at First Sight (2008)

by Stephen Cannell

  I didn’t need some Beverly Hills therapist to explain that, either. The trip here had convinced me I had lost control. My love for Paige Ellis had morphed into an uncontrollable obsession.

  That’s when the door opened and Chandler Ellis walked out of his house. At first I thought he was going to the mailbox. But instead, he walked to the green Suburban parked in the driveway, got in, started the vehicle, and backed out.

  I ducked down as his headlights swept over my car. Then I sat up, and without knowing what the hell I was doing, I started the Taurus.

  I followed him.

  Why did I follow him? I’ve asked myself that question at least a thousand times since all this happened. I wanted to see Paige. I came all this way to maybe find a way to talk to her. So why was I following Chandler? I didn’t know. I couldn’t answer that, except to say some psychic force had taken control and was driving me.

  At any rate, my mind reeled with questions. What was Chandler doing, leaving his house at eleven in the evening? Where was he going? Did he have a girlfriend stashed across town? Was he cheating on Paige? Was he so stupid that he didn’t know he was married to the most desirable woman on earth? What would happen if I caught him with another woman in some cheap motel someplace? What if I found him screwing his brains out? How would I deal with it?

  These were some of my fantasies as I followed him. Of course, the answer to that last one was I’d have to tell her. I couldn’t let somebody as sweet and trusting as Paige live unknowingly with a sleazy adulterer. Well, I couldn’t, could I?

  I was thinking I should try to buy a camera and get some pictures—evidence. And then Chandler pulled the Suburban into a shopping center. It was now almost eleven-fifteen and most of the stores were closed, but the Safeway and a Walgreens were still open. Both were throwing neon light deep into the late-night deserted parking lot.

  I pulled around to the side to stay out of sight. For some reason, Chandler didn’t park out front, but drove through the parking lot and finally pulled the Suburban around to the same side of the store where I was and parked. I was only ten or fifteen yards away, still in the driving lane. My mind whirled. What should I do? Should I wait? Should I leave?

  Without looking at my car, Chandler walked into the drugstore. I stared dumbly at his Suburban. Then I put my rented Taurus in Park with the engine still running. I tried to come to grips with all this.

  “Chick, get the fuck out of here,” I said out loud to myself. But I remind you, I was not in control, unable to change the course of these this events. I was lost, as if some unknown power was setting up tnis maze and forcing me to run through it. So then who was in control here? Who was making up the rules of this game? Not me—at least that’s what I told myself.

  And then, for a fleeting moment, sanity returned. I knew I had to get the hell outta there. I knew I had to get away before he saw me.

  My willpower surged.

  I grabbed the gearshift to put the car in Drive, but as this first sane thought in hours hit me, everything changed. It happened so fast I didn’t even see it coming.

  I still don’t quite understand it. I mean, I know the physics. The chronology. It’s the psychology that baffles me.

  At the very instant I gained control of myself and reached for the shift knob, Chandler came out the back door of the drugstore carrying a small bag from the pharmacy. He saw my headlights, saw that I had sort of blocked his exit. He started to come toward me, waving for me to back up. In a few seconds he would see me. How could I explain my appearance here to him?

  What would I say if he recognized me? “Hey Chandler, whatta you doing here? Small world, right?” He would never go for that. Some coincidences defy explanation and I knew this was one of them. There was no way I could explain this. No way. Or at least that’s what I was convinced of at that moment.

  He was still walking toward me, gesturing, so I slammed the rental into Reverse and hit the gas.

  But I was in the wrong gear and the car lunged forward, not backward. It struck Chandler hard, knocking him down. The front headlight broke and the car shuddered from the impact. Before I could take my foot off the gas, I ran right over him. I heard him scream. I felt the wheels roll over his chest; bouncing the Taurus like a speed bump.

  I slammed on the brakes, opened the door, jumped out, and ran around to see. He was lying under the car just in front of the rear tires. Only his head protruded from underneath. He was barely breathing. Blood had already started coming out of his mouth. The bag of medicine he’d been carrying was strewn on the pavement. I remember looking down. I read the label:

  PAIGE ELLIS:

  DARVOCET for pain.

  One tablet every four hours.

  Funny, how in a time of extreme crisis, something unimportant and stupid like that registers.

  “Help me!” he croaked, his eyes bright but desperate.

  Then he recognized me.

  A strange look of clarity passed across his face. “Chick?” he whispered.

  I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t speak. And then he started to choke on his own blood. It was oozing out of his mouth, oozing around my feet. I jumped back to keep it off my hand-sewn Spanish loafers.

  “Chick … help … ” It was such a low whisper—a moan actually—that I couldn’t even be sure he’d said those exact words.

  I ran back to the driver’s side, jumped into the car, and—God help me—I put it in Drive and inched forward to run over him again, parking the rear wheel on his chest for almost a full minute before pulling off.

  Then I got out, ran around the car, and looked down at him again. His eyes were open, but they were no longer bright. They were lifeless—shiny, but vacant. Dark and cold as an empty house.

  I’d never seen a dead man before, but it was obvious to me that’s what he was.

  My survival instincts took over. I looked around the empty parking lot for a witness.

  Nobody. At least I didn’t see anyone.

  I climbed into the car and squealed out of the lot.

  “Oh, shit. Oh, shit, oh shit,” I moaned, my thoughts a blur as they kaleidoscoped across the event.

  I drove for a mile, then pulled over, leaned out, and threw up into the street. I couldn’t even begin to get my mind around it.

  I didn’t know how all this had happened or why. Didn’t have a clue.

  Had I driven all the way down here just to kill Chandler Ellis, never admitting to myself that was what I was going to do until I did it? Is that why I followed Chandler instead of staying out in front of their house to watch Paige through the window? Did I plan to murder him all along? Did I hit Drive instead of Reverse by mistake, or did I do it on purpose?

  You see now why I’m writing all this down. You see why I’m so confused.

  I didn’t have a clue. I still don’t.

  But read on. It only gets worse.

  Chapter 10

  WHEN I WAS SEVEN, MY GRANDMOTHER USED TO DRAG me to church every Sunday, and after the service she’d make me sit through Sunday school. Even then biblical stories seemed a bit like comic books in their simplicity. I was always bored out of my gourd. Complete waste of time. Almost none of it stuck, but I do remember a few odd religious facts. For instance, Proverbs 27:4 teaches that “Wrath is cruel and anger is outrageous, but who can stand before envy?” Damn good question, especially in light of what just happened.

  I had envied Chandler Ellis, envied him for his looks and his money and for the fact that he seemed to reject all of the meaningless things that in my conscious mind I knew were unimportant, but that seemed to dominate me viscerally. I had spent my life lusting after nonsense. Power symbols like a large house in the status-heavy six hundred block of Elm, or important friends, expensive cars, designer clothes, and gaudy accessories. I had a wife with a killer body, who, I admit, I had long ago tired of making love to, but who still turned heads. It was enough for me that other men lusted for her. She was a sexual benchmark attesting to my powers in the bedroom. B
eing married to a body like that gave me status on the West L. A. cock exchange—identified me as a world-class swordsman. But all these symbols of success, power, and sexual prowess still failed to satisfy me or give me a moment of inner peace.

  I wanted to be envied for my status symbols, and sometimes, I was. But even when I saw envy in the eyes of others, it wasn’t enough. It felt empty because there were always guys like Chandler Ellis, who had more and seemed to care about it less. I envied him because he seemed to fit so tightly inside his skin, comfortable and full of grace, while I wore my hide like one of my dad’s garish sport coats.

  But most of all, I envied his relationship with his wife. I envied the way Paige looked at him when she held his hand. Envied that look of love and adoring devotion that she focused on him every time he spoke. So what happened may not be entirely my fault, at least not if you believe the Bible. Maybe I really couldn’t help myself, because as Proverbs clearly states, “Who can stand before envy?”

  I no longer envied Chandler Ellis. Instead, I’d killed him. Turned him into Charlotte, North Carolina’s latest hit-and-run statistic. And’ I’d accomplished this in a split second without even knowing I was doing it. Then I ran over him a second time, making sure the job was finished, destroying any chance I had of deluding myself later that I had done it by mistake.

  But hold it. Let’s throw a flag at that for a minute. Maybe there is another side to all of this. Maybe there’s a sliver of emotional salvation hiding in this human tragedy.

  Let’s accept, for the moment, the pure insanity of driving six hundred miles to get here just so I could look at another man’s wife through his living-room window. Maybe once I’d followed Chandler to that drugstore and he’d started toward me in the parking lot, I’d had no other course of action. Up till then, I had used bad judgment, but had committed no crime. Once he advanced on me, waving his arms in a threatening way, maybe then I had simply panicked, reacted .. . hit the wrong gear by mistake and run him down. After all, it was a rental car. I was unfamiliar with the gearbox. Maybe I had acted out of pure self-preservation. Maybe I had accidentally hit him, then realized that there was no explanation for my being in Charlotte. Knowing I would be an immediate suspect in a vehicular assault, maybe then and only then had certain brain synapses, bred into me by thousands of years of natural selection and Homo sapiens survival instincts, kicked in. I had done the only thing left to do under the circumstances. Back up, park on his chest, and finish the job, ending any chance for his survival. Kill or be killed. Law of the jungle, primal and pure.

  On the surface, I liked this second scenario a hell of a lot better than the first, but I didn’t trust it. I knew it was bullshit—a cheap rationalization for murder. But in those first moments of fear and confusion after I left the parking lot, I clung to that rationale like a man clinging to the side of a life raft. I was in a swirl of white water, wallowing and swallowing, adrift in a confusing storm of emotions.

  The first hour after I ran Chandler Ellis down was pretty much time lost. The best way to describe it is to say it was reminiscent of one of my old interplanetary drug hazes back when I was ghost-busting on acid. I was in a daze, my reality strobing and morphing into shapes, sounds, and colors I didn’t recognize at the time or remember well later. All the while, I was driving the damn Taurus. Miraculously, I didn’t hit anybody else. My mind was elsewhere, skipping over facts, landing on half-truths, bouncing and flying like a flat stone hurled against the tide.

  And then I found myself sitting in the car parked next to a shimmering lake. I didn’t know its name, or the time, or even where the fuck I was … somewhere near the Township of Salisbury, still in North Carolina, I think. A full moon lit the water. My head was throbbing; my neck and shoulders ached from having clutched the wheel in a vice grip for almost two hours. My whirling mind began to slow and I grabbed for it, trying to regain control, but only managed to hold my turbulent thoughts for a second before they snapped loose, spinning off wildly again. Like sparks flying off a miller’s wheel, tiny particles of reason finally floated down and landed around me.

  Had anybody seen me do it? Somebody in the market? A drunk lying in the shadows? But before I could focus on these questions, my ” thoughts were spinning again, catapulting over broken memories and the verses of old songs, which I chanted mindlessly as I sat there.

  Then another grab for sanity. The car. Was Chandler’s blood on the car? As that lucid, worthwhile question lingered, I suddenly heard myself chanting, “Oh God, oh God, oh God,” as if the Supreme Deity would have anything to do with me now.

  Once more I grabbed. This time I managed to hold my tortured thoughts.

  I locked onto something important. Tire treads.

  I remembered a documentary I saw on A&E dealing with the new forensic science being employed by police departments. Investigators could trace a car using tire tracks. They could make random pattern matches. Isolate something called “unique identifiers.” They could graph the imperfections in the tire tread and scan them into a computer. If they found the car, they could match the tire tread to the unique identifiers found at the crime scene.

  There was also something called “paint fragment analysis.” Tiny paint particles, so small you couldn’t see them, could be left on skin or clothes. They could retrieve dust-sized samples from Chandler’s body and tell what color and make of car the paint came from. I was starting to panic again.

  I got out of the car and walked around to the front. It was a mess. A broken headlight and frame. A caved-in right front fender. Some of the blue paint was scratched and scuffed. There was blood. Chandler’s blood. Not much, but some. It had seeped into the broken headlight. Shit. I had to do something about this.

  I sat on the hard ground and leaned up against the car to think about it, trying to sort out my options. Without warning, I began to cry. Deep, soul-wrenching sobs choked my throat and constricted my breathing. It wasn’t so much that I was feeling sorry for myself.

  Although, truth be told, there was some of that. It was more as if I was saying goodbye to the last remnants of who I thought I was.

  No longer could I accept myself as someone who had been put upon by life. No longer could I blame my emotional shortcomings on my dead father’s fucked-up value system, or on my mother or grandma. In truth, they had all helped to form who I was, shallow and transparent as that man had become. But none of that mattered anymore. I now knew I was no longer struggling against the events of an unfair childhood. I was no longer a victim of my father’s death, or my mother’s low-income circumstances. I couldn’t think of myself as someone put upon by the choices and actions of others. Chick Best, the victim, was gone.

  This new Chick had just committed murder. He had killed another man. This new Chick was an aggressor. A perpetrator. This new Chick had taken a human life, parked on a man’s chest and waited for him to die. I’m telling you, it was an impossible idea to come to grips with.

  Being a victim is so much more satisfying. In failure, as a victim your excuse is built in. It’s not my fault. I had no advantages growing up. My father was a cheap, slick asshole. When a victim succeeds, he has heroically overcome adversity, risen above cultural and sociological disadvantages to win bravely in the face of all odds.

  However, there is no heroic rationale for murder. Murder is pure aggression. Murderers are unredeemable psychotics. So I sat and cried for the loss of the man I had been. I cried until my throat was dry and my eyes were swollen. When I was cried out, I sat in silence, my mind aching, but no longer spinning.

  I knew that I had a lot of things to do, and I had to do them quickly. First I had to repair this fucking car. I couldn’t destroy it or ditch it, because the Hertz Rent a Car in New York City would want to know where it was. If a blue Taurus went missing from Hertz and the police got blue Taurus paint off Chandler’s body, a ten-minute computer run would find me and I would end up hosting a shower party in the North Carolina State Prison.

  I had to
repair the car so no one would notice. I knelt down and studied the right front fender. It was bent. No large paint chips seemed to have been knocked loose, but the rim was scratched and the paint underneath scraped, so that would need to be straightened and repainted. I had driven over Chandler’s chest with the right-side tires. Can skin and clothes be used to match treads? Did I leave tread marks on Chandler or on the pavement? I wasn’t sure, but to be safe, I needed new rubber.

  How long before Chandler Ellis’s death would become front-page news? With luck, it wouldn’t make the papers until tomorrow evening. Of course, because he was related to the L. A. Times Chandlers, the electronic media would jump all over it, pending notification of kin. That meant it could make the TV news by sometime tomorrow, maybe sooner. So there wasn’t much time, and I had a lot to do.

  I looked at my watch. It was still only 1:35 A. M. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since I’d hit Chandler, but in reality it had only been a little over two hours. I opened my wallet and counted my cash. Eighteen hundred dollars. I always carry a lot of cash when I travel because I sometimes incur personal expenses that I don’t want showing up on my Amex card. Don’t ask, because I’m not going to explain that further.

  I got back in the Taurus and drove all night, heading north. I stopped at a self-serve car wash in Richmond around 5:30 A. M. and scrubbed the front end of the car until I was pretty sure there was no blood left. I bought some dark glasses and a ball cap at a drugstore. The tire store I eventually picked was in Newport News, Virginia. It was in a grungy neighborhood full of low-end businesses where it looked to me like cash would talk. It was seven in the morning when I parked out front of Dale’s Tire Town and shut off the engine. Dale hadn’t worked too hard for his slogan. In red script it read: DALE’S Where the Rubber Meets the Road. Pu-leeze.