At First Sight

by Stephen J. Cannell

  “I’m very good with business,” he was saying. “Figures, accounts, all that.”

  “Oh, I know you are, Chick. You’re wonderful with that.” What on earth was he getting at?

  “I just wanted you to know if you need help on the probate for the estate or any financial stuff that you might not understand, I can stay and we can work on it or I could fly back here on a moment’s notice, to help you.”

  And now he grabbed both her hands in his and held them insistently.

  “Really. It’s what I do. I want you not to worry about any of it. Just turn everything over to me,” he said.

  “That’s so sweet of you, Chick. But …”

  “No, really. I’m serious.”

  “Yes, of course …”

  “Anything at all. I just want to help. It’s all I want.”

  “Of course. If I need anything, I have your number.” Now she was getting frustrated with him. He was gripping both her hands tightly. She tried to back away.

  “I could stay an extra day, if that would help,” he continued.

  Why wouldn’t he leave her alone? She just wanted to get away from these hovering, clutching people. “I’m fine, Chick,” she snapped at him. Didn’t he know the probate would be handled by the Chandler and Ellis family estate lawyers? She certainly didn’t need any of his help on that. “I think Chandler’s father’s lawyers are taking care of all that,” she said.

  “Oh, I … It’s just …”

  “Please, I need to go. I need to lie down. It’s very nice you came.” Then she tried to give him a quick hug, but he grabbed her again, squeezing her to him. She finally had to put her hands on his chest and push him away. “Give my love to Evie,” she said.

  It seemed an odd encounter, but almost immediately she forgot about it as more friends stepped forward to claim her attention. People embraced her. People asked her if there was anything they could do … if they could run her errands or help her with thank-you notes for all the flowers, until she wanted to scream. But she didn’t. She smiled politely and plodded on.

  “I think I need to get some rest,” she repeated over and over, but these friends wouldn’t let go of her either. They meant well, but they were smothering her.

  “I’m fine,” she kept saying. “I’ll get through this. I know I will.”

  But it was pure bullshit. She knew she wouldn’t get through it, and she certainly wasn’t fine.

  She was devastated.

  Her life, like Chandler’s, was over.

  CHAPTER 16

  SO GOING TO THAT DUMB FUNERAL WAS ONE OF my all-time biggest boner moves. I admit it. From the very start, I was off balance, off my game. But in her grief, Paige was more beautiful, more endearing to me, than she had ever been, and I remind you that I was already so smitten that I had murdered her husband to make her more available. Now my lust, love, or passion, whatever it was, overwhelmed me.

  Going back over it, I got to the funeral with an hour to spare. I ended up standing in back of a crowd of Paige and Chandler’s family and friends, surrounded by Chandler’s high-school students, listening to one drippy story after another. The hands-down prizewinner was the one his father told about Chandler fixing a bird’s wing. As this saccharine tale unfolded, a bunch of tenth-grade dropouts and high-school teachers cried. I was going to need an insulin shot when this was over.

  The memorial program had a verse from Proverbs inscribed on the front. The minister said Paige had picked it because it had been one of Chandler’s favorites, something about it being better to be poor than rich. So even in death this guy was pissing me off.

  I won’t bore you with my feeble attempts at communicating with Paige at the funeral. What the fuck was I thinking? Here I was, standing with a bunch of people I didn’t even know, trying to explain to her how I could help her with her financial affairs, when she had the best legal assassins in the world at her disposal. I felt as out of place as a Buddhist monk in a strip club. I was standing there trying to blend in with a bunch of schoolteachers who thought it was appropriate to wear brown tweed to a funeral.

  In between bouts of social awkwardness, I stupidly kept hitting on Paige. Eventually, I got pushed into a corner with another man who looked as out of place as I did. But we were hardly a matched set. I was stylin’ in my Armani long line; he was dressed like a tractor salesman, in tan pants and a fifty-dollar blazer. He had the worst salt-and-pepper, out-ofstyle flattop I’ve ever seen. It looked like his barber had used a lawn mower on him.

  “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’ ta 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 fu
neral, 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 boxa-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.”