At First Sight

by Stephen J. Cannell

“I’d like to see you if I might,” the voice continued softly.

  “See me?”

  “Yes ma’am. It’s a police matter. If I might, I’ll go on up to the front door and ring. See you in a second.”

  “Police? What police?” she said, but he had already hung up.

  Dread and fear now choked her.

  She rushed to the door and fumbled for the latch chain with numb fingers, swinging it open to face a thin, middle-aged man with narrow shoulders. He was wearing khaki pants and a wrinkled blue blazer. His salt-and-pepper hair was cut into an old-fashioned, fifties-style flattop, which framed a sun-creased, friendly face. He was holding a badge in one hand and a Bible in the other.

  “What is it?” she said, her voice shaking with anxiety.

  “Could we step inside?” he inquired gently.

  “What do you want?” she implored, taking a step backward as he followed her in and closed the door.

  “I regret to inform you, ma’am, that your husband was run over by a car in the Walgreens drugstore parking lot. They didn’t stick around to report the accident so it’s a hit-and-run.” He said it fast—gave her the bad news in two sentences, as if practice making these kind of calls had taught him not to draw it out.

  The words staggered her. This narrow-shouldered, plain-looking man had just hit her with a sentence more powerful than a fist. Her knees went weak and she found herself reaching for a chair.

  “That’s absurd,” she heard herself say.

  “The paramedics who picked him up listed him as ‘death imminent.’ That’s the classification they use until the docs at County Hospital can make it official.”

  “He’s dead?” she said dumbly, feeling the blood draining out of her head. She suddenly felt sticky and wet, white with fear. Her voice was disembodied, and although vaguely familiar, seemed shrill.

  “Yes ma’am, I’m terribly sorry. He was dead at the scene. But like I said, the doctors at the hospital have to be the ones to pronounce him.”

  She felt an agonizing sense of grief sweep over her. Suddenly, her legs buckled and she sank to her knees, falling forward, banging her head on the carpet.

  Detective Butler rushed to catch her, but he was a split second late and she went down anyway. He helped her to her feet, then led her to the sofa in the living room.

  “Where’s the kitchen, ma’am?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer. She had her head in her hands and could hear herself moaning—long, wailing, groaning sounds that she didn’t even recognize as her own until she realized they stopped each time she took a breath.

  Robert Butler turned away and went toward the back of the house. She heard water running, but all she kept thinking was, death imminent? A two-word phrase so immense she was still unable to comprehend it.

  Seconds later, Bob Butler was back at her side, handing her a glass of water. She took it and looked at it, not sure what he wanted her to do.

  “Drink,” he said softly, and she obediently sipped the water, her hands trembling before her eyes.

  “Mrs. Ellis … I’m sorry to have to do this now, but if we want to catch this perpetrator, time is of the essence.” She didn’t answer, so he continued. “I’m going to have to ask you a few questions. Is that going to be okay?”

  She nodded her head but still couldn’t speak.

  “Could you tell me why your husband went to the drugstore so late at night?”

  “Pills for my back,” she finally managed to say. “He was picking up a prescription for me.”

  “You’ve been here the whole time? You didn’t leave the house?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Can anybody confirm that?” She shook her head. Then he leaned back and studied her carefully. He seemed to make a decision, then continued on. “What I want you to know, Mrs. Ellis, is I’m not going to let this hit-and-run go unsolved.” He waited, then added, “That’s a promise. Me to you.”

  Somebody hit Chandler and drove away, leaving him to die alone? The idea was preposterous. Chandler was … He always seemed so … Charmed.

  “My own wife was the victim of a hit-and-run, three years ago,” Robert Butler was saying. “So while most people won’t understand what you’re going through right now, I want you t’know I understand exactly how you feel.”

  She looked at him, not really processing much of this. They were just words that buzzed in her anguish. The detective was looking at her with sad understanding, as if they shared a secret.

  Then this soft-spoken, plain man picked up his Bible, opened it to a dog-eared page, and began to read, first from Philippians 4: “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I say, rejoice.” His voice was soft, soothing. “And the peace of God which passeth all understanding shall keep your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

  He continued reading the Bible to her, how long, she didn’t know. At first it just annoyed her, but then she began to listen to his carefully selected passages.

  “Hebrews 9:27: ‘And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: so Christ was once offered to bear the sins of many.’” Then: “Acts 9:41: ‘And he gave her his hand, and lifted her up; and when he had called the saints and widows, he presented her alive. And it was known throughout all Joppa; and many believed in the Lord.’”

  His words began to finally soothe her. They cut into her grief with gentle wisdom. She listened, locking onto each sentence, holding tight to the ideas he was reading to her, as if they were slender ropes spun by God that somehow led to Chandler.

  Afterward, when she thought back on it, it seemed odd that a police detective working a violent crime detail would sit in her living room and read from the Bible after destroying her life with a few declarative sentences.

  Only later did she find out that after Bob Butler’s wife was run down and killed, he became a born-again Christian. He carried his Bible with him everywhere, right along with the North Carolina state penal code. Later still, she found out that his fellow detectives at the Charlotte P.D. called him “Bible Bob” behind his back. He had become something of a department joke, reading scripture to grieving relatives as well as unrepentant criminals.

  But during those first minutes after the horrible realization of Chandler’s death fell on her, crushing her, he tried to shield her from the pain by reading to her from the Bible in his soft, comforting drawl.

  And finally, “Revelations 14:13: ‘Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth. Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them.’”

  CHAPTER 12

  I MAY HAVE HAD TOO MUCH TO DRINK ON THE plane. At least my flight attendant, a smartly turned-out fruit cup named Denny with minty breath and plucked eyebrows, thought so. He cut me off somewhere over Denver. Back in the pre-9/11, dot-com wizard days, I would have given this prissy asshole some primo grief, but since the World Trade Center went down, flying has become a contact sport with bomb-sniffing dogs and cavity searches. These days, if you even get out of your seat too fast, your fellow passengers will knock you into a bulkhead, and the crew will take you off the plane in handcuffs.

  So I cut Denny some slack and sat there nursing the last one, trying hard not to think about Chandler and the rented Taurus and what a gross, horrible thing I’d done.

  Of course, it was a little like being in the desert and saying you weren’t going to think about water. Once you say it, that’s all you can think about. So I played tag with my thoughts, a terrible game of mental “gotcha,” where my conscience, or memory, or whatever it was, kept catching up to me, and each time it did, I had to readdress a new menu of negative terms that described me. Check, please.

  But of course I couldn’t leave … couldn’t get off the plane until it landed. Worse still, I couldn’t bear my own company. I wanted to get away from myself. If it could have helped, I would have asked Denny to move me to a new seat.

  L.A. was hot,
smoggy, and ugly. I say this as one who loves this fast, transient, slightly glitzy city. Normally L.A. is my kind of place. An hour from skiing or the beach, enough fun and glitter to keep you endlessly diverted. Booty, in shortshorts, whizzing by on Rollerblades almost everywhere you looked. A town designed for insincerity and bullshit. My town. But today it all looked different. As I deplaned, everything felt different, darker and less interesting.

  Then I did something I swear you wouldn’t believe. I stopped at an airport book stand and bought a copy of Hustler, a skin magazine with pictures of naked hookers in high heels doing squats and editorials so simplistic it’s like they were written in crayon. I took it to my car, which was parked in the big lot across from American Airlines, and drove until I found a liquor store on Century Boulevard. There are plenty on that boulevard of broken windows. I stopped at the first one I saw and bought a bottle of blended scotch, took it to the car, and had a few stiff ones right out of the bottle. Then I opened my April edition of Hustler and had a handkerchief date with myself right there in the front seat.

  Why I did this is anybody’s guess … some threehundred-dollar-an-hour Beverly Hills shrink would probably say I was trying to confirm my sense of self, or that sex, even self-administered, is a subconcious confirmation of life … a validation of my existence. Or maybe I just needed to get my mind off of what I’d done for a few minutes. At any rate, there I was, parked behind the liquor store, looking at shaved pussies, working on a dishonorable discharge.

  The problem here is, I couldn’t really get hard, which is generally not a problem for me at all. I’m a charter member of the diamond-cutters club. But all I had going here was a modified flounder. I finally did a soft ejaculation and closed the magazine, zipped up, and began looking around to see if I’d been spotted. Then lethargy and despair descended. Somewhere in the back of my mind, the old Chick started heckling me. What’s the problem, CB? Can’t get a good chubby anymore? The question began to haunt me. Doubts about my own sexuality hovered and I began to wonder if killing Chandler had somehow altered me, taken the pump out of my python.

  A friend of mine once boiled man’s existence down to one short sentence. “You know what life is all about, Chick?” he asked. “The cars, the houses, the great clothes, the rings and watches … Know why guys need all that stuff?”

  “Status?” I answered. We’d been drinking in the men’s bar at the Jonathan Club, where he was a member.

  “No, not status.”

  “What, then? What’s it all about?” I grinned drunkenly, thinking he was about to give me some funny punch line.

  “It’s about getting laid.” He saluted me with his drink and continued. “Boil it all down and that’s all it is. You go out and buy a sexy car or a big pinky diamond. Why? So your brother-in-law will think you’re hot shit? No way. All that stuff, everything we do, everything we buy—it’s all just about getting laid. Take that outta the equation and life becomes a zero-sum experience.”

  It’s strange that such monumental truth, such soul-defining wisdom, would be learned in a bar. But I swear, I’ve held everything I’ve ever experienced up to that simple equation, and it’s bulletproof. No exceptions.

  Follow the bouncing ball.

  Why did I buy the house in the six hundred block of Elm? Answer: So people would know I had money.

  Yeah, but what people, Chick? Ugly people? Old people? Male-type people?

  Well, no, not exactly.

  So why would I spend three million I don’t have, on a house I can’t afford … put myself into a hole, and cause myself endless sleepless nights? Why do that if I’m not trying to impress the guys I play golf with? Who was I trying to impress?

  Yeah, Chick, who?

  Well, the house was a great investment. Property values in that neighborhood are …

  You’re lying. Who did you buy it for? Not for Evelyn. She was already married to you. So who? Let’s hear it Chick. Stop hedging.

  Well … I guess I wanted other girls to know I had it.

  Yeah, but what girls, Chick? We talkin’ porkers here?

  No, not porkers. Pretty girls. California beauties. Greatlooking west side squid. I bought it so pretty girls would look at me and smile and wish I wasn’t married so they could sleep with me. They’d covet what I had and find me desirable, because if you want the absolute truth, I don’t find myself all that desirable. I think I’m a loser with nothing I really care about, so I need those things to help prop up my self-esteem—my self-image. My unspoken message is, Take a ride on the Chick Best Express. Maybe once you see everything I have, you’ll spread ’em and let me deliver a load.

  So that was the whole enchilada. Boil it down and, just like my friend said, everything we do or buy is just about getting laid. So it followed then that I’d killed Chandler Ellis because I wanted to sleep with Paige. Because of that fantasy, I’d committed a murder.

  But what if God gets so angry he takes the starch outta my monkey?

  What if, from now on, because of psychological stress or guilt, or some other Freudian malady, I’m cursed to limpdick my way through the rest of my life?

  WHAT IF I CAN’T GET IT UP ANYMORE?

  I took another deep swig of scotch.

  “You’ve gotta stop drinking so much,” some ghost from my past whispered in my subconscious. Grandma, my father … the long gone dot-com wizard … somebody.

  I pulled out of the liquor-store parking lot into a brown smoggy day.

  You see what I was doing here, don’t you?

  I was determined to punish myself. Determined to make myself pay a price for what I had done. Losing my hard-on was just about the worst thing that could happen—the worst thing that I could imagine. But back then, twelve hours after I killed Chandler, I thought it was just temporary, a stressrelated anomaly. Back then, I still thought I had something to live for. Back then, I was just getting started. It was only the first day of my slow drive through hell.

  CHAPTER 13

  PAIGE WOKE UP EACH MORNING AND FOR A SECOND would think everything was fine, but then her memory would return, crashing into her like a rogue wave, knocking her spirit flat, leaving her unable to rise. It left her dead inside, consumed by a feeling of complete loss. She felt used up and hollow. She would often lie in bed for an hour, unable to get up and face the day, looking at the black horizon that was now her future. How could she get up and slog through that darkness day after day?

  The intense anger came later.

  She would finally make it out of bed and wander into the bathroom, look at her tangled, sleep-tousled hair and tearstained, bloated face. For a moment, she would contemplate what to do with the mess. She generally just ignored it, grabbed for a scrunchie, and pulled her hair back and knotted it. No lipstick, no eye shadow, no powder. She would then wander downstairs, pale and wan, clutching the banister with a vacant expression, looking like the tragic ghost in a black-and-white movie. Her heart was sinking. She was totally unable to cope.

  Each morning her friends showed up to console her—mostly people from the school where she and Chandler taught. Teachers and administrators filled her house wearing anxious expressions. Nobody knew what to say to her, so they mumbled nonsense clichés: “Only the good die young … God only takes those who have finished their work.” She would nod and whisper her thanks.

  They would hold both her hands in theirs and look deeply into her eyes, searching for some spark of life, some evidence that their well-meaning sentiments had raised her spirits. But Paige’s eyes remained vacant, her whispered responses hollow.

  These interactions were predictable and ultimately useless to her. But she felt an obligation to be there for her friends, to help them with their mission of mercy on her behalf. Without her pretending to be encouraged by their efforts, the whole scene would have been even more hopeless. So Paige made the best of it. As she struggled to entertain them, at least they forced her to point her thoughts outward, away from the suicidal depression that burned inside. />
  And there were things that needed to be done.

  There was a funeral to plan, people to call, out-of-state friends to contact who might not have heard, although everyone must know by now. The network news shows had been running clips for days.

  The first forty-eight hours passed in a blur of faces and decisions.

  They picked a cemetery and then a gravesite. She bought two—one for herself right next to his. She couldn’t wait to fill it.

  They picked the clothes that Chandler would wear. Someone stupidly suggested his quarterback jersey. But she would never do that. He had moved way beyond football. She spent an hour in his closet before she finally selected the suit he’d been married in. It hadn’t necessarily been his favorite outfit, but it was hers. She loved the way he looked in that suit.

  By Wednesday, she had taken care of most of the essentials. She booked a minister, the pastor at their Episcopal church. She picked the pallbearers, mostly people from the school, along with two cousins Chandler had been close to. His best friend in college, a wide receiver named Clarence Rutledge, helped her organize it. She picked the time—2 P.M. Saturday. She made hotel reservations for Chandler’s mother and father.

  She had been reading the Bible, looking for a verse that Chandler liked so she could put it on the cover of the memorial program. She had narrowed it down to a few but hadn’t decided on which one yet.

  On Wednesday afternoon she went down to the Charlotte Police Department for a meeting with Detective Butler. He was waiting in the lobby with a tight smile. He didn’t smile so much with his mouth as he did with his eyes. She liked that. He understood the weight of her grief because he carried it himself.

  He didn’t hold her hands in both of his and mutter platitudes like her nervous friends at home. He told her she looked very tired. Honesty. He took her upstairs to a noisy detective squad room and they sat in his cluttered cubicle. There were pictures of a woman with a plain but friendly face displayed in ornately engraved silver frames. In several of the snapshots, older children in their twenties stood next to her. Bob Butler was pawing through a box at his feet, searching for something. He looked up and caught her staring at the photos.