All
in all it was a great day to wait around for a psychopath.
I made another circuit of the
four-block area around the United Methodist Church that sat on the corner of
Henderson and High Street. I’d been circling and crisscrossing the four blocks
at random, walking different directions, veering suddenly to cut through an
alley, crossing the street midway, all the while looking for my target. My
partner, Jake Wilson, and I were playing a game of, well, not capture the flag,
but the concept was the same.
Outside the Methodist church, Jake
sat in our panel van with the dark windows and magnetic signs on both the
driver’s and passenger’s doors that said “Tiffany Florists”. Inside the church,
Patricia Marquay was trying as hard as she could to become Mrs. Peter Marose
and it was our assigned duty to make sure that occurred without a hitch. The
mother and father of all hitches was who I was looking for, a psychopath who
rejoiced in the name of – I kid you not – Bill Smith. Not William. Not Billy
Bob. No middle name, just Bill Smith. I wondered if being born in a family with
such a stunning lack of imagination pushed poor Bill over the edge but I didn’t
wonder much. I wasn’t there to psychoanalyze him. I was here to stop him.
I was looking for his seven year old
blue Honda Civic. If he got past me, Jake was there watching the back and south
side of the church from the van. If he got past both of us and arrived at the
front of the church out of Jake’s line of sight, one of our part-timers, a
deputy sheriff named Celia Townsend, was dressed up as one of the wedding party
and lurking at the registration book with a sequined purse containing a
canister of pepper spray and, should that fail, her backup issue J frame Smith
and Wesson .38 Special.
I turned the corner two blocks south
of the church and walked up the middle of my grid, straight up High Street away
from downtown Columbus, Ohio. The streets were nearly empty that early Saturday
afternoon on a gorgeous autumn day in the capitol city. The leaves were already
a riot of dozens of shades of orange, red and purple but only a few had begun
falling off the maples, oaks and elms that lined the neighborhood streets in
this section of the inner city. The sky was Caribbean blue, empty of clouds but
specked with small planes towing banners in strict rotation over Ohio Stadium
where the Ohio State Buckeyes were scheduled to thrash the Boilermakers of
Purdue starting in about fifteen minutes. Between the game and the weather the
city of one and a half million had pretty much shut down, and the foot and car
traffic normal in this section was cut by two thirds. That made my job easier
and harder at the same time.
It was easier because I didn’t have
to scan hundreds of cars coming in from Worthington or up from the Short North
and Downtown, over from Arlington or in from Westerville. Traffic was a trickle
as all who could get tickets to the big game did so and those who could not
either escaped the city for a last shot at King’s Island amusement park, Wyandot
Lake, or sat at home riding their recliners and watching the game on TV.
Perhaps a few unfortunate souls had been dragged off to the mall, forced to
catch glimpses of the game through the windows of Radio Shack, holding their
wives purses.
But not me.
I was watching for any sign that
Bill Smith, noted nutcase and stalker, was going to try to follow through on
his threat to interrupt the Marquay-Marose nuptials. Of course, in a perfect
world this would be a job for the police. The Marquays had tried that route and
found it blocked — the police couldn’t do anything until Smith actually hurt
somebody. So Jake was in the van, Celia was in a dress, and I was walking past
the Block’s Bagel for the sixteenth time in the last four hours. That was the
part of my job that the low level of traffic was making more difficult; I was
getting noticed by the citizens who manned the stores in the area. It was only
a matter of time before someone called the cops on me. Not that they could do
anything until I did something. But I repeat myself.
I passed the time by calling to
memory all of the tunes and songs I could remember from the first section of my
life. My father, himself the son of Scots who had moved to Texas, had returned
to Scotland as a sailor in the United States Navy and married a local girl.
Now, thirty years after I was born in a Glasgow hospital I was cutting through
an alleyway, checking both directions before coming back onto Henderson, and
whistling “The Wee Kirkcudbright Centipede.” It dawned on me that I was
probably the only grown man in America who knew the words to it. I didn’t feel
a great rushing sense of accomplishment at that realization, but it was
something. After thirty minutes I had exhausted those memories and moved to the
second section, the time growing from late childhood to early manhood in
Central Texas. I named every song I could remember from the old Bob Wills band
to Steve Ray Vaughn and Double Trouble. Halfway through their catalog and,
still, Smith hadn’t shown up and I was still walking. The third section of my
life was Army CID and most of the songs I could remember were inappropriate for
singing out loud so I just hummed them. Then, I started on the last section of
my life – so far – and hummed the songs my daughter and I sing together when
I’m pushing her on the swings, making her supper, or just walking around the
neighborhood.
This isn’t what Jake and I usually
do. We co-own and run Trackers, Ltd., a private intelligence firm. We usually
spend our time working with corporations and law enforcement agencies, tracking
down facts and information for them, finding errant employees, uncovering
insurance fraud, and generally doing what they don’t have the time or staff to
do on their own. We also track down people who don’t want to be found for those
who want to find them; deadbeat dads, runaway kids, and lost loves. As a job it
isn’t everything it could be and it often falls short of what it should be but
it beats asking some CPA in a Hyundai if he wanted fries with his burger. And
every now and then… sometimes… you get a chance to be a hero. How many CPAs get
to say that?
When the Marquays came to our office
and asked for our help I was surprised when Jake accepted the assignment. We
aren’t private security and you can’t play bodyguard with the low level of
staff we have, so it didn’t make sense to take the assignment and I said so.
That’s when he informed me that the Marquays were Important People in Columbus…
and friends of the redoubtable and widely feared Althea Wilson, Jake’s
formidable wife. That was the end of the discussion. I might be Army CID
trained, Ranger qualified, possessed of combat experience and armed to the
teeth but even I would not entertain the thought of crossing the mighty Althea.
While she was not God, crossing her could get you an early appointment with
Him.
An act of kindness brought us to
this street on this day. Patricia Marquay had made the error of being nice to
Bill Smith. With people like Smith that’s the way it usually works. They rely
on people being nice and polite and willing to help. Most people are, so it
works for the psychos. Smith had arrived at the Registrar’s office of Ohio
State University where Patricia Marquay worked, folder in hand, ready to
re-enter the University after a layoff of several years. Patricia was not
beautiful, but she was pleasant and kind and Smith targeted her immediately. Of
course, she didn’t know that was what was going on. To her, he just seemed to
be a nice man, around thirty, well groomed and quiet spoken, wearing normal
clothes and looking, well, normal. He didn’t look like a raving loony but few
raving loonies do. He was just over six feet tall, thin, and had a nice smile.
She liked his smile.
He returned to the office a few days
later, made conversation, and asked her out. After some initial hesitation she
agreed to a date. Being a smart, modern girl with more than a little common
sense, she had insisted on driving her own car and meeting him at a
well-frequented local restaurant. The date went well at first. Bill Smith was
charming, soft spoken, attentive, full of good conversation and she found
herself relaxing and enjoying his company. Then the bill came. Smith’s face
changed as he called the waiter over and challenged several items on the bill,
quickly becoming verbally abusive and loud. When she asked him to keep his
voice down he wheeled on her with a look that struck her dumb. In a flash of
insight, Pamela realized that this face, the new face, was his real one. It was
a sudden shifting of the tectonic plates of his soul that revealed the real
Smith, a jagged warning from below the skin. When he spun back around on the
waiter, now joined by the manager, she slipped away, ran hurriedly to her car
and got out of there.
Of course, that wasn’t the end of
it. It never is. He came to her workplace the next day to apologize. Didn’t
know what got into him, he said. Never happened before, he said. He asked her
for another chance and she refused him, politely but firmly. So, he started
sending her flowers three or four times a week with little “forgive me” cards.
Greeting cards arrived at her work and home every day for two weeks and the
phone calls — every day, three or four times, at work, at home, at all hours.
After her rejection continued the flowers stopped but the cards and calls
continued. But they weren’t the same. They had changed. No longer were they
sickeningly sweet and full of promises of reformation. Now they were full of
anger, subtle threats, or worse. Sometimes there were no words on the cards at
all, just pasted on pictures with eyes poked out or calls in the night with
nothing but breathing on the line.
That’s when she, or rather, her
mother, called the police. The police politely explained that as soon as Bill
Smith hurt her they would be right there. Mrs. Marquay allowed as how this was
not acceptable and proposed that they should hunt down Smith and neuter him
with a blunt object. The police came back with that pesky little Bill of Rights
thing that precludes such behavior from Columbus’ finest and the Marquays went
off in search of alternative help. She called her old school friend Althea
whose husband “did something involving guns and police work” and asked for
help. Just in time, as it happened, for as she called us, Bill Smith had
graduated from harassment to stalking.
He wasn’t trying to be subtle about
it. He hung back where she could see him if she looked, but not so close that
she could yell at him to get away or point him out as a threat. The same week
she noticed him hanging around the edges of her life her mailbox was broken
into twice, graffiti appeared on the sides of her townhouse in Arlington — the
yuppie-orthodontist-junior-partner northwest side of Columbus — and her cat
disappeared. When the cat showed up five days later, disemboweled and nailed to
her front door, Jake’s wife and Ruler Of All She Surveys, Althea, told us that
we had to “stop this outrage immediately using any and all means necessary.”
We said, “yes, ma’am.”
I followed Bill Smith the next day
as he followed Patricia Marquay. I have never been accused of being
overburdened with tact and diplomacy so I didn’t waste any time. I watched him
as he watched Pamela leave her car and enter the Administration Building at OSU
to begin her workday. Smith slithered his way to her car and dropped down out
of sight. I circled from the rear and found him with a folding knife poised to
pop the valve or break the wall of her back left tire. His back was to me but I
didn’t mind. I kicked him in the left kidney. He “oooffed” and went down,
spinning, landing hard flat on his back, his head bouncing on the asphalt.
He saw me and tried to get a breath
to shout for help but I put one foot on his stomach and crouched down, pinning
him, my knee under his chin. I picked up his knife and held it an inch from his
eye.
“Hi, Billie boy,” I said, smiling.
My friends back in my CID days said I should never smile like that. Said
something about it giving them the willies. Grown men using the word ‘willies.’
“Do you know who I am?” He started to shake his head but remembered the knife
and thought better of it. I laid on my heaviest Scottish accent, the one I
reserved for angry, violent times. “You need to know who I am, laddie. I’m the
man who’ll kill you if you are seen within a hundred yards of young Miss
Marquay. You will not see me, Billie boy. You will not hear me, not until it is
too late to do anything about it. You won’t even have time to scream. Suddenly,
you’ll look up and I’ll be there and I’ll take you as painfully as possible. Do
we understand each other?” By this time my face was a foot from his and the
pressure on his chest from my leg was turning him tomato red.
I stood quickly, pushing off with my
leg, driving the last air from him. I stomped his knee, not breaking it, just
bruising it so he’d have something to remember me by, and left him. I drove the
knife through the middle of his bed’s headboard an hour later, letting myself
out through the door I’d kicked in sixty seconds earlier. When he got home,
he’d have something other than his knee to remember me by.
Trackers, Ltd. uses four deputy
sheriffs and two Columbus Police officers as part timers, so we told them about
Smith, asked them to keep an eye on him, and thought, “that’s it.”
And it was. For a bit.
Eight months later, Patricia Marquay and Peter Marose
decided to announce their upcoming nuptials in the Columbus Dispatch, as required by all Very Important and Moneyed
People In Columbus, and Bill Smith must have seen it for the calls, graffiti,
and stalking began again. Along with the standard stuff he’d done before, he
ratcheted things up, adding obscene descriptions of Patricia, Peter, and what
he planned to do to them to his homemade cards. Evidently our Bill was an old
movie watcher for he often pasted letters out of different papers and magazines
together to make his messages just like they do on those old black and white
films where somebody kidnaps the bank president’s son. He was far more careful
this time, making it harder to physically connect him with the threats. He was
a nut, but he wasn’t entirely stupid.
The police interviewed Smith but
weren’t able to do anything more than frown at him a lot and make some veiled
threats of their own. The Marquays got an old family friend who happened to be
a judge to issue a restraining order against him – which, since he was the soul
and breath of innocence, he said he planned to appeal – but they also called
us. They could read the paper and they knew that four women in Ohio had been
killed so far that year with restraining orders in their purses.They,
understandably, wanted to avoid that.
The threats centered around
Patricia’s wedding day so here we were. We were around because there was no one
else to be here for her. That is the proper province of private investigators
and private intelligence services. We step in when the authorities can’t or
won’t for whatever reason. We tread the quasi-legal wasteland between what is
demonstrably illegal and what is pristine in its legal righteousness. We are
our own sub-culture with our own magazines, web pages, conventions and
equipment shows, our own set of desperate clients and our own need to play the
lone ranger, the cowboy, the space pilot. It is a job for the not quite sane. I
think I might be overqualified.
So once again I made the circuit and
passed the doughnut shop, the sheet music store, and the Block’s Bagels
restaurant wishing I could be at Ohio Stadium watching the Buckeyes thump the
Boilermakers, soaking in the warm sun with my daughter and eating bad hot dogs.
I was considering walking into the bagel shop for coffee when the cell phone
vibrated in my pocket. Our phones don’t ring because having a phone ring when
you are hiding in a closet can ruin your whole day. I pulled the phone out,
flipped it open, feeling for all the world like Captain Kirk.
“This is Teacher. Beam me up,
Scottie.”
“Hah,” said Jake, flatly. Jeesh, put
some people in a van on one of the last nice days of the year and they get all
cranky. “You ready to do some real work, Teacher?”
“What’s up?”
“Our man might have just arrived. I
just spotted a blue Honda Civic with Ohio plates.”
I swiveled my head around. “Which
way and where?”
“He just went past me on Henderson,
turning right on High.”
I jumped into the alcove of Block’s
Bagels just in time to see Smith drive past, his head turning this way and
that, looking for any threat and not seeing me. Not that I’m easy to see, but I
tsked, tsked him silently anyway. If you’re going to be a psycho, Billie boy,
and play in the big leagues, you have to do better than that.
“I got him.” I leaned out and
watched as his indicator came on. Probably somewhere inside of his head he
would be able to think of a good two or three reasons not to telegraph his
turns like that, but psychos are usually so compulsive they have to do things a
certain way even when it might not make sense. “He’s turning left, east. Look’s
like he’s going around the block.”
“You getting back here anytime
soon?” Jake growled. I didn’t take it personally. Jake always growls, except
when faced with Althea.
“There’s a good idea. I’m going to
head up behind the post office and see if I can get behind him. See you
momentarily, O Cloistered One.” I made it up to the savings and loan before I
spied the Civic coming back to the Henderson and High Street intersection. He
turned right, away from the church and me. “Jake,” I said, “it looks like he’s
going to circle the northeast block.” Jake clicked his phone twice, message
received. Poor guy, he was probably busting a gut being cooped up in the van. He
was six foot four, two hundred ten pounds of former Army CID and, before that,
infantry officer. Well, it looked like he might not be there much longer.
I sprinted behind the post office,
across Henderson, and behind the Midas Muffler franchise, moving around its
north side just in time to see Smith pull up and park at the BP station across
the street on the north side of the church. I checked my watch. One thirty,
right in the middle of the vows.
Smith’s window was down and I could
see him staring at the church building. I was behind him and across the street
but I might as well been on the other side of Ohio as far as he was concerned.
He, like most of his kind, didn’t think anybody else was as sneaky, as smart,
or as dangerous as himself. How sad. It was time to move. I walked across North
High Street and moved onto the grounds of the BP station, taking cover behind a
van being filled up by a fat guy in a tank top, red stretch shorts, and flip
flops. He stared at me. I winked at him. He quickly quit staring at me.
Smith got out of the Civic and
pulled a package maybe three feet long and a foot wide and deep out of his back
seat. It was wrapped like a wedding present but I didn’t think it was anything
Patricia or Peter would want in their linen cupboard. Smith began a slow walk
across the gas station’s court and towards the crosswalk leading to the church.
He didn’t look behind him where I was matching his pace, thirty feet away. The
fat guy was done with the van and was now watching me from inside the station,
talking to the cashier and pointing at me. I could see the van parked behind
the church but the darkened windows kept me from knowing if Jake was still in
it or not. I didn’t worry. Jake would be where he should be, wherever that was.
Smith adjusted his tie and crossed
the street. I followed. If he went into the front door, problem solved. Celia
would take him down before he could make a scene. But he didn’t go in the front
door. He walked past the church and then suddenly cut up the side the building.
I quickened my pace to close the distance between us, turning the corner just
in time to see him move around the back of the church.
Moving more slowly, I followed,
easing around the corner. Smith crouched down and removed the top of the
package. The warm weather had caught the church warden by surprise and the air
conditioners had already been shut down. Casement windows were open all along
the back and it was there that Smith directed his attention. He pulled out a
dark cylinder, perhaps two feet long and eight inches around. It had a black
assembly of some kind rigged to its top and he fiddled with it a few seconds
before I straightened up and walked toward him.
These are the scary times. Time
compresses, skews, and twists as you walk into a confrontation. I felt the
breeze more keenly, heard every bird within fifty feet, felt the vibrations of
cars going past, and felt the earth beneath my feet more acutely; colors and
edges leapt into sharp definition. These moments aren’t normal for most people.
They are dangerous, unpredictable, full of adrenaline and oxygen, threat and
promise. I said a prayer to my Celtic ancestors and moved in.
“Nice suit. K-Mart have a sale?” I
said. He bolted upright, almost dropping the cylinder. “Hey, neat!” I said, pointing
at it. “Can I play with it? All I got for Christmas was a lousy sweater.” He
took a quick step back and twisted the top of the cylinder. I heard a hiss. I
got a feeling that it would be very, very stupid to go any closer to that
thing.
I went closer, hands held loosely at my side.
“Stay back,” he said, his voice an
unsteady mixture of hiss and shout. “I remember you. Stay away from me.” I took
another step forward and he backed up again. “I mean it! Stay back or I’ll…”
“Now that’s the real problem, isn’t
it, Billie boy? You’ll do something, will you? And what would that be? What do
you think you can do to me, Smith?” He looked at me. Unlike Jake, I am not
physically impressive. I don’t quite make it to five ten and I look like I
weigh less than my one sixty five. My hair is a neutral, undetermined brown in
a nonspecific style and my eyes are blue, green, brown, or a mixture of them
all, reflecting whatever colors are around. Smith had me by two inches in
height and reach. We had met before but I had taken him by surprise then and
you could see him wondering if that was the only reason he had lost that round.
I saw a decision being made behind his eyes, a slight vibration, a little
injection of daring arriving at his cortex. He shot out his right arm to toss
the cylinder underhanded into the casement window right as a very dangerous
blur I identified as Jake came flying around the other corner of the building,
grabbed the cylinder in mid-air, and continued right past me and out of sight.
Smith looked dumbly at his hand as if wondering how it got empty so fast.
“You see, Smith, it’s over. Time to
shut it down. Put your hands…” I didn’t get a chance to finish my speech. He
grabbed at his waistband under his jacket. I stepped in quickly, punching him
in the throat. I grabbed my right hand with my left and pulled, throwing my
elbow into his sternum with enough force to knock most of the air out of him
and force him back two steps. His hand came free at last holding a small black
automatic. I closed the distance between us, grabbed his gun hand in both of my
hands, pulled it forward, swinging under it, turning my back to him, and
sharply standing up, dislocating his elbow and wrenching his shoulder. He would
have screamed but the blow to his throat prevented that. Always think ahead,
kids. I took the gun from his limp hand and swept his legs out from under him.
He hit the ground hard enough to black out which, in his current condition, was
probably the nicest thing that could have happened to him.
I took a couple of deep breaths to
reorient myself to normality, drive the adrenaline down, and balance my oxygen
levels. The pistol Smith had pulled was a Raven .25. “Jesus, Smith,” I said at
last, looking at the dinky thing in my palm “couldn’t you even get the pistol
right?”
Jake came back around the corner
with a glower that did not bode well for the future of our Mister Smith, who
was making soft snorting noises in his sleep.
“So, what was in the cylinder?” I
asked.
“It was an oxygen tank with an
ignition mixture device on top. A homemade flame-thrower.” He looked into the
casement window at the decorations and presents stacked on the tables below.
“Could have burned the whole place down.”
“Where is it now?” I asked. Jake
pointed at the side of the building. I went around the corner and there it was,
just hissing its last, in the middle of a fifteen foot blackened circle of
grass. Beyond it, across the street, I could see the fat guy and the cashier
staring at us, the cashier on the phone talking, swinging his free hand around
furiously. I went back to Jake. Smith was awake, moaning and rocking around on
the ground but not trying to get up.
“Here you go,” I said to Jake,
dropping the Raven pistol into his hand. He gave it a disgusted look. Jake
didn’t like guns at all and didn’t carry one, but then again, he didn’t need to
looking like he did. But if he had to carry one he wanted a real one that would
actually work when you pulled the trigger and, if you shot someone, would make
a hole big enough for them to notice. “We’re about to have company.”
The words were barely out of my
mouth when we heard the sound of cars being driven hard – no sirens, not in
this neighborhood – and coming closer. Two patrol cars pulled into the parking
lot, overlooking the blackened cylinder, and four uniforms piled out, guns
drawn. We put our hands up. The church bells began ringing, declaring the vows
complete.
“Another job well done, Jake,” I
said as the police officers eased their way up to us.
“You ever notice how many times we
finish a job with our hands in the air?” He asked.
“Disconcerting, isn’t it?” I said as
a twenty something patrolman shoved me up against the wall and patted me down,
relieving me of my Glock 26, a subcompact 9mm.
“You got a license to carry this?”
he snarled at me. I didn’t blame him. No cop likes to find a gun on somebody
who might possibly be a bad guy.
“Sure do,” I said, and I did. I’m
not exactly a private citizen. He pulled my ID out of my sport coat pocket,
checked it, and cuffed me anyway.
“Anybody want to tell me what’s
going on?” another patrolman said, an older one with corporal stripes on his
sleeve and bits of gray hair sticking out under his cap..
“I am Teacher Todd and this is Jake
Wilson. You got our ID. We run Trackers. Call Lieutenant Pelechik, head of
Homicide. He’ll vouch for us. Inside the church is a pretty bridesmaid who is
also a deputy sheriff for Franklin County. She’s with us. She has a copy of the
restraining order against this guy here.” I used my almost Mid-Western accent
so as not to spook the nice man with the badge. Born in Scotland, raised in
Central Texas, resident in Ohio for the last several years I had an accent that
wandered all over the place. This was not a time to sound unusual or out of
place so I tried to strip everything out and speak in neutral tones.
“We’ll call the Lieutenant and talk
to the deputy. You just wait here while we check things out, all right?”
“Corporal,” I said, “could you do us
a big favor?” He frowned at me and crossed his arms, waiting for it. “We were
hired by the family of the bride inside the church here to keep the wedding
quiet and keep this man,” I gestured at Smith, still on the ground, his hands
secured behind him, moaning with pain, “from carrying out a death threat
against them. You can’t know that until you ask around some, but could you put
us in the police cars before they come out with the rice? I’m sure the family
would appreciate a minimum of distractions on their special day.”
He thought about it for a moment. “I
have no objection to holding you in the cars. You and your partner in one and
this guy in the other, right?”
I nodded. “That would be a nice thing
to do, Corporal.”
“Okay,” he said and directed two of
the officers to get it done and just in time. Patricia Marquay Marose came out
and stood on the front steps, just out of our sight, and received the rice and
cheers traditionally given to the newly wed. The police even pulled their cars
further into the lot and turned their lights off. Nice guys.
An hour later our statements were
taken, the restraining order against Bill Smith and the pistol he’d pulled on
me were produced, and Smith was off to the infirmary and then to jail. Jake
joined his wife and followed the wedding party to the reception at Nationwide
Plaza.
I climbed in my Toyota 4Runner, put in a Leo Kottke tape, and headed southeast to Lancaster. I had a date.
Rootless
all of my life, not really American or Scottish, Texan or Buckeye, I decided to
move to Lancaster, twenty five miles southeast of Columbus, six years ago when
a drunk driver killed my wife, Kathryn, leaving me with a baby girl to raise.
This was where my wife was raised, where my in-laws were well known and
established, and where I was determined to stop my roving and settle down. My
wife wanted us to have roots. Now we would have them, but too late for her to
enjoy.
It was for her that I’d left the
Army, turning down a promised promotion. She wanted me in a job that would
allow her and the baby we had just discovered she was carrying to stay put.
Four and a half years of moving around, including a ten month stint in South Korea,
convinced her that that kind of life wasn’t for her. Or us. I was recruited
directly from the Army by the U.S. Marshals Service so, after one week at home,
I was off to Glynco, Georgia for training. They liked me there. The old Marshal
who ran the firing range had a quick word and suddenly I was moved over to
Special Operations Group. The day before graduation the call had come, telling
me that my little girl and I would have to make it without my wife. I left the
Marshals before I’d really joined them and returned to Ohio to bury my wife in
her hometown.
After the funeral, I was lost. If not for the
foresight and generosity of her parents, my little Katie and I would have been
in terrible straits. Her father, Pete Sanderson, was a top ten salesperson at
Nationwide Insurance, headquartered just north of Columbus in Delaware, Ohio.
He and Marge Sanderson, my wife’s mother, had given us both one million dollar
insurance policies, paid up, as wedding presents just a few years earlier,
never knowing that we would be cashing in one so terribly soon. Pete was a big
player in the capitol scene, well connected and well liked. He arranged for me
to have several job offers within weeks. I took a job as the chief investigator
for the District Attorney’s office and did well for a few years until Jake
Wilson, my old CO, now recently retired, moved into the area and asked me to
help him set up a private intelligence service. Since I had the financial
cushion to back me up and protect my daughter and was possessed of a personality
that was better suited to working outside strict authoritarian channels, I took
him up on his offer.
In the meantime, the Sandersons and I purchased an
eccentric old home in Lancaster, where Pete’s agency had been a fixture for
thirty years. The glass baron who’d built the house in the early nineteen
twenties didn’t want his children to move away from him so he built a large
common area with a kitchen, dining area, library, and formal room that had
private living quarters on each side. Katie and I had our own bath and a half,
kitchen, three bedrooms, living room, and cellar as did the Sandersons on the
other side. I don’t know if it worked for the glass baron but it worked well
for us. It was good for Katie to be near her grandparents and, truth be told,
they were good for me, too.
I pulled into our circular driveway
and parked in front of the main door. A quick peek in the garage showed me that
the Sandersons weren’t back from their long planned trip to Branson, Missouri.
Better them than me. I went in and quickly changed into a plain blue polo
shirt, khaki Dockers and tennis shoes, washed the day off of my hands and face
and jogged back out to the 4Runner. My watch said I would make it just about on
time.
I drove the two miles through town
to Maple Hill Elementary School. Katie’s school was a two story red brick
rectangle with small windows that were supposed to save energy and direct the
children’s attention inside but succeeded only in making it look like a prison,
which, if I were a kid, would’ve made perfect sense. Because of the lack of
natural light inside it always seemed too dark or awash in a nasty glare of
fluorescent light that set everybody’s nerves on edge within an hour or so of
arrival. Had to play hell with learning your times tables. Or did kids do that
anymore?
On one side of the school was a parking lot, largely
empty now, and on the other side stood the standard tarmac playground complete
with a few swings, a shiny, blisteringly hot slide, a climbing frame poised
over a dirt patch, and a tetherball pole that leaned distinctly to the left. A
couple of adults were removing a large banner from above the entrance. It read
“Maple Hill Autumn Fair – 10am to 4pm Saturday.” Some candy wrappers were
dancing around the corners of the playground and a strange looking mixed breed
dog was trying to bat them down with his paw to see if anything edible
remained. You take what you can get, I guess.
Inside the metal double doors Maple
Hill was like every elementary school in America. There was that strange smell,
a mixture of sweat, dirt, eraser dust, tennis shoes, library paste, and
industrial cleanser. The walls of glazed, smooth yellow blocks were covered
with artwork and book reports in almost decipherable cursive. Down the hall and
to the left was the gym, or what they now called the multi-purpose room since
it doubled as a lunch hall. I walked in and saw my Katie sitting at a corner
table counting dollar bills and stacks of coins.
Katie, my daughter, was a newly
minted third grader. She’d volunteered to help with the money during the Autumn
Fair held every year to get extra money for books, computers, and supplies for
gym classes. She was my heart and my pride and joy, lovely just as her mother
had been, with long brown hair that reached the middle of her back, ending in a
gentle wave. She saw me, smiled widely, and then quickly looked around to see
if anybody saw her smile at her father. Evidently, that was a faux pas among
the third grade set.
“So how did we do, sweetie girl?”
She held up a finger while she added
a couple of figures and wrote the total on a scrap piece of paper. “One hundred
sixteen dollars and sixty five cents,” she said triumphantly. She was proud of
her math prowess. Me too. “That was for the inside games. I don’t know about
the cake or drinks or outside stuff.”
“Sounds good to me. What do we do
now? Who do you give the money to?”
“Mrs. Findlay. My new teacher.”
Just when things were getting just
about as homey as a circa 1950’s era sitcom Blanchford walked in. I caught a
blast of her perfume a few seconds before she actually made the corner and
entered the room. Mary Blanchford was in her late thirties, never married, just
over five two and weighed in at one eighty if she was a pound. Other than the
fact that she had the natural grace of a stump, a braying laugh that erupted
without warning or encouragement, an annoying, nasal voice, wore perfume that
was sold in industrial drums with skulls on the side, and always had to make a
joke about my name the only thing I didn’t like about her was that she was
aggressively hunting any male who was unattached and I was one of her top
targets.
“Oh, Teacher! It is SO good to see
you!” She said in a voice about three times louder than the occasion warranted.
She wrapped her substantial arm around mine and laid her other paw on my wrist.
“How are you doing? We just never get to see you around here.”
“Well, I’ve been very busy, Miss
Blanchford, and…”
“Mary, Mary. How many times,” she
said, “do I have to remind you to call me Mary?” She wagged her head back and
forth a few times in what she probably thought was a coquettish move. Bits of
makeup flaked off, floating down in the harsh overhead light, rejoicing in
their new found freedom. “Remember, we’re all ‘teachers’ here so you fit right
in.” And then she laughed. She should, by federal law, have to give ten minutes
warning before laughing. I would have paid her money not to laugh. But she
laughed and my fillings began to vibrate.
“Okay, Mary. If you would excuse me,
Katie and I need to be getting along.” As I spoke I unwrapped her arms in
preparation for my great escape. She resisted it at first and it looked like it
might become an all-in wrestling match there for a moment but thank God there
were witnesses in the gym so she finally allowed me to break free. “It was
really good to see you, Mary. Oh, look, Katie,” I said to my daughter who was
standing behind Blanchford – sorry, she will always be Blanchford to me –
trying to stifle a serious attack of the giggles, “there’s Mrs. Findlay.”
Turning back to Blanchford I smiled an insincere smile and took Katie’s hand.
We successfully delivered the paper with the total on it and the box with the
day’s take and escaped the multi-purpose room with my honor still intact. In
the hallway Katie let loose a whoop of laughter.
“Daddy’s got a girlfriend, daddy’s
got a girlfriend…”
“Watch out, little lady,” I faked a
mad face. “I might just call her sometime and see if she wants to baby-sit you
when I am out of town.”
“No!”
“Yes, sure, why not. Maybe you two
could have a sleepover or something, share makeup tips, or…”
“No, no, no, no, please, please,
daddy….”
“Well…” I said.
“Anyway, if you did I’d tell her
that you were really sweet on her and you’re just too shy to say anything and
she should just kiss you really hard and …”
“Okay, all right,” I said, holding
up my hands. “I give up. You win. Truce?”
We shook hands and she said,
“Truce.” Ten steps later, as we left the building, she started skipping and
sang again, “Daddy’s got a girlfriend, daddy’s got a girlfriend.”
I chased her to the car.
* * *
*
One thing I’ve noticed about private
detectives in fiction, they are either gourmet chefs or they live on alcohol
alone. I can’t cook much of anything and don’t drink any alcohol at all, so I
guess I’ll never make it to the private eye hall of fame. In fiction, I’ve also
noticed, women throw themselves at private eyes all the time, sometimes
sincerely and sometimes for dastardly, ulterior motives. In my life there is a
stunning lack of women – other than Blanchard – throwing themselves at me. But
I had my little Katie and, most days, that was more than enough to make my life
light up and mean something.
I scared together some macaroni and
cheese, green beans, and sliced ham for us to eat. Pete and Marge weren’t back
yet, but they’d told us it might be late so we didn’t worry. Dessert was
already negotiated and planned. We were going to pop popcorn and watch “Bambi”
one more time. I had seen it so many times I was beginning to root for the
hunters… but this is what my Katie wanted to do and, since she is who she is,
that meant that was what we were going to do.
Not long after she tucked into the
movie, sitting in a Kermit the Frog bean bag, wearing Mickey Mouse pajamas, I
heard a car’s tires crunching gravel outside. I looked through the front window
and saw a brown Chevy so ugly and plain it had to be a cop car. And so it was.
None other than Lieutenant Pelechik of the Columbus Police Department pulled
himself out of the driver’s seat. He was wearing his standard rumbled suit,
spotted and stained tie, and wrinkled white shirt. He probably had ten outfits
just like it at home. He cultivated the dumb, slow, pudgy Polish policeman look
on purpose. Pelechik was an easy man to underestimate but those who did
regretted it the rest of their incarcerated lives. He was one of the good cops,
decent as they come. Imagine the love child of Einstein, Mother Teresa, but
with a gun. On second thought, that’s a silly picture to be carrying around,
isn’t it?
Pelechik’s patch Columbus, up in
Franklin County and this was Lancaster, down in Fairfield County. He was off
the reservation and in my front yard. Hmmm.
I opened the door as he walked up to
it.
“Greetings, fine sir. You got a
locked room mystery you need me to come in and solve for you? Perhaps you need
some Sherlockian advice?”
“Good evening to you, too, Teacher.
Can I come in now or does this routine have a ways to go yet?” He couldn’t fool
me. He was crazy about me. I waved him in. He pulled the dented hat off his
head and spoke to Katie’s back. “Good evening, Miss Todd.” Katie didn’t turn
around. She just held her hand up and wiggled her fingers at him. Jesus, I
loved that.
“What’s up, Lieutenant? You’re a
long way from home.”
He pointed through the room toward
the kitchen. “Can I get a cup of coffee from you, Teacher? Maybe a chair?”
We went into the kitchen on our side
of the big house and I waved him to a chair. “Will instant do? I’m afraid I
don’t drink coffee and don’t own a pot.”
Pelechik shook his head sadly.
“Sometimes I think you’re a closet Mormon, Teacher, I swear. No alcohol, no
coffee. You got any vices at all?”
“Yep. But you didn’t answer my
question.” I held up the jar of instant coffee.
“I’ve been drinking squad room
coffee for twenty two years. Any taste buds that can survive that can’t be all
that picky. Instant’ll do.” I set a kettle on to boil and grabbed a mug from a
rack by the sink.
“It’ll be ready in just a couple of
minutes.” I knew the coffee was a pretense. Nobody came visiting Katie and me
to have coffee. But I also knew the way the game played out so I stood and
looked out the back sliding door and he sat and looked back into the living
room and we said nothing until the kettle boiled. I added a spoonful of granules
to the mug, filled it with hot water and took it over to him, putting it on a
coaster in front of him. “There you go,” I said. “Just like momma used to stir
up.”
He sipped it, grimaced, and set it
back down. He sat back and looked at me, measuring me in some way. “How long we
known each other, Teacher?”
In my thirty some years that
question has never once led to a good conversation. I sat down. “What is it,
Lieutenant?”
“I don’t know how to do this with
you, Teacher. I do it with other people all the time, but you?” He shrugged. My
world dipped and dived and a gnawing pain hit my stomach. Was it something to
do with Pete and Marge? Had the cosmos played another dirty trick on Katie and
me, ripping what remained of our foundation and family away?
“You’d better tell me, Lieutenant.
Go ahead. It’s all right.”
He measured me a little more and
nodded once. “Okay, here it goes. We, or rather the Reynoldsburg police, found
John MacDonald in Blacklick Park this morning. He was murdered there sometime
early this morning.”
I felt dizzy with the snap and twist
of my expectations. I was elated that Pete and Marge were all right but shocked
and dumbfounded that a guy like John MacDonald could be a murder victim. Seven
or eight separate emotions flowed through, kicking and screaming for attention.
I swallowed hard; trying to get my mouth wet enough to speak. “Murdered? You’re
sure?”
“Oh yea. No doubt about it. By more
than one person, maybe three, maybe four.”
“Four? How, I mean, why, I…” My
voice trailed off. I gave it another try. “I can’t imagine one person wanting
to kill John, much less four. You have any suspects, any idea about motives?”
“No, not yet. I knew you two were
friends so I wanted to tell you personally. Also, since you and he were close
you might have to answer some questions about where you were last night and
this morning and what you know about him personally, that kind of stuff.”
“I’m a suspect?”
“No, no, no,” he waved a beefy hand
in the air. “C’mon, Teacher. You know the drill. How many close friends did
John MacDonald have? Very few. Who was one of them? You. In murder cases you go
to the family and to close friends and, bingo, you find the murderer ninety per
cent of the time. Or, at least, you find the motive. I don’t suspect you, but you
can bet your Scottish…..” he looked back into the living room where Katie was
absorbed in her movie, “… uh, rear end, that others will want to talk to you.
You understand?”
“Yea,” I said, leaning back, still a
little dizzy from the news, feeling lost and displaced. “I understand. If I
weren’t me I’d want to talk to me, too.”
“Tomorrow morning, then,” Pelechik
said. “Nine o’clock. My office.”
“Nope,” I said. “Tomorrow’s Sunday.
I take Katie to church every Sunday morning. I’ll be in after that. Say, one o’clock.”
He looked at me, the beginning of a
smile on the right side of his mouth. “You tend to push things a little,
Teacher. Anybody ever tell you that?” I didn’t respond. “All right. I’ll set it
up for one o’clock. Come ready to tell us anything you can about John MacDonald
and his wife.”
“Cindy?” I said as another thought
hit me. “Has she been told? Is she all right?”
“Yea, she was told. We had two
officers over there around one o’clock this afternoon, after we’d identified
MacDonald. We called in her doctor and he gave her something to help her rest
at nights over the next week or so. A neighbor’s with her now, I think.”
“Did she have to identify the body?”
I asked, cringing at the thought.
“No. We got his office manager, a
Miss Joyce…”
“Joyce Thompson.”
“Yea, Thompson. She came in on
behalf of the family. Not really necessary, though. He had his license on him
and the photo was a good likeness for once.”
“I’ll need to go see her. Cindy, I
mean.”
“Maybe so,” Pelechik said, “but come
see us first. Besides,” he checked his watch, “she’s asleep now. The doc really
wanted to knock her out. She probably won’t wake up before mid morning.”
“Okay. I guess you’re right.” He
stood and so did I. I opened the door and let him through before asking,
“Lieutenant, how did they kill him?”
He turned those sad, big, Polish
eyes at me, shoved his hat on his head, and said, “They crucified him, Teacher.
Nailed him to a tree and then shot him.” He turned away and walked to his car.
On TV, Bambi was calling for his mother.
I shuffled and scraped my way
through my usual routine that night and the next morning. It wasn’t easy. I
kept hearing my dead grandmother’s voice, whispering incantations in Gaelic
against the demons who lay in wait to take little boys like me away to the
haunted land under our feet. She’d whispered their names to me so I’d know them
if I ran into them one day, maybe disguised, wearing a suit and tie. Her
wonderful and terrifying stories about the old gods and angels who stood with
us against the denizens of the night gave meaning to the wind and substance to
the night.
We finished the movie, laid out our clothes for the
next day, and I read to Katie from The
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, editing for language as I went along,
trying to keep up the funny voices for each character. After an hour of that
she read to me from an Amelia Bedelia book and then, finally, she was sleepy.
In church the
next morning I couldn’t keep my eyes off of the cross that hung on wires above and
behind the minister. Who would nail a man to a tree? Once again, my
grandmother’s whisperings came to me and I thought I saw my grandfather – who I
only knew from pictures on grandmother’s dresser – sitting a few rows ahead of
us in the small church. But it couldn’t have been him. He’d been a minister for
the Church of Scotland, known as an exorcist and an enemy of darkness. Long
before I was born, my grandmother told me, he was on his way to cast the demons
from a small boy west of Drumnadrochit when the deuchainn took him and
he was never seen again. She would never give any other details to the story
and neither would my parents.
I don’t
remember anything of the sermon, or even the name of any of the songs, but I
survived it and that was as good as I could do that morning. Katie, the
Sandersons – who’d returned around eleven the night before – and I ate lunch at
Applebee’s before I dropped them off and drove back to Columbus.
The Columbus Department of Public
Safety building is a new, impressive stone, concrete and glass building down on
the Scioto River just a few blocks from the State Capitol building. It housed
not only the city police but also the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department and
most of the administrators for the city fire department. I parked the 4Runner
in a nearly empty garage, locked my Glock in a gunsafe I have in the cargo
area, bolted to the frame, and went inside.
The lobby was large and airy, with
security glass in front of the information counter behind which were two young
women and a uniformed sergeant. The lobby had seats lined up against the walls
to the left and right. Containment ropes corralled visitors, directing them
through the metal detector which gave those declared safe and appropriately
badged access to the elevators. I went up to the counter and spoke to the
receptionist, a twenty something blonde lady, pretty in an over-accessorized
way. The sergeant stood behind her and the other receptionist, wearing
sunglasses, a scowl, and at least twenty five pounds of gun and equipment on
his Sam Browne belt. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I could feel them.
“I have an appointment with
Lieutenant Pelechik in Homicide,” I told her.
“Yes sir,” she said as if that was
the best news she’d had all day. “And what is your name?”
“Lamont Cranston,” I told her,
straight faced. Of course, she was too young to have even come across the
Shadow in re-runs. My dad had all of the old Shadow books, comics, and classic
radio tapes. Sometimes I forgot other people weren’t raised by my dad. She
asked me to spell it and I did before being asked to take a seat.
I took one of the hard plastic
chairs and settled in. The sergeant left his post, slowly easing around the
perimeter of the lobby, feigning interest in the photographs and watercolors
interrupting the tedium of industrial beige walls. He slid closer and closer to
where I sat leafing through a back issue of Columbus
Monthly. He was probably fifty with the beginning of a gut that looked hard
as a rock. A gray flecked mustache perched on his upper lip. When he got to the
painting beside me he murmured, without looking at me, “Lamont Cranston?”
“Excuse me, sergeant,” I said, not
looking up, “I don’t think you are — technically – supposed to be able to see
me.”
He cracked a grin and moved on, slowly
looking at the other paintings and photographs, but never directly at me. So at
least one other person in the building knew about the Shadow. That made me feel
a little better, but I wasn’t sure why. The far right elevator dinged and
Pelechik came out. He came to the metal detector and waved at me to come over.
“You okay?” He asked. I shrugged.
“Are you carrying?”
“Nope.” I said. Even those of us
lesser mortals who are allowed to carry firearms in the Great State of Ohio
aren’t allowed to carry them into government buildings. He led me through the
metal detector, into the elevator and punched the fifth floor button. We only
went up a floor and a half before he reached over and punched the Stop button.
The elevator jerked, lurched, and groaned to a complete stop.
I looked at him. “What? You’re going
to work me over with a rubber hose or something? Don’t you guys usually use the
basement for that kind of thing?”
Pelechik shook his head like I was
the saddest thing he’d ever seen, which was always possible. “That’s exactly
what I want to talk about, Teacher. I know you think you’re funny…”
“’Think?’” I said.
“… but I want you to tone it down
for the boys upstairs. They aren’t happy about being here on a Sunday afternoon
and more than one of them doesn’t care for private cops of any kind. You might
buy yourself a lot less trouble if you cut out the wise cracks and one-liners.
Got it?”
“Yes.
Gotcha. Sorry, Lieutenant.” I said, and meant it. I pinched the bridge of my
nose and closed my eyes for a moment.
“You really okay, Teacher?”
“No. Let’s get this over with,
Loot,” I said.
He pulled out the Stop button and
the elevator moved upward again. On the fifth floor the doors parted, revealing
a large squad room with twenty five hot desks, so named because they didn’t
belong to any particular officer but to any officer who might claim them that
particular shift. He led me through the maze of desks and coffee makers to his
enclosed office at the rear.
Three men were already there. I recognized a Homicide
Detective named Perry Thomas and his partner, a new guy named Willis, sitting
in the two guest chairs. Leaning against the wall with an omnipresent sneer
woven into his fox face was Terence Mason. When his eyes met mine his sneer
turned even uglier and my gut tightened. Mason and I had a history.
“Everybody here know each other?,”
Pelechik said as he slid into his chair, his eyes warning me not to get into it
with Mason. It really wasn’t a question he wanted answered so nobody did.
“Teacher Todd,” he pointed at me with a pencil he’d picked up off of a yellow
pad on his desk, “runs Trackers, a information firm that serves this department
and several others. He’s done us favors in the past and we appreciate it.”
Mason snorted and coughed something vaguely obscene into a handkerchief.
Pelechik glared at him. “You got something to say, detective?” Mason shook his
head. “Then stop the adolescent crap and listen up.” Mason colored slightly but
said nothing.
Pelechik continued. “Mister Todd is
one of the few individuals who really knew our murder victim from yesterday,
John MacDonald. The police in Reynoldsburg have thrown this case to us because
of our resources and the Chief told us to take it so that’s why we’re here.” He
turned to me. “Mister Todd, what we need from you is everything you can tell us
about John MacDonald, his business, his relationship with his wife, whatever.
For starters, how did you meet MacDonald?”
“I met him on a golf course. It was
Valley View in Lancaster. This would have been two and a half years ago now. It
was sometime in May and the starter assigned us the same tee time and put two
young men who were riding a cart with us.” I remembered the day well. It was a
glorious day with not a cloud in the sky, light winds, and warm temperatures.
After the long, wet, gray winter it was a sign that maybe life would be worth
living again. Most winters in our part of Ohio are wet and nasty without the
benefit of snow. When the weather breaks and the gray shield that covers us
from October through early May is rolled up by warmer air, people jump at the
chance to get out of their homes and offices. I’d left work early to get a
round in while Katie was still in school. John was there already, waiting for a
group that would take him as the course didn’t let singles out alone. We were
paired immediately and then linked to the college boys who drove up to the
first tee in a cart. The look John gave the cart let me know that he felt the
same as I did about those monstrosities. We both hit fine drives and the boys
both found rough on the right. As we walked down the fairway the few words that
passed between us were enough for me to notice his accent.
It was a polished accent, what the
Brits would call very public school, by which they mean private schools with
lots of dark corridors, uniforms, cricket on the lawn, and random sodomy. I’d
never met an Englishman who jumped up and down with joy upon meeting a Scotsman
so I broke the news to him gently. He took it well and, by the end of the
round, we were casual friends and I had an invitation to his home to have
dinner with him and his wife, Cindy. Surprising even myself, I took him up on
it.
I enjoyed their company, envied their love for each
other, and appreciated their friendship. And that was all I knew about John
MacDonald.
“Oh, c’mon,” Mason said. He jutted a
finger my direction. “He wants us to think that he and MacDonald hung out
together for three years but he doesn’t know the town he was born in, who his
other friends were, or anything about his business?”
“Mason, I wouldn’t expect an inbred
mouth-breather like yourself to understand,” I said. Pelechik shot me a warning
look. I ignored it. “The British aren’t like Americans. We don’t do that
‘instant friendship’ thing you do. We don’t ask personal questions. We value
privacy.”
“I thought you was American.” This
from Willis who was taking notes furiously.
“Yes. And no,” I said.
“Well, what’s that mean?” Willis
asked.
“I’ll fill you in later,” Thomas
said. He had worked with me on two cases back when I worked for the district
attorney. He knew the story.
“Tell us about the relationship
between John MacDonald and his wife,” Pelechik said.
“They were in love. They married
just a few years before I met them. No kids. They held hands a lot and she plainly
adored him. He worked hard and it looked like they were doing all right
financially. She did some club and charity stuff. I never saw a cross look or
heard a harsh word between them.”
Mason grunted and turned away,
walking over the window. Mason had been married twice, divorced twice. I was
betting on Mason being the cause.
“What about business rivals?”
Willis, again.
“John ran a travel agency in
Lancaster, detective,” I said. “It’s hard to get travel agents riled up enough
to nail somebody to a tree in a city park.” Willis and Thomas just looked at
me; expressionless, cop eyes. “Guys, I know of no one in the world who disliked
John. Couldn’t this just be a random thing? A psychopath on the loose?
Something like that would make more sense than looking at Cindy or John…”
“Or you?” Mason said.
“Or me,” I said.
“Are you so incapable of violence,
Todd?” Mason sneered.
“No. I am not only capable of
violence,” I said, looking at him steadily, controlling my breathing. “I am
gifted.”
He tried a snort but it didn’t
develop right. It came out sounding a little choked.
“All right, ladies,” Pelechik
said, “back off.” He turned toward me,
pointing the pencil again. “Is that all you can think of to tell us, Mister
Todd?” I nodded. “Any further questions?” he asked the three detectives. Willis
and Thomas shook their heads and closed their notebooks. Mason turned away. I
got up and left. The whole interview had lasted less than an hour. Nobody had
offered me coffee or cookies and nobody said goodbye.
* * * *
I turned the 4Runner towards
Reynoldsburg. It was my intention to go see Cindy and offer my sympathies, but
I ended up on Livingston Street, heading towards Blacklick Park. I don’t know
what I thought I’d find there, but I knew I had to look. I had to see the
place.
The park was full of families
picnicking, playing volleyball, softball, and horseshoes. I found a place to
park near where I had been told they’d found John a day and a half ago. I
wandered through the patchwork of picnic tables and blankets, through a crowded
playground, and into the woods that encircled the park. Following a path barely
a foot wide I wove past poplars, hophornbeams, maples, and oaks until I came to
a larger clearing, a circle where the underbrush had been flattened down,
perhaps fifteen feet in diameter. Remnants of yellow crime scene tape fluttered
in the muted sunlight. I could no longer hear the sounds of life and joy from
outside the woods.
In the middle of the clearing stood
a white oak. Its trunk was a foot and a half or so thick, but the bark had been
stripped from the ground to over seven feet. The evidence boys had been out and
done their job. Nothing remained but a few stains around the tree and the
footprints of a dozen cops. The barbed wire that had held him here was gone, as
was the sock that was shoved into his mouth to stifle his screams. The bullets
shot into his knees and, finally, his head, hadn’t gone through him into the
tree so there were no bore-holes in the trunk. Even the leaves around the tree
that had been splattered with his blood had been taken in after they had
photographed, videotaped, and mapped every drop they could find. I put a hand
on the tree and cried.
It took me longer to pull it
together than I would have thought. I hadn’t cried since after Kathryn had
died. Even then, I didn’t cry at all at first. It was six months later when the
reality that this was now permanent, that she was forever gone and Katie and I
were forever alone, came down on me with a devastating thud and I’d cried for
three hours. John’s murder was bringing back feelings of loss, confusion and
helplessness. I didn’t have time for this, I told myself. But I cried anyway.
I shook it off, dried my face on my sleeve, and began
walking in slowly widening circles around the tree. I wasn’t sure what I was
looking for, but whatever it was, it wasn’t there. No matchbooks from the Kitty
Kat Nite Club, no dry cleaner’s receipts, no handkerchief’s with a Chinese
laundry mark. Nothing. I continued by ever widening spiral until I was back out
on the edge of the woods, looking at a group of pre-teen kids who were staring
at me. I suppose they’d been watching me for a while. News of the murder had
hit the TV last night so maybe they figured I was connected to the
investigation. They went quiet at my approach and I walked right through them,
back to my Toyota, and drove away.
I stopped at a gas station and
washed my face and hands. I bought a fountain drink and took three aspirin to
drive down the pounding headache that was beginning behind my left eye. A
migraine. Yea, that’s what this day needed. I combed my hair with my fingers
and checked my appearance in the flecked bathroom mirror. Not stunningly
handsome, but my eyes weren’t too red from crying and my sport coat looked all
right over my golf shirt. I was presentable enough to do what needed doing
next.
The drive to Cindy’s house took less
than twenty minutes. Pickerington bordered Reynoldsburg in the same way
Reynoldsburg bordered Columbus. The cities and towns had grown into each other
and now fought for their own individuality and against being absorbed by the
metastasizing capitol city. Pickerington was where mid level executives lived,
with custom built homes that were smaller than they looked on tiny lots with
taxes twice as high as neighboring communities to keep out the riffraff. John
and Cindy lived in one of the older homes, built before the land rush and the
parade of poseurs that invaded and took over Pickerington in the eighties and
nineties. Their home was a large two story colonial, complete with four white
columns rising from the large concrete floored porch to the classic pitched
roof, dusty red brick, and white non-functional shutters.
I slowed to turn into their long
gravel driveway but had to slam on the brakes as a car came roaring out, tires
squealing as it pulled onto the tarmac and sped away. Right behind it was its
twin, a dark blue Crown Victoria with four antennae and a blue bubble light on
its dash. In the front seat I saw Mason and he saw me. I didn’t like the look
he gave me. Not that I ever liked his looks but this one I especially disliked.
I let the dust settle, making sure no other cop cars were coming, and then
pulled in, my tires popping and pinging on the gravel, rolling slowly down the
sixty yard lane. Twenty yards in the world outside disappeared behind the tall
screen of Lombard poplars that marked the edges of their two and a half acres
of gardens and grounds.
At the parking circle I stopped the
4Runner and killed its engine. The house’s front door, already cracked open,
was flung wide and Cindy came running out towards me. Uh oh.
“Teacher! I knew you’d come… I don’t
know… you can’t…” and she collapsed into my arms, sobbing. She was small, her
head only coming up to my neck, her body shuddering with tears. I pulled her in
tight and held on.
“All right, Cindy. I’m here. What’s
going on? Why were the police here?”
She pulled her head back, her oval
face stained with tears, brown eyes rimmed with red. “What do you mean? You
mean you didn’t know? I thought that’s why you’d come.”
I shook my head and continued to
hold her at arm’s length, a hand on each shoulder. “No, I just came to see you,
Cindy. Tell me everything.”
She started to say something,
hesitated, and began silently weeping, her head dropping, her chin on her
chest. I pulled her into me again and gently rocked her. “Hang on, Cindy.
Whatever it is, let me take it. I want to help.” It took her a few minutes, but
she found strength somewhere deep in that hidden reservoir that lies unnoticed
and unknown inside of all us until the worst thing that could happen happens.
She pointed to the house, the door still wide open, and said in a voice so
tiny, so fragile it broke my heart, “Look.” I opened the door of the 4Runner
and put her inside, assuring her I’d be back. I walked quickly across the
gravel and the concrete stoop into the house.
The house had been raped. Carpets
torn up and shoved in heaps in the corners of the room. Everything that had
hung on the walls, pictures, photographs, paintings, wall sconces, all smashed
and in piles on the floor. Huge holes were torn at random in the drywall,
outlets pulled out and left hanging by wires. The china hutch in the dining
room had been pulled from the wall, surrounded by broken plates. The kitchen
was a nightmare of torn cabinet doors, tossed plates, heaps of food and dry
goods on the floor and in the sink. The sink’s pipes had been ripped out and
taken.
In the bedrooms it was the same
story. The closets had been emptied and clothes thrown violently to the floor
where muddy footprints tracked over them. The beds were torn apart, mattress
stuffing poking out through ragged holes. The bathrooms would take a day of
work to even be usable. I worked my way back to the living room and entryway,
trying not to step on the personal effects of John and Cindy that had already
been stepped on quite enough, thank you, when I saw Cindy standing in the
doorway visibly shaking and looking like a lost fifteen year old girl.
“I…I kept asking them why they were
doing this,” she said, her huge eyes looking up at me. “I told them they were
tearing up my life, all I have left now. They wouldn’t talk to me.”
“The police?” I said, even though it
was a dumb question.
“Yes.”
“Did they have a warrant, Cindy?” I
asked.
“Yes. They showed me a paper. I
think it was a warrant.”
I nodded. It would have been a
warrant. It was just like Mason to do this, and I should have seen it coming. I
should have done something. At that moment I wouldn’t have been able to tell
you who I hated more, Mason or me.
“Cindy, did they say anything about
what they were looking for?”
She nodded half an inch. “One of the
younger policemen, one of the ones in uniform, he was in our bedroom. I kept
asking him, begging him to tell me anything. He finally told me that they were
looking for drugs.”
“Drugs?” I probably sounded as
shocked as I was. She came over to me and looked up at me, not seeing anything.
I moved to her side, put my arm around her, steering her to a chair which I
righted, guiding her down into it.
“Teacher, isn’t it insane? It’s
insane, right? John never even took aspirin. I tried to tell them, but they
wouldn’t listen. The policeman with the long hair – do you know him? – the one
with the mustache and little beard, he said that the way John was killed he had
to be involved in something really bad. Teacher,” her eyes met mine again. I
wasn’t sure how much of that I could take before my heart popped, “you know
that’s crazy, don’t you? It was like he was blaming John for getting killed,
like it was his fault or something.”
“Cindy, I’m so terribly, terribly
sorry. I wish I had been here earlier.” I couldn’t help but think that I would
have beaten Mason here if I hadn’t been futzing around in Blacklick Park
holding a private pity party. “I’ll help you take care of this.”
“They can’t do this, can they? I
mean, this can’t be legal… can it?”
“I’m sorry, Cindy, but yes, they
can. It shouldn’t be this way, but if Mason gets the right judge there isn’t
anything you can do about it and you can’t hold them responsible for the
damage.”
“But that’s not right! That’s not
fair!”
“I know. But that is the way things
are and we are going to have to deal with them that way.” I looked around,
gauging what needed to be done, who needed to be killed, that sort of thing.
“Cindy, I’m going to get you out of here for a day or so, just until we get
things organized. Stay right here. I’ll be back in a minute.”
I left her there, her head in her
hands, and ran back upstairs collecting a large suitcase on the way. It had
been tossed from the attic and its handle had caught on the banister. In her room I put together a few outfits and
underthings as best as I could and then went into her personal bathroom and
gathered all the unbroken toiletries putting them into a string bag that I
found under her sink. When the collection of clothes and toiletries filled the
suitcase I closed it and pulled out my phone, punching in Jake’s home number.
He grunted a hello.
“Jake, we got a real problem over
here at John MacDonald’s house.” I told him about Mason and the state of the
house. “You know people. Could you arrange some contractors and get them over
here today…”
“It’s Sunday, Teacher.”
“C’mon, Jake, you and Althea have
been part of this town since Noah. You have to have some pull with somebody.
Get them here and tell them to work through the night if they have to. I’ll pay
them…”
“Not by yourself, you won’t.”
“… and then get a maid service in as
soon as they are done. If they have any questions, have them call Althea. She’d
know better than me about replacing stuff.”
“I’ll send Althea over with them.
She’ll make sure it’s done right,” He said. I had no doubt about that. I would
need to remember to say a prayer for the contractors.
“I’m going to need to get Cindy out of
here for at least a day or so, until things are organized again,” I said.
“Any ideas about where?”
I rubbed my forehead and left eye.
The pain was not getting any better. “No. I haven’t thought that far ahead. I
guess I could take her back home with me.”
“Teacher, you’re not thinking. How
would that look to Mason and his crew?”
I almost said something stupid like
“why should I care what Mason thinks” but he was right. I was John’s friend.
Taking John’s wife into my home, as innocent as it really was, would look
terrible to the detectives.
“Okay, Jake. You have any
suggestions?”
“Sure. Bring her here. We’ll put her
up. We have a lot of room and we aren’t connected with her husband at all, so
it’ll look better.”
[note: this is the last chapter to be posted until I return on March 1st. The comments were slowing down so I might have been posting them too quickly anyway! Enjoy your week and a bit. God give you peace]
Four
days later, Pelechik, Jake, and I sat in my office with the lights off while
the wind and rain spat at the window and the lights from High Street slipped
through the dying trees of early October, throwing spider web shadows across
the walls. The dry cleaners’ shop downstairs had closed down for the day and
the sounds of traffic leaving Ohio’s capitol city for the suburbs and home had
little competition from us. We had nothing to say.
We were stumped. We had the
coroner’s report. We had the daily reports of the detectives assigned to the
case. But we didn’t have a clue why someone had taken John, or taken him as
they had. We had gone over everything again and again.
They’d nailed him to a tree.
Eventually.
First, they
took him – off the street, from his office, out of his car – we still didn’t
know the answer to that one. It was possible, though hard to imagine, that he
had gone with them willingly. Sometime later, for reasons none of the three of
us could guess, they’d killed him in Blacklick Park. Our best guess was that
they had first stuffed his socks in his mouth to muffle his screams, and then
beaten him as he was held in place with three strands of barbed wire, cruelly
tightened around his chest and upper thighs, fastening him to a white oak.
Then came the pole barn nails through his wrists and
three gunshots – one each through his kneecaps and the final one through his
forehead. Four days later and we had no idea why John was killed. No news was
bad news.
Four days. No clues. No hot leads.
Nothing.