Dear God, I thought. I hated this story already, and I didn’t want to hear any more of it, but at least it had a happy ending. Didn’t it? I mean, she was there, telling me her terrible tale, wasn’t she?
Raped. Shot. Lying in snow.
I stared at the gentle, delicate woman seated across from me, and tried very hard not to allow a picture of the warlike scene to come into my mind.
Sweet Mother Mary.
And I’m not even Catholic.
“I was still alive when the paramedics arrived,” Grace Kairn told me, while my stomach knotted as she spoke, “because a passing driver with a phone in his car found me pretty quickly. But I died in the ambulance on the way back into town. I was dead for ten minutes. No heartbeat. No brain activity. No respiration. They said I was absolutely, clinically dead.”
“Yeah? One of those near-death experiences?”
I sat up, interested for obvious reasons. It’s always good to meet a tourist who has already visited your next destination. They can clue you in as to the weather, what to wear. I’d heard plenty of those tales in ’Nam, but that was a long time ago, and these days I have a more personal interest in collecting any available data. As she told the familiar tale of the tunnel, the light, the love at the end of it, her face was—aren’t they all—glowing with happiness. She almost, but not quite, made me want some of it.
But I was still waiting to hear anything “unusual.”
“While I was dead,” Grace Kairn said, predictably, “I felt loved in a way that I can never fully describe to anyone who hasn’t felt it. And I learned some things from that love …”
I couldn’t help it, I had to ask: “Like, what?”
She smiled, almost a grin, catching me in my curiosity. Before she could reply, I realized we’d better skip the fantasies and cut to the chase. “So who do you want me to keep from getting killed?” I asked her.
But she would tell it at her pace, not mine.
“The man who attacked me was captured and tried and convicted of armed robbery and put into prison.”
“Just armed robbery? Was it a plea bargain?”
“Yes. He served four years of his sentence.”
“Four … you mean he’s out now?”
“Yes,” she said, gently, “he is.”
I felt a chill for her sake.
At that moment, I also experienced a strange, physical sense of a compression of time; it seemed to cast my office in shadow, as if the day were drawing too quickly to a close. All in all, I had a sudden and unaccountable feeling of urgency, which I tried to quell within me, because it was weirdly close to panic.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt panic.
“And you’re afraid?” I asked her.
Or was I talking to myself?
She glanced out my window, smiling a little to herself, before she looked back at me. “I’ll tell you the truth, the answer to that is yes and no. I’m not afraid of anything for myself, certainly not of dying, not anymore. But yes, I’m … afraid … for other people.”
“Who?”
“My husband.” The expression in her eyes made me envy any person who occasioned such affection. “Rick absolutely believes that I really died. In Rick’s eyes, the man who … killed me … is a murderer. Not an attempted murderer. A murderer who should have been convicted of premeditated homicide.”
“But you’re alive,” I pointed out.
“But I was dead,” she countered, quite firmly. “He did kill me.”
I let out a whistle. “Try telling that to the law.”
“We did—to the police, to the prosecutors, to the judge, to the jury, to anybody who would listen, but they laughed at us. Not openly, they weren’t that unkind, but they didn’t take us seriously, because, as you yourself said …” Grace Kairn touched her blouse above her heart. “I’m alive.” Then she added the kicker: “Rick says he’ll kill the man who murdered me.”
“Murdered you.”
“I was dead.”
“And you want me to keep Rick from doing that?”
“Oh, yes!”
“You want me to protect the man who assaulted you?”
I heard my own voice rise in disbelief and protest at the idea of it, and yet, I understood the logic of her plea: She didn’t want her husband to commit a murder—a real one—and go to jail for it. And he would, because—trust me—the law is an ass, and so are many of the men and women who administer it. It wouldn’t matter that he killed a very bad guy, or that he was acting out of perfectly understandable rage at the man and the system. He’d still get the very sentence the true bad guy didn’t gel. Grace Kairn was correct to fear for her husband. Not to mention the fact that he could, instead, get himself killed by the bad guy, and then what would become of her, left alone in the universe with a monster?
Her thoughts were way ahead of mine. “Yes,” she affirmed, “I want you to protect that man and I also want you to protect Rick, so he doesn’t get himself killed.”
“Who’s the third person?” I asked her.
She had said she wanted me to prevent three murders.
“Well, it’s me.” She smiled that gentle smile. “The man who killed me—his name is Jerry Heckler—has friends who have sent me threatening letters and phone calls, all of them saying that Heckler will ‘get me’ when he gets out.” She blushed at the phrase, “get me,” as if she were embarrassed to be uttering such a cliché, but that’s about as disturbed as she seemed to be. The fact that this vicious bastard—this Jerry Heckler (also not his real name)—was once again free to hurt her seemed not to perturb her peace of mind. I, on the other hand, felt a quickening of horror on her behalf and a heavy dose of rage. I utterly sympathized with her husband’s vendetta. Like I always say, where’s the goddamned death penalty when you really need it?
“Okay,” I said, “so you want me to protect Jerry Heckler so your husband won’t do something stupid and get arrested for it. And you want me to protect Rick, so Heckler doesn’t kill him for trying. And you want me to protect you, so Heckler can’t kill you. Again.”
“No,” she said, gently correcting me. “I want you to protect all of us, because killing is … wrong. Under any circumstances, for any reason, it’s a … mistake.” That weird look of serenity—the one I coveted—came over her face again. “That’s one of the things I learned.”
“Just a mistake?”
“An error.”
“Mistakes can be corrected,” I pointed out. “But if I kill somebody, he’s never coming back.”
She smiled at me. “I’m back.”
I agreed to take the case. Not for her reason. I didn’t believe her reason. I accepted her advance money for my reason: That bastard Heckler was not going to hurt this nice woman again—or any other woman—if I could prevent it, and he was also not going to lure her husband into making a stupid, possibly fatal mistake.
“Will you agree to do what I tell you?” I asked her, and then when she said she would, I asked her to give me a few minutes to think about what that was going to be.
Because I felt such urgency for her sake, I sent Grace Kairn immediately out of town to stay with my mother, figuring Heckler would never know to look there. I didn’t even let her go home to pack. I told her not even to call home until I okayed it; I’d inform and deal with her husband—that was part of what she was paying me for.
Maybe you think I was wrong to take a chance on endangering my own mother, but then you’ve never met Mom. Her only child grew up to be in the military, and then became a private investigator. Think about it: This is probably a mother who can take care of herself. Anyway, who do you think first taught me to shoot? Not Dad, he’d have been the one she shot if he’d ever come back to the rotten neighborhood he left us in. She’d have told the cops she thought he was a prowler, and I’d have backed up her story, even while I was privately thinking, is this any kind of woman for a man to many? My mother cracks me up; I think she’s great, but I can see how she looks f
rom Dad’s point of view.
Anyway, once I had Grace safe, the next three steps on my list were: visits, of varying degrees of cordiality, to Rick Kairn, Lt. Janet Randolph, and Mr. Jerry Heckler.
In descending order of cordiality, I started with the cop.
“On a scale of clear water to cesspool, Janet,” I said to her in her office, “where does this Heckler fall?”
“Close your mouth and hold your nose.”
“That bad?”
“You can’t be too careful with this one, Angie.” The lieutenant, no beauty queen to begin with, hiked an eyebrow, which gave her the appearance of a quizzical rottweiler: black hair, brown skin, pugnacious face, aggressive nature. “What are you going to do?”
“Take a look at him.”
“That’s all?”
I grinned at her “Somebody’s got to be able to identify the body.”
Her answering smile was grim. “We were all hoping some other prisoner would kill him.”
“It’s not too late for that. The world is full of ex-prisoners.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“Can I see a picture of him?”
“You don’t need to. He’s not real hard to spot. He’s a carrottop.”
I had to laugh. “You’re kidding.”
“No. If I had carrot hair, I would never be a criminal. Criminals are so stupid.”
“He’s out after only four years. So who’s stupid? Him or us?”
She handed me the address of the halfway house where he was residing. I wanted to say, “Good dog.” Janet had been in Vietnam, too, but in spite of the fact that we were coffee friends, she didn’t know I had been there, and there was no way she could look it up, because those files don’t exist. Hardly anybody now living does know. It’s not too difficult, pretending innocence. People don’t expect a woman veteran, not even other women. When Janet or some other ’Nam vet starts in on their war stories or trauma tales, I know how to widen my eyes and look awed and sympathetic.
She doesn’t know about the cancer, either.
I’m good at disguise, so I went home and put one together.
I put on my black wig that is long enough to make a ponytail and that has bangs down to my eyelashes … and I put in my false bridgework that gives me an overbite … and my green contacts and plain glasses … and from out of my Goodwill clothing pile I selected a soiled white waitress uniform and dirty white waitress shoes. But my best trick is probably the only one I ever really need: I increased my bust size dramatically enough to draw a man’s eyes away from my face. I added makeup, which I usually don’t wear, or dangly earrings, either, and I offered a silent apology to all of the legitimate, hardworking waitresses in the world.
One good thing about a DD cup is that you can snug a pistol right down in there between the pads, and nobody suspects a thing unless they try to hug you. If you ever see a buxom waitress reaching in to adjust her bra strap—duck.
Thus camouflaged, I set off to find Jerry Heckler.
Do not assume I took that visit lightly.
There’s a writer, Andrew Vachss, who wrote a short story I read one time that I’ll never forget, because he was so right. In the story, which was called “The White Crocodile,” Vachss compares certain kinds of people to crocodiles. He says baby crocodiles get abandoned by their mothers, so they have to fend for themselves, and if they live to be adults, they spend the rest of their lives getting even.
I figured Jerry Heckler was one of the world’s crocodiles.
It didn’t matter how much theoretical pity I might feel for whatever abuse he might have suffered as a child, the fact remained he was a man now and he would rend other people limb from limb and eat them if they got within striking distance of him, as proved by what he did to Grace Kairn.
I don’t mess around with the Jerry Hecklers of the world; there’s no talking to them, no reasoning with them, no sympathy to be got from them, they have no conscience, they are the most dangerous kind of human being that exists, the crocodiles of the human kingdom, and they have—quoting Vachss again—no natural enemies. If I have to deal with them at all, I do the only thing you can do, what I was taught first by my mother and then in ’Nam: strike first.
I made him within half an hour of waiting at a bus stop across from the halfway house. Suppertime. Carrottop came out of the halfway house and walked two doors down to a deli.
While he ate, I made use of the time by getting on the pay phone across the street and calling Grace Kairn’s husband, Rick. There was no need for me to go see him personally, not when I had only one basic message to deliver, which was: Don’t do it, you’ll get caught. According to the schedule Grace had given me, her husband should be home from work now, and only just beginning to wonder where his wife could be.
“Rick? My name is Angela Fopeano, and I’m a private investigator that your wife hired today. She wants me to keep you from trying to kill Jerry Heckler.”
I couldn’t mince words; Heckler might eat fast.
Kairn was incoherent, indignant, frightened, on the other end of the line, but I could tell he really did love his wife, because he verbally took his frustrations out on me, not on her at what she’d done that day to knock his pins out from under him.
I interrupted Kairn to tell him, “Here’s how I’m going to stop you from making a dead man or a prisoner out of yourself, Rick. I have been to see Lt. Janet Randolph today and I have informed her of your intention to kill Heckler.”
Dead silence from Kairn.
So often the simple way is the best way.
There was nothing he could do now, without getting himself—and by extension, his wife—in a hell of a mess. And if he loved her—which she believed, and I did too—he just wouldn’t do that. It was one thing for him to rant in private; another thing entirely for those rantings to become police knowledge. Whether Grace knew it or not, this is why she had come to me—she couldn’t be the traitor who betrayed her husband to the police in order to protect him, but I could be.
“He deserves to die,” Rick said, sounding furious, paralyzed, sad.
“You bet,” I agreed. “But you don’t, and Grace doesn’t deserve to be left alone if Heckler gets you first, or you get arrested.”
“I can’t get arrested, can I, just for wanting to kill him?”
“No, Rick, there’s no law against that, yet.”
“But this leaves him free to hurt Grace again!”
“It’s my job to see that he doesn’t.”
Rick Kairn didn’t sound convinced that I could do that, but then why should he, he didn’t know me. I felt for him. When he asked me where Grace was, I said I couldn’t tell him until I was absolutely sure that Jerry Heckler would never bother her again, no matter where she was. Kairn didn’t like the mystery, probably half suspected me of kidnapping Grace, but he could see the point. If he didn’t know where his wife was, he couldn’t accidentally—or as the result of force—give that information away to Heckler. I wasn’t worried about Heckler’s friends, the ones who’d terrorized Grace and Rick with their messages that Heckler would “get her” when he got out; if they were going to do the job on her, they would have done it by now. No, Heckler sounded to me like a man who wants to take his pleasures for himself.
I assured Rick that I’d relay messages between Grace and him.
And then I got off the phone fast when I saw Jerry Heckler in the deli start to dig in his pants pockets for cash to pay for his supper.
When Heckler came back outside, I called out to him.
“Oh, sir!”
He turned, a beefy, red-haired, suspicious-faced man in his thirties, bumpy-skinned and heavy-lidded as a croc.
I advanced, holding a man’s wallet out so he could see it.
“Did you leave this—”
“That ain’t mine.”
By then, I was close enough.
Strike first, but know your enemy.
“Grace,” I said, low and clear. He looked startled, but
then a corner of his mouth ticked, as if in amusement. “If anything happens to her or to her husband or to anybody she has ever met in her life, I will find you and I will kill you.”
He laughed, at my appearance, at my threat.
“Yeah? What if something happens, and it’s not my fault?”
He was having fun now, playing with his food.
“If I were you, I would work under the assumption that everything is your fault, Heckler.”
He told me what to do with myself, his eyes on my chest, and then walked off, in no hurry to escape from me. But now I knew him: he was arrogant, unobservant, and careless, the kind of guy who never, never learns that he will get caught, which means he will not only do the time, he will do the crime.
What I said to him wasn’t a warning.
Guys like that, they don’t take warnings, because they have no restraint. The shrinks call it “low impulse control.” No, what I was doing was making a positive identification and scouting behind the lines to protect my own rear.
I have high impulse control. I am very careful, at least I always have been. Now, with this cancer thing, something’s coming loose.
I spent the subway ride home considering my choices and the consequences of them. When I was in the military, they took intelligent advantage of my best skill, which is exactly that—the ability to observe multiple opportunities and to foresee the consequences of all of them, quickly. It was a rare example of the armed services actually matching ability to assignment.
I spent only ten minutes at home setting up my plan.
First, I called Lt. Randolph.
“I talked to the husband, Janet. How about if I set up an appointment for him to go to your office?”
“Sure.”
“When? You say.”
“Tomorrow morning, ten-fifteen.”
“Ill send him in.”
Next, I called Grace’s husband back, and told him.
“But I’ll be at work—”
“Tell them something. You gotta be there, Rick. You have to convince her you won’t harm a strand of Heckler’s red hair.”
Women on the Case Page 5