At First Sight

by Stephen J. Cannell

  Paige ran in the evening along the well-lit clay path down by the river, smelling the damp, mist-wet ground, pushing herself harder and faster, trying to develop enough clarity to begin to chart the next act of her life. She was trying to view herself not as a victim, but as a work in progress.

  One thing was damned sure. Chandler wasn’t coming back. He was part of her past. If Paige intended to go on, she needed to establish some goals and pick up a more positive attitude.

  It was November, on a Friday, almost seven months to the day since Chandler had died, and Paige was about four miles into her run, when she finally decided that she had to get out of Charlotte. Everywhere she looked there were painful memories. The restaurant where she and Chandler had gone to celebrate after they’d bought the house; the movie theater where they’d held hands and talked afterward about having a baby; the parks where they’d walked and shared their feelings. Even the dry cleaner that kept losing his favorite shirt. There were also her friends who still treated her like a broken thing. The constant reminders of what she’d lost were everywhere, and when she saw them, they would drive her to the ground, where she would curl around her grief like a wounded animal.

  She knew she had to leave. But where should she go? Where could she start her new life? Paige hadn’t gotten to that part yet.

  But her runs allowed her to stop marinating in Chandler’s death, and if only for an hour, she was finally focusing on the future. She knew she would never find anybody to replace Chan, but she had to get on with life, had to reclaim what was left of Paige Ellis.

  So, on that Friday, she finally made the decision to leave. It was an important first step.

  When Paige returned from her run, she saw Bob Butler’s car parked under a streetlight in front of her house. She slowed her pace as soon as she saw the gray Crown Victoria with her sad detective slumped in the front seat, waiting.

  Right after Chandler died, she had looked forward to Bob’s visits. They had pushed her out of the early stages of grief and forced her to contemplate the future, even though that future only encompassed the gristly act of vengeance.

  Bob and Paige had pledged to catch the bastard. But lately, as her mind steadied and her emotions stabilized, she was beginning to have second thoughts.

  Bob Butler had shown her how lack of closure could poison you. Bob was living proof of what could happen if you let yourself wallow in grief. She could still see the remnants of who he had once been, but his emotions had calcified. He was lost inside his Bible. There were fewer and fewer things that entertained or interested him. Where once there had been a lively enthusiast, she now only saw the skeletal fragments of what she thought was his former self. Paige was determined not to let that happen to her.

  Worse still, despite his monumental, even heroic effort to find Chandler’s killer, it was clear that Robert Butler was getting nowhere. This quest was all tied up in his emotions about his dead wife. This manhunt was something they were doing more for him now than for her. She could almost chart his failure in the stoop of his shoulders and the lower angle of his chin.

  With no new breaks in the case to report, they often ended up giving their weekly meetings more weight by lapsing into long psychological discussions about loss and death. It was a subject where Paige still had no sense of proportion. They were both just venting.

  She slowed and stopped a few hundred yards behind the gray sedan, and for an instant, had an urge to take off and ditch him. Catching Chandler’s killer was no longer the sole answer for her. Vengeance had become a destructive emotion that kept her wallowing in despair.

  But for the moment, they were still mired in it, so she jogged up to his car, stuck her head in the open passenger window.

  “What’s up, stranger?” she said, through a smile she didn’t feel.

  “I think I’m finally getting somewhere,” he said. “Get in and listen to what I just found out.”

  CHAPTER 22

  I’D BEEN SITTING IN THAT DAMN CLUB CHAIR FOR almost an hour when I finally heard Mickey D pull my Porsche into the garage. I heard them talking and laughing, then heard Mickey walking down the drive. He’s short and wears Cuban heels, so when he walks his shoes clack; it’s easy to hear him coming and going. His car is a piece-of-shit Camry, and to keep up appearances, Evelyn makes him park it just around the corner. Subtle as the Gay Pride Parade, these two.

  Then Evelyn entered the house. I saw her walk down the hall to get her car keys out of the dish in the kitchen. She looked in the den and saw me pounding down scotch shooters, slumped in my chair, but she didn’t bother to acknowledge my presence. She walked right past. But that’s okay, Evelyn, ’cause you’re about to get your wheels cleaned.

  Evelyn passed the doorway again, heading out. This time she didn’t bother to look in at all. I heard her unlatch the back door and walk into the garage. She started the gold Mercedes and pulled out.

  I rocketed up out of my chair, and still clutching the bottle of scotch, I grabbed my gloves, my prepacked backpack of fresh clothes, and a box containing the now-loaded .45. Then I followed her into the garage. I waited until she’d cleared the drive, then climbed into the Porsche and checked to make sure the lovers hadn’t left the gas tank on E. Then I followed her.

  My hands were shaking as I drove. I don’t know if it was from anticipation, excitement, or fear. It took us about forty minutes, with the traffic, to get to her hair salon in the Valley.

  I knew once I stepped out of the Porsche and started to do this, there would be no turning back. I couldn’t approach her wearing a ball cap, dark glasses, and a plastic raincoat, aim a .45 at her through the window of the Mercedes, then get cold feet and say, “Sorry, just kidding.” This would have to be, as they say in show biz, a one-take master.

  It was about four-fifteen when she pulled in and parked behind Salono Bello. The hair salon is located in a strip mall on the north end of Van Nuys Boulevard. The guy who does her hair is a narrow-hipped sword dancer with a hair transplant. His name is Mr. Eddy—not Eddie, not Ed—Mr. Eddy. I love this shit.

  I parked a block away in an alley and walked up the street to a spot where I could see her getting out of her car. I couldn’t do the deed right then because, at that exact moment, some Mexican delivery guy was all involved in unloading boxes from his rusting van.

  I found a spot up the street where I was out of sight but could see the parking lot and Evelyn’s car. I opened the backpack and put on my leather gloves, then pulled the baseball cap low. I opened the bag and took out the plastic raincoat. The clothes I was wearing were old, and even though I had the raincoat, I was planning on dumping everything after the shooting to defeat paraffin tests and blood splatter evidence.

  Then I settled down out of sight in some heavy bushes and watched the back of the hair salon. Salono Bello was a little too far out on Van Nuys Boulevard for its upscale clientele. Liquor stores and rundown apartment complexes were closing in on the strip mall, surrounding it like graffitipainted savages.

  Mr. Eddy had told Evelyn he was giving up his lease and moving to a shop on Lankershim. I was glad he hadn’t gotten around to it yet. This area was a perfect setting for a carjack murder. The politically correct way to describe the block would be to say it was “mixed.” A better description would be to say it was being totally overrun by ethnic assholes.

  I continued to watch the parking lot behind the hair salon. It was late in the afternoon and there were only three or four cars there. The sun sets early in November. My guess was around five o’clock. I figured that since Evelyn was getting her two-month dye-job, she wouldn’t be out until after dark—around six. The parking lot should be empty by then. I kept telling myself, Relax, Chick, this will work out fine.

  Only trouble was, my hands wouldn’t stop shaking. My palms were sweating in the leather gloves. My heart was beating too fast, and I kept pulling on the bottle of scotch I’d brought, looking for relaxation and courage. Time oozed.

  Finally, at five-fifty-five,
Evelyn came out with Mr. Eddy and stood at the back door of the salon. They paused to talk.

  After they finished their chat, she gave him a peck on the cheek. He tittered, cooed, and waggled his fingers at her as he made a graceful pirouette and went back inside to close up. Evelyn hurried to her Mercedes.

  From here on, my recollection of the event gets kind of hazy. I mean, I remember what happened, but it’s sort of surrealistic. Time became abstract. I was more than a little hammered on scotch, and remember thinking it’s probably not such a good idea to try and commit a first-degree murder while half in the bag. But I was already too far into this to abort. I waited until Evelyn was inside her Mercedes with the motor running, then I walked up to the car.

  She was starting to pull out of her parking space when she saw me. She stopped the car and frowned, her expression pinched and mean. I walked toward her, holding the gun low and out of sight behind my leg. I swear I still didn’t know if I could do it. My mouth was suddenly bone dry. But to gain resolve as I closed the distance, I was concentrating on all the things I hated about her. Standing naked on the hotel balcony, screwing Mickey D, wasting more money than a Hollywood charity, taking all my dot-com profits and blowing them on jewelry she never even wore, hiring a forensic accountant to get me arrested for fraud—the whole depressing array of complaints I had built up over the past two years.

  As I got closer, she started rolling down the window. “What the fuck are you doing here?” she growled. “You look ridiculous in that getup.”

  “I came to give you this,” I said theatrically as I pulled the gun out from behind my leg and pointed it at her.

  You won’t believe this, but she actually started laughing at me. No kidding … she sat there and just laughed.

  “Who do you think you’re kidding with that?” she said, glancing at the automatic. “What a fucking moron you are, Chick.”

  That did it. I’m pointing a gun at her about to take her shitty life and she laughs and calls me a moron?

  I pulled the trigger.

  I wasn’t at all prepared for what happened. To begin with, the .45 roared, reverberating with deafening impact in the enclosed concrete strip mall. Blood spewed, blowing back all over me as Evelyn flew sideways, all the way across the seat of the car toward the passenger door, taking the unrolling seat belt with her. It finally snapped to the end of its length. She hung there in the belt. With half of her head gone, she was undoubtedly dead, but then the seat belt slowly retracted, pulling her toward me. She came relentlessly back across the seat, like the murderous corpse in a mummy movie. As she neared, I could see the hole I’d put in her forehead, which was about the size of a nickel, but the bullet had exited, taking the back of her head with it and breaking the far window. She finally settled back into the driver’s seat, where she sat dripping blood and cerebral fluid. It was gruesome and horrible.

  “Holy shit,” is what I think I said. But I couldn’t stop now. I couldn’t freeze up. The gunshot would bring people. They would see me. I opened the door, reached in, unhooked the seat belt, and dragged her out of the car. I threw her onto the pavement. Then I jumped into the idling Mercedes and roared away.

  I couldn’t believe how much blood and brain tissue was in there. I didn’t count on there being such a terrible mess in the front seat. When I had imagined it, there wasn’t any blood or cerebral tissue at all, but now, the whole dash and seat were oozing with gore.

  I drove up into the hills and parked in a deserted spot I’d picked out earlier. I had chained my BMX Black Mountain trail bike to a tree well off the road almost a week ago.

  Here’s the story on the BMX bike: It had been Evelyn’s gift to me two Christmases ago. She wanted me to ride it, get back into shape—more grief about my body. That was back when we were still occasionally bumping boots together. She once told me after sex that she was repulsed by my flab. As I remembered this, I had a moment of pure joy that she was out of my life forever. Now, all I had to do was finish the job.

  I didn’t have to wipe down the car, because I’d been wearing gloves, and even if a print of mine miraculously survived, so what? After all, it was our Mercedes.

  I went to work stripping the car using the small Mercedes toolkit in the trunk. I pulled out the radio and the CD player. I took the airbags and the phone. I’m not much with tools, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, but most of this stuff was easy to remove, except for the radio, which I accidentally broke when I pulled it out of the dash.

  I stripped off the bloody raincoat and all my clothes and changed into the fresh duds I’d brought. Then I rolled everything up and put it in the backpack. I put on the pack, dropped the .45 near the car, climbed on my bike, and rode down out of the mountains.

  I peddled for at least fifteen minutes. I was peddling like mad and I thought my lungs would explode. Finally I made it to a gas station that I’d picked earlier because it seemed like nobody in the place spoke much English. Using my fractured Spanish, I asked one of the Mexicans who worked there to watch my bike.

  “Mira esta bicicleta,” or something. He nodded and I called a cab. I went to an address in the Valley about a quarter mile from the murder scene, paid the cabbie, and walked the rest of the way to the hair salon.

  When I got to Salono Bello, it was six forty-five. There was a coroner’s van there, and cops all over the place. Looky-loos were ringing the crime scene. I had parked my Porsche a block away, in an alley. The cops were still working by Evelyn’s body and hadn’t gotten around to canvasing the neighborhood yet. I got into my car and drove back to where I’d hidden the radio and the airbags. I threw them into the trunk and drove to the gas station, then threw my trail bike in the back of the Porsche along with everything else. Then I drove up to the Hollywood Reservoir, and after I made sure nobody was around, slung the radio, phone, and airbags out into the water and watched them sink. I grabbed the backpack full of clothes, walked up into the woods above Lake Hollywood, and set fire to everything using a can of lighter fluid I’d brought with me. Then I buried the ashes. I got back into the car and was home well before eight.

  For my alibi to hold up I had to be able to prove I was at home from around five-forty-five until now, give or take half an hour. That’s where my angry daughter came in. Melissa was still asleep, so I sneaked into her room and reset her clock to six-oh-five. Then I woke her up.

  “What the fuck do you want?” she said, typically pissed, as she rolled over and glared at me out of one bloodshot eye.

  “You know where your mother went?” I asked.

  “Fuck, no.” She looked at the darkened window. “What time is it? I’m meeting Big Mac later.”

  “I don’t know. Is that clock right?” I asked, pointing at it. She turned a bleary eye toward the dial.

  “Yeah … five past six?” she said.

  I looked at my watch. “Six-oh-five exactly,” I confirmed. “Go back to sleep. I’m just getting worried about your mother. When do you want me to wake you up?”

  “Eight … nine … I don’t know.”

  I turned off the light and sat on the floor outside her room until I could hear her steady breathing again, then I sneaked back inside and reset her clock to the right time.

  I wasn’t sure how long it would be until the cops arrived. I knew I would be their prime suspect until they located and dusted the car and gun and came up with Delroy’s prints.

  Then I jumped in the shower and lathered up.

  While I was washing, a strange thought hit me. I had been completely destroyed when I killed Chandler. It had tortured me for weeks. After I’d run him down, I’d had to pull over and vomit. I couldn’t even get an erection. But with Evelyn, I didn’t feel a shred of anything—no nausea or guilt. No remorse or sadness. I simply felt free.

  Was that a gain or a loss? It felt like a gain, but I was smart enough to realize it was probably a loss.

  As I stood under the spray, washing myself clean, I was so happy I couldn’t keep from smiling.


  You see, I was already looking forward to calling Paige and telling her about my horrible, unexpected tragedy.

  PAIGE & CHICK

  CHAPTER 23

  I THOUGHT BOB BUTLER HAD AGED TERRIBLY IN the months since Chandler died. He looked tired and drawn sitting in his car in front of my house. He had lost weight, and I could see new lines framing his mouth, cutting the skin around his eyes. As I looked at him sitting there, smiling, ready to tell me his good news, I wondered if I could go through another meeting where some promising clue he found turned into a disappointing dead end.

  “Come inside, I’ve got some coffee on,” I told him.

  “No, no … I wanta get going. Got me two hundred miles t’go, and I want t’get there ’fore it gets too late.”

  He leaned over and opened the passenger door, so I slid in. The car smelled like fried grease and old socks. Since Althea died, Bob had fewer and fewer nights when he went home. He had turned his car into temporary living quarters. I suspected he was either sleeping in the backseat or on a couch at the precinct house.

  “Let’s hear the news,” I said, trying to keep it upbeat, while not expecting much.

  “Remember the sheet I sent to all them tire stores?” he asked. “Well, I got a hit.” He pulled out a fax and handed it to me. On the top of the page, in letters that were designed to look like tire treads, it read:DALE’S TIRE TOWN

  NEWPORT NEWS, VIRGINIA

  WHERE THE RUBBER MEETS THE ROAD

  I scanned the fax and saw that it was from somebody named Dale Winthrop. He wrote that on April 13th of this year, he had sold four new Firestones to a guy in a blue Taurus with a busted-up right front fender. The fax said that the tires he took off the car still had more than an inch of good rubber left.