The Sixteenth Man

by Thomas B. Sawyer

  The tire-tracks began to parallel the creek, dropping to only a few feet above the gently flowing water. Scrubby trees and brush extended their branches over the stream. Charlie tapped the brake pedal a couple of times to alert Marjorie so she wouldn’t rear-end him. She dropped back, and Charlie slowed, stopped. Marjorie pulled up behind him. She climbed out of the Chevvie and, illuminated by the spill from the dome light, held onto the door for support, mutely watching him approach.

  Charlie hissed: “Close the door. Gently.”

  Marjorie hugged herself as she joined him at the rear of the pickup. At Charlie’s directions she lent an automaton-like hand. Which was okay with him. More of a make-work distraction for her than any substantive help for him, it maintained the calm he needed. First, they dragged-pulled Joe Bob’s mattress-pad shrouded corpse off the truck-bed, rolled it to within a few feet of the shallow creek-bank. Then, from the Chevvie’s trunk, Charlie collected a roll of duct-tape, plus several red bricks he carried for snow-traction. He quickly taped them – and the car-battery carcass he’d discovered behind the pickup-seat – to the mattress-pad. During this he kept up a whispered, hopefully reassuring monologue about how Marjorie should trust him – it was all going to work out. Finally, he guided Joe Bob Millgrim’s body feet first over the edge, allowed it to slide almost silently into the water, where it quickly vanished.

  Charlie briefly debated whether or not to ditch his .38, decided against it – for now, anyway. He returned to Marjorie’s side. She seemed to be staring out at the dark stream. Her hands had stopped shaking. He tried to read her face, to guess what he was seeing beyond the fatigue and fading beauty. Sadness? Anger? Regret? A lesson learned?

  Her eyes began to fill.

  After a beat she looked at him. “Eight lousy years, Charlie. I mean is that such a big goddam deal...?”

  THIRTEEN

  Present Time

  Wednesday

  “I’ll be right down.” Packard switched off the intercom, glanced at the time. 8:57 AM.

  Oboy.

  He threw some clothes on, hurried downstairs, thankful that Leslie had awakened him, that she hadn’t let herself in, but wishing she’d telephoned instead. He yanked the door open, buttoning his shirt with his other hand.

  Leslie was in full makeup, dressed in one of her killer outfits, holding a sack of bagels. She was startled by his appearance. “God, you look like you had a wretched night.”

  “Thanks.”

  “That isn’t what I wanted to say. Are you all right?”

  “I’ve been better.” He reticently allowed her to enter the foyer.

  “I thought you could use some moral support. Meaning protection from Daddy.” She proffered the sack. “Cinnamon-raisin and cranberry. Am I forgiven?”

  Packard summoned the best face he could manage. “Hey, nothing to forgive.”

  It wasn’t good enough. “Jesus, that was convincing.”

  “Les, I’m barely awake.”

  “Yes, well you’d better get your ass in gear or my father’s going to eat you alive. Now, am I invited in or what?”

  Packard realized that he’d been unconsciously – or maybe consciously – blocking her path. “Of course.” He stepped aside as Leslie moved past him. “By the way, I’ve got company.”

  At that instant, just ahead of Leslie, the door to his study opened and Kate Norris emerged, tucking her shirt into her jeans, toothbrush clenched in her teeth, hair not quite together.

  Leslie spotted her before Kate noticed them. Icily: “I guess you do.”

  “Oh. Hi.” Kate’s smile was as open as her manner. “I’ll bet you’re Leslie. He told me all about you. I’m Kate Norris.”

  “Miss Norris showed up late last night and---”

  “How nice – for both of you.” Leslie indicated his den. “I assume he showed you his hobby. Did he tell you how I don’t understand him? Or why---”

  “Oh, shit. C’mon, Leslie---”

  “...Why anyone in their right mind would want to walk away from a career that---”

  “Dammit – I really don’t need this.”

  “Funny, neither do I.” She shoved the bag of bagels at him, headed for the door.

  “Oforchristsake. “

  The door slammed shut behind her. Packard’s shoulders sagged.

  Kate studied her toothbrush, then: “I know I’ve got no business saying this, but she was way out of line.”

  Leslie stalked out of Packard’s condo, sped away in her BMW, disappeared around the next corner. The blue Taurus rolled slowly away from the curb. The man at the wheel accessed his phone’s stored numbers, called the first one. Then as he neared the rear of Kate’s muddy Bronco: “Run Montana four seven alpha zebra five four two.” He drove on past the condo, turned left at the corner.

  The male on the other end cleared his throat. “Okay, here we go. She’s in the system. Katherine – with a k – Norris – that’s n as in---”

  The man nodded. “What is she now? About thirty?”

  “Twenty-eight. Bozeman address. Deputy Director, Forest and Shoreline Federation-dot-org. Tree-hugging outfit. Last eyeballed – let’s see – three months ago. Negative. Communications monitoring, ongoing. Negative. You need phone numbers – SSI – credit cards?”

  “Throw ‘em in my voice-mail.” The man punched end. If he’d been someone else, he would have smiled. He turned left again, toward the campus.

  Back on Packard’s street, at the far corner, past where the man had been parked was an ancient, beat-up International pickup truck. South Dakota tags, heavily tinted windows, its once-bright blue paint now a dull, oxidized gray-and-rust-color. Fastened to the truck’s bed by cables and corroded turnbuckles was a weathered, dented camper-body. In the truck’s cab an elderly, somewhat overweight woman sat very still. Her roundish, still-pretty face was lived-in, comfortable with who she was. Behind ever-present dark glasses, her intensely blue eyes were clear, youthful, and quick-moving – almost catlike – the kind that noticed everything. Only when she leaned forward would it have become apparent to anyone that she was tense. She reached her right hand beneath the dash – and touched the .45 caliber Colt automatic in its holster, which was fastened to the rear of the radio. As if for assurance. But when she sat back, she was not noticeably more relaxed.

  Within a few minutes of Kate Norris’s arrival the night before, she had filled Packard in on everything she knew about her grandfather, Charles Callan. It wasn’t much. She had for instance no knowledge of what he might have been doing in Moab in late 1963 – whether he was just passing through on his way home to Reno, or if he was there in his private investigator capacity. All she seemed to know for sure was that he was never heard from after Moab.

  Packard had guided Kate into the kitchen, mostly so he could sit down while keeping her in a less-intimate, less-comfortable setting than the living room. His fatigue notwithstanding, he was hooked sufficiently that he wasn’t quite ready to send her away. But it was close. Pointedly, he did not offer her food or drink.

  She started to reach into her backpack. “There’s other stuff---”

  Packard stopped her. “Let’s back up a little. Why come to me with this? Why not George Quinn over in Moab?”

  “Because – hey, I know this may sound crazy – but if that skeleton is my grandfather – then his disappearance and your assistant’s murder – I think they might be connected.”

  Packard stared at her, re-processing everything – his impressions about the bloody scene at the dig site, Quinn’s observations and surmises, Scott’s words, his suspicions that his apartment had been searched. His own crazy hunch.

  Kate misread his look. “You’re gonna send for the men in white suits, right?”

  “What about distinguishing characteristics? Did your mother ever mention that he had a limp, or broken bones?”

  “No... Listen, are you saying you---?”

  “Okay – hard question. Couldn’t this have been done with a phone call or a lett
er?”

  “Instead of my showing up on your doorstep in the middle of the night. Not to mention driving all the way from Montana. I figured you’d ask me that.”

  “If you’ll forgive me, the word ‘obsessive’ leaps to mind.” He wished it hadn’t come out so waspishly, but she didn’t seem to take offense.

  “Oh, you’ve got that right. I mean you should’ve heard my roommate. When I saw the piece, I let out this scream and she went ‘God, now maybe you can put this crap behind you so I won’t have to listen to it anymore.’ Anyway – I didn’t mean to sound flip.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  She became distant, as if revisiting things she’d long ago filed away. Then she looked at Packard, her words full of conviction. “For starters – I know it’s him. I know it here.” She paused, touched her breast, then: “And two – this is important to me. Personally.”

  Uh-huh.

  “Miss Norris, look, maybe we could do this another time---”

  “My mother – she believed he was responsible for her mother’s death.”

  Ohgod...do I really want to go there...?

  “You mean – your grandfather killed your grandmother?”

  Kate nodded. “And I want to prove she was wrong. No. I need to.”

  She plunged ahead. “My mother was bitter – said her mom complained that he wasn’t much of a husband, that he fooled around, that they were always short of money.” She paused, then: “But I think it was something else...”

  Packard was annoyed that he’d let her ratchet up his curiosity, made him wonder why she cared so deeply about such old business, about someone she never knew. And raised a few more possibilities about this odd set of bones. He waited for her to elaborate.

  She had picked up the old photos, peered at them. “I don’t know – I look at these, at his face, and I think, maybe he was all those things. A bad guy. But I can’t see it. And I sure don’t see a - a wife-murderer.”

  Packard rose, began to prepare a pot of coffee.

  Kate continued. “It was odd, her hating him so – my mom. Because what I remember is that whenever she’d tell me about her childhood, it was mostly about him. Places they went together. Good times they had.”

  Her words resonated for Packard. Images. Playing catch with his dad in that warm, singular orange light of so many summer evenings. Side-by-side with him in his basement workshop, awed by his mastery of saws, drills and the like. Saturdays with him at the racetrack following the older man’s far-into-Friday-night calculator-assisted attempts to predict the winners. Indulging Matt in art classes starting at age seven, despite an almost religious belief in mathematics – of a finite, specific answer to everything – that rendered him unable to imagine that one might make a career out of such unstructured frivolity as “drawing pictures.”

  And yet, perhaps like Kate’s mother, much of that was overridden by a downside. In Packard’s case, the lectures. A well-meaning man, his dad was convinced he could make his son perfect by relentlessly badgering the boy about his shortcomings, from social gaffes to quitting the Boy Scouts before becoming an Eagle to displaying animosity toward his parents – and, to young Matt, anyway – on and on. Among the costs to him as a teenager had been contemplation of suicide, and as an adult, years on the couch and, for the wrong reasons, pursuit of a career that had never been a really good fit. And more recently, making posthumous peace with his father. And a decision, finally, to let himself go where his life wanted to take him.

  Kate gripped her elbows. “I think partly I’m trying to do this for my mother. To redeem him for her, sort of.” Then she quickly added: “But mostly it’s for me...”

  Packard liked her self-awareness. It seemed honest, unedited. He smiled.

  “...What?”

  He shook his head, apologetic for throwing her off-balance, gestured for her to proceed.

  She produced a folder from which she removed photocopies of three newspaper clippings, their backgrounds medium gray, consistent with the originals having yellowed. Two were from the Reno Evening Gazette. The first, dated December 2, 1963, described the death of her grandmother, Phyllis Callan, in a fire the previous evening that destroyed the Callan residence. Reno authorities considered both the fire and her death to be accidental, Mrs. Callan presumably succumbing to smoke inhalation. The piece listed husband Charles and daughter Lynn as survivors.

  The second news item was dated January 3, 1964. It was headlined Local Investigator Disappears. The story went on to say that Charles Callan had vanished about a month earlier, around the time his wife perished. An unnamed Reno Police source recalled seeing Callan about ten days prior to the fire. While admitting the fire was at that point being re-examined with an eye to the possibility of arson/homicide, Police denied he was a suspect. Friends and business associates of Charles Callan were unable to account for his whereabouts, nor could they provide information about his movements over the previous six weeks.

  “That ‘unnamed police source’ – I tracked him down about three years ago. Edwin Brackett. At a nursing home in Carson City. He was pretty much out of it, but he remembered my grandfather. Apparently they’d had some run-ins with each other. He said granddad had come to see him about some kind of domestic surveillance case, but he was drew a blank about the details. Then he recalled that for awhile they suspected him of killing his wife and torching their house.”

  ‘Obsessive’ may have been an understatement. But it was a grabber. Whether or not Kate’s grandfather was the sixteenth man, he had clearly been a piece of work.

  The third clipping was from the December 12, 1963 Los Angeles Times, a tiny item headed Valley Woman Found Dead. The body of Emily Callan, 59, had been discovered in her Studio City apartment by a neighbor. She had apparently died several days earlier, of natural causes. It mentioned that Mrs. Callan was a freelance Script Supervisor, that there were no known survivors.

  Packard re-read the dates. “Jesus. Your grandmother, grandfather and great-grandmother.”

  “All within a four-week period. And it started only a few days after the postcard was mailed.”

  “Do you suppose he could’ve been – involved in something illegal?”

  “I don’t know. Not that I entirely trust it, but my impression is, it would’ve been out of character. I mean – his only police record was for a couple of speeding tickets and an arrest for breaking and entering. For which he was acquitted. No theft. So I figure that probably had something to do with his detective business. Except – when all this happened...” She gestured at the clipping. “...he and my grandmother were in financial trouble. At least from what I could find.”

  “So it could be he wasn’t very good at what he did.”

  She threw him a look.

  “Sorry.”

  Kate tossed her hand. “Hey, it’s cool. It’s also possible.”

  “What about his cases, the clients he had...?”

  She shook her head. “If there were any files I don’t know what became of them. What’s interesting is – city records show that the building where he had his office was bulldozed in January, 1964. Oh – and something else. I tried to find his dental records – youknow on the off-chance they might be useful someday. His dentist’s office? That was destroyed the same night my grandmother’s house caught fire. A gas-explosion.”

  Kate’s look and intonation said it all – she was convinced these long-ago events were linked. That Packard was beginning to agree, to find it plausible, made him uneasy. It was the stuff of nutcases and whackos. Besides – what in hell could the connection be? Packard blinked, his tired eyes slow to read the oven-clock. It was after one AM. He’d had little sleep in the past two days. He rubbed his temples.

  “Look, Dr. Packard, this isn’t a paranoid fantasy. There’s---”

  Packard broke in: “The postcard. Any idea what he was referring to that was going to be ‘okay’?”

  “Not for sure, but my guess is it was about my mom having a
baby. She told me I had a half-brother who died in infancy – way before I was born. She was sixteen in 1963. I don’t think she was married at the time. That’s the other thing. Maybe this is armchair psychiatry, but I’m more than halfway convinced a lot of my mom’s anger toward her dad was because of when he disappeared – just at the time she needed him most.”

  “That’s not unreasonable. So – he addresses the card ‘care of.’ She would have been – visiting his mother, Emily when she – Emily – died?”

  “That’s what I figure. But Mom never said. And I only got those clippings a few years ago – long after she and my father were murdered.”

  “Murdered? Your parents?”

  “That’s what I was about to tell you.”

  “I’m sorry.” He wished he could have said something – anything – less trite.

  She continued – with some difficulty. “I – was eleven. Almost. Anyway, the police called it a ‘home invasion robbery.’ I think they said it was the first one in Laramie. The thing was – I was there...” She looked away. “...under the bed.”

  “You saw it?”

  Kate swallowed, then: “They never saw me. I managed to sneak out the back while they were setting fire to the place.”

  “Jesus...”

  “All I took with me was my doll-suitcase. That’s where I kept my little-kid treasures – like those snapshots and the postcard.”

  “My god... How do you get past something like that?”

  Kate shrugged. “I had nightmares for a few years. My grandparents, the Norrises – they came and got me the next day – took me back to Vermont to live with them. Years later they told me I was virtually catatonic. For almost a month.”

  “Were their killers ever caught?” Packard poured two mugs of coffee, handed her one.

  “No.” Kate poured skim milk into hers, stirred it. “For most of my childhood I figured okay maybe we were just a youknow jinxed family. I mean growing up I was like – this total outsider. Kids would ask me about my parents, and I’d just change the subject – or else I’d make up stories. Once I said they died climbing Mount Everest, only it got back to the Norrises and there was hell to pay. They weren’t big on lying – or saying much of anything for that matter.” Kate laughed at the memory.