“Still… Turner might’ve been doing all the things I did… I don’t see how you knew…”
“Turner has a silenced gun. He wouldn’t go around making noises with a straight razor. Besides, I asked him.”
“What?”
“Turner was down in that farmhouse, at the bottom of the hill. I saw smoke from its chimney earlier tonight. My car was hidden in the barn, and while you were tied in the chair, sleeping it off, I took Janet down there and had her stay in the barn while I went in the house to talk to Turner. He was asleep. I woke him up.
“He was surprised to see me. Didn’t know I was anywhere around. And that was enough to tell me he wasn’t running around doing things at the lodge, which I didn’t think he was, anyway. He’s dead now.”
“He’s… you killed him? Why?”
“There was a woman named Wilma. I liked her. You’ve eaten at her place yourself… you mentioned it, remember? I value few people in this life… but she was one. He killed her. And in doing that, he was being careless. Careless about me… I lived almost next door, and had been in the place shortly before Wilma’s death, and his doing that could… still could… cause me trouble. He was always doing thoughtless fucking things like that. He almost got me killed once. I didn’t like him. And now this. You see, people in Turner’s business… the business I used to be in, and still am, marginally
… don’t go around carelessly destroying life. To you murder’s a hobby… Turner was in business. In my way of thinking, that’s what separates me from the psychopaths like you. But that’s just a rationalization, so the hell with it. Anyway, Turner was careless.. he killed Wilma as thoughtlessly, as casually as he’d humped her sixteen-year-old niece, and… well. What am I doing boring you for? There’s no reason for you to have to listen to all this.”
I switched the tape recorder back on, took his nickel-plated. 38 out of my belt-I’d loaded the gun with ammunition I’d found upstairs, with my nine-millimeter — and swung the gun up toward him. Some light reflected off the shiny barrel as he opened his mouth to say no and I slid the barrel in and squeezed the trigger.
The chair went over backwards with him. Some of what used to be inside his head spattered against the brown brick fireplace and clung.
At this point the tape ran out and began flapping in the machine. I untied the cable from the chair and him and returned the cable to the rest of the black coils of cable and wire covering the area surrounding the movie set like an underbrush. The gun was still in his mouth. I moved his right arm up towards his face and made the fingers touch the gun. The straight razor I put in his pocket.
I almost tripped over Waddsworth on my way out.
31
The first weekend in June I had some men over to play poker. One of them was Bob Katz. He was the last to arrive; the other three men and I were already playing when he got there.
I got up and met him at the door. He was an intense little dark-haired man with glasses; he never seemed entirely at ease in sports clothes, like the red short-sleeve banlon and plaid bermuda shorts he was wearing now
Before he’d stepped in the door, he said, “My daughter’s down for the weekend. She dropped me off. I’ll catch a ride home with one of the others.”
“Fine,” I said.
“She’s waiting out there. Wants to say hello.” And he gave me a funny look, like he’d just figured out it hadn’t been so wise, that time, to entrust his daughter’s honor to me for an evening.
So I sent him over to the big round table I’d set up in the living room, and went outside.
It was a cool night. Overcast. No stars, no moon, for the lake to reflect: just the various color lights from the cottages and the few restaurants and such around the lake.
There’s a gravelled area alongside the A-frame, and Bob Katz’s big green Lincoln was pulled up there, parked, and Janet was standing by it-not leaning, standing-looking out at the lake.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello Jack,” she said. She was in a dark blue halter top with denims, a yellow scarf around her neck. She was pretty as ever, the brown arcs of hair framing her face, her glasses resting on top of her head, pushed up there, like she wanted to look out at the lake and see it through a soft-focus lens. Or maybe it was me she wanted to see that way.
I hadn’t seen her since I’d driven her back to Chicago, after we’d spent, half the day in that barn, in my GT, waiting for the snowplows to come along and clear the way. She’d huddled with me in the car, and it had been cold, because I hadn’t been able to turn on the heat, for fear of carbon monoxide poisoning in the enclosed barn.
But that was then. This was now.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said Her near baritone voice was soft sounding. Gentle.
“Mind what?”
“My seeing you. You advised against it, remember?”
“Well, it’s been two months, practically. It’s okay. No one’s come round to talk to me about it. You?’’
“Yes,” she said, looking out at the lake, not me. “They tracked me down… despite my having used Stein instead of Katz as my last name.”
“Through your friend at the Playboy Club at Geneva?”
“Right. The one who recommended me to Castile for doing sound. Anyway. Some men came around. It was in Chicago, and they were Chicago police detectives. I don’t know why they were involved… but they were who did the questioning. They were no problem. They talked to me at my apartment a couple of times. That was it.”
“What did they ask you?”
“They asked when I’d left the lodge, and I told them in the afternoon before the snow got heavy. Like you suggested. They asked how I got to and from the lodge, and I said I’d taken my car… which I hadn’t… Castile had those two men, Harry and Richie, come pick me up… and you drove me home, of course. But the detectives accepted everything I said. They were also good about keeping my real name out of the papers. My parents still don’t know I was involved.”
“That’s good.”
“I’m a little numb about it all, to this day. Did you read Castile’s confession in the papers? The crazy suicide note he left, on tape? Weird.”
“Very.”
“That’s one of the things the detectives wanted to know about.”
“Pardon?”
“The tape Castile made… he didn’t say anything about that one man he killed. The detectives showed me pictures of the man and I’d never seen him before… he wasn’t anybody who was at the lodge when we were.”
“Isn’t that strange.”
“Yes. They found him in that farmhouse… gives me the creeps just thinking about it. All that time we were sitting in your car, in that barn, cuddling together keeping warm, trying to hold each other a little and forget about some of the ugliness… all that time that man was in that farmhouse, next door, with his throat cut.”
“Really.’’
“It gives me the creeps just thinking about it.”
“Don’t think about it.”
“How could anyone do a thing like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I read where the film is going to be released. Isn’t that… sick? Just awful?”
“It’ll make money.”
“I know. I know it will and it’s just sick. Oh… I’m sorry. I forgot that you invested in the picture…”
I had told her, in the barn, when she finally got around to asking me whether or not I really was a writer for Oui and if not what had I been doing there, that I was a silent partner in the film, that I had invested with Castile and wanted to come around and watch the filming, without announcing myself as one of the “money men.”
“I won’t be able to come forward for any of the money,” I said. “I used a false name and I don’t want to stir the investigation, up, where I’m concerned.”
“That’s too bad, in a way. Money is money, after all.”
“I guess so.”
“Anyway. I just wanted to stop and
tell you how things came out on my end… and see how you were doing.”
“I’m doing fine.”
“I wish it had been different. Not just for those people that got murdered. You know, it’s really something… people are talking about what happened at the lodge in terms of what Manson did and terrible crimes like that… they’ll be writing books about it, trying to figure out what exactly went on at that place.”
“Good luck to them.”
“But I started to say… I wish it could’ve been different. For us. I think I said back at that lodge… and I know I said it waiting in that car in that barn with you… but I’ll say it again: I wish we could get to know each other better, under better circumstances, than either of the times we got thrown together… that first time by my father, the second time, horrible time, at the lodge… But now we never will, I suppose.”
“I suppose.”
“Every time I’d see you I’d be reminded of what happened back there… and the memory of that is hard enough to deal with without being reminded of it constantly.”
“I understand.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I am too.”
She touched my face and got in the Lincoln and pushed her glasses back down and drove away.
I stood there a while, looking out at the lake. There was a breeze. It was cold for June.
I went back to my game.
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