or towers of the papacy."
Towers of the papacy. I'd have to remember that one.
"If Jesus was with us today, in the flesh that is," the Reverend said, "He would own His own radio station."
"Not TV station?" I said.
"You're like Sam Lodge," the Reverend said. "You mock without understanding."
Mindy looked at me and smiled. "You don't want to end up like Sam Lodge, do you?"
"That's right," the Reverend said. "That's right indeed."
I was still confounded by the youthfulness of his face. He was well into his thirties but he still resembled a student-council president from a prestigious Eastern university, all well-concealed ambition and blow-dry politics.
I looked at each of them. "So you all knew him?"
"Indeed, we all knew him," the reverend said.
"Not out of choice," Kenny said.
"Speak for yourself," Mindy smiled.
If we didn't know by now that she slept with the recently departed Sam Lodge, we were never going to get the hint.
"Did any of you kill him?"
"Is that supposed to be a joke, Mr. Hokanson?" Kenny said. "Because if it is, it isn't funny."
"It's no joke," the reverend said in his best patriarchal manner. "He's being serious."
"Well, I don't think it's funny, either," Mindy said. She looked right at me. "Up until you asked that question, Mr. Hokanson, I sort of liked you. Maybe Kenny here isn't the smartest person on the planet, and maybe I'm not always the good girl I should be, and maybe the reverend here spends a little more of the church money than he should—but we're all basically good people. Good Christian people. And we certainly wouldn't go around killing people."
She was serious. I kept looking at her for the sardonic smile or the sarcastic phrase, something to indicate that she and I were still conspirators, that we knew the real truth about dopey Kenny and the relentless reverend, but now I saw, and saw with great vast disbelief, that she was actually one of them too—one of the Christian pod people.
I sighed a serious sigh, set down my coffee cup and stood up. "Well, just thought I'd stop in and say hello."
"You really piss me off, you know that?" Mindy said, tears choking her voice and filling her eyes.
"Mindy!" the reverend snapped, seeing that other diners were watching us now.
She put her head down. "I'm sorry I used that word. Forgive me, O Lord."
I stared at her a long moment. Here I'd had her all neatly filed away under Good-time Girl but she wasn't that at all. She was something dark and mercurial and perhaps even dangerous.
"Excuse her vulgarity, Mr. Hokanson," the reverend said.
I nodded.
"You better go," Kenny said.
And go I did, glad for the street and the gathering night and the balming, cleansing cold air.
4
Later that year, in Cellblock D, a lifer serving time for cutting up two fourteen-year-old girls and then dumping their bodies down a grain elevator, got hisself hitched to a 348-pound babe from Astoria, Kansas. Not, you understand, that the lifer was any prize hisself.
Warden, being warden, wouldn't give them permission to set up an impromptu wedding chapel inside the prison, so they had to make do with a wedding on the yard, with the woman's blind mama and deaf papa. Also in attendance were several of the lifer's fellow convicts, including two killers, three bank robbers and six just kind of generally bad people. They all wore Aqua Velva, they all sang the Barry Manilow song "Mandy" (that being the bride's name and the lyrics having been typed out for them) and they all kissed the bride, three of them in the French manner. The bride's mama sang along, but not her deaf papa.
This would not be the way they got married, with such public scorn or ridiculous setting.
Oh, no.
Dear Reece,
I've spent the last few weeks looking through bridal magazines. I dream of the day when I, attired in white, and you, attired in a good blue suit, approach the altar and quietly take our vows.
I read the newspaper clipping you sent about the in-prison wedding and, honestly, I was appalled. Don't these people have any self-respect? Don't these people understand that they're being mocked? They're the type of people who go on "Oprah" and "Geraldo" without seeming to understand that they're being used as buffoons. (Yesterday, Geraldo's topic was "Women Who Sleep with Their Daughters' Girlfriends" and here we had three women blithely talking about having affairs with teenage girls. I just couldn't believe it. I know you think it's silly that I read romance novels but that's exactly why I do—to block out all the filth and despair and lunacy I see every single day in this sorry old world.
I'm enclosing a novel I hope you like. Chapters Six and Nine were especially entertaining. I thought so, at any rate. Not my usual cup of tea, I admit, but I also admit to being engrossed.
Oh, darling, I know our day will soon come and I'm so happy that you agree that I shouldn't come and visit you in prison. I don't want our first meeting to be behind bars. That would set a tone for the rest of our lives. I'm glad you believe that Roger is a good enough lawyer to get you a new trial. He's working at it diligently and believes we'll soon see some results.
In the meantime, darling, read the novel I've enclosed. I hope you agree with me that it's a most instructive book.
Wild Wanton Love, My Darling,
Rosamund
The novel was a shiny new paperback that showed a kind of studly young cop holding a punk up against the brick wall. Cop had a big Magnum pushed right against the punk's head. The title was Battleground, Miami—Bloodbath. He hated these dimwit kind of books. All these hero cops. Not a dishonest, sadistic, stupid or incompetent one among them. All pretty pretty boys with their sweet summer sweat, and every one of them a hero.
Why would Rosamund (by now, she'd told him her real name but he, like her, preferred Rosamund) who loved gentle and delicate and beautiful things like a book like this?
He tried reading it straight through. He was no literary critic, to be sure, but as far as he could see this Robert David Chase guy was the hackiest of hacks.
Giff turned and
fired his Magnum, chuffing death into the startled face of the drug dealer. But it was more than just bullets that were destroying this lizard's life. It was freedom and the American Way and summer nights on Indiana porches and snowball fights on Christmas Day that were really killing this scab-sucking criminal. This scumbag coke merchant was like a vampire, see, he couldn't stand the light of decency and honor, and now he was going down down down, way way down, into the darkness, into the pit, into the eternal abyss, man, way way way way down, man. Way down.
He couldn't be sure, having always fallen asleep in his English classes, but this Robert David Chase seemed like a really awful writer. Really really awful.
Those were his feelings, anyway, till he came to Chapters Six and Nine, both of which were told from the viewpoint of one Haskins P. Washington, a self-described "entrepreneur of the flesh "—i.e., a pimp.
Haskins, it seems, this all told in flashback, had been incarcerated for life before finally escaping six years into his sentence.
Here's how it went. When prisoners worked farm detail, they worked outside the prison walls, usually in fields not far from highways or arterial roads on which there was heavy truck traffic.
Haskins decided to take advantage of this (1) by getting himself on farm detail, which took fourteen months and (2) by then having a friend of his rent a truck and drive by a certain field on a certain day at a certain time, at which point friend stopped the truck at a certain point and two other friends with Uzis jumped from the back of the truck, firing hundreds of rounds to protect Haskins P. Washington who came barreling across the road from the field, and who then hopped in the back of the truck, which then sped away.
This was Chapter Six.
Chapter Nine contained another escape plan—this involving abducting a prison official and putting a chopper down in the middle of the yard—but this was pure Hollywood and sounded crazy as hell and completely bogus as a serious escape plan.
But Chapter Six, now that was another matter.
