Chat

by Archer Mayor

  Joe glanced at John Leppman, trying to read his mind. His face was slack with remorse and guilt—his closest and most valued patient had been overlooked or, perhaps worse, dismissed.

  “I don’t know why I chose those two,” Sandy said. “Something clicked with the first one’s name. Gwennie loved the Rocky movies, and I always loved Norman Rockwell. Maybe that was it. And he was so horrible, too. When I started chatting as Mandi, he came on like a boy in high school, all awful one-liners and disgusting innuendos. He thought he was such a Don Juan.”

  Her cheeks had colored as she spoke, and her voice grew in strength. The growing rage she was describing hardly needed better illustration.

  “I began fantasizing about him—what I would do if I ever got him into a room alone.” She laughed once, very quietly, almost a sob. “I came up with plan after plan, each time making it more real. The Taser had to be a part of it—the same thing that pig had used on Gwennie. That seemed only fair.”

  “You got Wendy to steal the cartridge without her dad knowing?” Joe asked.

  She looked up at him, a sad smile on her face. “Poor Wendy. I didn’t ask her to do that . . .” She stopped in mid-thought, reconsidering. “Not directly, but I suppose I did. I’d been telling her of my fantasies.”

  Her husband groaned next to her, barely audibly. Her head jerked in his direction, and Joe thought she’d break from her monologue to give him a tongue-lashing. But she stopped at the last second and merely stared at him for a moment.

  She returned to Joe, ignoring Leppman. “She was feeling as I was. Dangling. She needed an outlet, too. She wanted to help, and when she was with him on that tour of the police department and she suddenly saw the cartridge we needed, she took it.”

  By now Leppman had slumped into his chair, his hands in his lap, his eyes unfocused, all energy seemingly drained from his body.

  “She also helped you drop his body into the river,” Joe suggested.

  She shook her head but answered affirmatively, “That was wrong. I shouldn’t have involved her so much. But I believed she wanted to. She told me the two of us had to do everything together, every step of the way. I went along because I wanted the company. And she was so enthusiastic.” She said this with emphasis, her eyes bright.

  Joe stoked the mood of the moment. “You were like sisters,” he suggested.

  She nodded. “After we dropped him into the water, we hugged and laughed. It was the best I’d felt in years.”

  Joe knew he should probably get as much detail as possible—the gap between using the Taser in the motel and subsequently drowning Metz miles away suggested a horrifying picture of many repeated electrical impulses in order to keep the man subdued. But he wasn’t sure how much longer this moment would last. It had come about spontaneously, and could just as quickly vaporize. These kinds of confessions were tricky enough in the best-planned environments, let alone something like this.

  He forged ahead to get as much as he could. “But by the second time, things had changed.”

  Her face fell. “Yes,” she conceded. “That’s when I realized how wrong I’d been. Such a fool. I should have thought of that. We planned it together, worked out all the details. But when it came down to actually doing it, Wendy balked.”

  Joe was watching her every gesture, every shadow that crossed her face. She was discussing this as if she’d chosen the wrong dress for her daughter’s coming-out party—an important glitch in an otherwise well planned event. The fact that they were discussing a double homicide had slipped into irrelevance.

  Not that Joe was outwardly behaving much more rationally. Since Sandy Gartner had brought herself to this level of reality, Joe wasn’t about to disabuse her.

  He glanced quickly at Leppman, who seemed almost catatonic by now. “So, you had to act on your own,” Joe suggested helpfully. “Is that why you left him in the motel room instead of taking him somewhere else, like you did the first guy?”

  Gartner nodded. “Yes. It all happened at the last minute. Wendy came with me, but then she wouldn’t get out of the car. She was supposed to open the man’s door, carrying the cookies. She’s so much prettier than I am—and younger, of course, which was the whole point. Fortunately, that part didn’t matter. He was so hot and bothered, I could have talked him into anything.”

  “What did you say to him?” Joe asked. “He was expecting a fourteen-year-old.”

  She looked straight at him and smiled sadly, her head slightly tilted to one side, as if mystified by every aspect of her own tale. “I offered him one—I showed him Gwennie’s picture and told him she was waiting for him.” She paused and leaned forward in her chair, her body language seeking confirmation. “And she was, wasn’t she?”

  He was hard-pressed to argue, while at the same time wondering how many people might have seen her ploy as victimizing Gwennie all over again. It wasn’t lost on him that at the very same moment, Wendy had sat in the car, traumatized and guilty, feeling that she had let mother and sister down, alike. “I guess so—as things turned out.”

  John Leppman, however, was having no more of it. Mirroring the apparent family tradition of impulsive rashness, he suddenly stirred from his torpor, pushed himself up from his chair, and launched onto his wife, flailing with both fists and knocking them both onto the floor in a struggling heap.

  Gunther pushed backward in surprise, smacking against the wall behind him, and scrambled to his feet, trying to circle his desk to intervene.

  Almost predictably, the gun went off as he was halfway there. There was a startled cry from Leppman, and he rolled off his wife, clutching his left upper arm, just as Joe arrived over them both.

  Sandy Gartner, her eyes wide, focused suddenly on Joe and brought her gun to bear on him next. He struck out with his right foot and caught her straight on the wrist, sending the pistol skittering across the floor.

  With a yelp of pain, she curled into a ball, striking a curious counterpoint to her husband, who was doing much the same thing a few feet away.

  His adrenaline pumping and his own gun out by now, Joe stared at them both for a few moments, wondering what might happen next, even glancing at the door once to see if their one remaining daughter might not be standing there with a shotgun.

  But all was finally at rest.

  “Jesus” was all he could summon up in the end, reaching for the phone. “What a bunch.”

  JMAN: hey – Mandi144 u out ther?

  LoneleeG: don’t no Mandi, but im here

  JMAN: kool. ASL

  LoneleeG: 15/f/Burlington

  JMAN: Vermont? Wurks 4 me

  Chapter 27

  Joe switched off the table saw and examined the edge of the board he’d just pushed through the blade.

  “No blood?” a voice asked from behind him. “I would’ve thought by now you’d be missing a thumb at least.”

  Joe put the board down and dusted his abdomen free of sawdust. “Hey, Willy. Slumming in the neighborhood?”

  Kunkle shrugged, looking around the small barn that his boss had converted into a woodworking shop attached to his house. “Something like that.”

  “You stand a cup of coffee?” Joe asked. “I made it an hour ago, and I’m having some anyhow.”

  “Sure,” Willy answered, pointing at the table saw with his chin. “What’re you making?”

  Joe laughed, removing the thick apron he wore. “If I’m lucky, an end table for Lyn’s daughter, Coryn. Her apartment is supposedly like a sixties college museum of stacked bricks and orange crates.”

  They left the shop for the living room next door and the kitchen beyond. Joe lived in what might have been a gatehouse had it not been stuck onto the back of a Victorian monstrosity fronting the street. In any case, it was also inexplicably and oddly proportioned, so that anyone taller than five and a half feet looked shoehorned into the place.

  “You two still tight?” Willy asked.

  “With Lyn?” Joe responded, taking out a mug. “So far, so good. I ta
ke it you’re asking because Sam just threw you out.”

  “Fuck you,” Willy said without emphasis. He watched Joe pour out the coffee in silence. Only after he accepted the mug did he add, “We just had a fight. I left. She wanted to talk—as usual.”

  Joe poured his own mug and sat on a stool near the counter. “You do talk sometimes, though, right?”

  Willy took a sip and answered, “Yeah, Mom. We talk. I wasn’t in the mood this time.”

  “It’s tough,” Joe commented vaguely, knowing his audience. “The price we have to pay for companionship. Still worth it to you?”

  Willy stared a moment into the depths of the mug. “I guess.”

  A thumbs-up, given the man, Joe thought.

  “How’s your brother doin’?” Willy asked, changing the subject.

  “Close to good as new. Using a cane only, driving on his own. He’s even back at work half days.”

  “That was a weird deal.”

  “You mean Dan Griffis going after him?” Joe asked. “Yeah. I never thanked you properly for doing what you did, by the way, getting close to E. T. In the long run, that probably saved all our bacon the night Dan came hunting for me and mine.”

  Willy nodded. “No sweat. Got me to hang out in a bar again. I always liked bars, even if what they had in them didn’t like me.”

  Or liked him too much, Joe thought.

  “E. T. was a good enough guy, though,” Willy continued unexpectedly. “A fucked-up dad, maybe, but okay in the end. Did you ever get together with him after?”

  Joe shook his head. “The night he called, I could tell it was about all he had left in him. The local scuttlebutt has it he hasn’t left his house since—not to see Dan in jail, not to run the business, not even to have a drink. From what I hear, the lawyers are gathering to figure out all his businesses.”

  Willy laughed. “Any lawyers left over after the Leppman-Gartner clan got through hiring?”

  “Good point,” Joe agreed.

  Willy put his coffee down and gazed at his host. Joe had rarely seen him in such a contemplative mood. “This family shit is so weird.”

  Joe smiled at him. “How so?”

  “I don’t know. Getting ticked off at Sam tonight and driving around, I got to thinking. Seems like all we do is piss and moan about breaking up or sticking together, and when we’re not doing that, it’s family, family, family. I mean, what do you get out of that whole deal with Gartner using the death of one daughter to screw up the other? Or E. T., for that matter? He puts Andy in jail to spare Dan and then has to drop the dime on Dan because the bastard’s about to kill a cop and his entire family. How messed up is that? How wrong can you get it?”

  Joe absorbed all this, knowing that an answer wasn’t requested. But it did make him think of Lyn and her family, half destroyed by the sea; of his own mother and brother, almost lost through capricious malice; and of how fragile and tenuous even the best of bonds could become, through no fault of one’s own.

  None of which considered the other, more willful human dynamics that Willy was talking about: divorce and abandonment, revenge and paranoia, murder and mayhem.

  “How bad is it with you and Sam?” he asked.

  Willy made a dismissive face. “Just a pissing match. No big deal.”

  Joe nodded and gazed out the darkened window for a while in silence. “I guess we just do the best we can,” he finally said, “and keep our fingers crossed.”

  Willy took a final sip, put his mug down, and slipped off his stool. “Okay, Obi-Wan. I’ll go home now. Thanks for the java, if not the bullshit.”

  Joe nodded. “Take care, Willy. I’ll see you tomorrow.”