Then. Now she looked like five years in a women’s prison.
“Mrs Tasot, I’m going to ask you a lot of questions now. If you tell me the truth, maybe I can stop Wes before he gets himself into any more trouble.”
She looked up from studying the photograph. “You’ll have to shoot him. I don’t think you can stop him otherwise.”
“Believe me, Mrs Tasot, that doesn’t have to happen.”
“Wes will make it happen,” she said. “You’ll see. What is it you want to know?”
Chapter 40
“Mrs Tasot, do you remember Luis Ortega?”
“Yes,” she said docilely. “The Mexican boy who cleaned the pool that time.”
“Did Wes kill him?”
“Yes,” she said, without looking up from her studied concentration on the photograph.
“How?”
“He shot him.”
“Tell me how, Mrs Tasot. In detail.” She seemed too spacey, too likely to say things because she thought I wanted to hear them.
“Wes put on his …” Her voice ran down and she raised her hand to her swollen cheek.
“I won’t hit you,” I said, “and Wes isn’t here.”
She nodded, slowly at first, then more rapidly. “Yes. Of course. Well, Wes still had most of his Oklahoma costume, so he put that on and pretended to be a bounty hunter. He fooled a private detective into helping him. Wes took Luis into an alley and shot him, then he got into the car and we drove away.” She sighed deeply and looked at her photograph.
“You drove away? Was that you in the Pontiac?”
“Yes.”
“Who else was with you?”
“No one. Until Wes got in, of course.”
I said, “That’s a rough neighborhood for a pretty Anglo woman, alone.”
“Wes can do makeup. He’s been in dozens of little theater productions. I was supposed to be a teenage boy.” She shrugged. “Besides, Wes said if I got into trouble, that was just too bad. I deserved it, he said, for being with Luis.”
“That is why Wes killed Luis, then? Because you had an affair with Luis?”
“No.”
“Let’s go over that again. Why did Wes kill Luis?”
“Because he thought I’d had an affair with Luis. He …” A long look at the photo, then, “Wes was good before it happened. Really good. He hadn’t hit me for a long time. I was out by the pool, when this nice-looking Mexican boy came and introduced himself. He said he was here to clean the pool. He said it was a bonus from one of the companies Wes keeps books for.”
A wind gust clattered rain against the window; she jumped. I smiled at her and nodded, and slowly she went on.
“So I said okay and thanks, and Luis cleaned the pool. I read my magazine and sat in the sun. That’s all.”
“Luis had a thing about women,” I said.
“Oh, he was cute!” she said. For the first time a hint of a smile seeped through. “He flirted, sure, but it was only … Like he’d say, ‘Got to have a really clean pool for a good-looking woman like you.’ Things like that, sort of courtly, romantic, um, Latin compliments.” She looked wistful. “Don’t you know what I mean?”
“And that was it? He flirted; you sat?”
“Yes. He never touched me, I swear.” More looks at the photo. “But Wes had sneaked home and he’d been hiding inside. When Luis left, Wes came running out of the house. His eyes were odd. He was screaming and crying; I remember he had these big tears running down his cheeks. He came over to me and he grabbed my hair.”
As she began to talk about Wes, her voice became leaden again. “Wes pulled real hard, and jerked me off the chaise lounge. It hurt a lot because I landed on my hip. On the tiles. And my hair hurt, too, when Wes used it to drag me across the patio and throw me into the pool.”
The day was ending; there were no lights in the room. The gloom may have helped her tell me about that berserk and sunny day by the freshly cleaned pool.
“Wes wouldn’t let me out of the water,” she said. “He yelled at me and called me names and accused me of doing terrible things with Luis and other men. Part of the time I couldn’t understand him. It was just a … gabbling noise. I tried to tell him he was wrong, that I hadn’t done anything, but that made him even madder. He jumped in the pool then, and he held me under the water.”
She sighed. “Wes has always hit me when I needed it. All husbands do that, I guess. But the afternoon Luis cleaned the pool, that was the only time I thought Wes would kill me. I was scared, really scared. He’s so strong you wouldn’t believe it. I got away from him twice, but not long enough to catch my breath properly. Finally he got his legs around my waist and he grabbed my hair again to hold my head under. I remember it was all bubbly and blue under the water. Almost peaceful in a way, except that I couldn’t breathe. My chest felt hollow, but heavy. It was strange. Then, just when I knew I couldn’t stand it any longer, I passed out.”
I said, “Mrs Tasot, I promise to you, I swear to you, I won’t let him do anything like that again.”
Her voice went on in the dim room as if I hadn’t spoken. “When I woke up, I was in our bed. It still hurt to breathe, and later on I had a fever for days. Wes took care of me.” A note of fondness crept into her voice. “He was really good to me. He’d bring me meals on a tray and read to me. One evening he sat on the edge of the bed and combed my hair for an hour. When he wants to be, Wes is a wonderful husband.”
“But he didn’t believe you about Luis, did he?”
“No. He said he knew that Luis and I had been going to motels and taking off each other’s clothes and touching each … he said we did crazy things. Which wasn’t true, none of it, but the way Wes said those things, almost crooning them, I didn’t think it was a very good idea to argue with him.”
“I’m sure that’s right,” I said. “When did he decide to kill Luis?”
“I don’t know. He told me about it a few days after, uh, the pool thing. He said when I was better, when I had my strength back then Luis would have to die so I wouldn’t be tempted again.”
“Tempted,” I said.
“Yes. And so I didn’t tempt other men, I had to stop wearing jewelry and perfume. Wes threw it all away. Most of my clothes, too. He bought me new things, like this dress.”
“And he worked out a way to kill Luis.”
“Yes.”
“And you helped him.”
“Wes is very persuasive.” It was too dim to see her face now, but if it is possible to hear a wry smile, I did.
“Mrs Tasot, the day he shot Luis, Wes came to my office and conned me into helping him.”
“Oh, that was you.”
“That was me. Why did he pick me?”
“Wes decided to hire someone to get caught while we got away. I thought he meant a crook, the kind of man who beats up people for money. But Wes said he didn’t know any crooks, so he’d hire a cop. Well, a private detective. Wes said private detectives were no smarter than real cops and they’d do anything for money.”
“But why me specifically? Does he know me from somewhere?”
“Oh, no. But he loves your ad in the Yellow Pages.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No. Wes thinks the part about ‘people sought, crooks caught, wars fought’ is a scream.”
After a while I said, “How often does he beat you?”
“It depends,” she said seriously. “If he has a lot on his mind, he … but look, Wes is right. I usually deserve it. I do really dumb things sometimes.”
“For instance?” I said.
“Oh, well, once I put this big dent in Wes’s fender. I guess I wasn’t looking. Wes says I never look where I’m going. That time he bent my arm way back until it made a funny noise. Wes said later he should have hit me instead, because what with the X rays and the cast and all, it cost more to fix my arm than to fix the fender.”
“Didn’t Wes get into trouble for breaking your arm?”
“We told th
e doctor I fell down the back steps.”
“How long has he been killing people, Mrs Tasot?”
“A long time, I think. Eight years ago when we lived in Austin, we were at a party and a neighbor patted me on the fanny. He didn’t mean anything by it; he was a little drunk, that’s all. Wes hit me that night. And a week later, Frank was killed downtown. Stabbed. The police said he must have tried to fight with a mugger, but … Wes didn’t want to talk about that. He muttered something about Frank having gone to see Dr. Mike, which I never understood.
“Then today,” she said, “Wes came home in a big hurry and said that nosy detective—that’s you, I guess—was after him and he had to go away. It was my fault, he said. He hit me, then he grabbed a bunch of stuff and left. But he left his private closet unlocked and I found … Wait, I’ll show you.”
The room flared with light as she switched on a table lamp. She left the room with that same submissive walk and faint limp. When she came back, she handed me an old, wrinkled manila envelope. There were three newspaper clippings inside.
While I looked at the clippings, she studied her photograph.
One clipping was an article from an Austin paper. The small headline was: MAN MUGGED, KILLED, and the story told about the “mugging” she had just mentioned.
There was another clipping, circa 1971, about a college junior who died in a one-car freeway crash west of Denver. The coroner said suicide, but relatives disagreed.
The oldest, most worn, clipping was dated November 11, 1960. With a TRAGIC HUNTING ACCIDENT headline, and a Eugene, Oregon, dateline, the clipping told how Dr. Michael Koenig had been accidentally killed by a stray bullet while deer hunting. Near the end of the story, after listing Koenig’s survivors, the reporter quoted a longtime patient and family friend.
“We were camped nearby,” Mrs Wilma Tasot, also of Eugene, said. “My whole family is devastated. We all loved Dr. Mike.” A spokesman for the sheriff’s office said today the identity of the careless hunter is still unknown.
I said, “Mrs Tasot, you do realize that Wes is sick, don’t you?”
“Well,” she said reluctantly, “maybe he could use a little help, yes.”
I’d unearthed enough ancient history to know Wes Tasot was dangerous. And I knew how he had killed Luis Ortega. Now it was time to catch the loony son of a bitch. I took out my pocket notebook and settled into cop mode.
“What car is he driving?” I said.
“A Chevrolet Corsica. It’s a company car. I don’t know the license number.”
“I’ll get that from his office. Does he have a company credit card for gas?”
“No, he buys his own. With cash. Wes doesn’t trust the oil companies.”
“Where do you think he’ll go, Mrs Tasot?”
“I really don’t know.”
“Would he go to a close friend or relative?”
“Wes doesn’t have any close friends. His family lives in Oregon. And Washington, too; he has an uncle in Washington. State.”
“Help me, Mrs Tasot. Do you think he’ll stay in Dallas and hide, or get out of town?”
“Well, he wants to kill you. He’s very angry because you found him. But he talked about going away, too. And hiding.” She shook her head helplessly. “I can’t tell what Wes will do from one minute to the next.”
That was fair enough; Wes Tasot probably couldn’t, either.
“He still has the shotgun he used to kill Luis, doesn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“And a rifle?”
“That’s right, a hunting rifle. I don’t know what kind it is, though.”
“Any other weapons?”
“He has two pistols, but only one of them is real. The other one is a prop, from the Oklahoma production.”
“Oh, great. Describe them, please.”
“They’re cowboy guns, like in the western movies. What do you call them, six-shooters?” She shrugged. “I can’t tell the real one from the fake.”
“How badly hurt is his hand?”
“How did you know about that? It’s pretty bad, but he can use it a little. I’m surprised people would keep a vicious dog like that in an office where …”
Wes Tasot was a very, very sneaky guy.
I asked her for a recent photograph. She found one and gave it to me. And then I was finished. That’s one advantage to being private; a real cop would have been here for another hour or two. And up all night writing the report.
“Okay, Mrs Tasot,” I said, “if you’d like to pack anything, please do that now. I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”
“Go? Why, no. I’m staying right here, thank you.”
“Mrs Tasot, there are shelters, there are people who will help—”
“No!” she said, and her hand crept up to gingerly feel her swollen, darkening eye. “If Wes came back and I wasn’t here, he’d be really mad.”
Chapter 41
Ricco nodded importantly. “I said it to Ed; I said, ‘That’s gotta be Rafferty. Who else would be playing John Wayne in a motel parking lot?’”
“Come on, Ricco,” I said. “I’m reporting an aggravated assault. I was the victim.”
“That was last week,” Ed Durkee rumbled, pawing through the stack of papers on his desk. “It took you long enough to get in here.”
“True, it’s been a couple of days,” I said, “but you have no idea how traumatized I was.”
“Cut the crap,” Ed said. “What have you got?”
I told them about Wesley Tasot and his job keeping Aqua-Tidy’s books. I gave them the photo of Tasot I’d gotten from his wife the night before. I gave them the Corsica license plate number Tasot’s boss had given me an hour earlier. I told them what weapons Tasot had, why he had killed Luis, how he’d forced his wife to help him, and how he had probably killed at least three other people over the last thirty years. I told them all of it. Everything. I was brilliant.
Ricco whistled. “This Tasot guy is a fucking nut.”
“Clear, concise, and straight to the point, as always,” I said. “Wes Tasot is, indeed, a nut. Now, what are you going to do about it?”
I told them about Mrs Tasot, too, and how she had stayed at home the night before, sitting in a pool of light staring at a photo of better times. Times that could never return.
“She’s pretty flaky right now,” I said. “She’s frightened, she’s far too submissive for her own good, and her mind hops back and forth from Wes tried to kill me to Wes loves me truly.”
Ed frowned and rumbled, “But if she lives in DeSoto—”
“To hell with the fancy jurisdictional boundaries, Ed. Call her a material witness or a suspect, whatever. Charge her if you have to. You can always drop it later. Just get her out of that house and into a hospital or a shelter.”
Ricco said, “Hey, if she drove the getaway car, Ed, we can probably make her as an accessory.”
I said, “But only as an excuse, right? Believe me, she’s going to be your best witness.”
Ed thought for a minute, then said, “Maybe you’re right. Let me find out how far I can go with this, then we’ll go see her.” He punched out an internal phone number and outlined the problem to whoever answered.
Meanwhile Ricco said to me, “Listen, Rafferty, what’s your guess? Is this Tasot guy gonna rabbit or is he gonna hang around, try again to whack you?”
“Who knows?”
Ricco led me toward the door, away from the desk where Ed sat talking on the phone. “Tell you what. If you see this freak, do us all a favor, huh? Blow the fucker away. It’d walk easy as self-defense. We got the Ortega thing and two previous attempts on you. And you know, with the goddamn courts the way they are now …” Ricco looked tired, which was unusual for him. “Trust me,” he said. “You see him; don’t wait. Just do it.”
“I won’t let him hurt me or anybody else, Ricco. I’ll take him out before that happens. But I can’t sneak up behind him on the street and shoot him in the back of the head.”
“Why not? That’s what he’s trying to do to you.”
“Yeah, well, even so …”
Ricco sniffed and went out the door shaking his head.
Cowboy thinks I’m a candy-ass, too.
Tuesday the Mustang died. It hissed twice, stalled and wouldn‘t start. It cost me two hundred and eighty-seven dollars to have them replace a pile of greasy parts with names I couldn’t pronounce. I spoke harshly to the mechanic. Hilda said she hadn’t heard some of those words before and would I please not explain them to her.
Late on Wednesday a patrol unit found the Corsica in a parking lot at Love Field. Ed wondered if Tasot had caught a plane and was long gone. Ricco said that “park the car at the airport and catch a cab into town” stunt was so old it had arthritis. Besides, he said, most airline flights left from D/FW, not Love Field.
True, but …
I argued that there was an inter-airport shuttle service. And Tasot was an amateur. Where would he hear of the airport parking-lot gimmick?
Which was also true, but …
Ricco countered that Tasot was obviously a helluva gifted amateur, and he could have picked up that gimmick from any of a hundred TV shows or movies or books.
And that, too, was true. But …
It all came down to the same thing in the end. Tasot could be anywhere. Or nowhere. He could be driving, riding, or pedaling anything. Or nothing. We were worse off than before. We’d have to be lucky.
“Which is asking a fucking lot,” Ricco groused to Ed and me. “How fucking far behind do we fucking have to fucking get before we get fucking lucky?”
Ricco has this vocabulary problem when he’s upset.
Chapter 42
“Only adjust upward,” Thorney said, “because you want to measure the highest altitude. If you adjust the other way, and measure the sun coming down, you’ll miss it. And the next one’s not till tomorrow.”
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