by Ed Gorman
Her crowd grew wider, deeper. They wanted her autograph. They wanted to know if she'd be doing a segment of her show from town here. One woman wanted Tandy to touch her leg-crippled daughter. Tandy gently declined. She looked embarrassed, even a tad frantic.
I could understand them. They wanted something to believe in. Since you could no longer believe in government, business, movie stars, sports stars, or even many religions . . . that left you exploring the fringes for people to believe in. That explains Pat Robertson and all the other pseudo-religious con artists; and that also explains our obsession with things extraterrestrial, even though there's no hard evidence yet that we've ever actually had a close encounter.
So when a fragile young woman through mental powers alone unearths long-buried bones . . . that's remarkable.
So why not push your crippled son toward her? Or your blind daughter? Or your cancer-dying husband? If any of these folks were my kin or beloved, I'd probably do the same thing.
Where's the harm?
At least Tandy wouldn't ask you to send her "prayer messages" in the form of twenty- and fifty-dollar bills and "reward" you with little pamphlets of inspirational bilge. And she wouldn't get involved in far-right politics, pushing their message of hate.
So where's the harm?
Maybe on the off-chance Tandy can do something miraculous for you . . .
It was all a little frantic and desperate and sad, the yearning way they surrounded her, but there was a human sweetness about it, too.
By now, it was full-fledged football weather, the chill almost tart but fresh and invigorating. Somebody started a small fire. A woman showed up with a small van loaded with coffee and doughnuts and Danish. As the crowd seemed to be increasing steadily, she'd probably turn a nice profit.
I watched the lab people work under their big lights. Extracting the bones was laborious work. We'd taken a course at Quantico in such excavations. Hard, important work.
Somebody tipped the press to who I was, so I had my turn, too. I said very little. Their excitement was based on the fact that I was formerly an FBI profiler, and that Tandy and I had successfully worked together on two murder cases.
I was assaulted in all media—audiotaped for radio, videotaped for TV, and fed live as a special bulletin interrupting whatever network show was on locally at the moment.
No, I had no idea how Tandy had gotten her special power. No, I had no idea whose bones we'd found. No, I had no idea who the private eye Kibbe was, but I doubted that his presence and subsequent death had anything to do with the bones that Tandy had found.
They were disappointed in my responses, of course. They wanted a sound bite that'd be good at the top of the ten o'clock news, which was coming up fast.
They wanted me to link Kibbe and the bones and say that Tandy was having visions of Kibbe's killer and would soon identify him for the police.
They wanted me to say that, in fact, the real killer was already stalking Tandy, fearing that she'd expose him.
The stuff of TV movies—that's what they wanted for the TV news.
And as I said, they didn't get it. Not from me, anyway.
A lot of the time, I thought about Noah Chandler's phone call. Paul Renard still alive? I liked a good urban legend as much as any-body. But the prospect of the tale being true seemed remote.
I was actually more interested in his admission that he'd fired the shots at us at the asylum the other day. What the hell was that all about? Even then, under the anxiety of the moment, I'd felt that the shooter was missing us on purpose.
I wondered if Laura knew about Chandler. Or was maybe even his accomplice.
I tried once more to get close to Tandy. Impossible.
I also tried to say good-bye to Susan Charles. She was busy, too. The press had just discovered her as their next target.
The line at the doughnut van was longer than ever. The coffee was steaming hot and the pastry glistened with sugary coating. If the line hadn't been so long, I'd have indulged myself.
EIGHT
Lonesome prairie night. That was the feeling I had when I saw the plastic lights of Brenner, the reds and blues and yellows of all the chain fast-food places and the video stores and convenience stores with the six-deep gas pumps and all the Harleys parked slantwise along the front of the walks.
Kids would be in bed all warm and dream-thrilled and parents would be in front of TVs or in bed early for a quick tumble with their mates and teenagers would be humping in cars or on park benches and cats would be dozing wherever it was warm, and dogs would be doggy-prowling through the night.
Somehow, I didn't feel as if I belonged to any of it, and I desperately wanted to. I wanted to be in the house where I'd lived with my wife and still lived in sometimes; or at the least in my apartment in Cedar Rapids, anywhere where I felt a sense of community, not a fucking motel room and a fucking motel room bed and Tandy all gone from me now with her power back and celebrity dazzling her eyes sure as jewels.
I would have settled for an animal to ride with, dog, cat, raccoon; hell, night crawler if I had to.
I was pulling into Brenner with a full load of dislocation and self-pity. I was not ready for prime time.
"Evening."
"Evening," I said.
"Help you?"
I hadn't seen him before. He looked like a retired gent, earning a little spare cash working the motel desk at night. He wore a ratty cardigan, thin flannel-style cotton shirt, and had some kind of serious-looking wart on the bottom of his lower lip. His HMO had probably convinced him it was nothing to worry about. His dentures clicked when he spoke. He was reading a Collector's magazine. BIG MONEY FOR "JUNK"! cried one headline.
"I went to Noah Chandler's room," I said, "but he didn't seem to be around. Just wondered if he'd told you where he was going?"
"They don't usually do that. Tell me anything, I mean. Hotels, they tell you where they went sometimes. But not motels. Not usually, anyway."
"Well, thanks."
The trucks on the highway, the trains on the prairie, provided the usual amount of roaring rumbling background noise. The night smelled of cigarettes and cold and exhaust fumes from a truck that had just pulled in. Half the lights above the various motel doors had burned out, lending the place a seedy quality it had plenty of already.
I decided to try Laura and Tandy's room. Maybe Noah was there. I hadn't checked because I didn't know if Laura knew what Noah wanted to tell me. Maybe, given her feelings about me, she wouldn't want him dealing with me.
I knocked and the door creaked open. Nice crisp horror-movie sound effect, that creaking.
Dark room. Tart smells.
I pushed the door open with a single finger.
I knew instinctively that this door would soon enough be dusted for prints. I didn't want to hinder the lab people any more than I had to.
I went back to my car and got the small penlight I use for reading maps.
I didn't go any deeper into the room than I had to. The lab would comb the carpet for prints, too.
She was naked and her throat had been cut. She had a very nice body. Her wild, red-blonde pubic hair gave me an erotic little charge. And, as you can imagine, I felt very proud of myself.
He'd died from a bullet to the left temple. The side of his head was a salad of blood and bone fragment and pus-like brain matter. Presumably, the damage had been done by the heavily blued .45 dangling from the tips of his fingers. The tabs were going to love it. He'd been too unimportant to cover since his cop drama had been canceled. Now he was back in the good graces of vampires everywhere.
I backed out of the room, leaving the door ajar, and pulled my cell phone from my back pocket.
I called the police station first and they patched me through to Susan Charles. I told her what had happened and she said, "Has this whole town gone crazy?"
"Sure seems like it," I said.
Part 3
ONE
Tandy was out of Susan Charles's personal Buic
k before the wheels had quite stopped rotating.
The same crowd of folks who had gathered here to watch Kibbe be carried out were back again. I recognized several of them. Maybe they were part of this portable crowd that got dropped off at all crime scenes.
As she struggled her way toward me—small against the taller, wider, heavier crowd—she looked young and frantic and scared.
She started to go around me, head for the open door where police officers and various other officials came and went.
But I stopped her, pulled her to me. "You don't want to go in there."
She tried to jerk herself free of me. "She was my sister, Robert. Now let me go."
"You don't want this to be your last memory of her."
Her struggling stopped. "Oh, God, is it that bad?"
"Pretty much. I'm sorry."
"But who did it?"
"Looks to be a murder-suicide." Then, "I was thinking about all the arguments they had over getting married."
"But Noah wouldn't—"
"I heard some of their arguments when I passed their door. He got pretty angry. And you told me yourself that he struck her a couple of times."
"But striking her—"
"Striking her means you're into violence. And the fact that she put up with it just made it worse. She showed him that there wouldn't be any serious consequences."
"She wouldn't talk to him for two or three days at a time."
"But she always took him back. And that was all he cared about. He could handle a few days of not having her as long as he knew that he'd get her back eventually. Which he did. Plus, he was a very possessive guy. And he drank a lot."
She'd calmed down. Tears gleamed in her eyes. "I just keep thinking of Laura. How—how did he do it?"
"Knife."
"Oh, God."
I decided to spare her any more details for now.
"Was it fast?"
"Her dying?"
She nodded.
"Probably very fast."
Which wasn't necessarily true. She'd put up some kind of fight. And if this was typical of most throat-slashings, her last minutes had been hell. But Tandy didn't need to know that. At least not now.
"I'm going to be sick."
I got her up to my room and into the bathroom. She vomited twice. I hadn't unpacked everything since I'd been moved. I turned on a nearby lamp, dug out toothpaste, mouthwash, and an unwrapped toothbrush for her. She thanked me between a half-inch of door and frame.
She spent twenty minutes washing up. I sat in the shadows on the other side of the room. Listened to all the activity downstairs.
When she came back, she sat down in the overstuffed chair and said, "He cut her throat, didn't he?"
"Yeah."
"That can be a terrible way to die, can't it?"
"There are a lot of terrible ways to die."
"You didn't answer my question, Robert."
"Yeah. It can be a terrible way to die."
"You think it took her a long time to die?"
"Probably not a long time."
"How long would you estimate?"
"I'm not a medical examiner, Tandy."
"You're evading my question again, Robert."
"I suppose a couple of minutes."
"A couple of minutes after he cut her throat?"
"Yes."
"God, when you're bleeding like that, and gasping for air, and all panicked and angry—a couple of minutes can be a long time."
"It probably can."
"I hope I don't see it."
At first, I wasn't sure what she meant.
Then she said, "Some psychics 'see' their loved ones dying. They can re-create the whole death scene. They live it over and over again."
"I hope you don't see it, either."
"It was starting to go well for us. I'm getting those funny feelings in my arms again. And all the time. Ever since we went out to where we found the bones."
She'd once told me that when her powers were operating at maximum efficiency, she'd get these tingles that raced up and down her arms.
"The tingles."
"Yeah," she said. "The tingles."
She put her face in her hands. "She would've been so happy about it. This whole night. Finding the bones and everything. The cable people would've been ecstatic."
Then she was weeping. More than simply crying but not yet sobbing. Weeping.
I went over and knelt next to the chair and started giving her a shoulder rub.
"That feels good?" she said tearfully.
"That's all the encouragement I need."
I lifted her up and carried her over to the bed, where I set her gently on top of the spread. I rolled her over and started working not only on her shoulders but her back as well.
"You're getting a woodie," she said.
"Sorry."
"I really don't want to do anything."
"I know. I'm sorry. This was something it did entirely on its own."
And isn't that always the way? Some nights when you need them, they're nowhere to be found. Other nights, they keep popping up at inopportune times.
I unstraddled her bottom, knelt next to her in such a way that the only part of my body touching hers was my hands.
"You really think he killed her?" She was done weeping. For now, anyway.
"Sure looks like it."
"Couldn't have been faked?"
"Could have. But it's tough to fake."
"She should've dumped him. I don't know what she saw in him, anyway."
"I guess she loved him."
"He was so unfaithful. I'm not sure why she put up with all the bad stuff Noah did to her. She must have really thought she loved him."
"I'm sure she did."
"God, I wish I could get my hands on him."
The calming effect of my massage was starting to lose its charm, apparently.
The knock was curt. "Hello," a female voice said. The uncertainty in her voice suggested that she wasn't sure that anybody was even in here.
Police Chief Susan Charles.
I eased off the bed and opened the door for her.
"I'll turn on another light," I said.
The light revealed Tandy sitting on the edge of the bed, combing through her short hair with her fingers.
Susan said, "I was actually looking for Tandy. There are two detectives here from the state, and they were asking if we could all talk to Tandy at the same time."
"Fine," Tandy said. "I need to go to the bathroom first." She went in and closed the door.
Susan stepped closer. "You get a good look at Laura West?" I nodded.
"He must've really been angry."
"There's one thing that's strange, though." I told her about his phone call and wanting to see me.
"Did he say about what?"
"He seemed to think Paul Renard is still alive."
She smiled. Obviously couldn't help herself. "Are you serious?"
"That's what he said."
"God, I knew he wanted ratings but—"
"That's what I thought. But I wanted to hear his story, anyway."
"I'll let you go through his effects with me if you want. See if we can turn anything up. I need to talk to you anyway. About the crime scene when you saw it. We'll go through his things afterwards."
"I'd appreciate that."
Tandy came back. "Do you have any Tums or anything like that? My stomach is a mess."
"I'm afraid I don't," I said.
"I've got some in my car:," Susan said.
"Thanks."
She looked around the room. "Forgive me for saying so, but this is kind of depressing."
"Gee," I said. "I hadn't noticed."
She smirked at me. "Uh-huh." Then, "You ready, Tandy?"
Tandy nodded. Then, "Robert says that maybe she died pretty quickly."
Susan knew she was being put on the spot. She avoided glancing at me to tip her hand. "Sometimes, it can be very fast."
"Did you se
e her?"
"Yes."
"You think it was fast?"
This time, Susan did glance at me. "I think there's a good possibility it was fast."
"She should have dumped him," Tandy said. "I told her to." She wasn't talking to us. She was talking to Laura. "Big TV star. I think she actually went for that somehow. She was so smart. I don't know why she'd fall for that. Do you?"
This time, she directed her question at me.
"No," I said gently. "I don't know why she'd fall for that, either."
Susan led her quietly out the door.
The retired man was still at the desk. He looked, if possible, even worse than I felt, in his old cardigan, old flannel-type shirt, and old tired eyes.
"This here is town is becomin' quite a place."
"It sure is."
"And both of 'em'll make the national news."
"Probably will."
I had two questions for him. But he wasn't going to make it easy for me.
"There was a senator out here once. State senator by the name of Gibbons. Found out his mistress was bein' unfaithful so he killed her. Shot her eight times. Right out on the highway. Couldn't even wait for her to get out of the car, he was so pissed. Shot her eight times inside the car, then took her body and threw it in the ditch. Now, that's pissed."
"That's pissed, all right."
"Then, when they caught him, he hanged himself in jail. And then you know what?"
"What?"
"Three weeks after that, his wife got in a car wreck. Killed her and the oldest boy."
I didn't need any more depressing stories. "Right at the point where tragedy becomes absurdity" has always been one of my favorite phrases. When things get so bad you have to start seeing the ridiculous nature of them.
But tonight, because of Tandy, pale, frail, fucked-up Tandy, I wasn't able to find anything humorous, let alone absurd, about any of it.
"Well, that's quite a story," I said.
"Ain't done yet."