by Jess Walter
“Out,” he said quietly. “Get out of here before I call the cops.”
Tommy pulled himself up. “My dad rented…”
“I don’t care if your dad owns the fuckin’ hotel, kid.” He said it like he was quoting us a price. “Get your things, get your girl, and get out of here.”
Tommy walked to the bed. He pulled Amanda’s dress back up over her bra and then shot me a glare. He wrestled with Amanda and got her to her feet. “I’m on TV!” Amanda chirped, then she slumped in his arms. Tommy staggered under her weight.
“I’ll help,” I said, and stepped forward.
“Don’t come near me, you fuckin’ one-eyed freak,” Tommy said.
Eli came out of the bathroom and helped Tommy stand Amanda up. They carried her out of the room and toward the elevator.
“Get the other one and get out of here,” said the desk clerk. Then he turned and followed Eli and Tommy and Amanda, who chirped, “What channel is this?”
In the bathroom, Dana had gotten to her feet and wiped her mouth on a towel. She smoothed her dress in back and turned to see me. “That’s not very good wine,” she said.
She fished around in the medicine cabinet until she found a small tube of toothpaste, put some on her finger, and rubbed it on her teeth.
“I was going to kick him as soon as I finished puking,” she said. “But thank you.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Where’s Eli?” she asked.
“Helping Amanda to Tommy’s car.”
I could hear engines growling and tires squealing on the street below. I checked my watch. It was midnight. The dance was over.
Dana looked out the window at the glittering skyline of Spokane. I’ve always thought it a strange city that way: a city of illusion, at night its downtown big and sparkling, but during the day small and decaying, with big gaps between the buildings. At night, you can imagine great things here. But daytime in Spokane is cold and real.
Dana reached out and touched the window. “Do you have any idea how many kids like me sit at home on Friday nights and fantasize about this, about what people like you and Susan and Amanda and Tommy are doing? Everything we want is inside rooms like this.” She turned and smiled. “It’s sad.”
She picked up her wrap and draped it over her shoulders.
“Thank you for coming to this dance with Eli,” I said. “I think it really meant a lot to him.”
She got a faraway look. “You’re welcome,” she said.
I stepped forward and gave her a small hug and we separated.
“God,” she said, and reached up to touch my face. “Your eye.”
I don’t remember much after that, how we ended up on the floor or when my hand found the neckline of her dress and one of her fine, new breasts, or how long we chewed on each other’s tongues and ran our hands over each other’s legs and sides and ribs and shoulders. What I do remember is the realization that someone was in the doorway watching us. And I remember being glad we hadn’t gotten any further when I looked up from the floor and saw Eli Boyle—saw that look on his face that would remain with me forever, that look I would see again this week on his dead face, his eyes round and helpless, taking in more than they could bear.
I wish I could tell you how we all got there. Or what was said afterward. Honestly, I don’t remember much beyond the look on Eli’s face. I remember the carpet smelled like wine. I remember that Dana Brett’s skin was a revelation. And I remember that it was just after midnight, the beginning of another cold, real day.
A foolish man is no more unhappy than an illiterate horse.
—Erasmus, In Praise of Folly
SIX MONTHS WITHOUT A DEAD BODY
1 | IT’S THE EX-WIFE
It’s the ex-wife. It dawns on Caroline as she reads Clark Mason’s bitter divorce records, as it also occurs to her that this nice philosophical, theoretical discussion of crime may in fact refer to an actual crime—messy, banal, and ordinary, a new pile of old shit: Woman bangs everyone but her husband. Takes all the money from the divorce. Remarries before the ink is dry.
So he kills her.
Clark or Tony Mason—whatever he calls himself—why should he be any different from any of the slag-headed, short-tempered men who end up here? Most murderers kill someone close to them, and most murderers are men and most victims women—the unrequited, the girlfriends, the wives and ex-wives, women who spurned or cheated or simply didn’t get dinner on the table in time. Caroline had wanted this to be different, wanted him to be different. But that’s what happens when you go trolling for meaning in the truth. Fables are for children, parables for priests. All true stories are melodrama. Or noise.
The noise in these divorce papers is deafening. Caroline winces as she flips through the charges and countercharges recounting the three-year matrimony and acrimony of Clark A. and Susan A. Mason: Complainant was unfaithful…Respondent forced complainant to quit her profitable job in Seattle and move to Spokane…Complainant hid joint money in private accounts…Respondent irresponsibly spent couple’s savings, mortgaged their home, and liquidated stock to run for Congress…Infidelity…Impotence…Emotional abuse.
From the dissolution papers, Caroline learns that Clark and Susan were married in December 1999 in Seattle and divorced in January 2001 in Spokane. It was his first marriage and her third. There were no children. In 1999 they left Seattle and moved to Spokane, and bought a swanky, sizable house on Manito Country Club—with cash. Caroline can imagine it. Stories like this seem apocryphal in Spokane, because they never happen to anyone from Spokane. It’s always a cousin in Seattle…or a friend in the Bay Area.
Clark’s story starts like all of those: Guy sells stock holdings right near the high-tech peak. Sells a house in the inflated Seattle market. Pulls a few million from investments and a million more out of a waterfront condo. Comes to Spokane with enough money to buy half of downtown, so it’s a cinch to pick up a top-of-the-line $500,000 house abutting the city’s best country club—with cash.
That’s where this story diverges from the fairy tale. Clark uses the rest of his dough to run for Congress, and when he realizes he’s losing, he starts draining the bank account. When that’s gone, he mortgages the house. The wife is the kind of woman—Caroline can see her with handled shopping bags climbing into her Lexus outside the Bellevue Nordy’s—who doesn’t pay attention where the money comes from, as long as her pedicure is paid for. Clark loses the election, of course, and when she finds out he spent all the money, well…the divorce lawyers are called in.
Apparently, there was some kind of settlement in which Clark was supposed to make payments to Susan, because the last court filing—and the probable spark for killing her—is from only a week earlier. Clark has missed a payment (for the second time this year, the papers note) and Susan’s lawyer wants the court to garnishee his wages. Caroline can see the whole thing play out. He is served the court papers. He’s listed as representing himself (ouch—a lawyer who can’t even afford a lawyer). As he reads the court order (over and over) his face tenses up. The woman has cheated on him, bled him dry, and mocked his dream of running for office. He’s all full up. So he whacks her.
It’s hard for Caroline to admit, but if Clark’s ex-wife is dead, then all his talk of contrition and nonsense about “nameless crimes” is just so much rationalization—the sound the guilty make when their mouths move.
Oh, I can name your crime, she thinks. And there’s one other thing that worries her. Susan is apparently remarried. When the divorce papers were first filed, she was Susan Ann Hargraves Jennings Larsen Mason—a maiden name and three husbands—but in this last court order she is listed as Susan Ann Hargraves Jennings Larsen Mason Diehl, and Caroline worries for a moment if husband four, Mr. Diehl, is facedown in the same ditch as his new wife.
It also strikes Caroline in a moment of cattiness and self-abuse that this woman—who is her age, thirty-seven—has managed to snag four husbands in the time Caroline has gotten exactly z
ero.
The Diehls aren’t listed in the telephone book, so Caroline checks the reverse directory. Doug Diehl is listed as having a house on Five Mile, a hilltop neighborhood of big, newer homes just north of the city. He’s part owner of a Mazda and Ford dealership. No wife is listed, but they have probably just gotten married. Caroline calls Doug Diehl’s home number.
“Hello!” Two voices answer together, in a terrible singsong. Caroline can imagine them bent over the answering machine as they recorded this, probably holding hands. “What’s the Diehl?” asks the male voice. “We are!” says the female voice. “The real Diehls!” they sing together.
“We’re not home right now,” she says, “but if you leave a message for Susan—”
“Or Doug,” he chimes in. He sounds older than her, and there’s just a hint in his flat voice that these are her lines that he’s reading.
“—we promise to call you back. So, do we have a Diehl?” she asks.
“We sure do,” he says.
Caroline drops the phone into the cradle. “My God,” she says aloud. Play that tape in court and Clark might just make a case for justifiable homicide.
She grabs her jacket, and on her way out peeks in the window of Interview Two. Clark Mason is rubbing his eyes, his pen still poised over the legal pad. It’s eleven o’clock Saturday morning, fourteen hours since he began confessing. Maybe it’s some sort of endurance test, she thinks, for him or for me. Or maybe it’s an angle. After all, he is a lawyer. So what, he dresses and acts like a loon because he wants her to get fed up? Wants her to send him home so that later, when he’s arrested for killing his ex-wife and her new husband, he can say that he tried to confess, but the police sent him away? It’s a stupid idea, but it makes as much, or as little, sense as any of this—as much sense as a guy who wants to make a religious confession to a cop.
The confession has stretched now into its third shift. She tells the new desk sergeant there’s a potential witness in Interview Two making a statement, and that if the guy wants to leave, to please call her. The sergeant promises to check on him, but he doesn’t look up from the lurid paperback he’s reading.
The drive north is quiet and peaceful, the early spring sun melting any last pockets of snow. Spokane lies in a long east-west river valley—pinched, it feels some days—and leaving downtown either to the north or the south takes a person up a progression of short hills blanketed with modest homes. Five Mile is one of the last and most drastic hills, where the houses lose their modesty, a steep three-hundred-foot tree-lined shelf, as if a huge cruise ship had improbably ground ashore at the edge of a city.
Doug and Susan Diehl’s grand house is perched on three or four fenced acres on the starboard side of this ship. It is a new home of brick and cedar, three stories, with a massive attached garage that has four progressively larger doors: the smallest for a golf cart, the next two a standard two-car garage, the last door for a big motor home. The grounds are landscaped and fountained, covered in flowers, and there is a horse barn in back. Caroline parks behind an old, beat-up pickup truck with a metallic sign that reads JACK’S STABLE SERVICE. Out of habit, she feels the hood of the truck. It’s cold.
The white gravel crunches beneath Caroline’s feet. She walks between flower beds to a big, arched front door, rings the bell, and waits. Nothing. She looks inside the window next to the door. The sunken living room is immaculate. White carpeting and white leather furniture and white lamps. It’s like heaven. There are no bodies anywhere. That’s a good start. She walks around back and sees no sign of anything suspicious, which doesn’t prove a thing, of course. Doug and Susan could be in the basement, their heads crushed. The Real Diehls!
Sixty yards behind the house, the barn stands in a field of cut alfalfa. It appears to be new, painted bright red, with a white X on the door. A horse is grazing in the bunchgrass outside it. The barn door swings lazily in the wind. Caroline walks across the backyard toward the barn. Halfway, she bends over and picks up a woman’s sandal. She walks through an open gate and keeps walking until she reaches the barn door. The horse looks up, sees her, and looks back over its shoulder, into the barn. Caroline follows its gaze to a bench across from the horse’s stable and sees what appears to be Susan Ann Hargraves Jennings Larsen Mason Diehl, very much alive, and very much naked, astride what appears to be Jack of Jack’s Stable Service, who looks about twenty and whose cargo pants are bunched up around the ankles of his cowboy boots. Jack must be pretty good at the service he provides in stables, because Susan’s eyes are pressed shut and she is grinding her upper teeth into her lower lip. Caroline turns back to the horse, who turns back to her, as if he’s going to speak, as if he’s been waiting all morning for someone to come along so he could say what’s on his mind—Fuckin’ humans—and then he goes back to grazing.
She backs away and considers leaving or letting Jack finish his service (according to her fading recollection of such things, they are getting close), but then the answering machine echoes in her head—“We’re the real Diehls!”—and she decides she can at least ruin the former Mrs. Mason’s day. Caroline steps behind the barn door and knocks on it. The faint rustling sound—which she desperately wishes she’d heard before she looked through the barn door—stops completely now.
Susan whispers, “What was that?”
Caroline knocks again. “Ms. Diehl. Can I talk to you?”
There is a louder rustling now, back into clothes, she presumes. Caroline steps back from the door and waits. After a minute Susan Diehl comes out, wearing very small, very tight, very brand-new blue jeans, a western shirt, and one sandal. Her hair is blond and frosted and even after Jack’s service she looks fit to entertain, with a good half-coat of makeup on her sharply featured face. She is tall and bottle-pretty, heavily produced, with vivid green eyes and long legs that go some distance in explaining what a guy like Clark saw in her.
Caroline offers her badge. “I’m Detective Caroline Mabry. With the Spokane Police Department.”
Susan flinches. Behind her, a single eye watches through the crack in the barn door. Susan opens her mouth to say something to Caroline, but nothing comes out.
“I need to ask a couple of questions about your ex-husband.” When Susan’s expression doesn’t change, Caroline realizes she’s going to have to be more specific. “Clark Mason,” she says.
Susan covers her mouth. “Oh my God. What happened?”
“Nothing. I just have some routine questions,” Caroline says. “We’re just trying to get some information.”
Susan’s eyes tear up.
Caroline is surprised.
“What did Clark do?” Susan asks. “Is he okay?”
“No, he’s fine.” Caroline smiles reassuringly. “I just talked to him.”
“Oh.” Susan reaches up and absentmindedly pulls a piece of straw from her hair. “Oh. Thank God. I worry about him.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” Susan looks Caroline up and down, measuring her. They are about the same height, but that’s the only similarity, and eventually Susan looks at the ground. “Habit, I guess.”
Caroline looks down at Susan’s one sandal. She hands her the mate she found in the lawn. Susan drops it in the grass and steps into it without apology.
“How is Clark?” she asks.
“He seems a little troubled,” Caroline answers.
“You don’t say.”
They walk back to the patio. Susan steps inside, pours them each a glass of lemonade in green, stemmed glasses, and with little prompting when she returns, begins telling the story of herself and Clark.
“We started dating when we were sixteen,” Susan says. “Clark was my high school sweetheart. We went to the prom together. The whole nine yards.” She crosses her legs. Painted toenails.
“But you didn’t get married until 1999?”
Susan nods. “We broke up at the end of our senior year. He went to college and acted like a—” She searches for the word. “—beatni
k for a while. I married an older guy. Sort of like Doug, but a bit more—” She glances up at the barn. “—attentive. Clark and I lost track of each other. I was living in Seattle in ’99. I’d just gotten divorced.” She makes eye contact with Caroline. “My second divorce. My ex-husband had been a big political donor, and we were invited to a fund-raiser for some candidates, and I figured just because we were divorced didn’t mean I had to lock myself away, so I went. It was at the Seattle Art Museum. There were all sorts of candidates milling about, and I watched one of them work the crowd and I couldn’t believe it. It was Clark.” She smiles at the memory. “Do you remember the first person you ever really loved, Detective?”
Caroline nods and thinks, not of high school, but of someone far more recent—she’s surprised to find that she wants to call him right now.
Susan shrugs. “He swept me off my feet.” She looks out to the barn, to where Jack is leading the horse back inside, and then looks down at her painted toenails. “Which is probably not that much of a trick, now that I think about it.”
Caroline doesn’t know what to say. She sips her lemonade. It is fresh squeezed.
“Our first date, he rented a Jeep Wagoneer and we drove into the mountains.” Something about the memory strikes her as funny and Susan looks down at the ground. “We were married within three weeks. It just felt so right.”
“And you moved back to Spokane?” Caroline asks.
“It’s funny. At the fund-raiser, I just assumed Clark was running in Seattle. It wasn’t until I’d agreed to marry him that I even realized that the Fifth congressional was in Spokane. And by then, I was convinced that we were in love.”
She shakes her head. “I spent my whole life trying to get out of this place, and now Clark drags me back with him. It was hard. I had a little boutique in downtown Seattle—nothing fancy, second-tier designer wear, last season’s misses. But I was happy.