Touchy and Feely

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Feely!’ called Serenity, from her bedroom. ‘Touchy wants you!’

  Feely hurried awkwardly downstairs, almost tripping on the cuffs of his borrowed chinos. He struggled into his shoes, and opened up the front door. Robert was standing in the driveway, next to his car, which had almost a foot of snow on the roof. The exhaust was smoking in the cold, so that Robert looked like a magician, surrounded by vapor.

  ‘Where the hell were you?’ Robert demanded. ‘I’m doing my best to be unnoticeable here. A ghost, remember. Instead of that, I have to wake up the entire neighborhood.’

  ‘You could have knocked on the door.’

  ‘You think I’d ever touch that knocker? That knocker is bad luck. Or maybe you don’t believe in bad luck.’ He held up his heavily bandaged left hand. ‘This is bad luck. I think it’s turning septic, in which case I will probably wind up with blood poisoning and everybody will get what they want. To you, Feely, I leave my CD collection.’

  ‘That’s OK, I don’t dig Bob Dylan too much.’

  ‘That’s because you were born at the wrong time. Not to mention the wrong place. That’s the trouble with being a baby, you don’t have any choice. You take your first look out of your mother’s muff and even if you don’t like what you see there’s no turning back. Come here.’

  He beckoned Feely round to the back of the car. With a sweep of his right elbow he cleared most of the snow off. Then he opened the trunk and said, ‘There—what do you think of that?’

  Inside, the trunk was lined with assorted cushions, some of them satin, some of them brocade, some of them plain chair-cushions filled with latex sponge. On one side of the trunk was a plaid traveling-blanket, carefully rolled up. Robert reached inside the trunk and unrolled it.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘What do you think of this baby?’

  Lying on the blanket was a black rifle, with black telescopic sights and a matt black stock.

  ‘You know how much this cost? Over ten thousand dollars. It’s a Remington 700 Sniper Rifle, .308 caliber. Actually it belongs to a friend of mine who is not yet aware that he lent it to me. He’s in Chile for nine months, on business.’

  ‘I couldn’t shoot that,’ said Feely, brushing the snow from his eyes.

  ‘Of course you can. It’s a beauty. It takes five .308 rounds, in a flush internal magazine, and you load each round manually, using the bolt. It’s very slow, but that’s not the point. It has a bullet velocity of 2,650 feet per second and the great thing is that the .308 bullet retains a significant amount of energy after passing completely through the human body, so it keeps on going for several hundred yards after hitting its target which makes it much more difficult for crime scene investigators to find it. It also has a stop percentage of ninety-nine percent. You know what a stop is? A stop is when you hit somebody when they’re trying to attack you, and they stop attacking you; or when you hit somebody when they’re running away and they fall down after ten yards. That’s the technical police definition of a stop.’

  ‘I still couldn’t shoot it.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Categorically not.’

  ‘Not just not, but categorically not?’ Robert pulled a philosophical kind of face. ‘Well, that’s up to you. That’s entirely up to you. I can’t use it, even though I made myself the solemn promise that I would bring down one happy person every day seven days a week. With my hand all screwed up I couldn’t hold it steady. But there you are. Different people have different values, don’t they? I picked you up when I saw you thumbing for a ride in that blizzard because that’s the kind of person I am. I feel that I was put on earth to help my fellow men. But if you don’t want to help me, I can’t argue with that. Like I say, it’s entirely up to you.’

  Feely said, ‘Don’t get me wrong, Robert. I really appreciated you picking me up. I can’t tell you how much gratitude that filled me with. But you’re asking me to foreshorten a person’s life.’

  ‘What are you talking about? You won’t be doing anything. You’re my proxy, that’s all. You may be holding the actual physical rifle, but it’s me who’s doing the shooting. If a puppet hits you on the head, it’s not the puppet’s fault, is it? You don’t punch the puppet, you punch the guy who’s got his hand stuffed up the puppet’s rear end.’

  Feely looked dubious. He felt dubious. The snow fell on his black curly hair and on his eyelashes, and somehow he looked more Christlike than ever.

  Robert said, ‘The great thing is, nobody will see you doing it. This is the pièce de resistance.’ There was a large STP sticker on the rear of the car, which he peeled back to reveal two circular holes drilled right through the metal.

  ‘The back seats fold down, so that you can lie flat on your belly in the trunk. The muzzle protrudes about a half-inch through the lower hole and you can aim through the upper hole. You can take as long as you like to get a fix on your target, because nobody can see you, and when you’ve taken your shot, all you have to do is climb out of the trunk, push the back seat upright, and drive off, and nobody is any the wiser.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Feely. All the same, he was very impressed by this mobile sniper’s-nest. The idea of hitting back at the world which had treated you so badly, while comfortably lying on a pile of cushions, that appealed to him somehow.

  Robert hung his left arm around Feely’s shoulders. ‘It’s up to you, Feely. Like I say, different people have different values. When I offered you that ride, I wasn’t thinking to myself, what can this guy give me in return? It’s like last night . . . I shared Serenity with you, didn’t I? I actually shared her with you. But did I think, what’s Feely going to do to repay me for being so generous? Of course not.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Robert.’

  ‘What’s to be sorry for? She really goes, that Serenity, don’t she? She really likes it. How do you say that in Cuban, she really likes it?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . ella tiene furor uterino.’

  ‘Is that it? Ella tiene furor uterino? She has a furious uterus? That’s terrific. That’s amazing. So what are you going to do, Feely? Are you going to shoot this rifle for me or not?’

  Feely looked at him and even though he didn’t say anything Robert knew that he was going to do it. He winked, and gave him a giddyap click with his tongue, and then he slammed the trunk. ‘Let’s get some coffee with a slug of something in it, and then let’s drive out someplace and find ourselves a happy person. How about that?’

  Interview with the Suspect

  Steve was staring out of the window in the interview room when they brought William Hain up from the cells. Snow was teeming into the parking lot, and the morning was so dark that it felt like the middle of the night.

  William Hain was wearing a grubby green-and-white sweater with huge hexagonal patterns on it, and a worn-out pair of gray Levis. He hadn’t shaved, and he smelled as if he hadn’t washed for a while.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Steve.

  William Hain sat down, and looked around the room, and coughed, and shuffled his feet.

  ‘You’re sure you don’t want a lawyer present? It’s your right.’

  William Hain shook his head. ‘What do I need a lawyer for? I took the van, that’s all, and I already admitted to that. I didn’t murder nobody.’

  ‘Your van was seen opposite the Mitchelson house at the time that Ellen Mitchelson was shot dead. Directly opposite, parked in such a way that she was right in your line of fire.’

  ‘I don’t own no gun. You can’t have a line of fire if you don’t own no gun.’

  ‘But you admit you were parked there.’

  ‘I was only there for a couple of minutes. I needed a leak.’

  ‘Can you remember what time that was?’

  ‘I don’t know. Eight fifteen or thereabouts.’

  ‘So what did you do? You stopped, you relieved yourself, then what?’

  ‘I drove down to Danbury. I was collecting some termites from Paulie’s Aquarium.’

  ‘Termites?�
�

  ‘That’s correct. Rick Bristow got me some supplementary reproductives from North Australia.’

  ‘What the hell is a supplementary reproductive when it’s at home?’

  ‘If the king termite or the queen termite happens to die, they’re like sitting in the dugout, waiting to take over.’

  ‘I see. So what time did you get to Paulie’s Aquarium?’

  ‘Around, um, nine thirty I guess.’

  ‘And this Rick Bristow . . . he can vouch that you were there?’

  ‘Nope. The aquarium was closed. There was no notice or nothing in the window to say why. I hung around for a while and then I drove back home.’

  ‘Did anybody see you outside Paulie’s Aquarium?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just sat in the van hoping that Rick was going to show up, but when he didn’t I drove back home. I stayed at home the rest of the day, finishing off my termite warren. Did you take a look at my termite warren, when you was looking around my house?’

  Steve was doodling a laughing tree on the notepad in front of him. Loners and psychopaths, he hated them. They rarely had alibis, and they rarely had rational explanations for what they were doing. Yet he couldn’t lock them up just because they liked spiders, or guns, or pornography, and nobody saw their comings and goings, and they smelled.

  He was still trying to think of something else to ask William Hain when Jim Bangs knocked on the door and beckoned him outside. He went out into the corridor, leaving the door two or three inches ajar, so that he could keep his eye on William Hain’s back.

  ‘We finished checking over the van,’ said Jim.

  ‘Don’t tell me. Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing to indicate that a firearm was discharged inside it, or that a firearm was ever carried around in it.’

  ‘Anything else suspicious?’

  ‘Mice droppings, shredded-up newspaper, empty orange-juice cartons, two copies of Jugs and oceans of peanut shells.’

  ‘Jugs? What’s that? A pottery magazine?’

  ‘There’s no forensic evidence that William Hain is your shooter, Steve.’

  Steve rubbed the back of his neck. ‘It’s beginning to look like our witness may have been mistaken, at least about the time-frame.’

  ‘I’m sorry . . . but if there was only one single grain of gunpowder in that van, we would have found it.’

  ‘Thanks, Jim.’

  ‘What are you going to do? Let him go?’

  ‘I guess I don’t have very much choice. Besides, I wouldn’t want his spiders to go hungry.’

  Sissy’s Warning

  Doreen came into headquarters at 10:07, bringing a box of assorted donuts from the Litchfield Home Bakery.

  ‘I’m trying to lose weight,’ Steve told her, picking out a caramel-frosted donut with sprinkles.

  ‘You should worry more.’

  ‘You think I’m not worried? I’ve just had to release the only suspect we had for shooting Ellen Mitchelson, and Alan’s still insisting that he’s guilty of sexual assault.’

  ‘You know he’s not guilty. That boy couldn’t sexually assault a fly.’

  Steve pushed the rest of his donut into his mouth. ‘Frankly, Doreen, I don’t know what to do next.’

  ‘Have one of those cinnamon ones. They’re to die for.’

  He was still clapping powdered sugar off his hands when Trooper Rudinstine came in. Trooper Rudinstine was tall, wide-shouldered, with scraped-back hair. Doreen always said that she really would have fancied her, if only she were a man.

  ‘Sir? There’s a woman downstairs who wants to see you. She says that she has some urgent information on the Mitchelson homicide.’

  ‘Oh, really? Did you get her name?’

  Trooper Rudinstine checked the piece of paper she was holding. ‘Mrs Cecilia Sawyer.’

  ‘OK . . . what are your impressions?’

  ‘She’s a senior, sir.’

  ‘I see. And? You’re trying very hard not to smile, Rudinstine. There’s something else you’re not telling me.’

  ‘Nothing, sir. I guess you’d call her individual, that’s all.’

  Steve’s head dropped forward onto his chest. ‘Just what I need. An individual senior with urgent information on a random homicide. They don’t teach you about this at detective school, believe me.’

  Trooper Rudinstine ushered Sissy and Trevor into Steve’s office. She had been right about Sissy’s appearance. Steve didn’t know how many other sixtyish women were walking around Litchfield County in floor-length sable coats and hats that looked like upturned fire-buckets, but he guessed that they weren’t exactly thick on the ground. He stood up and shook Sissy and Trevor by the hand and offered them a seat, while Doreen stood in the corner with her mouth full of donut, smirking at him.

  Sissy opened her black crocodile purse and took out Le Cocher Sans Coeur. She laid it on Steve’s desk, and said, ‘There.’

  ‘What’s this?’ said Steve, frowning at it but not picking it up.

  ‘Le Cocher Sans Coeur. The Coachman Without a Heart. He comes from the DeVane deck of fortune-telling cards, first printed in France in 1763.’

  ‘And this has exactly what to do with the Mitchelson homicide?’

  ‘This has nothing to do with the Mitchelson homicide per se. This is warning you about the next homicide to be committed by the same person.’

  ‘Oh, I see. The next homicide.’ Behind Sissy’s back, Doreen was almost choking.

  Trevor leaned forward and said, ‘My mother has a gift, Detective. To tell you the truth, I always used to think that it was hocus-pocus. But last night I felt it too, and how. My wife wasn’t enthusiastic about me coming up here, she said I was suffering from displaced guilt because my mother doesn’t want to come to Florida with us for a winter vacation. But the force was so strong that I couldn’t resist it.’

  ‘The force? As in, “May the force be with you”? That kind of force?’

  ‘In a way, yes,’ said Sissy. ‘A collective unconscious, like Jung wrote about.’

  ‘OK,’ said Steve, cautiously. ‘So what is the card warning me about?’

  ‘It’s quite explicit,’ said Sissy. ‘The DeVane cards always are, if you know how to read them correctly. A man on a vehicle will be killed but the vehicle will keep on going, toward “Catastrophe.”’

  ‘And that’s going to be the next homicide, by the same person who killed Ellen Mitchelson?’

  Sissy nodded. ‘I had to show you in person, because I don’t think you would have believed me, otherwise.’

  Doreen gave a suppressed snort and donut crumbs blew out of her nose. She had to leave the room, but even when she had closed the door behind her, Steve could hear her laughing in the corridor. He had to bite the inside of his cheek to stop himself from smiling—so hard that he could taste blood.

  Steve said, ‘I, ah—I think I can see what the card is telling me, but I’m not sure I understand where the force comes into it.’

  Sissy made it obvious that she was trying her best to be patient. ‘Detective Wintergreen, any strong emotion causes a ripple in the collective unconscious. Anger, especially, and love; and I am very sensitive to both.’

  ‘So you felt—anger?’

  ‘Exactly. Yesterday—after Ellen Mitchelson was killed—I felt an irresistible compulsion to drive up to Canaan. Somebody in Canaan is harboring such rage and frustration that they feel the need to shoot innocent people to get their revenge. It could be a man or a woman, but I have the feeling that it’s probably a man.

  ‘I saw Ellen Mitchelson’s murder before it happened. This card, look, La Poupée Sans Tête. I’ve had several other warnings as well. I must beware a man locked in a chest. I must be careful of a trap.’

  Steve looked at the cards and nodded and then he handed them back. ‘Ms Sawyer, I know that you have the very best intentions, and that you’re only trying to show how public-spirited you are, but you have to see this from my point of view.’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ said Sissy.
‘Good heavens above, I’d be skeptical, if I were in your shoes. Here you sit, trying to solve a homicide using all the latest techniques and sophisticated police methods, and some batty old broad comes into your office with a dogeared deck of cards and tells you that she knows who did it, and what they’re going to do next. I’m surprised you don’t give me the bum’s rush.’

  Steve stared at Sissy, and Sissy stared back at him, and he saw something in her eyes that made him feel as if he had lost a minute of his life—as if the morning had subtly changed without him being aware of it.

  ‘You know who did it?’ he asked her.

  ‘There are three people involved—two male and one female—but only one of them is the prime mover. See this card? Les Trois Araignées, the Three Spiders, two white and one black. I’ve seen them, and I’m sure that they’re the right people. The force led me directly to the house where they live.

  ‘See this card? I saw one of the men chopping wood, outside the house, and he accidentally chopped his fingers while the other one laughed at him. It was almost an exact re-enactment of what you see in the picture.’

  ‘And this was yesterday, in Canaan?’

  ‘That’s right. They’re living in a house on Orchard Street. I don’t know what number it is, but it has an SUV outside, covered with a blue tarp.’

  Trevor said, ‘You can go check, if you don’t believe her.’

  Steve kept staring at her, turning his ballpen end-over-end. ‘It’s not really a question of not believing her, Mr Sawyer. It’s a question of resources.’

  Sissy smiled at him. ‘It’s nothing to do with resources. The real problem is, you can’t think how to explain to your colleagues in Canaan that you’ve been given a hot tipoff by a fortune-teller. And suppose it turns out that the fortune-teller’s wrong? They’re still going to be jerking your chain about it at your retirement party, aren’t they? They’ll be calling you Gypsy Rose Wintergreen.’

  ‘OK,’ Steve admitted. ‘But you can see my difficulty. I can’t send troopers around to the house without reasonable cause.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Sissy. ‘Let me tell your fortune. If it’s one hundred percent accurate, you’ll agree to send officers round to the house on Orchard Street. If it’s wrong in any respect, Trevor and I won’t say another word, and we’ll go home.’