at First Sight (2008)

by Stephen Cannell

  “Beautiful service,” he said, not really looking at me, but keeping his gray eyes on the people milling around in the rectory.

  “Yeah, great,” I replied.

  “What’cher name?” he asked. So I told him.

  “Not from around here, are you, Chick?” he asked.

  “Flew in for the funeral. Got here like an hour ago.”

  “L. A., right?”

  Now I sort of turned to look at him, because how the hell could he have known that? I’d never met this guy.

  “It’s the accent,” he smiled. “Flat vowels—that’s always West Coast. I’m guessing L. A. ‘cause a the tan and the little Valley thing you got going there, putting the word ‘like’ in a sentence where it don’t belong.”

  “Doesn’t belong,” I corrected coldly. If he was going to fuck with my grammar, I’d fuck with his.

  “But I’m right, no? It’s a hobby a mine tryin’ to guess where people are from by their accents.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I’m from L. A., the carjack capital of the world.”

  “Yeah, I read about that. I also read you people kill each other over bad lane changes.” He smiled benignly. “What’s the deal with all that?”

  “Footballus-interruptus,” I smiled. “We’re all still pissed the Rams moved to St. Louis.”

  “Right. Good one. That explains it.”

  He smiled back at me—bad teeth, heavy tobacco stains. A real hode. I was just about to leave when he stopped me with his next question.

  “What’s your connection to the deceased?”

  It seemed to me like a funny way to put it, calling Chandler “the deceased.” It was almost as if he hadn’t known him at all.

  “Friend,” I said. “What’s yours?”

  “I’m protecting his rights. Making sure he gets the best that the city of Charlotte can provide.”

  “I’m sorry, what? You’re with the city?”

  “Yes, sir, work for the city.” Then he went on. “So you knew Chandler in L. A. before he moved here?”

  “Hawaii. We met a few months ago, became friends.”

  “Musta been some quick friendship. Only known him for a few months. Flew all the way in from L. A. for his funeral.”

  “Yeah … yeah, we … I’m doing some Internet advertising for Paige, so naturally … “

  I stopped. Something was wrong about this guy. He looked at me as if he could see beneath my skin, his eyes suddenly like lasers, peeling off surface paint.

  “… So, naturally, you came.” He finished my sentence for me. “Yeah,” I said. “What exactly is it you do for the city?” I asked. “I investigate homicides?’

  “Oh … ” How could I have missed it? The bad haircut, the cheap clothes, the bowling-alley personality. Cop. I was standing here like a moron, shooting the shit with the very guy who was employed to catch me.

  I’m not one to spend a lot of time worrying about bad karma, metaphysics, or spiritual payback, but even for me this was a little spooky. For a second, I stood looking away from him, trying to figure out how to take it from here. I’d already sorta stepped in it by telling this guy I’d only known Chandler for a few months—telling him I came all the way from L. A. If I’m such a recent acquaintance, why would I be at the funeral? Of course, you can see the problem—there was only one easy answer to that question. The old Mickey Spillane favorite: “The killer always returns to the scene of the crime.” Of course, I was just at the funeral, but it’s really the same thing, isn’t it?

  I glanced at my underdressed companion and found him still staring at me with those sharp gray lasers. Except for the eyes, he didn’t look all that smart. Maybe the steel glint I was seeing was just mean, North Carolina stubbornness. After all, the brothers in this state had been marrying their first cousins since the Civil War. Inbred people are supposed to be stupid, stubborn, and mean. At least that’s what I was hoping.

  I kept trying to ease my way out of this, but for the moment I was stuck in the conversation, so I plunged on. “So you’re investigating Chandler’s death?” I said, trying to make it conversational.

  “Not his death. Coroner investigates the death. I’m investigating his murder.”

  “Murder? I thought it was just a hit-and-run.”

  “Second-degree homicide.”

  “Oh.”

  Silence descended while I tried to decide what to say next. “Why are you at the funeral?” I finally asked.

  “Always go to the funeral.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep … yep, ever time.”

  He actually said “ever” instead of “every?’ I was starting to feel slightly better. He obviously had never gone to college. If you’re gonna commit a second-degree homicide, I guess it’s better to be investigated by an undereducated, inbred, southern cop than some knuckle-cracking Harvard criminologist.

  “You’re here because you think the killer might show up?” I asked. I don’t know what I was doing. Why was I leading him on like this? It was almost as if I was intentionally trying to get myself caught. Of course, acting dumb but interested could also serve to throw him off. After all, like I said, … Make that as I said, … he didn’t look too bright.

  “Yep … more times than I can tell you, the killer shows up. These perps think they gotta put flowers on the coffin. Sometimes, it’s a complete stranger. Sometimes it’s a good friend, sometimes just a recent acquaintance:’ He paused, smiled, then added sleepily, “Like you.”

  I smiled back, but my heart, I swear, was pounding on the walls of my chest like a deranged mental patient trying to get out. Then he went on, still smiling, “There’s something, some inner force that seems to make these people want to come to the funeral.”

  “Really?” I was scrambling for a casual attitude.

  “Yep.”

  “What do you suppose it is?”

  “Well, I’m not a psychiatrist. I’m just an underpaid flatfoot, but I expect it’s two things, maybe three.”

  “This is fascinating.”

  “Ya think?”

  “Like, yes … ” I said and then smiled at him. “So come on, what are they?”

  “Like, okay,” he smiled back. “One is hubris. Some killers just want to put it all out there. They’re sayin”I’m smarter than all a you blue flannel assholes. I can watch the coffin go into the ground, stand right here out in the open and you’ll never get me.’ So, hubris is the first one.”

  “And the next?”

  “Stupidity comes next. Some killers are just plain box-a-rocks stupid. They want to experience the funeral because they hated the victim, or they had some fiscal or personal reason to commit the murder, and they don’t think any cops are gonna be here looking at who shows up. So stupid is the next, pure and simple.”

  I nodded. Of course, this was the category I so neatly fit into. But I was committed to this line of questioning, so I asked him what the third was.

  “The third is ‘cause it would be inappropriate not to come. Cause suspicion. Brother, husband, wife … that kinda thing. Course everybody in that category is gonna get a hard look from me anyway.”

  “Paige obviously didn’t do it,” I said, rushing to her defense.

  “Pretty sure a that, are ya?”

  “You kidding? She loved him. She worshipped him.”

  He took out a notepad and started writing.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “I’m writing that down. Don’t want to forget it,” he said, and right then I had a shiver of fear. It went down my spine and chilled my balls.

  Why did this smartass remark frighten me? I’ll tell you why. It frightened me because this cop had obviously decided to start fucking with me. He was being sarcastic and offhand. Two things about that: One, it told me he had already formed a healthy dislike for me, and of course this is the last thing I needed. The second thing was even more distressing than the first. That little piece of sarcasm gave me a glimpse of the man looking out at me from
behind those gray eyes. He was not some stupid, inbred country bluecoat. He was a shrewd, smart, cold-blooded son-of-a-bitch.

  In that brief second, I saw this ending badly. In that moment, I suspected that this narrow-shouldered man in the fifty-dollar sport coat might one day actually arrest me for Chandler’s murder.

  Chapter 17

  BY THE END OF MAY, THE ANGER THAT HAD SPORADIcally been hitting Paige settled on her like a vengeful cloak. She needed to get it out, so despite her painful back, she enrolled in a full-contact martial arts class. Her instructor was a half-Asian, half-German roughneck named Hans Mochadome—Moch. She was athletic, and the four hours a week she spent in the dojo helped to take the rage away as she methodically tried to beat the shit out of her quick, agile classmates.

  Paige also decided to take the next school year off. She was in no frame of mind to teach kindergarten. Whether she even wanted to stay in Charlotte was still up for grabs. It had been her hometown after her parents died, and when she and Chandler decided to get married, he had agreed to relocate there for her.

  But now she felt maybe she needed a change. The loneliness since Chandler’s death was overpowering and the anger debilitating. She knew she was terrible company and in a bad place emotionally.

  Six weeks had passed since the funeral and she was still clobbered anew every morning by the stark realization that he was gone, that she was all alone.

  Her religious beliefs precluded suicide, but her memories made going on seem pointless. She had two general conditions—sad and angry. When sadness hit, she more or less just sat. Sat in her house with all of Chandler’s things. Sat in the park watching other people’s children play. When she was angry, she went to the dojo and tried to kill anybody stupid enough to stand in front of her.

  She slept on Chandler’s side of the bed, not changing the sheets for the first two weeks because his smell was still there. She sat in the back of his closet with his clothes hanging over her, crying until she had no more tears.

  Bob Butler made weekly visits and brought her up to date on the investigation. At first these visits seemed to calm her, to take her out of these two polarized moods. With Bob Butler, she was seeking retribution. With him, she could look toward the future. Admittedly, that future only encompassed catching the asshole who ran down Chandler. But it was still a step out of lethargy and anger.

  “The paint is from a blue Taurus,” he told her a week or so after the funeral. They were sitting in a little cafe across from the dojo where they often met. She was in her sweats; he was wearing the same outfit he always wore, the frayed blue blazer and tan pants.

  They stirred their mochas as he continued. “The good thing about it being a Taurus is, Hertz, Budget, and Avis all rent ‘em. Buy ‘em in bulk. If our killer rented the car, that could be a break ‘cause they keep records of every rental. I’m working that angle.”

  “That’s great, Bob,” she said, trying to find some enthusiasm. There had to be thousands of blue Tauruses.

  “Well, it’s a lotta damn cars, but I’m gonna take that time period around the killing—the tenth through the fifteenth of April—and send an e-mail to the district headquarters of all a them companies, and ask ‘em if any cars came back smashed up around those dates. Then we sort through those and check the names back.”

  “Do you think that will tell us who did it?” A useless, dumb question, but she asked it anyway.

  “Well … might … can’t never tell. They’re pretty careful checking cars back in, lookin’ for damage, so if it was some rental and it was dented, there’d be a record. Course maybe it ain’t a rental. It could just be some civilian car, but hey, it’s a place to start.”

  She smiled and took his hand. “Thanks,” she told him.

  He embarrassed easily and now he looked away. His ears, which stuck out badly, turned bright red. “It’s no trouble. Least I can do, Mrs. Ellis.”

  “Paige,” she instructed softly.

  He always wanted her to call him Bob, but insisted on calling her Mrs. Ellis, almost as if he needed the formality to define the relationship. He was humble and sweet and his motives were pure. He wanted only to catch her husband’s killer. She knew he was doing it for his dead wife, Althea, as much as for her. There was something very Old World and sentimental about Bible Bob Butler.

  Next, he went over a list of names he had collected at the funeral. There were half a dozen people he was curious about—most of them out-of-town friends of hers and Chandler’s. Somewhere toward the end he looked up and said, “What about this guy, Charles Best?”

  “Chick?” she said. “What about him?”

  “He said he met you guys in Hawaii less than a year ago, then he comes all the way from L. A. for the funeral:’

  “Yeah?”

  “Recent acquaintance seems kinda funny, is all.”

  “He’s just a very caring person. Actually, it was sweet of him to come.

  “So there was nothing strange going on there?”

  For the first time since the funeral, she thought about the way Chick had wanted to help her with the probate of the estate—how he seemed almost desperate about it, and how he had pleaded with her in the parking lot of the church. It definitely seemed unusual then, but now she decided it was nothing. Everybody had been acting strangely. “He’s just a good friend,” she said.

  Bob Butler put the list away. “Okay, then. Guess far as I can see, the killer didn’t show at the funeral. Don’t tell Angela Lansbury.”

  They sat quietly for several minutes and sipped their coffees.

  “Are we really going to find out who did it?” she asked, hopefully. “‘Cause with all this karate I’m taking, if you catch him, I want the first two out of three falls.”

  Bible Bob smiled at her as he absently stirred his mocha. The spoon clicked dully in the thick pottery mug. “Then stay in shape, Mrs. Ellis,” he said softly. “‘Cause I’m gonna set that meeting up for you.”

  Chapter 18

  I DON’T MEAN TO SOUND LIKE A WHINER, BUT THE months following Chandler’s funeral were more painful for me than you can imagine. We finally found Melissa. In typical Melissa “go fuck yourself” fashion, she was sleeping under a bridge off the 134 freeway. The way we found her was, one of her whacked-out, homeless girlfriends overdosed on a spoonful of Mexican Brown, curled up in a ball, and caught the big bus. Melissa was asleep near her when the cops and the paramedics arrived to bag and tag the body, then started pulling that sad bunch of runaways out of their cardboard boxes and rolled-up blankets. There was enough space paste hidden under that off-ramp to lift the whole bridge ten feet off the ground and set it down sideways.

  So we got Melissa back. Blessing, or curse? You decide. Since her court date hadn’t come up yet, she technically hadn’t skipped bail, but her bondsman, a tattooed, gap-toothed, ex-prizefighter named Easy Money Mahoney, told me he knew that Melissa planned to split, and that in his opinion, she had no intention of meeting her court date. If he was going to continue to hold her paper, his insurance company wanted the whole twenty grand in escrow—a no-fault bond, he called it. See how this is going? Everything was hitting me at once. So now I had to convert the last of my company IRA account to keep her out of jail. And what did I get back from Melissa in return? A lotta fucking attitude, that’s what.

  “They’re just my friends,” she snarled when I asked why she was hanging with a bunch of addicts under the bridge.

  “Your ‘friends’ have more tracks than the Southern Pacific,” I said accusingly.

  “My dad, the great seventies drug guru. You got all the fucking answers, don’t you?”

  It went on like that. It was endless.

  Melissa was just being Melissa—pissed off, making us bleed. It seemed to amuse her that I’d had to cash in our last worthwhile asset to keep her from being put back in jail. Amused Melissa—pissed-off Evelyn. There was no way to win with those two.

  Speaking of Evelyn, I was seeing less and less of my scowling wife. />
  Here’s the story on the Mr. USA Contest. Mickey D had come in fourth, and for Evelyn, that was a big deal. She got to wear his cheesy runner-up medal around the house occasionally.

  “Mickey shoulda won,” she’d grumbled. “It was supposed to be an all-natural show, but they only did random drug tests, so this other guy—who anybody with eyes could see was on steroids—didn’t have to take a piss test, and he stole it.”

  Like Mickey doesn’t shoot enough gym-juice to bench-press a school bus. Our daily conversations had started to become short and angry.

  “Where you going?” Me.

  “Out:’ Her.

  “When you coming back?”

  “None of your damn business?’

  “Could you please go to the market? There’s no food.” “What’s wrong, Chick? Your fuckin’ legs broken?”

  It was cold enough in our house to go ice-skating. Occasionally, the girls from Hustler and I would sneak into the bathroom, lock the door, and check on the Bishop.

  Nothing. Limp as a spruce willow.

  I borrowed some Viagra from a friend of mine. He gave me two 50-mg little blue pills. He said to cut ‘em in half. Of course, I ignored this advice. In my world, more is invariably better, but 50 mgs proved to be too much. In fifteen minutes, my heart was racing—fluttering like a hummingbird. It scared the shit out of me, but I sorta came up to half-mast. I sat there on the toilet looking at the sorriest erection since Michael Jackson’s wedding night. But at least I wasn’t hanging limp at six-thirty. Progress … kinda.

  Oh yeah, and I had begun drinking much more than before. It started almost from the first day I got back to L. A. after Chandler’s funeral. I’d pound down a few shots before noon, to get the knots out of my stomach, toss back a couple more at lunch, and then engage in some serious elbow-bending in the evening. By six, I was usually giving my tonsils a good shellacking. I don’t think I started drinking like that just because I killed Chandler. I think it was also because I longed to get in touch with Paige and now I couldn’t. After the funeral and my run-in with that rumpled cop, I was afraid. Half a dozen times I almost called, but froze, my hand shaking as I gripped the receiver, trapped between longing and fear. So I got drunk instead.