by Ed Gorman
I nodded and went back out into the night.
In my room, I grabbed a box of ammunition, a flashlight and my small leather bag of burglary tools. I sensed it was going to be a long night.
In my car, I laid my Ruger on the passenger seat, put the ammunition neatly next to it, and backed out of the parking lot.
I needed to go back to the church. It was time to confront the good reverend and tell him everything I knew. Then it would be time to have him give Melissa McNally back to her mother.
Steam covered the windows. The defroster didn't seem to help much. By the time I had rubbed the window clean, I was pulling up next to Jane Avery's patrol car in the parking lot of her apartment complex.
She answered on the first knock. Whatever it was she really wanted to say, she restrained herself and said simply, "Oh."
"I figured you'd be happy to see me."
"I've got a headache, Robert, and I'm really not up for this."
I sighed. "Look, I know you're taking all this very personally, but you shouldn't."
"That's what you drove out here to say?"
"I drove out here to say that I like you. A lot."
"I wish you'd leave."
"Goddammit—" I shook my head. "Sorry. I'm a little strung out at the moment." I looked inside her decidedly untidy apartment. "You're getting better. I don't see any panties hanging on any doorknobs."
She didn't laugh. She didn't even smile.
"Are you going to invite me in?"
"No."
"Just like that? 'No.' You didn't even have to think it over."
"You're obstructing justice, for one thing. You could be arrested."
I reached out and touched her shoulder. At least she didn't wince or pull away. "When it's all over, you'll understand why I couldn't tell you anything."
She turned her fetching head sideways, looking over her shoulder. "I've got some vegetable soup on. I'd better go eat it."
"You make it yourself?"
"Right."
"I forgot. That you're a lousy cook, I mean."
She looked at me a long time and said in a voice husky with pain, "Robert, just get out of here, will you? I really don't appreciate this."
There wasn't much I could say to that.
I leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek and said, "I meant what I said. About liking you a lot."
"Good-bye, Robert," she said, and quietly closed the door, leaving me, in more ways than one, in the darkness.
I felt banished, cast out. I'd started thinking about Jane more seriously than I'd ever intended. Maybe it was her freckles or that stupid little nose of hers; more likely it was her wonderful combination of competence and tenderness I found so alluring. A faint mist was in the air. The night smelled of the rain that had just quit falling. The parking lot was half-full and lonely-looking in the mercury vapor lights.
I was thinking about Jane and about how I might square things, so I didn't see him until I was a few feet away. In his cheap brown leatherette jacket and dirty jeans, I didn't recognize him at first.
He leaned against the trunk of my car, smoking a cigarette, watching me walk toward him.
He was a lone figure in the rolling midwestern night, just like the apartment house itself, which was surrounded by woods on three sides.
"I need to talk to you."
"You should talk to your wife first, McNally. Give her a little peace of mind. She's a good woman."
"You don't need to tell me that."
"You ever lay a hand on her again, I'll break your arms, and that's a promise."
"You supposed to be a tough guy?"
"No. Just a guy who doesn't think men should beat up women."
His eyes were animal bright and animal quick.
"I want to get my daughter back," he said, anger gone suddenly. He sounded weary, scared. "Me and Sam Lodge—we got in way over our heads."
"Tell me everything. Maybe I can help you figure something out."
"I'm scared for her—for Melissa, I mean."
He brought his cigarette to his mouth. His entire hand was shaking. "I really went and messed things up this time."
"Just tell me what you know, McNally. You can beat up on yourself later."
He pushed away from the car, and was just starting to stand up straight as he flipped his cigarette somewhere on the lawn, when I heard the report of a rifle—then two, three reports.
The odd thing was, McNally didn't jerk when the bullets hit him, not at first. He only slumped back against the trunk as if he were weary beyond measure.
Then he crumpled, and it was quick and bloody and there was the frantic cry of a man who learns in a single instant that life is leaving him, that cold rushing eternal darkness is about to take him forever.
I caught him just as his cap was tumbling from his head, just before his head cracked the pavement.
As I laid him out on the cold driveway, he fouled himself, the stench hot and sour.
And then the apartment house door was bursting open. And Jane was coming quickly down the stairs, having obviously heard the rifle shots, and she was saying, "Are you hurt, Payne? Are you hurt?"
"Over here!"
By the time she reached me, McNally was gripping my hand and sobbing. He was saying things but they were the incoherent rush and jumble of last words.
When she knelt down next to me, she shook her head sadly, seeing at once that McNally would soon be dead.
And before she could object, I slipped my hand from McNally's, got quickly to my feet and started running in the direction from where the rifle shots had come.
By the time I was twenty feet on the wet grass, I had my Ruger in my hand.
On the far side of the woods, I could see headlights from the two-lane highway leading out of town. The woods were no more than a quarter-mile deep and maybe the same across. But they gave a person plenty of places to hide.
The trail through the woods was all slippery mud and splashing puddle. I slipped and fell several times, skinning my knee once, cracking my head against a rather unyielding birch tree another time. The soggy brown leaves of autumns past covered trail and forest like a grimy parasite with a shiny wet shell.
I heard him ahead of me. He had deserted the trail and was crashing through the undergrowth that lay westward. He was the same man who'd shot at me earlier, I knew. And I also knew who he was.
I plunged into the undergrowth, keeping my Ruger held high above the brambles that snapped at my hand like an angry serpent, and the rocks that seemed to jump at my feet in order to trip me.
I was in brambles so deep I had to keep shifting my hips left and right to stop them from clinging to me. The trees changed abruptly from birch to pine, the boughs slapping my face with their scratchy fingers and high sweet perfume.
Horns sounded from the road to the east. Angry horns chastising somebody for nearly causing an accident.
He'd escaped, down the hill from the woods, straight across the highway where he likely kept his car.
I stood on the edge of the highway inside the glaze of my own chilly sweat, breath coming in hot rushing gasps, as I watched cars and trucks resume their normal course into and out of town.
He was nowhere to be seen, the man I'd been chasing. Nowhere.
The ambulance siren was still a few blocks away by the time I got back to the parking lot. The night was dark and windy with drops of rain being blown on the breeze. The exterior lights of the brick apartment house gave it the stark imposing qualities of a prison.
A small crowd encircled McNally's now-dead body. A few of the less-optimistic ones had brought umbrellas, apparently planning to stay here for some time. As usual with people who show up for murders, they seemed both somber and excited, and maybe just a little bit ashamed of the latter.
Jane was talking on a portable phone, giving orders to her troops about how to handle murder scenes. At least they'd had enough practice lately.
I went up to her and said, "He got away."
>
She snapped down the antenna on the black portable phone. "Did he tell you anything before he died?"
"He was going to. But he was shot before he could get it out."
I looked down at McNally. Jane had draped her jacket over his face and the upper part of his chest.
"You didn't get a look at the person who shot him?"
"Not really."
She frowned. "Even if you did, I'm sure you wouldn't tell me, anyway."
I wasn't sure how I was going to sneak away from here and go out to the church.
But then Jane went and made it easy for me.
"Why don't you get out of here, Payne? I don't need any more aggravation." I wanted to argue with her but what was the use?
"If that's the way you want it," I said.
Just then the ambulance, full of wailing grief, pulled into the parking lot, a hero too late to matter.
10
By the time I reached the church, the rain started again in earnest, cold and drab and relentless.
I parked in the U-shaped gravel drive, then ran up to the front door. I heard guitar music. Except it wasn't of the churchly sort, those "born-again" ditties that seem to be about romantic love but are really about Jesus ("He's the greatest lover the world has ever known/The only lover who will never leave you on your own" ran a song I'd heard while dialing around on the radio one day)—no, this was bayou blues crossed with some high fine rock licks.
I went inside, stood in the back.
Kenny Deihl didn't see me or hear me, apparently. He just sat up on a folding chair on the empty altar, pausing now to tune his guitar. The church was dark except for the lone narrow beam of a small spotlight that highlighted Kenny's blond hair.
I listened to the rain, hard and cold, and had a moment of simple animal appreciation for my shelter, even if it had been built by a hypocrite minister.
"Kenny."
I walked down the center aisle. The stained-glass images were difficult to pick out with no sunlight streaming through them.
He'd played a few chords, hadn't heard me."
"Kenny."
This time, he looked up. He wore a green Western-style shirt and jeans and Texas boots.
"Hi, Mr. Hokanson."
"You seen the reverend?"
"Not in the last hour."
"Think he's up at the house?"
Kenny shrugged, looked back at his guitar. "Suppose he could be."
I reached the altar, looked up at him.
"You a part of it, Kenny?"
He didn't raise his eyes, kept pantomiming notes. "A part of what, Mr. Hokanson?"
"Remember I asked you how the reverend made enough money to keep everything afloat?"
"Uh-huh."
"Well, I found out how he does it."
Now he raised his head and looked at me. "It's like I told you, Mr. Hokanson. The reverend's treated me pretty good, all things considered, so I don't figure it's my business to ask him any questions about where his money comes from."
"He's the worst kind of man there is, Kenny. He molests little girls and boys."
He frowned. "Now I sure don't believe that. Tell me he drinks a little, or cheats on his old lady from time to time—yes, I'd have to say he probably does. But what you said— no way, mister. No way at all."
"You ever go into Cedar Rapids with him?"
"Not really."
"How about Mindy? She go in with him?"
The shrug again. "Sometimes, I guess."
"They pretty tight are they, Mindy and the reverend?"
He picked a chord. The church echoed with its keening power. "Tight? Yeah, they're tight I guess you'd say. After the reverend learned the truth about Mindy and all. He had a hard time with it at first, the reverend did, but he seems all right about it now."
"I guess I don't know what you're talking about, Kenny."
"About Mindy."
"What about Mindy?"
He looked at me with unfathomable green eyes. Very somberly, he said, "Then you couldn't tell either, huh?"
"Tell what?"
"Neither could the reverend."
"Tell what?"
A slight smile this time. "Heck, I couldn't tell either. Not till the reverend told me."
"Told you about what?" I said.
"About how Mindy used to be a man."
He just kind of drawled it out, nothing special now, old news in fact.
But to me it wasn't old news.
If Tolliver was right that his son was still alive and killing people . . . what better disguise to assume than that of a woman?
"You're sure of that?" I said.
"Mindy told him one night. All about it, I mean. Personally, I didn't want to hear it. When she started talking about how—when he was still a man, I mean—they had to cut off his . . . Well, you know what I mean. I just couldn't get that out of my mind. What kind of guy would let somebody cut off his . . . you know, down there."
"Where did she have the surgery done?"
"Holland, according to the reverend."
I thought of what the reverend's wife had said last night, talking around a smirk, about how she hadn't known her husband was so "kinky." She'd been referring to the reverend and Mindy. Now her remark made sense.
Her husband was sleeping with a woman who had once been a man.
"They're lovers?"
"Guess so. Like I said, it really ain't my business."
"And you don't have any idea where I could find either of them now?"
"Not unless they're up to the house."
"Mindy goes up to the house?"
"Oh, sometimes. But then they get to squabbling. You know how women like to squabble."
He played another lick, shrill and obscene in this ersatz house of God.
Then he grinned at me. "Gotta say one thing for those Dutch doctors."
"What's that?"
"They sure gave Mindy one fine set of hooters. I mean, her being a guy and all."
11
I drove up the driveway to the reverend's house. My car smelled of dampness now. The rain was falling so hard, it sounded as if hail were being mixed in.
I was still trying to make some kind of visceral sense out of what Kenny Deihl had just told me. It's all very well to watch Oprah and Geraldo and Phil interview transsexuals but it's another matter to realize that you actually met one. My first instinct, of course, was Kenny's. Why would you willingly submit to having your pee-pee removed? You worked hard all your life to keep it from getting injured or damaged in any way—the little thing was pretty vulnerable when you came right down to it—and now here comes a guy who opens up his flasher coat and says, Take me I'm yours.
Of course, the reason I couldn't understand that was because I didn't have any sense of why transsexuals do what they do. Homosexuality is at least imaginable in many respects—you keep your born-with sexual identity, which means that you prefer lovers of similar identities. Not very mysterious, when you come right down to it. But transsexualism . . .
Both bays of the garage were open. Only one Lincoln was there. The garage was attached to the house so I parked inside the empty bay, then walked up to a veranda filled with colorful lawn furniture that looked like children forced to stay inside because of the rain. The veranda smelled of gin and cigarette smoke.
I knocked on the door several times but got no answer so I tried the knob, which was unlocked, and went inside.
The kitchen was what they call farm-style: wide-open spaces with lots of shiny pots and pans and cooking utensils dangling from a wooden contraption on the ceiling, large butcher-block table in the center of the big room and gleaming white refrigerator and stove and dishwasher tucked neatly into the east corner.
"Hello."
But nobody answered.
"Hello."
Again no answer.
I walked into the dining room. Like the living room and den, which I saw shortly after, it looked like a tribute to an interior decorator rather than a place where
real human beings actually lived and laughed and sweated and snored and kissed. A little too-too, if you know what I'm talking about, from a very elegant but obviously uncomfortable Barrymore sofa to an antique china buffet that had to have cost at least half my annual income. But who would dare risk opening it up? I was as intimidated here as I was in a museum, a little boy's fear of bumping or nudging or backing into some pricey work of art and watching it tumble to the floor and shatter.
I looked for foot tracks that a man might make who'd been running through the woods tonight but didn't see any.
The noise was faint but had a regular rhythm. Opening and closing; opening and closing . . . opening and closing drawers, I finally realized.
The house was carpeted throughout so it didn't take any great stealth on my part to quietly reach the door of the master bedroom and put my ear to it.
Drawers being opened and closed. Definitely.
I reached inside my jacket pocket, took out my Ruger with my left hand and eased the door open with my right. He was packing, getting ready to flee.
When he turned and saw me and saw the Ruger, he said, "What are you doing in here? I could have you arrested."
He was still every bit the suave TV minister, from the carefully moussed hair to the suitably purposeful gray pin-striped suit to the brilliantly shined cordovan loafers. And he looked right standing in a room like this, with its canopied double bed and huge, curtained window. But despite his bluster, his poise was gone.
I took the photo I'd found earlier this morning. I walked over to him and tossed it on top of the bureau.
"Pick it up."
"Why should I?"
I raised the Ruger and aimed it right at his forehead. "Pick it up."
He picked it up. Looked at it. His mouth twitched unpleasantly.
He tossed the photo back on the bureau. "That doesn't have anything to do with me."
"I've got two witnesses who saw one of your white Lincolns pull up to an old closed-up shop in Cedar Rapids. And I'll be glad to take you down there and show you the video equipment, and the blood from where the girls were beaten doing some bondage tricks."
He shook his head. "It's them."
"Them who?"
