by Jack Ketchum
Pye smiled back. “You know me better than that, Lieutenant Schilling.”
“Yeah, but you know how kids are today. They’re all of them into the stuff. Silly of me for even giving it a thought, though. What can I say.”
“I’m not exactly a kid, Lieutenant.”
“No. That’s true. You’re not.”
He reached into his jacket and pulled out the photo and placed it on the desk.
“Seen this guy?”
Pye frowned and picked up the photo and studied it. Then he put it down.
“No. Never. Why?”
“Very interesting actually. He’s wanted for murder over in Hopatcong and naturally we’re cooperating. Seems he shot and killed two teenage girls, campers, in the park overlooking the lake. Interesting because we had a shooting a whole lot like that a few years back. Also in a park, up by Turner’s Pool. You remember that, right?”
“Of course I do. You and Detective Anderson questioned me about it a few times.”
“A few times, yeah.”
“And some friends of mine.”
“You don’t resent that or anything, do you? I mean, I’m hoping there’s no hard feelings.”
He shrugged. “I walked in. Told you I’d been there. I guess I made myself conspicuous. No hard feelings. You were just doing your job.”
“That’s right. You got that right exactly.”
“That second girl from that night, she just died recently, didn’t she? I think I heard that someplace.”
You little fuck, he thought. You cold little piece of shit.
Schilling slid the picture back across the desk away from Ray and appeared to study it himself a moment.
“Yeah, Ray. She just died. Guy looks a bit like you, don’t you think?”
“This guy? Not really.”
“Have a look again.” He handed it back to him.
He’d chosen Billy Shade precisely because he remembered Shade did look a lot like Pye, young and dark and good-looking if you liked them on the sleazy side.
He wondered how Shade was doing m the joint these days. With all those good looks.
“Okay. I guess. A little.” His face lit up suddenly like a kid who’d just been handed a brand-new bicycle. “You think maybe he could be the same guy? I mean the same guy who shot those girls over here?”
Schilling gave it a beat, staring at Pye straight on and then said, “Anything’s possible. But no, Ray. We don’t think he’s the guy who shot those girls over here. We think that was some other guy. We’re actually pretty sure of it.”
He reached for the photo and Ray handed it to him. His face had gone blank again. Maybe it could only be animated by lies.
“Can I see your registry for today?”
“Sure.”
He pulled it out of the desk drawer and opened it and found the page and turned the book toward Schilling. Schilling ran his finger down the page, pretended to look.
“Who else is on today? Besides you?”
“Two girls on housekeeping. Pool man was in this morning but he’s already gone for the day.”
“Your father?”
“Not till tonight.”
“Okay if I talk to the two on housekeeping?”
“Sure. No problem.”
Schilling got out a pad and pencil. “You want to give me their names, Ray.”
“Ginny Robertshaw, she’d be on the second floor. First floor’s Sally Richmond. She’s new, though.”
“We’ll take the new girl first. Where’d I find her?”
“You want me to show you?”
“Nah. You just hold the fort here, Ray. General location’s fine.”
“She’d be working the right side of the pool. Ginny will be over on the left side. Sure you don’t want me to come along? It’s no trouble.”
“No thanks, Ray. I’m a detective, remember? I gather information for a living. I find things, people. Sometimes it takes me a while because I’m kind of slow. But usually I find them eventually. You have a nice day, Ray.”
He found Sally in the very last unit. Ed Anderson had told him she was lovely and he wasn’t kidding. She reminded Schilling of a doe you might surprise in a clearing. Everything about her looked soft and feminine and gentle but you could see raw natural power running beneath it and know there wasn’t a spare ounce of fat on her body.
“Sally Richmond?”
He held out his shield. She put down the two rolls of toilet paper and the tiny bars of soap and brushed at a loose strand of hair.
“Yes?”
“I’m Detective Charlie Schilling. A friend of Ed’s.”
He saw that it was possible for her to blush. But also that she recovered quickly.
“He’s mentioned you. Often. My god! This isn’t about him, is it?”
The concern in her voice was absolutely genuine. He decided right then and there that he liked her.
“No, Ed’s fine. He’s a little worried about you, though.”
She looked puzzled at first but she was quick.
“You mean about the job. You mean Ray.”
“I mean Ray. He come on to you yet?”
She laughed and nodded. “Yesterday. My first day here. Can you believe it?”
“I can believe pretty much anything about Ray Pye. What did Ed tell you about him exactly?”
“That he was a suspect in that murder a few years ago. Your main suspect.”
“Two corrections, Sally. First, it’s not murder, it’s murders. Elise Hanlon died just a few days ago. Second, Ray wasn’t our main suspect, he was our only suspect. Both of us liked him for it from the get-go. In an interview situation that boy’s eyes would go empty as a blue summer sky. I just found out they still can. I’m morally certain he’s our guy, Sally. So is Ed. We just couldn’t put it on him. And now you’re telling me he’s come on to you. And I’m wondering if he didn’t come on to one of those girls back then and she told him thanks but no thanks, and that’s why they’re both of them dead now. You see what I’m saying?”
She saw, all right. He knew he’d disturbed her.
But disturbing her was the point.
“I need this job, Mr. Schilling.”
“No you don’t. There are other jobs. Suppose I told you I’d make it my business to try to find you one?”
“At anywhere near the money? I understand what you’re telling me and I’m not a fool. I’d probably jump at it.”
“Good. In the meantime think about this. Whoever shot Lisa Steiner shot her in the shoulder, in the mouth and directly into her left eye from not three feet away. Elise Hanlon was shot in the head and just below the breast. This was cold-blooded as it gets, Sally. From all I could learn they were a pair of nice young women. No enemies. Nobody needed to do this to them. Somebody just felt like it. I don’t mean to frighten you but you’d do well to stay as far away from Ray as possible until we get you out of here.”
“Okay. Thanks, Mr. Schilling.”
“It’s Lieutenant Schilling. But to you I guess it’s got to be Charlie.”
He pulled the photo out of his pocket and held it out to her.
“Ever see this guy around here?”
“No, sorry.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“Looks a little like Ray, though. Sort of.”
He grinned and put the photograph away.
“Yeah,” he said, “does, doesn’t he.”
He walked away to find the other girl Ginny. It was all smoke and mirrors just in case Ray was paying attention and to cover the fact that the real reason he was here was Sally. That and to shake Ray’s tree a little.
When what he really wanted to do was bulldoze his tree to the ground.
When he was finished going through the motions he went back to the car and slipped the photo in the file and drove on back to the office. He really did wonder how Billy Shade was making out in jail. Because however he was doing, a punk like Pye would probably do just as badly.
Ray, he thought, d
on’t lose your looks. Hang on to ’em a while.
Chapter Eleven
Katherine
By noon the gray rainy mist had burned away but the sunlight felt thick with humidity. There was the lake or Alpine Pool. She’d been told there was another bigger pool somewhere up by the State Forest campgrounds but she didn’t know the campgrounds yet or how to get to the pool and it was far too hot to go hunting around. The lake would be crowded with tourists and summer people. There would be motorboats and fishermen and kids and radios. Alpine Pool was up in the hills, not much more than a swimming hole really, filthy after a good hard rain but probably fine after a light one like today. The pool was mostly used by the locals. Katherine decided she was a local now, like it or not.
She drove to the ridge off Summit Road which was the nearest you could get to the pool by car and parked the little black Corvette her father had given her for her seventeenth birthday on the gravel shoulder. There were only three other cars there besides her own so she figured she could expect some privacy. She took her blanket, towel and beach bag off the passenger seat and headed down the narrow trail through the woods.
It was cooler in the woods but it was a damp cool and it wasn’t long before her skin felt sticky with the breath of all that vegetation. Crossing the wide granite shelf that was open to the sun was better and she might have stopped there on another day and set down her blanket but today she wanted the water. The trail turned rocky and steep. She moved slower, more carefully, aware of her sandals and thought that next time she’d remember to wear tennis shoes instead.
When she reached bottom she knew she’d got it right, taking the pool over the lake. There were only about a dozen to eighteen kids scattered across the wide pebble beach, all of them her age or slightly younger. Not a little kid with a pail or a parent in sight. Only one radio and that was way down the far end where most of them were grouped together. From here she could hear it only faintly. Just four people in the water. The water looked a little silty but not bad at all.
There was just one downer. The single person at the pool who was more than only vaguely familiar to her happened to be Tim Bess.
He was sitting with two other guys about forty feet away. He was wearing yellow boxer trunks and she could see the ridge of spine down his pale skinny back. His shoulders were already burnt and he’d spread them with zinc oxide. He hadn’t noticed her yet but he would. On a beach that size it was inevitable.
Live with it, she thought. Do what you came here to do. Get cool and wet.
She slipped off the short terry-cloth robe. Her blue bikini would probably have appalled her father but there were girls on the beach wearing less. Skin was in this year.
The water was cold at first because of the rain but she dove under and dove again and cold turned to refreshing. She stood and pushed back her streaming wet hair and started swimming. She was a good strong swimmer. Her mother in far saner days had taught her how. Crawl, backstroke, sidestroke left, sidestroke right, breaststroke, butterfly. She alternated them three times each going halfway across to the muddy steep bank opposite and back and then dove and swam underwater toward the beach until she was only in up to her waist, and then she surfaced.
When she wiped her eyes she saw Bess and the other two boys roughly five yards away up to their knees in the water and wading. Bess was talking to the kid with curly red hair and hadn’t seemed to have noticed her. The other two had, though and the guy with the red hair nodded in her direction so that Tim turned to see who or what he was looking at and that was when he saw her. He waved and smiled.
“Hey, Katherine.”
“Hello, Tim.”
Her greeting wasn’t exactly friendly but it wasn’t unfriendly either. It struck just the note she wanted. She dove again. In the opposite direction, giving them a brief view of her butt flashing out of and then back into the water but also telling them that she wished to be left alone, thank you very much. When she surfaced she’d put six more yards between them and she was into deep water. She turned briefly and saw them laughing and splashing at one another near shore and thought, my god, boys and began to swim away, the crawl this time, taking the pool lengthwise.
She did this twice until her muscles began to ache and then turned over on her back and headed for shore. Taking her time, stretching out the burn in her muscles with the backstroke. She was nearly to where she knew she could probably stand and wade the rest of the way in when a head popped up to the left of her not three feet away and of course it was Bess, wearing a great big stupid grin and wiping the water from his eyes wiping his runny nose and sputtering.
Gross.
“Hi again,” he said.
“Hi.”
She was aware that her nipples were erect. Also that he couldn’t seem to keep his eyes off them as he paddled along beside her. What an asshole. She pushed one more time and got to where she knew she could stand and rolled over facing him. The water was up to her neck and cloudy. He couldn’t see much of her nipples anymore. She figured she’d just stay there awhile.
“Where’s Ray?” she said. It was really all she could think of to say to him.
“At work.”
“Ah. Right. Work.”
And that about ran her out of conversation with the guy.
“Look, Tim, I don’t mean to be unfriendly or anything but I came down here to be alone for a while, you know? Relax, take a swim, get some sun, do some reading. Know what I mean?”
“Sure. No problem. I’m just hanging out with the guys over there. Just wanted to say hello. Drop by later and I’ll introduce you if you want. See you.”
He stopped paddling and stood and started splashing his way toward shore.
“Enjoy,” he said.
She didn’t answer. She waited until he was on the sand and toweling dry and then walked out of the water. She realized that while she was swimming the other two boys had relocated slightly—instead of being forty feet away from her blanket and towel, now it was more like thirty. That was a whole lot closer than she’d have wanted but she was damned if she was moving. She was aware of their eyes on her as she toweled off and settled in on the blanket. She rolled the towel into a ball as a pillow for her head and dug her sunglasses and copy of Anais Nin’s House of Incest out of her bag and started reading.
The book was too surreal for her tastes but her rule always was, you start a book, you finish it. This one had the virtue of being short at least and Nin wrote about her fiction so much in the Diaries—which she far preferred to this stuff—that she’d thought she’d ought to give it a try. Now, though, she was bored with the thing.
She glanced across the beach and saw that Bess was faced in her direction and caught him watching her. Damn this kid! He was making her uncomfortable. Which also made her angry. Couldn’t a woman just lie on a beach without some dipstick kid gawking at her, wishing he could crawl all over her?
Go get yourself laid for godsakes.
His eyes darted away. They’d be back though. She’d bet the farm on it.
Okay, schmuck, she thought. I’ll give you something to gawk at.
She dug into the bag for the suntan lotion and took off the cap and set it beside her on the blanket. Then she reached around in back of her and unsnapped the clasp to her halter and slid the straps down off her shoulders. It was the first time her breasts had seen the sun this year though not nearly the first time they’d seen the sun. But they were pale and they’d burn quickly without the lotion and besides, she had the feeling that watching her smooth the lotion over them would unravel Bess completely so she did it slowly, taking care not to look at him, Bess wasn’t even there, feeling the nipples stiffen under her fingers. As in more ways than one, she rubbed it in.
When she was through and her breasts were glistening she lay back on the blanket and closed her eyes. Shutting him out. Shutting everyone out. Feeling the nipples slowly soften again. She wondered how many women went topless here. It was no big deal in California but it might be he
re. She wondered if word would get around. She wondered if he’d tell Ray and if he did, what he’d think.
She decided she really didn’t give a damn on any of these questions and took the sun.
Chapter Twelve
Schilling
Evenings were the worst times, not the nights.
Nights he could lose himself sitting in front of the television set with a couple of beers and it was fine even to fall asleep that way sitting in his chair, feet up on the hassock. He didn’t need the bed.
But evenings like this after leaving Teddy Panik’s the sheer goddamn emptiness of his days would wrap around him like a dull soft glove. The glove concealed a fist. One that could hurt him. He made it a rule not to have more than three or four tops at Teddy’s bar because more than that and he knew he’d be nothing but a drunk again. They were calling them alcoholics these days but that was bullshit. What they were were drunks. The problem was that three or four wouldn’t get him past the glove, that sense of uselessness that had settled over him since Lila took his son Will and daughter Barbara to Arizona to live close to her parents in Mesa.
Will was eleven when that happened and fifteen now. Barbara had just turned seven. It struck him as very interesting that Barbara was Elise Hanlon’s mother’s name too and he wondered if that had anything to do with the bug up his ass on this one. But he didn’t know from psychology and it probably didn’t matter anyway one way or another. The bug was there. Sometimes he thought since Elise died it was just about all that was there.
Ed Anderson called it obsession but there you went with the psychology again.
He’d been a lousy father, he knew that. A slightly better husband. Slightly. There had been so much physical going on between him and Lila that it had the power to smooth out a lot of the rough spots. The sex was wonderful, had been ever since they met in high school. And so was the tenderness. Their sensitivity to each other’s touch remained a constant between them no matter why they were doing the touching, whether it was for reassurance or just holding hands or foreplay. The touch. They’d never lost that. Not until the distance between Jersey and Arizona made it impossible to touch.