"I'm waiting."
"I knew her, Callahan. We talked. In fact, she was starting to open up to me when . . . but I wasn't sleeping with her, okay? Loner McDowell did, and Jesus, damn near everybody else did, but I didn't."
"I had to ask." Loner, too?
"Look here," Bass sighed, "when I asked you to keep your mouth shut about that body, I had my reasons. They just may have something to do with what happened to Sandy."
"What are you holding back, Bass?"
He glared at me. "You know something, smart ass? It has crossed my mind that if the coroner's report does indicate foul play, it very well might have been you that done it. You were the last one to talk to Sandy."
"Why don't you pin the other one on me while you're at it?"
"Maybe I can, Callahan. Let's think about this for a minute. Who's to say you didn't pop that man? Maybe I got there before you could finish bashing his teeth in, so you ran off and came back to act all innocent."
I nodded. "Or who's to say you didn't shoot him yourself, before I ran up? Then you considered killing me to cover your tracks, but decided to trust me, call in an old debt of honor instead."
"Listen to me," Bass said urgently. "I didn't hurt Sandy Palmer."
"You didn't seem all that upset when she died."
Bass started putting the shotgun back together. "That's probably because I wasn't too surprised."
"Excuse me?"
"Look, Sandy slept around, and some of the people she got around with were pretty powerful. She was asking for trouble. I kind of had an idea what might happen sooner or later."
As Bass sighted down the clean barrels, right towards my face, I said: "Just out of curiosity, sheriff, you do plan on telling the State Police you knew her when they get here on Tuesday, right?"
"You mean do I plan on withholding potentially vital information in what might turn out to be a murder investigation?" Bass pulled the triggers. SNICK. SNICK. I flinched. Bass said, "Leave this to me, Callahan. I'm on top of it. Quit poking around things you don't understand. Your mouth is starting to write checks your body can't cash."
"Maybe so," I said, truthfully, as I got to my feet. Bass rose too. Suddenly the room seemed a whole lot smaller. "But I'm sticking around anyway."
"You know what? You look a lot like another stubborn Irish kid I served with. He died too. I am going to say this one last time, in as friendly a way as I can. Leave town. I will straighten this out."
"I'd have to believe you folks would do the right thing on your own," I said. I put out my hand to shake. "No offense, but I'm starting to have trouble trusting anybody." He ignored my hand. I lowered it again. "Besides, what's going to happen if I don't leave?"
"You will find out that you're no hero," Bass said. "Like Cherry, you've just been lucky so far."
I limped out into the afternoon sunshine. Annie was sweeping her front porch, half a block away, and she waved to me. Small puffs of dust spun around her ankles. Bass slammed the door shut behind me.
Sixteen
Sunday Afternoon, 4:20 PM
I limped on back to the motel room, turned on the noisy air conditioner and stripped. I examined my body for bumps and bruises. My chest ached. Bobby Sewell and his boys had put a hell of a lot more miles on my odometer. Finally, I took a long shower and let the hot water massage my sore muscles. I toweled dry and sat down to think things over.
I had stirred up a lot of trouble, taken a pounding, and collected a lot of biographical information, but in the end all I had learned was that Sandy was promiscuous. The answer, if there was one, was hiding in the psychological profile of someone who was secretly a murderer. But who?
To a therapist, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is the Bible. I had a battered, dog-eared, soft-cover copy of DSM IV in my luggage. I sat in my underwear, thought about various people in and around the Dry Wells area, and drank a cold can of soda. Then I reviewed some sections in the book. I thought some more, then slipped into a fresh pair of jeans and a clean shirt and opened my copy of Paradoxical Interventions in Existential Psychology by E.M. Markoff.
"It may be said that death anxiety, ergo the attempt to avoid confronting the impossibility of further possibility, is the underlying cause of all character disorder. The three other difficult existential givens of (a) assuming responsibility for the self, (b) constructing meaning from meaninglessness, and (c) coping with the isolation of the human experience, all arise from the fourth; the reluctance of the ego to face its own fragility and impermanence. Also, as all addictive behaviors are clearly avoidant in nature, they are ultimately traceable back to this one root cause."
I closed my eyes for a moment, pondering the concept of unconscious death anxiety. Something Loner McDowell had said kept nagging at me. I read for a bit to refresh my memory, and then meditated. Finally, I replaced the book in my suitcase and went back out into the sunshine.
The radio station's front door was unlocked, so I let myself in. The red "ON AIR" light was lit, but that probably meant that Loner was taping an interview. There was a small monitor box above the head of the stairs. Loner: "I'm glad you could take the time to be with us today. I know you have a busy schedule."
A female-sounding voice, very low and husky: "I'm delighted to be here Mr. McDowell, and it is exciting to meet you in person."
"Before the commercial break, Loretta, you were telling me about the first time you had the . . . experience."
I stopped by the huge fish tank at the foot of the stairs. The tropical fish were hungry, so I fed them and listened to the interview. It was vintage Loner. "Now, I believe you said you had been reading in bed? A romance novel?"
"Yes," the guest gushed. "I was still just the teeniest bit awake and suddenly the lights in my bedroom began to flicker on and off, on and off. The television had a picture but there was no sound at all, just this strange moaning."
"Moaning."
"Yes, and I couldn't imagine where it was coming from. And then the closet opened and out came a creature tall as an average-sized man, but smooth and hairless. It had a round head on it, with one big eye. I don't mind telling you I was scared to death."
"I'm getting scared just listening."
I grinned and began to poke around the office. The interview droned on. The small desk in the cubbyhole behind the fish tank held nothing but a fountain pen and some notepaper. The large front window had recently been cleaned. The wooden arms of both the couch and stuffed chair placed strategically in the waiting room smelled of polish. There were several storage cabinets downstairs, and a random assortment of metal and wood structures and bookcases. I searched them.
The woman said: "It was terrible. I'm almost too embarrassed to go on. He . . . it . . . forced me to have sex."
"My stars."
I opened a storage cabinet, went through some papers. The woman with the low voice continued: "When he had had his way with me, he went back into the closet. The lights came back on as if nothing had happened."
"So you never actually saw a spacecraft?"
I looked carefully at some of the titles on the tape boxes in one cabinet. The shows contained titles too absurd for the National Enquirer. MY SON HAD AN ALIEN BABY, THE ALIENS BUGGED FIDEL'S UNDERWEAR, MONICA LEWINSKY WAS NOT OF THIS EARTH and more. I put one pile to the side and picked up another.
"Oh, yes! I looked out the window into the night and saw it floating straight up towards a large mother ship. It was quite beautiful, all big and round and milky to look at, almost transparent, and it had a long tail that wiggled."
"Sort of like a sperm."
A chilly silence followed. Then: "I suppose you could say that."
"I think I just did say that. Now, was that the only time you were visited by a lover from outer space, or did he come back for seconds?"
"I did not come here to be disrespected," she said.
A fat manila envelope spilled open. It was stuffed with hotel brochures targeting Vegas 'high rollers,' and also hel
d several signed markers, or gambling notes. One, from a Reno casino called the Wagon Wheel, was for over forty thousand dollars. Loner owed some serious people some very serious money. I put the envelope back where I found it, feeling guilty. Meanwhile, upstairs, the show was falling apart.
"You owe me an apology," said the guest.
"I'm sorry to have offended you," Loner protested, but his voice was trembling with mirth.
"You certainly should be."
I was running out of time. I briefly examined some videos. There was only one unmarked cassette. I slipped it into the small TV/VCR and used the remote to fast forward. Somehow I knew what I would find. A woman's face swam into view. It was Sandy Palmer and she was masturbating for the camera. I closed my eyes, rewound the tape, and put it away again.
I closed the video cabinet, started up the steps. The second stair made a loud squeaking noise, and I paused. I looked beneath it, saw that one side of the board was coming loose and a nail was bent. I left it alone. No sense in hammering something down during the taping.
Loner was wrapping up, so I went back to the couch and sat on one arm. After a few moments I heard Loner's big finish, the patented Halloween music and vocal button. A tall, morbidly obese man with white hair pulled back into a ponytail came bumping and thumping down the stairs. He was dressed as a woman, in a garish and loose-fitting dress, but clearly had a five o'clock shadow. Now I understood why the second step had sprung loose and started squeaking so loudly.
"Well, I never!" the guest said. "You were mocking me!"
"No, Loretta," Loner chuckled. He was following him/her down the stairs. "I was only making some observations."
"Look, McDowell, I'm trying to make a buck here just like you," the guest shrieked. "You could have cut me some fucking slack." He spotted me on the couch and immediately went back into character. "And when the aliens finally come for us, you will be left behind, Loner McDowell. I can personally guarantee that!"
He glared at me. "Don't you go on this program? This man is a cynic and a fraud and I intend to expose him."
I somehow managed to keep a straight face, nodded in agreement. "He is kind of an asshole, ma'am."
The guest slammed the door hard enough to run a fingernail crack along the bottom edge of the front window. Undiscovered dust flew everywhere. After a few face-twitching moments Loner began to laugh, and then so did I. It was that good, gut-wrenching kind of laugh between friends that relieves tension and clears the air. When it was over we were both close to tears. The two of us ended up sitting on the floor, panting.
"What a way to make a living," Loner wheezed.
"You're out of your mind."
"I have to be. Jesus, Mick, I'm glad you were here to see that. Not a soul on this earth would have believed I didn't fake it. I'll tell you something, I can't wait to figure my way out of this business."
"What do you have up your sleeve?"
"Me and my partner, we got some ideas, but I can't talk about them yet."
"Partner?"
"A 'beaner' name of Manuel," Loner said. "I'll tell you about him sometime."
"I've always meant to ask you how you got into doing this. I've told you my story a couple of times over. What was your first job?"
Loner stretched out flat on the floor. "On the air? An FM station in Dallas, back in the early eighties. I did that middle-of-the-night, Barry freaking White low voice thing. Most of the listeners were devastated to find out I was a white bread cowboy from right there in Texas."
"You're from Texas?" I asked. "I had it in my head you were from Arizona or someplace."
"That's from my bullshit web bio. I hail from Paris. Texas, not France. But I don't advertise the fact."
"You still have family there?"
"I doubt it. My folks are dead." Loner stood up and dusted the wide seat of his black jeans. "Maybe I still got some distant kin in the flats around there, who knows. Say, haven't we ever got around to talking about this before?"
"Don't think so."
"Then why ask now?"
I rose too. "I was thinking that in this business you can work around a man, get hired by him out of nowhere, and still not know his real first name or where he's from. Just struck me as odd."
"Based on the other night," Loner said, "I was figuring that there was more than curiosity behind those questions. Okay, here we go. My first name, and I will break your jaw if you ever repeat it, is Milton."
My jaw dropped. "What? Excuse me, I didn't catch that."
"Fuck you, Callahan."
"Milton?"
"God damn it, if you were named Milton McDowell and wanted to be an outlaw radio star, wouldn't you change your name to Loner?"
"I guess I would at that," I said. I sat on the couch, motioned for Loner to park in the stuffed chair. "So Milton McDowell from Paris, Texas is an FM jock somewhere, changes his name, and then what?"
"Some lady called in to tell me some ESP story instead of a request. I was bored, so I put her on the air with me. People called in to the station the next day and said that they dug it. The genius part is I realized most of them weren't calling to make fun of that lady. They liked listening to her and wanted to believe what she was saying. It hit me that there might be a market for oddball stories told straight. Then when I heard that there was this little radio station in Dry Wells that was for sale, I went for it. I knew I could pump doing this show from a place known for UFO sightings. With syndication, I could send it out anywhere. Plus, I like my hookers legal, and I flat love to gamble. Nevada made sense." Loner realized how much he'd revealed. He squinted at me and cocked his head. "Seems to me you gave me some crappy excuse for asking me so many questions a couple of minutes ago. What was it again?"
"Some kind of bullshit about wanting to know you better, I think."
"Oh, that's right. So what's the real reason?"
"Okay," I said, studying the big man's eyes. "I'm here to ask you what you know about how Sandy Palmer died."
Loner shook his head. "Well, I'll be damned."
"What?"
"The other night when you were asking questions I thought no, not Mick Callahan. The Mick I know is burned out. He's too busy trying to keep himself out of trouble to worry about somebody else's problems." McDowell motioned to the door. "You walked to talk? Okay, but let's go get us a beer."
We stepped outside and Loner locked the door. Out on the street, he seemed uncharacteristically subdued. "Mick, what do you know about the Palmer family?"
"I know that Lowell Palmer made a lot of money, most of it the wrong way. I know the rumors about Wilson not keeping his pants zipped. What else is there?"
"A lot," Loner said. "And you didn't hear it from me, okay?"
"Fair enough." Our boots drummed the dirt for a moment.
"You want to understand," Loner said, "you got to ask yourself something. How does a man who went belly up three times, the big BK and everything, end up with a large ranch and nice cars anyway? How does an old dude in a wheelchair whose son don't do jack all day but knock up women, how does this old man pay the bills? You getting my drift?"
"That had occurred to me."
"Good," Loner said. "Because I can't go a lot further than what I just said. I'm too fond of breathing."
I stopped in the street. "Give me a break, man. Save the melodrama and just tell me what people around here are so wound up about."
Loner shook his head. "Can't do it, friend." He lowered his voice, but kept his facial expression pleasant. "Not right out here in the middle of the street, in front of God and everybody. Let's go inside."
Tap's plywood bar was deserted. Sunlight streamed in the window and danced a jig with motes of dust. Loner dropped a mangled bill on the counter. He reached into the refrigerator, popped open a beer and offered one. I shook my head. Loner laughed. "Don't you get tempted?"
"Not today."
Loner took a long pull, belched, and leaned over the bar. "I don't understand you, man. I mean, you were more fun
drunk than you are sober. How long has it been this time?" I didn't like the subtle emphasis placed on this time.
"A while."
"And what has it gotten you? You don't have any more good times. You make less money than you did when you were high. You probably ain't been laid since you got cleaned up. What does this sobriety shit do for you?"
"I enjoy remembering where I was yesterday. I don't have as many bad dreams. Let's just say it's for the best."
Loner downed the rest of the beer, left a second bill on the counter and popped open another bottle. "This thing you started fooling around with here in Dry Wells, it probably ain't for the best you keep it up."
I waited, my expression blank.
After a moment, he continued, "Small towns are funny. Everybody knows everybody else's business. You take Sandy Palmer there, the little girl just loved to party, and she wasn't particular about who she partied with. But then, right after you got it on, she'd not talk to you for days. Act like she was pissed, or maybe nothing personal even happened. She was a strange girl."
I studied his face carefully, then broke eye contact and fiddled with a coaster. "It's clear she had problems," I said.
"That would be an understatement," Loner said. "She'd say things while you was necking and getting ready, like 'can I call you my boyfriend?' And you'd always say 'sure thing,' even though you knew it was crap and that she was saying the same thing to everybody else. Hell, I probably would have felt sorry for the kid if I had stopped to think about it."
I looked up again, my gaze cool. "But then, you never were the stop and think about it kind, Loner."
Loner howled. "Ain't that the truth? I never was, not like you, Mick. So anyhow, the way I see it, Pop Palmer had to know exactly what was going on. Both of his brats were way out of control."
"He didn't interfere?"
"Not even before he had the stroke and got stuck in that chair, assuming he really is crippled. He's a piece of work, that one. But the kids just ran wild. Maybe Lowell didn't give a damn."
Memorial Day: A Mick Callahan Novel (The Mick Callahan Novels) Page 13