by Ronald Malfi
I ordered a Budweiser from a middle-aged tattooed woman working the bar, then dug through my satchel and took out the packet on Holly Renfrow. When the bartender brought over my beer and saw that I was reading an article about a murdered teenager, I stammered out some pathetic excuse while simultaneously stuffing the papers back in my satchel.
“Takes all kinds,” the bartender said, cutting me off. “You want something to eat?”
“I’m waiting for someone.”
Without a word, the bartender departed for what was probably more enthralling conversation with the gray-haired lumberjack a few stools away.
2
Forty-five minutes, a second beer and a plate of chicken wings later, and I was convinced that Denise Lenchantin had decided to bail on our meeting. Just as I was about to wave over the bartender and request my bill, Lenchantin came in. She’d gone home and changed her clothes, I saw, which accounted for her delay. Coming through the pub’s door on a burst of frigid air, she wore an electric-blue halter top beneath a black leather motorcycle jacket, and charcoal-colored jeans that clung to her like body paint. She looked lost for a moment, then smiled as she noticed me seated at the bar. She approached, a fat handbag studded with silver buttons and fringed trim clutched under one arm. She’d ditched the hair ribbon, too, her golden hair spilling down past her shoulders now.
“You mind if we grab a table instead?” she said as she came up to the bar.
“Sure.”
I followed her to an empty table. She hung her purse over the back of her chair before she sat down. I sat opposite her, with a clear shot of the bar and the front door beyond. The men in this place were not subtle in their appraisal of Denise Lenchantin; not only had heads turned upon her arrival, but at least one fellow at the bar had swiveled completely around on his stool so that he could stare at the back of her head. I glanced at him disapprovingly, but he seemed unperturbed by my reproach.
“I almost didn’t recognize you,” I said, feeling it necessary to say something; her transformation from dowdy waitress to someone who could have been modeling in a magazine seemed to demand some sort of acknowledgement.
“Sorry you had to wait so long, but I wasn’t coming in here dressed like a bag of cotton candy.” She poked a cigarette in her mouth.
“You can smoke in here?”
“Unless these are strictly for show,” she said, picking up the black plastic ashtray that sat in the middle of the table.
The tattooed bartender arrived with a pitcher of beer and two pint glasses. She set them on the table.
“Any fresh ink?” Denise asked the woman.
The bartender hoisted one leg of her nylon pants to reveal what looked like Gumby giving it to Pokey in the rear, just above her ankle.
Denise laughed. “Excellent! Oh, shit! I love it.”
The woman swiveled her gaze in my direction, as if anticipating a more in-depth critique.
“And they call the horse Pokey,” I commented.
The expression I received in return could have been a grin, a grimace, or evidence of sciatic pain. She dropped her pant leg and went off to reclaim her station behind the bar.
Denise Lenchantin filled both pint glasses then slid one over to me.
“Thanks,” I said. “Although I don’t think I’ll be able to help put much of a dent in this pitcher. I’m a bit of a lightweight, and I’ve already had a couple.”
One of her hands sprung out and clutched me about the wrist, before I could even lift my glass off the tabletop. “Hey,” she said, all serious as a heart attack now, leaning closer toward me from across the table. “I’ve been thinking about your wife ever since your phone call. That’s fucking dismal, man.”
I felt my face go through the motions of appreciation, but said nothing.
“You don’t gotta be polite about it,” she said, still squeezing my wrist. Her fingernails, shining with metallic silver polish, looked like bolt heads. “What was it, an accident? Some kind of accident?”
“Well, not exactly.” I told her about the shooting at the plaza. It was something I hadn’t planned on doing, but once I started, I found that I couldn’t stop. Also, for much of the day, I’d felt you right here with me, Allison, crazy as that sounds. Talking about you now seemed almost natural. As if there were three of us seated around this table instead of just two.
“Jesus fuck, man, I remember hearing about that on the news,” she said, shaking her head in astonishment. “I just didn’t make the connection to your wife, is all. I mean, it sounds shitty, but this stuff happens so much now that you just kinda lose track of all the shootings. Am I right?”
“Sadly, yes,” I admitted.
She released my wrist and sat back in her chair. She brought her beer to her lips and downed half of it in a series of thirsty gulps. When she set the glass back down on the table, there was a crescent of red lipstick on the rim.
“That guy keeps staring at you,” I said. “Dude at the bar.”
She looked over her shoulder, saw the guy, waved to him. Almost in a daze, the guy raised a hand and waved back. His bearded face never cracked a smile.
“You know him?” I asked.
“Not a clue,” she said, turning back around and topping off her beer from the pitcher. “I used to work here, though, you know. He’s probably a regular. Hell, they’re all regulars. You’d think the money would be better working in a bar than in a restaurant, but look around. These guys aren’t exactly big tippers, you know what I’m saying? But you get used to the stares. It don’t bother me.” She shrugged. “At least I didn’t have to dress like cotton candy when I worked here.”
“I’d like to talk about what happened to you last fall,” I said.
“You’re talking about that creepy dude in the car? The story I told your wife?”
“Yes. The guy you reported to the police after Holly Renfrow was murdered.”
“Right, yeah.” Her face tightened. “Fucking animals, right? This guy just walks into a shopping center with a gun and ruins your fucking life? I’m sorry, I’m just thinking of your wife again. Makes me crazy. Hey—you wanna do some shots?”
“Uh, no, I’m okay. The beer’s fine.”
“Just one round,” she insisted, and before I could protest further, she was out of her chair and stomping in her clunky heels over to the bar. The guy on the barstool who had been ogling her since her arrival repositioned himself on his stool so that he could look directly at her ass now.
This was hopeless, Allison.
Despite an absence of music, Denise Lenchantin danced her way back to our table, an amber-colored shot glass in each hand. She placed a serving of the suspicious liquid in front of me.
“What’s this?”
“Brake fluid.”
“What?”
“I’m fucking with you. Just tequila,” she said. She raised her own glass. “Listen, listen—to your wife, okay? Andrea.”
“Allison.”
“Fuck! Allison! I’m sorry. I’m terrible.”
“It’s okay.”
“It’s not. What a shit I am.”
“It’s fine.”
“To Allison!”
I raised my shot glass and clinked it against hers. Booze sloshed down my wrist and soaked the cuff of my shirt. The smell of it made my eyes water. “To Allison.”
We both downed the shots. Like a flaming arrow, the tequila fired straight down my gullet where it detonated in my stomach like a nuclear bomb.
To my astonishment, Denise bent over and kissed the top of my head. I caught a whiff of her perfume, dizzying and floral, before she dropped back down in her seat on the other side of the table.
“This guy that approached you back in the fall,” I tried again.
“Yeah, right,” she said, nodding vigorously now. “Total fucking creep.”
“Can you tell me what happened?” I asked.
It had been around midnight and she had been getting off her shift at the diner. She got in her car and was heading home al
ong a wooded roadway that curled around the hillside. It was a beautiful vista during the day (she told me) but could be downright creepy at night. She hadn’t gone more than a mile when her car, an old Ford station wagon from the eighties which she’d inherited from her parents, began to thump-thump-thump. She pulled over, walked around the car, and saw that the rear passenger-side tire was flat. At that point, she had considered calling her father or even her boyfriend to come and get her, but she decided it was too late to disturb either one of them. She had a spare and a jack in the trunk, and she’d changed tires before.
She had only just opened the trunk when she heard a vehicle approaching. She looked over her shoulder and watched as a pair of headlights carved a passage toward her through the darkness. Its engine was loud, an eight-cylinder job (she knew a bit about cars from her father, a mechanic by trade), and it clawed its way down the road through the otherwise silent night. The vehicle slowed until it came to a stop beside her car.
“I thought he was a cop at first,” she said, “because he had one of those floodlight thingies on the side of his door. Shined the light right in my eyes.”
“Was it a police car?”
“If it was, it was one of those undercover cars like a detective would drive. Like in the movies? I mean, it didn’t have the lights on the roof and wasn’t painted like a cop car. It was just a plain sedan, I think four doors. Brown or gray—I couldn’t really tell in the dark. But he wasn’t a cop.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I asked him,” she said. “He didn’t say yes right away, but then he said he was. But by then, I could tell he was full of shit. He called himself a ‘policeman.’ Cops don’t call themselves policemen unless they’re talking to goddamn five-year-olds, am I right?”
“I guess you’re right,” I said.
“Also, it was the way he said it that creeped me out. Like, he stretched out the word, you know? Po-leeeece-man. Like that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s creepy.”
She took a long swallow of her beer.
“Go on,” I said. “Keep going.”
3
The vehicle idled in the road parallel to her own, trailing a cloud of exhaust in its wake. The floodlight attached to the driver’s door was impossibly bright. It blinded her.
“You look like a ghost,” the driver said, his voice barely audible over the rumble of the car’s engine. It was a man, his voice deep. “Gave me a scare. Standing out here like this on the side of the road.”
He kept the floodlight trained on her face, which made it impossible for her to see any details beyond the light—not of the vehicle nor of the driver himself. When she sidestepped out of the glare, the driver repositioned the light so that it blinded her again.
“Flat tire,” she said, holding up a hand to shield the light from her eyes.
The man said nothing; she listened to his car idling there in the middle of the road. It was the only sound she could hear.
“You a cop?” she asked.
“I’m always here to help,” he said.
She recognized that this was a non-answer, and that the lizard part of her brain was already recoiling from this stranger.
“I can help,” he said, and she detected a hint of urgency in his voice this time.
She didn’t want his help. “That’s okay. I’ve got a spare and a jack in the trunk. If it’s—”
“Spin around,” said the man.
She thought she’d misheard him. Or maybe in her increasing apprehension she’d misinterpreted some advice he was offering about changing a tire. “Excuse me?”
“Like a ballerina,” he said. “Spin. Around.”
Her hand still in front of her face, she took a step back until her thigh thumped against the quarter panel of her car. The driver repositioned the floodlight again so that it filled her vision.
“I don’t think so,” she told him.
The driver said nothing. She couldn’t see him behind the light, but she could hear him shifting about inside the car. All at once, a million different and terrible things began to shuttle through her mind. There was a tire iron right here in the trunk—would she be able to use it as a weapon? If it came to that? She picked it up, its iron-cool weight feeling insubstantial in her grasp.
“How ’bout killing that light, man? I’m going blind over here.”
“This is no place for you,” the man said, ignoring her request. There was an odd singsong quality to his voice. “Come with me.”
“What?” she practically wheezed; her throat felt like it was constricting, making it difficult to talk, to breathe.
“Leave the car,” said the man. “Come with me.”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s safer that way. I’m a policeman.” Po-leeeece-man.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“You shouldn’t change a flat out here in the middle of the night. You’re liable to get struck.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t think so.” It seemed all she was capable of saying. She forced herself to sound casual, unafraid. Like not showing fear to a snarling dog. “Thanks, but no thanks.”
When she thought she heard the latch open on the car door, she moved quickly around to the passenger side of her own vehicle, stepping onto the grassy shoulder of the road and feeling a bit safer with her car between them. Fear rose up in her, strident as a klaxon, and the tire iron suddenly felt like it weighed a thousand pounds as she carried it with her. Yet instead of panicking, she put her cell phone to her ear and pretended she had just received a call.
“Yeah, hi, Dad,” she said into her phone, loud enough for the stranger to hear. “Yep, I’m just down the road. Keep driving until you see me. A nice man has stopped to help me, too.”
At this point, she had moved far enough out of the glare of the floodlight so that her vision had returned. From this vantage—near the front of her own vehicle now and still moving, staring at the headlights of the stranger’s car—she saw that the driver had climbed out of his car and was standing in the road between the two vehicles. She had heard the door unlatch but hadn’t actually seen the man get out of his car. His sudden appearance there in the road terrified her.
“I’m just past the bend, Dad,” she said into her phone, still pretending to speak with her father. “Okay, great. Can you see the car lights? Great.” She paused, her body prickling with apprehension. Her grip tightened on the deadly weight of the tire iron, which she kept down at her side. “Hold on, I’ll find out,” she said into the phone. And to the stranger—the dark shape standing in the middle of the road, slowly being swallowed up by the cloud of exhaust unspooling from his car’s tailpipe—she called, “Hey, mister, my dad wants to know your name.”
The man said nothing. She stared at him—at the shape of him—while her heart thrummed in her chest. Despite the chill of a late autumn night, a great heat roiled out from her waitress uniform and caused sweat to pop from the pores along her cheeks. Sweat stung her eyes and she quickly mopped it away.
“What’s your name, mister?” she asked again. “My dad’s just up the road and he wants to know.”
4
Denise Lenchantin paused here to refill her beer. She refilled mine, too.
“Christ, kid, you know how to build suspense,” I said. “What the hell happened next?”
“Nothing. He just got in his car and drove away.”
“You scared him off.”
“Well, I was freaked the fuck out myself. I really did call my dad after that, woke him right up, and he was there in like no time, right? He changed the tire and followed me home. I told him about the guy and what he’d said to me, and just the overall creepy vibe he gave off. But we didn’t do anything about it. Not then. It wasn’t until later, when I heard about that girl in Furnace, Holly what’s-her-name, and how the police were asking anyone with any information to come forward, blah blah blah, I thought, shit, what if that creepy son of a bitch was the same guy killed that
girl in Furnace? Holly, right? I mean, it happened on the same fucking night, right? So, I reported it.”
“You were smart,” I told her. “That thing you did with the fake phone call, it probably saved your life.”
“Don’t say that. You’re giving me chills, man.”
“Well, it’s true. Quick thinking.”
“Listen,” she said, and leaned forward across the table toward me again. “You work in places like this, you learn how to stay on your toes, know what I mean?”
“What happened when you went to the police in Furnace?”
“I gave them a statement. They asked if I could identify the guy, but I told them it was too dark and I didn’t see his face. I didn’t see anything about him. I couldn’t even give them a good description of the car. Except, well, it really stank.”
“What do you mean?”
“The exhaust. It was fogging up the road and it smelled like the freaking car was on fire. I mean, I know when a car’s burning oil, but this thing, it was like ready to explode.”
I nodded, unsure what to make of this.
“But anyway, back in January, they found the guy who killed that girl. Did you know that? Turns out he was some local pedophile or something. Anyway, he killed himself.” She put a finger-gun to her temple, pulled the trigger. “Blew his brains out.”
“His name was Das Hillyard. And he didn’t shoot himself. He overdosed on heroin.”
“Yeah? Wow. I guess… well, dead is dead, right?”
I thought of our closet light coming on seemingly by itself, and the stark impression of your handprint materializing on the windshield of the Subaru. The figure that materialized in the doorway of our home office. But in the end, I said, “Yes. Dead is dead.”
“They said it wasn’t the same guy. The guy in the car who I saw that night and the guy who killed that girl. Furnace police said that Hillyard guy didn’t own a car like the one I described. He had a truck or something. Which means your wife was wrong. Allison. Allison.” She jabbed a finger to her temple, as if to imprint your name on her brain.
“Wrong about what, exactly?” I asked.
“Well, your wife thought it was the same person. But this was before the cops knew it was that Hillyard guy. They didn’t have any suspects when your wife came out here. Nobody knew nothing.”