by David Waters
I had just put down the receiver when Ryan called from Burlington.
“So how did your day go?”
I gave him a brief synopsis.
“Interesting. Particularly about Gooden.”
“Yeah.”
“And how did your day go?”
“Strange.” He laughed. “When I was a cop, I got used to bureaucrats giving me any information I wanted. Now they treat me like some smelly piece of fish the cat dragged out of the garbage!”
I remembered Leclair’s admonition. I grinned. “Just who are you referring to?”
“The customs officials on both sides of the border. I just wanted to know who was on duty Sunday and whether they could identify either Hendricks or the Symanskys. You would think I was asking to see their income tax reports.” His tone shifted. “But I did come up with something towards the end of the afternoon. A pure piece of luck. Well, not quite. Maybe it was really persistence and ingenuity.” He sounded almost smug, and there was a pause and I knew he was going to milk it for all it was worth.
I waited.
“I figured,” he said finally, “that whoever took a potshot at Gina might not have had the rifle or the ammo readily at hand. So I made a list of all the gun shops within a thirty mile radius of Essex Junction and Burlington. There were only six of them. I started with the one that was farthest away, thinking that the person might want to maintain a degree of anonymity and bingo! One of the young clerks made a positive identification of Hendricks as someone who bought a box of .22 shells on Saturday afternoon.”
I found that I was holding my breath. “Is the clerk absolutely certain?”
“Yep. Turned out to be one of life’s little ironies. It wasn’t the clerk who served him but a part-time employee, a student, a friend of the guy you bumped into at the cottage. He had met Hendricks and so he recognized him. After Hendricks left, out of sheer curiosity, he checked what Hendricks had purchased.”
“Well, well,” I said, “our first piece of solid evidence.” I tried to sound enthusiastic but my heart wasn’t in it. Part of me wanted Hendricks to be one of the innocent bystanders. And not a multiple murderer.
“You don’t sound very pleased.” Ryan said.
“No, no, I am.” I protested. “It’s a major breakthrough. It’s just that I was beginning to develop a soft spot for Hendricks. The bastard is proving to be very good at manipulating me. So where do we go from here?”
“Good question. I’m not sure. Unless we can find his rifle or the rest of the box of ammo, it’s circumstantial evidence at best. Lt. Ricci is unlikely to get a warrant to search Hendricks’ house in Montreal just on what I’ve found out so far.”
“Gina and her mother will be arriving tomorrow afternoon.” I mentioned.
“I’ll be back before then. I have one more border crossing to check out. Why don’t we all have supper together?”
“Sure.” I said. “Maybe I’ll get a bucket of fried chicken wings and a tub of salad. We can try to figure out what to do next by reading the chicken bones.”
“Chicken bones?”
“Yeah.” I gave a morose chuckle. “The Romans used them to forecast the future.”
“Hell, no wonder Rome collapsed! Jesus, I thought our methods of detection were primitive. But to get serious for a moment, I’d sure like to know what moves Hendricks makes next.”
“So would I.”
“We should hire someone to follow him.” Before I could say anything he went on, “I know an ex-cop who has his own detective agency. I’m sure he must be tired of following delinquent spouses with too much money and the genes of a chimpanzee.”
“How are we going to pay for it?”
“I’ve thought of that. Why don’t we go half and half? I’ll talk him into giving us a special rate.”
“Okay, I’m game.” I wouldn’t have been but Hendricks had got under my skin.
“I’ll call him right away.” Before he hung up, he added, “the motel I’m in has a satellite dish and over a hundred channels.” He laughed. “I’m going to spend a quiet evening zapping through all of them. See what’s new. See if it’s any better than what I have on the twenty odd channels I get at home on cable.”
I took down his number. It’s truly a postmodern world, I thought. I envisioned him zapping rapidly through hundreds of fragmentary images of a twentieth century born under a seal of contradiction and discord: a frenetic, atonal, electronic universe speeding through the night on a zillion airwaves from a lonely satellite in the sky as darkness envelops thousands of motel rooms each with their flickering monitors.
Outside my den window, twilight had descended.
Then suddenly I remembered something. It had been an odd, discordant note in my conversation with Hendricks earlier in the day. It was one of the things that had been nagging at me ever since. When I had first mentioned the shooting outside the motel, Hendricks had shown no reaction whatsoever. That now struck me as unusual because my mention of the incident should have come as startling news to him. I had certainly not mentioned it to him when I had phoned from Portland. And as far as I knew, no news report of it had mentioned my name or Gina’s. Some surprise, even consternation would have been normal. But then, given what Phil had found out, perhaps Hendricks had known all along. He would have, if he had been the one to fire the shot. On the other hand, I told myself, if Hendricks was guilty, surely he would have tried to fake surprise and display some curiosity about the shooting? Why hadn’t he?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The phone rang just before midnight. I had not yet fallen asleep. I scrambled from the bed to answer it.
“He’s on the move.” Ryan said.
“Who is?”
“Hendricks.”
“Hendricks?”
“Yeah. We were lucky. Paul Racine, the detective we just hired got there just in time. He had decided to scout the place before assigning someone tomorrow morning as we had agreed. As Paul parked nearby, Hendricks came out, packed three suitcases in his car, and took off. I was going to call you in the morning, but I thought this warranted waking you up.”
“I wasn’t asleep.”
“Well, I was. Until Paul called. I’m in constant touch with him now over his cellular phone.”
“Three suitcases?” I asked.
“Yeah. And one of them was very large. Certainly big enough to contain a rifle.”
“More luggage,” I muttered, still trying to puzzle out the significance, “than he would take for just a weekend at the cottage.”
“My thoughts exactly. At first, I thought maybe he was heading for an airport and that we would lose him. But they’re now only a few miles from the border. He’s obviously going to the cottage for tonight at least. I’ve asked Paul to keep on his tail. I’m leaving the motel now to stake out the cottage. I’ll call you later once we know what’s what.”
I tried to go back to bed. Hendricks, I thought. Like all those roads which once led to Rome, all the evidence in this case was leading towards him as our murderer. I lay there reviewing the problem of motive. His infatuation with Naomi? A rancorous encounter with Monaghan? They seemed to me to be pitifully inadequate. Then why? I had had longer conversations with him than with any of the other likely suspects. Had I got to know him too well to see him as a murderer, and yet not well enough to understand why?
I fell asleep only to be woken two hours later.
“Sorry to wake you.” Ryan said, “he’s in the cottage. He took the luggage in, and the lights have gone out. Looks like he’s planning to stay put at least until tomorrow. I’ve discussed our problem with Paul, and what we’d like to do is put two men on surveillance here first thing tomorrow morning.” In the brief pause which followed I could see the costs mounting and so I asked why.
“We could station one of them up in the woods behind the cottage with field glasses and a cellular phone, and another in a car where the road leads into the village. I’m concerned about the rifle. It’s our only solid p
iece of potential evidence. I think you told Hendricks that the Montreal police found the bullet and the casing?”
“The casing, yes,” I said, “but not necessarily the bullet.” But I knew I was nit-picking. They had probably found the bullet by now.
“He’d be a fool to assume they don’t have the bullet. And he’d be a fool to assume that they couldn’t match what they have with the barrel of the rifle.” I agreed, although I suspected Hendricks knew more about the forensic possibilities of all of that than I did. Ryan went on, “so if he’s brought the rifle back to the cottage, he will probably want to get rid of it soon. I would. I mean, why take a chance? And so if he does do something, and we can retrieve the evidence, we’ve got a case. But we’ve got to watch the cottage, and also be prepared to move fast by car if he decides to leave.”
“Can this Paul Racine get two men there by tomorrow morning?”
“Yeah. He can roust two of them out of bed and get them down here in time. You’ve seen the place in daylight. It’s pretty dark here now. Am I right in assuming that the woods are pretty wild and extensive behind his cottage?”
I tried to visualize the setting. “There’s certainly no cottage behind him, that’s for sure, and my impression is that the land rises fairly rapidly towards a ridge about a half mile away. It’s too rough and craggy to accommodate buildings. How wooded it is I don’t know. A lot of stunted fir trees I think, at least as far as I can remember.”
I could hear him relaying this information to Racine. “So do I go ahead?” He asked.
I felt an adrenaline rush. “Yeah. Definitely.” Again I heard him relay the decision to Racine.
“He’s gone to call them. We’ll head back to my motel. The agency has no license to function outside of Canada, so they’ll just be temporary visitors like the rest of us. That means they’ll have to be particularly careful not to attract attention to themselves. Still, they should be able to do the job for a day or two. Meanwhile, I’ll check to see of there’s an outfit down here we can use. Get Paul off the hook as soon as possible.”
After we hung up, I went back to bed for a second time. In the darkness of my room, I felt drained. Empty. Despondent. I was no psychoanalyst, but I suspected I knew why. I was out of the loop. Whatever was going to happen in the next eight hours would happen without me. It was now Phil’s game. I felt alienated, without real use or meaning. What I was feeling was similar to what I had felt two weeks after retirement; when it had finally dawned on me that the newspaper would manage just fine without me; that even the memory of my involvement with it would dwindle in time to a dying fall: and then tumble off the edge of memory into oblivion. I suspected that I was beginning to mourn the inevitability of my own death. How long did I have before I would be erased from the memory bank of humankind? How many of us, I thought, begin the process of mourning our own death years before we actually die? The process of mourning our own demise, I speculated sadly, probably begins once we know that we have gone past the peak of usefulness.
As I lay there, I told myself, well you’re still alive you bugger, so stop feeling sorry for yourself. Besides, this time, you’re only out of the loop temporarily. Tomorrow you will be involved again in whatever happens. But that presentiment of death I had felt in the darkness of my room lingered. I remembered my conversation with Phil Ryan when I had first phoned him. He had asked me to make sense of the fact that he had been put out to early pasture, particularly, since he had so identified with the job that he had probably lost his wife as a consequence. It was a form of dying. How does one explain any death? Even the death of a career? Or the death of a marriage? It was something I wanted to think about. Something I knew I would want to discuss with him eventually.
A gray light was seeping around the window shade when a nightmare brought me suddenly fully awake. In my nightmare one of the children I had seen earlier in the day was bashing one of the other children with a rock. I was trying to race across the street to halt the carnage. But my legs were leaden, and my feet stuck to a coating of tar on the road.
The images of the nightmare faded. I went to a front window. In the early overcast dawn, the street was just a street. Only a few birds scuttled silently around on the nearby lawns. My role in the nightmare was too obvious to need interpretation. But why did my dream use the children across the street rather than adults?
I went downstairs and put on the coffee. Last night I had been troubled by the problem of motive. Adult motive. Was my sub-conscious mind trying to tell me that the motive for violence, any violence, even murder, was fundamentally childish? It could well be. Or even more, that the real cause of violence might lie in childhood or even beyond? Is the inevitability of a murderer’s actions writ large, like certain other diseases, in one’s genetic code? In that case, looking for any motive, remotely adequate to the act, was pointless.
It was the stuff of Greek tragedies where human life was fated to act out the spinning motives of the gods. Christianity, certainly, had rejected that view. A degree of freedom in determining one’s fate was primordial to it. But the postmodern world was increasingly placing its faith in the sciences, and in particular, in one of its offspring, genetic engineering. Would they ultimately find both Cain and Abel in the genetic code? Would they eventually learn how to isolate the gene of violence, and successfully modify it? In my fevered imagination, I saw a grinning, gnarled figure of death, scythe in hand, mutter mockingly: genetic slaves, so where’s the dignity of the son of man and the son of God now?
A big genetic fix might bring a reign of peace, but I did not want it. There was no dignity without a degree of freedom and choice. And that meant the horror of human adult evil. I had come back full circle to the problem of motive; preferably adult motive: preferably one which could be understood.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ryan phoned around ten o’clock. Racine’s people were in place. He was on his way back to Montreal. When he asked me what my plans were for the day, I told him that I would be putting my notes in order, and making courtesy phone calls to both Joe Gibbs and the newspaper. In fact, I planned to spend much of the day cleaning the house. As a confirmed bachelor I tended to keep my place neat and orderly, but I had my flaws. I would put off vacuuming until the growing number of fuzz balls made it unavoidable. And laundry tended to pile up until there were no more clean towels or bed sheets. In other words I was facing hours of work before the house would be fit to accommodate Mary and Gina who would be arriving later that afternoon. I threw on a large wash of sheets and towels, then I tackled the kitchen, cleaning out the fridge, washing the floor, putting on the dishwasher and making a minimal grocery list. While I remembered it, I phoned “Wings and Things”, and placed an order for a large bucket of wings, medium hot, to be delivered around six o’clock.
I had just hung up when the phone rang. It was Mel Vogel’s secretary. Now that she had me on the line, she put me through to him.
“Tom, Haylocke has just filed a story out of Washington with a note that says it’s meant to be a sidebar to your story. Unfortunately I’m in the dark, what’s happening? When are you going to be filing?”
“I don’t know. We’re on the verge of tracking down someone who has murdered twice. I’m not going to write until I have more solid evidence.”
“Haylocke’s story seems to me to be valid on its own. All it needs is a phone call to the Symanskys to get a confirmation or a denial. I mean the fact that a Canadian university harbored CIA informers is front page news. Could you check with the Symanskys so we can run the story?”
I explained that I had already spent an afternoon interviewing them, and that I had told Symansky that I didn’t necessarily plan to use that information unless it proved truly pertinent to the story I was working on.
“Tom, did I hear you right? You’re supposed to check with me before doing anything like that!”
“Mel, I’m not one of your employees anymore. Remember?”
“Christ, that’s not the issue,
Tom! The issue here,” he said in the authoritarian tone he often used when he felt exasperated, “is the public interest!”
“Is it? Whose public interest? What public interest?”
“Jesus,” Mel said in a quieter tone, “I can’t believe what I’m hearing. You’ve only been gone one month. Are you trying to tell me that CIA agents on a Montreal campus is not an issue that’s in the public interest?”
I thought that over. “I guess I am. You’d be surprised, Mel, how one views journalism and the public interest as an outsider. If there were agents there now, yes. Front page story. But the Symanskys left the country a decade ago. It’s now an old story. It should have been written back then when it would truly have been in the public interest. Anyway,” I said, “it wasn’t a commitment on behalf of the paper I made to the Symanskys. It was only a statement of intentions. My intentions.” I could sense his frustration. He had his hands on a very readable story. Whether it was really in the public interest was not what was motivating him. I knew him too well. I sighed to myself. In for a penny in for a pound. I went on to explain the deal I had made with Joe Gibbs. That seemed to stun him into a prolonged silence. Then he said, “but you didn’t agree to anything in the paper’s name, is that right?”
“Right.”
“So there’s nothing to prevent me from running Haylocke’s piece?” His tone made it clear that it was not really a question he was asking. It was a sarcastic jab. He was simply reasserting his power to decide.
“I have no intention of making any commitments on behalf of the paper. You’re paying Haylocke, not me. What conditions I put on my writing is another matter.”
“And I don’t have to authorize payment to you if I don’t like the conditions you’ve placed on anything that you submit.”
“I can live with that.” I said simply.
Perhaps he sensed that he had gone too far. When he spoke next his tone had softened. “If I decide to run Haylocke’s piece, will it interfere with what you’re working on?”