by Gorman, Ed
"Yeah. You are."
She said, "I get the bathroom first."
THREE
Back in the first days of the prairie, the government had trouble rounding up soldiers to fight the various Indian wars. This was particularly true of the Black Hawk Wars in 1832 and the Civil War.
That's when they got a very bright idea. In addition to wages, the soldiers would be given land. In Iowa. All the way up to 120 acres. This served two purposes. The army got soldiers (or cannon fodder, depending on your point of view), and Iowa, not exactly teeming with new arrivals, got new voters and taxpayers.
The land back then was about $1.25 an acre. A hundred dollars could buy you a very nice farm. You'd stack rocks as a fence meant to define the dimensions of your land, and then you'd build yourself a soddy—a house made of sod—and then you'd move in. If disease, flood, or prairie fire didn't get you, you could have yourself a nice, ass-busting life for you and your family.
On my drive up to see Dr. Williams, I looked at prairie land that had undoubtedly been the site of soddies. Nearby creek. Plenty of timberland for firewood. Rich black earth for planting. Of course, the Big Mac billboard probably hadn't been there in the distance.
Nor the small airport to the east, a small plane just now landing in some turbulent air. Nor the TV tower beaming forth mediocrity twenty-four hours a day. There was always something to spoil the idyllic vision I had of pioneer days. I wanted to crawl into one of those pulpy old book covers of the brave musket-carrying mountain man and his flaxen-haired immigrant woman surveying a beautiful valley just at gorgeous sunset.
The hospital was located on a hill overlooking a valley, all right. But the valley was filled with two strip malls, a high school football stadium, and a truck depot. To make things even worse, I didn't have a flaxen-haired immigrant woman with me.
If you faced away from the valley, you had a very different sense of the area. A much nicer one. Oaks and hardwoods surrounded three large brick buildings. A swimming pool, tennis courts, and a picnic area lay to the west of the buildings. Nurses in crisp white uniforms watched over a variety of adults engaged in various quiet endeavors such as checkers, chess, badminton, and volleyball. Oddly, nobody was in the pool—the temperature was in the seventies—nor was anybody playing tennis.
A sign, black letters on white, read ADMINISTRATION. I parked in the visitors' area and went inside. It had that smell, that feel, that aura of all bureaucracies. Busy busy. Even people with the brightest souls would be blanched to an administrative gray after a few months of working here. Each little office group would have its gossip, its victim, its slacker. Each group head would have his or her secret, a drinking problem, an adultery problem, a money problem, a son or daughter with a law problem. Some of the nurses would be sleeping with some of the doctors. And some of the lesser staffers would be sleeping with some of the other lesser staffers, hoping someday to be sleeping with some of the doctors, thereby enjoying a new status. Every year at the Christmas party somebody would jump up on a desk and announce that this wonderful group of folks was the best fucking wonderful group of folks in the wide world—pardon my French, ladies—and he was goddamned proud to be a goddamned part of it. The more emotional would cry; the more sensible would want to fill a barf bag. But Christmas was three months away, this was still Indian summer, and a workday, and so busy busy was what was going on here, busy busy the computer keyboards, the ranks of phone consoles, the clack of high heels on polished floors.
While I was waiting for Dr. Williams—I'd called half an hour ahead for an appointment and was told I could have fifteen minutes—I read up on psychology magazines. The current obsession in psychiatric circles seemed to be the growing reaction to "recovered memory" cases. I hadn't paid all that much attention to the subject until a California jury put a man in prison for a murder of twenty-five years earlier, a murder his eight-year-old daughter claimed to suddenly remember eleven months before the trial started. Her father had, she said, murdered her best little friend. There was no physical evidence; there were no witnesses. Simply the woman saying that yes, after several visits to a "recovered memory" psychologist, she suddenly recalled what her father had done. The verdict scared the hell out of me. The judiciary has enough trouble ascertaining the truth—thanks to things like new DNA testing that helped free eleven men on Illinois's death row, proving that the system is hardly infallible—we certainly don't need "recovered memory" cases making things even worse. Under the guidance of a clever shrink, you can "remember" virtually anything he wants you to.
Dr. Williams looked much as he had yesterday, a short, stout man who vaguely resembled Albert Einstein. Good, firm grip. Nice, quick smile. Then he led me inside.
The walls were a testimonial to his brains, pluck, and talent. Scroll after scroll, plaque after plaque, degree after degree—all arranged imposingly on the same wall—attested to his magnificence. The furnishings were cherry wood and in such good taste you almost wanted something vulgar—a screaming orange canvas chair—to liven them up.
"I'm sorry I'm in such a hurry today. We have six new patients arriving and that's always our busiest time."
Busy busy.
"That's fine. All I really want to know is if you saw Sandy when she was alive."
"Saw her in what sense?"
"I'm sorry. I mean 'saw' her in a professional sense."
He nodded. "Yes. Twice. I asked her to come once with Rick and once without him."
"Did she open up to you?"
He shrugged. "To some degree, I suppose. She was very nervous. Her father was angry that she was here. She said he hated the whole notion of her being here."
"I'm told that her father used to take nude photos of her."
He half smiled. "You really are a cop, aren't you, Mr. Payne?"
"I used to be. Now I'm just sort of a glorified field investigator."
He leaned forward. He had stubby arms. He pulled his chair flush against his desk. "You know I can't discuss what my clients told me."
"The shrinks I knew at Quantico did. In fact, they never shut up. They were always swapping stories about who had the weirder patients."
He frowned. "Very unprofessional. I know it goes on. But I certainly don't approve. I'm from the old school—when it meant something to be a so-called shrink. Now anybody who can finish a few night school courses can go into the counseling business."
"Did you ever talk with the father?"
"No. He called once and was vaguely threatening, said he'd sue me if I saw his daughter again. I have to admit, he did seem like a man who had a secret."
"Afraid his daughter might tell you something about him, you mean."
"Exactly. I understand that there are people who don't believe in psychiatry, and people whose religion forbids them from seeing a shrink, and people who think it doesn't work and costs too much money—all the familiar objections. But he was too strident. So the only thing I could think of was that he had something to hide." He smiled. "Shrinks have very suspicious natures, I'm afraid."
"I'm going to go see him."
"I'm told he's a very violent man. I know he was arrested a while back for public intoxication. And he managed to knock out two policemen before they could restrain him."
"Great. Just what I want. A fistfight."
The intercom buzzed. "Mr. Alexander has arrived," his secretary said. "You asked me to tell you."
"Thank you, Beverly." He tapped his Seiko. "I guess I'm even busier than I thought. We didn't expect Alexander until late this afternoon."
He stood up and came around his desk and shook my hand. "Rick's parents aren't wealthy by any means. In fact, they're almost poor. I have a lot of faith in Iris Rutledge, but she can't afford to hire any outside help. I'm giving her all the money I can, but my resources are limited, too. Some people are very skeptical of Tandy West trying to build a show around this. But I guess I should be grateful she is because we're getting a very good investigator in the bargain—and we don't have to pay for him."
Then, a little dramatically, he said, "My only concern is Rick. He's innocent."
Rick, and your reputation, I thought. It won't look real good if the kid you "saved" is convicted of murder. Like the time Norman Mailer, among others, helped free a convicted murderer who then killed some poor young man who was working as a waiter. There were good reasons ordinary people distrusted the psychiatric profession.
I walked out with him.
In the reception area, he said, "Excuse me, Mr. Payne. I need to hurry down the hall."
"That's fine."
I was just leaving the building when a voice behind me said, "Mr. Payne."
She was a pleasant-looking, gray-haired woman in a blue suit and a frilly white blouse. "I just wanted to tell you something I forgot to tell the detectives." When she reached me, she said, "My name's Myrna Haines. Dr. Williams has two offices—the administrative office and his personal office. He oversees a lot of the electroshock and things like that, so he needs an office close by. Anyway, I'm the secretary for his personal office."
"I see."
"Are you headed out?"
"Yes."
"Good. I could use some fresh air."
We stood on the front steps. The day made me feel twenty and immortal.
"The man they found in your room, Mr. Kibbe?"
"Yes?"
"One afternoon I found him going through my desk. He'd been in to see Dr. Williams earlier in the day, so I recognized him, of course."
"Did he take anything?"
She nodded. "I saw him stick two envelopes and a very small paperweight and a couple of pieces of paper in a briefcase. What would he want with things like that?"
"Did you confront him?"
"Yes. He pretended not to know what I was talking about. Then he just pushed past me and left."
"You told Dr. Williams."
"Of course. He called Chief Charles right away. She came out and talked to us and then said she'd try and find Kibbe. But she called later and said he wasn't registered at any of the motels in town."
"Did you ever figure out which envelopes and papers he took?"
"Yes. And they were nothing important at all. Just routine correspondence I'd typed up to two different HMOs. They're always trying to talk us into accepting less of a payment." She smiled bitterly. "I can remember when we thought HMOs would save the entire medical profession."
"When was this?"
"Two days ago. I know you're trying to help Rick. He can be pretty obnoxious, but I agree with Dr. Williams. I don't think he killed that girl."
"You have any suspicions about who might have?"
"Not really."
"Well, thanks for telling me about the papers and the envelope."
"And the paperweight. About the size of a poker chip, with Dr. Williams's initials on it."
"That is strange."
She inhaled deeply. "God, I hate to go back inside. I wish a butterfly would just carry me off."
It was a nice little Ray Bradbury image, and it stayed with me for most of the afternoon.
FOUR
Noah Chandler was waiting for me.
I wasn't supposed to know he was waiting for me, of course. But as I came down the steep hill leading away from the hospital, I had a wide view of the road below. His TV private-eye profile was hard to mistake.
I turned left, toward town, pretending not to see him. He came right after me. He kept a proper distance, but on an empty county gravel road, he wasn't real difficult to spot. A couple of times he talked on his cell phone. I was naturally curious about who he was talking to, and what about.
As soon as we hit the town limits sign, he fell away, turned left into a strip mall.
I had an address for Frank Caine, Sandy's father, so I drove out there. He collected cars. Or rather, parts of cars. The front lawn of the small white bungalow was strewn with transmissions, radiators, steering columns, windshields, doors, and bumpers. A sign, red letters on white, announced: FRANK T. CAINE, AUTOMOTIVE. A loud, portable radio playing heavy metal blasted from a sagging white barn.
I pulled into a rutted dirt driveway covered by chickens. They paced like cartoon fathers in maternity wards. I'd read that slaughter animals know when their time comes. For no reason apparent to scientists, the blood pressure and brain waves become agitated. Somehow, they know. And these birds looked as if they knew, too, the frantic way they moved up and down the rutted drive.
Frank Caine turned out to be a tall, balding man in a white, oil-stained T-shirt. The way his long arm muscles moved, he had to spend some frequent time with weights. He stood with unmistakable insolence in front of an ancient white barn where he'd apparently been working on a red Plymouth with the hood raised. He held a long greasy wrench in one hand and kept slapping it against the open palm of the other. Frank planned to be a gangsta when he grew up.
The barn-garage looked interesting, actually. Inside there would probably be yellowing newspapers going back to the forties or maybe even the thirties (Iowa farmers are savers, which is why so many antiquers ask farmers if they can look through their attics and barns and garages). There would be the odd cheap child's toy (my wife being an antiquer, I'd learned what some of that species is constantly looking for: a Captain Midnight Big Little Book about fighting the Japanese during WW II; a Davy Crockett figure from the mid-fifties, maybe; a Frank Sinatra album; a Monkees lunch box even; and magazines, rat-nibbled and time-faded, depicting an era when the sexiest thing in prim Mom's life was her new appliance or dressing up for hubby when he got home for dinner).
I parked and got out of my car and immediately saw the largest canine God had ever created.
Dogs have replaced guns as the preferred macho toy. I'm not talking about man's best friend, the sloppy, sweet, faithful clown of a family dog we grew up loving and will remember to the end of our days. No, I'm not talking about the killing machines that the macho boys keep telling us are necessary in such a violent society. Tell that to the two-year-old ripped and killed by such a beast, or the mailman whose leg was shredded and ultimately amputated.
They aren't dogs, they're monsters. And while it isn't their fault—and objectively I feel a real sorrow for them—I take no chances. The Roman legions used such dogs, and there are many historians of antiquity who wrote about watching the savage canines turn first on the enemy, and then on their masters. The dogs are the same today. Their owners have the dogs so overwrought, they can't even control them. So what chance would I have of controlling them?
This one was a patchwork gray mutant combination of Saint Bernard and greyhound. It came trotting out of the barn with an insolence equal to that of its master. It crouched next to him. Even from here I could smell it, an animal that gorged on other animals during the night. No Puppy Chow for this one. It had been cursed with mindless, relentless fury, a miserable life for an animal that could have been a loving and valued part of a family, or a guide for a little blind girl.
Frank Caine smirked and stroked the dog's head. He was proud of his work.
The dog growled at me and the earth rumbled.
"I do believe Henry here doesn't like you," Frank Caine said.
"Gee, and I was hoping he'd go to the prom with me."
"Henry doesn't like sarcasm."
"Henry is awfully sensitive. For a dog, I mean."
"Henry's a lot more than a dog, mister." Slapping the long wrench into his palm. "Some people around here think he's some sort of supernatural being."
That, I didn't have any trouble believing.
"We got him from this priest. Not that I'm a Catholic. I'm Lutheran. Anyway, we got him from this here priest. He said he found this strange little puppy in the church one night. It was about midnight and the priest was asleep and he heard all this noise in the church. So he rushed over there and there was this here puppy. He said the puppy really spooked him. The eyes, he said, at night they kind of glow. And they still do. Give me goose bumps myself sometimes, they way they kind of have this amber light ins
ide them. Anyway, this here puppy had destroyed the altar. Knocked everything over and smashed it. The priest said that there was a good chance that the puppy was evil. He said he didn't usually believe in stuff like that. But he just felt this dog was really dangerous."
"So he gave it to you?"
"Well, I'd heard about it, of course, how it'd knocked over everything on the altar. I just thought an animal like that sounded kinda interesting. And if he gave it to the animal shelter, they'd just put it to sleep. By then, everybody who saw the puppy was kinda spooked by it. So I took it."
The throat rumble again. Henry's back arching slightly, preparing to spring.
"He don't like you."
"Well, I'm not crazy about him, either."
"In fact, I don't like you, either."
"You don't even know me."
"Nope. But know who you are and why you're here. You're some kind of detective fella and you're working with that scam-artist lady from that TV show and you want to prove that that sonofabitch Rick Hennessy didn't kill my Sandy."
"A lot of people don't think he did."
"Not the chief of police. Not the county attorney. And not the jury they end up pickin, either. He sure as hell did kill her, mister. And he admits it himself."
"Dr. Williams says he's delusional."
"Dr. Williams." He sounded as if he wanted to spit. He went back to slapping the wrench against the palm of his hand. "I'd like to get Dr. Williams in a room with this here wrench sometime."
"What've you got against him?"
"That don't matter anymore. She's dead."
"Sandy?"
"Of course Sandy. Who the hell else would I be talkin' about?" Then, "Fucker tried to turn my own daughter against me." The wrench slapping harder and harder now.
The photos, of course. Sandy had told Rick about the photos and Rick had told Dr. Williams and Dr. Williams had talked to Sandy about it the few times she'd come to visit.
"He's a fucking liar is what he is. I'll bet he's a fucking Jew."
"I don't think so."