by Paul Moomaw
I put the pictures back into the envelope and go to the sink. Under it I find what I hoped to, a container of large black garbage bags. I take one of the bags out, throw the envelope into it, and return to the rear bedroom. I put the other envelope into the bag, and follow that with the albums and then the DVD’s and tapes. I start to tie the bag and then catch myself. I reach in and find the album with the pictures of Angwin. I open it and take the first picture out. Then I close the bag and tie the neck in a knot.
I leave the gun safe door wide open, go back to the dining area and put the photo on the table. I pull out my wallet and find one of Lucifer Caine’s business cards. I place it on top of the picture, front side up. Then I pick up the garbage bag and walk out. I leave the front door wide open, too.
Chapter 45
That evening I drive to Katherine’s house with the photographs Angwin took of her. As I turn onto her street I half hope she will not be home, but her car is in the drive and the lights are on in her house. I park and sit in the car for a moment. I think she needs to know about these pictures, and needs to have control of their fate, and yet I do not want her to have to see them. I want to believe I am simply concerned about her feelings, but I have lived with myself long enough to know that empathy is not one of my strong points. Maybe I just do not want to be the messenger. Bad things happen to messengers.
I get out of my car finally, walk to her front door, and knock. Katherine opens the door right away.
“I was wondering if you were ever going to come in,” she says. She motions me inside. “You didn’t have to knock.”
“I always knock.” She gives me a doubtful look, and I correct myself. “Almost always.”
I hand her the manila envelope. “You need to see these.”
She takes the envelope without saying anything and sits down on the sofa in her living room. I stay on my feet as she opens it and pulls the photos out. She looks at the first one, then shakes her head slightly and looks away, out the window, and then at me.
“Did you look at these?” she asks.
I nod.
“I wish you hadn’t seen them.”
“I know.”
She tosses the first picture on the table and then goes slowly and deliberately through the rest, her face expressionless. When she is done she sits back on the sofa and presses her hands against her face. She rubs her forehead with her fingertips, and finally says, “Where did these come from?”
“I let myself into his apartment today,” I say.
“These were just lying around?”
“No, he had them locked up, but not well enough.”
“So he’s been hoarding these things for years.”
“There was more. The place where he had these hidden was filled with pornography. Photographs. He had them in albums. And DVD’s and videotapes. The DVD’s were non-commercial. I expect they were downloaded from his computer.” As I say that, I realize the implications, and so does Katherine.
“If he was downloading, he was uploading, too,” she says. She rubs her forehead again and sighs loudly. “I wonder how many creeps around the world have been masturbating over these.” She points at the stack of pictures on the coffee table, then looks at me again. “Did he have a lot of stuff?”
“He did. But not any more. I took it all away.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“I don’t know.” I move to sit next to her and she shifts over a little to make room. I have the impulse to touch her, but as I move a hand toward her I feel her withdraw. There is no physical motion, just a shrinking on the inside that even I can see.
Suddenly she laughs. It is a hard laugh, without pleasure. “This is so stupid,” she says, “but I really don’t want anybody to find out. Not just about me. I don’t want my fucking asshole of a brother to get arrested. It would kill my niece.” She turns suddenly and faces me. “You said he had albums of pictures?”
“Three. He’s the star in one of them.”
“Fuck him,” she says, and falls silent again for a moment.
“Did you look at all of them?”
“Not closely.”
“What did you do with them?”
“I took them home until I decide what to do next.”
“Nothing, I hope. I do worry for Paula.” She shakes her head slowly, her eyes unfocussed, as if she is still trying to digest this. “Will you bring me the albums?”
Her request catches me off guard. I cannot imagine that she wants to look at those pictures. “Why?”
“It’s probably silly, but I want to see if my niece is in any of them. Probably not, but if she is I want to take those out and burn them.”
“That’s fair.” We sit side by side in silence for a long time. We are close together physically but I can still feel how far Katherine has withdrawn in every other way. At some point I point to the photos on the table. “Are you willing to tell me about that?”
Katherine does not respond at first. Then she sighs and says, “I don’t talk about it much. In fact almost never. The only person who knows even a little is my sister-in-law, and I just told her enough to make her know she had to protect my niece.”
“Keep your secret if you need to. I’m not even sure why I want to hear it.”
Katherine laughs again as harshly as the first time. “Some goddam secret,” she says, and points to the pictures. She sighs again and stretches back against the sofa. “Why not?” she says. She pauses again, then says, “You have to understand that my folks were gone a lot. Dad was busy being a success, and Mom was busy being the woman behind the man.” Her voice has an edge of anger that sounds as if it has been festering for a long time. “Eddy and I were left to our own devices a lot. I guess we were supposed to raise ourselves. He’s four years older, you know? I don’t know if something had happened to him or he was just wired wrong, but some of my earliest memories are of him tormenting me, even before things got sexual.” She glances at me. “I told you about that time on the island, in the old house.”
I nod and keep my silence. Katherine turns her head and stares out the window again, but I can tell that she is looking at some other place and time.
“When he first started doing sexual stuff to me I was too young to understand what was going on, except that I knew some of the things he did were painful.” She shakes her head quickly as if she is trying to shed the memory of that pain. “When I tried to get him to stop he just ignored me, and when I said I would tell Mom and Dad he said he would kill me, and I believed him, especially after he killed our cat.” She shudders. “He had me tied up in the basement. He brought the cat down and put it into a burlap bag. Then he hit it with a hammer.”
She covers her face, but not before I see tears begin. When she speaks again her voice is high, like a frightened child. “The kitty screamed and yowled and struggled inside the bag, and Eddy just kept hitting it, over and over again.” She hunches her shoulders together and pushes her face hard against her hands. “Over, and over, and over.”
She is silent for a long while. When she pulls her hands away from her face, her cheeks are streaked with tears but her eyes are dry and hard. “So I didn’t tell anybody then. When I got older, like in junior high school, he changed his threat. He said if I told he would make copies of the pictures he had been taking and spread them all around the school so everybody could see what a slut I was. So I didn’t tell then, either. And then my parents got killed and it was too late to tell.”
After that there is a long silence. I struggle with my thoughts, trying to think of something to say, but anything that comes to mind seems banal, and so I say nothing. Finally Katherine gets up.
“I think I need some time alone,” she says.
“I can understand,” I say, and stand up.
“Maybe we can do something this weekend.”
“I’m going to be out of town.”
She looks at me. “Are you killing someone?”
I recoil from the bluntne
ss of the words, and yet they are the simple truth. I swallow and say, “Yes.”
“Is it a bad guy?”
“Pretty bad,” I say, and she nods.
“Will you call me when you get back?”
“I’ll call.”
She walks to the front door and opens it.
“Do I wish you luck, or what?” she asks.
“Good luck always helps.”
* * *
When I get home I have no thought of eating, but as soon as I look at the kitchen my stomach tells me it wants food. I make a quick omelet with the remains of a chopped onion and some pepper jack cheese, and pour myself a glass of red wine. I sit at the kitchen table and eat in silence. I feel detached, as if I am not quite inside myself. It is not an uncomfortable sensation, but a little unsettling, a sort of what do I do now? mood.
Then it occurs to me what I am going to do now, and I am completely back again, and enjoying a feeling of anticipation. I finish the food, pour myself another glass of wine, and take the glass and my telephone handset to the big chair by the window. I dial in Edward Angwin’s number and wait. He answers on the fourth ring. His “hello” is tense, guarded, even a little frightened, and that makes me smile.
“I think you know who this is,” I say.
Silence, and then, cautiously, “Yes.”
“I have what you’re missing.” He does not answer. “I have all of it.” He still does not speak, but I can hear him breathing hard.
“What are you going to do?” he finally says.
“I haven’t decided yet. One idea that occurred to me was to take a couple of pictures, the ones that show your smiling face, and make copies of them. I thought it might be interesting to send them to all of your neighbors. How does that strike you?”
After a long pause he says, “You fucker.”
“Then, of course, there’s the cops.” I pause to enjoy the moment. “And the FBI, of course. I think interstate trade in child pornography is a federal offense, isn’t it?”
“You won’t dare,” Angwin says. He has recovered a little and the fear in his voice is mixed with anger. “You try it and I’ll tell them everything I know about you. And remember, I know your real name.”
“You have accusations and theories. I have pictures. I have lots of pictures.”
Another long silence, then, “What do you want?”
“First, I want you to forget anything you think you know about me. I’m not worried about your private investigator. You haven’t paid his bill. Next, there is one name left on the list you gave me.”
“Two names,” Angwin says.
“One of them doesn’t count. You know which one that is. But otherwise I’m inclined to finish the assignment, so you need to send the final installment.”
“The money’s gone. I had some bad luck, so I had to use it.”
I gaze out the window at the lights of Seattle. He may be lying, he may be telling the truth. Either way, I will have to think about this development.
“Then we have nothing to talk about right now,” I say.
“What do I do?” he says.
“Worry,” I say, and hang up. I get up and pour myself another glass of wine, then return to the chair to think. That last name on the list—last because I have removed Katherine from consideration—nags at me. I have taken on a task, and it bothers me to leave it undone, even if I am never paid. Maybe I am just too compulsive. Or maybe I am simply suffering from the Zeigarnik effect. I remember that from college. A psychologist named Zeigarnik, I don’t recall her first name, discovered that if people were given a task to do, not allowed to finish it, and then after a space of time offered the choice of completing the old task or starting a new one, they almost always returned to the first task, even if the new one was more interesting or more rewarding. People are stubborn. I am stubborn. It can be a good thing. It has survival value.
The telephone rings. I pick it up and before I can say hello, Katherine is saying, “I want to go with you.”
“Go where?”
“I won’t say it on the phone, but you know. This weekend.”
“Not a good idea.”
“I don’t care. I want to go.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t matter why.”
“No.”
“Look,” she says. “Either I go, or I tell, or you kill me. It’s all the same to me. You choose.”
“You’re serious.” It is an acknowledgment, not a question.
“I mostly am.”
“I need to think,” I say.
“Call me back when you decide,” she replies and hangs up.
I put the handset in my lap and stare out the window again. The idea is crazy, and I begin to wonder if Katherine is a little crazy, too. Maybe so am I, for that matter. That makes me laugh. It has never occurred to me before. I sit and try to think. My inner scold insists that it would be reckless to let her have her way; but another piece of my mind begins to whisper that maybe I have no choice. That thought takes hold and sends tendrils through my brain, and before I know it I am making it okay. Maybe it could even be an advantage. A couple checking into a small town motel will attract a different kind of attention than a single man. I nod in agreement with myself, and then go on from there. We could take her car, which would separate me even farther from the event. I nod again. I will do it. We will go together, act like love birds, and she can watch television in the motel while I take care of business. Then another happy thought occurs to me. I do not even have to use my own weapon. I still have the big Ruger I took from Maxfield’s house. What better gun for the wilds of Montana than a big, black Long Colt .45?
I pick up the handset and call Katherine back.
“We’ll take your car,” I say.
“Are you sure you want to?”
“No, but we’ll do it anyway.”
A pause, then, “Thank you.”
“You better not thank me until it’s done,” I say.
We hang up. It is late, but I am not sleepy. I go to my computer and start tracking down the last man on the list. His name is Gordon Washburn and he lives in Colorado, in what a story on the Salt Lake City Tribune web site describes as a monument to Mammon on the shores of Lake Dillon. I check the Tribune archives and discover that he has had plenty of press in recent years. He owned a company called Deseret Decoctions that made herbal remedies and nutritional supplements, riding the crest of the alternative healing wave. He was a Mormon bishop, and used that squeaky-clean image to squeeze millions in investments from Latter Day Saints who could not conceive of being bilked by one of their own. He told them they had a Heaven-sent opportunity to do well by doing good, providing pure and healthful products from a company that could not fail, and the early suckers did very well indeed; but Washburn was doing them double dirt. His financial operation was the simplest of Ponzi schemes, paying the first in line with the money from the last in line; and the company itself was making products that were useless at best and harmful at worst. It all fell apart when one of his products started killing people. It developed that he was using industrial strength chemicals that he had gotten from somewhere in Bangladesh, and they were badly contaminated.
In the end, Washburn managed to cut a deal. Deseret Decoctions went into receivership and Washburn paid a fine that, according to the Tribune, amounted to less than a third of what he had looted from his fellow Mormons.
I go to Google again and find Lake Dillon. It is in Summit County, west of Denver in the Colorado Rockies. Before there was a lake, there was a small ranch and farm community called Dillon. It has been under the water for more than forty years. Now there is another town called Dillon, made up mostly of condominiums and tourist traps. This is where Washburn lives. The Tribune offers a photograph of the place. It is an ersatz Tyrolean mountain home three stories high. At the center of the third floor, under big eaves, is a cathedral window with a balcony. A flagpole extends from the balcony and supports a huge American flag. Crook or not
, Washburn wants it known that he is a patriot. That does not surprise me. If I were writing a thesaurus, the two words would be classed as synonyms.
I log off and shut down the computer. I am still not sleepy, but I cannot think of anything else to do, and so I go to bed. It takes a long time for sleep to come, and when it does it is fitful and restless. I seem to be suspended between wakefulness and unconsciousness, and at some point the dream, if that is what it is, comes again. The door is still huge, the shadowy figure with no features still blocks it, and the light still glows dark red. I wake up frightened and breathing hard, and I have to work at putting myself back to sleep. The image is still with me the next morning. I try to push it away, but for a long time it hovers just behind my eyes.
Chapter 46
It is dark when Katherine and I reach Thompson Falls. We check into a roadside motel on Highway 200 on the east edge of town. It is called the Shady Rest, and I smile at the thought of staying there because I am here on shady business. The motel consists of a string of one-room log cabins. They are real logs, and there are real holes in the chinking, which promises a chilly sleep. The cabin on the right houses the office and has a blue neon sign in the window that says VACANCY. I wonder if there is ever not a vacancy, and then remind myself that in a couple of weeks hunting season will begin and bring in enough business for the whole town to keep it going until summer fishing starts.
The cabin is sparsely furnished. One bed that has seen better times, a throw rug at the foot of the bed, a dresser with a wobbly chair, and a television set that is hooked to satellite cable. There is no closet, but a wooden rod for hanging clothes runs the length of one wall. The bathroom smells of dry rot. A small electric baseboard heater supplies what warmth is available. I remember that when we first agreed to have sex Katherine wanted to go to a roadhouse sort of place. This time she gets her way.