Distemper

by Beth Saulnier

  So it didn’t take much for Mad to convince me that since he was supposed to be the primary on the story anyway, he should be the one to call Cody for comment. I guess he thought he was going to have a fight on his hands, though I can’t imagine why; if he hadn’t offered, I would not only have begged, but bribed him with enormous quantities of alcohol.

  I couldn’t stand to sit around while he made the call—listening to his half of the conversation and trying to guess what the hell Cody was saying on the other end—so I went out on a rat run for Mad’s and my dinner. I was standing at the counter in Schultz’s, waiting for Mad’s turkey on rye and my Swiss cheese delight (which I had proscribed for myself as a tranquilizer for mounting hysteria), and of course I flashed back to the time I’d eaten there with Cody just a week earlier. I wondered for the hundredth time how pissed he was going to be when he found out about our nosing around down in Texas, and then I thought for the hundredth time how he had no right to be mad because I was just doing my job, and I didn’t go telling him he couldn’t do his, and what was with his sexist attitude anyway?

  And then, having worked myself into a frenzy, I realized (also for the hundredth time) that I was upset with him for something he hadn’t actually said. This did not seem the definition of sanity.

  I kept thinking about Cody as I was walking back to the paper, about how what we were up to was probably obvious to everyone even though we thought we were being so sly. I remembered that time in Schultz’s when I started feeding him—which is a pretty intimate thing to do, and definitely not standard practice between cops and reporters—and our little debate over vegetarianism and the Benson animal-rights thing, and how he’d been lots more open-minded than I would have thought.

  Something struck me then—call it dog-lover’s intuition. I’m not sure how long I stood there on the Green, gaping like an idiot, holding two sandwiches and some fat-free chips and two cans of Diet Pepsi. First it all seemed to make sense, then it seemed ridiculous—as though someone who killed women for fun would make himself that conspicuous. But I couldn’t shake the suspicion that it might be irresistible to him, that he couldn’t find himself among so many like-minded people and just sit on his hands. He was, after all, a man of action.

  I ran back to the paper, found Melissa in the darkroom, and got some contact sheets from her. Then I went in search of Mad, who was just getting off the phone. He grabbed the food the minute he saw me and cracked open one of the sodas, which promptly exploded all over him.

  “Christ, Bernier, what’d you do, shake this thing up?”

  “I ran all the way back. Listen, I thought of something.”

  “And that Kraut bastard better not’ve put mayonnaise on this…”

  “Will you shut up and listen to me for a second? I had a brainstorm.”

  He put his feet up on the desk and proceeded to unwrap his turkey on rye. “Heaven help us.”

  “Okay, it’s like this. What’s the one thing we know about Bobby Ray?”

  “He likes to kill chicks.”

  “Come on, we don’t know that for sure. But what’s the one thing we do know about him?”

  He shoved a quarter of the sandwich into his mouth, chewed a little, then gave me a lovely view of the contents. “I dunno. You tell me.”

  “Come on, play nice.”

  He shoved another quarter. “Loser who can’t hold down a job at the dog pound?”

  “Argh… You are such a jerk. The correct answer is, he’s nuts about animals. Dogs, anyway.”

  “So?”

  “So if he’s really in this town, he’s not alone.”

  “Do you have to be so goddamn oblique on deadline?” I shoved the contact sheets under his nose. “What are those?”

  “The shots from the animal-rights protesters. Four rolls’ worth.”

  He squinted at them, then at me. “Don’t tell me you think he’s in there. That’s your brainstorm? Give me a break, Bernier. You don’t really think he could be that stupid, do you?”

  “Well, I thought maybe…”

  “No way does a guy go out and kill chicks and then show up at some asinine rally where he might get himself arrested. It makes no fucking sense.”

  “I thought about that, and you’re probably right. But if he’s really such an animal fanatic, maybe he couldn’t resist.”

  “Wouldn’t he be more likely to just break into a lab and liberate the beasts?”

  “So why hasn’t he done it?”

  “Because he’s not even in this stinking town, how about?”

  “Well, if he’s not in this stinking town, then he’s not our problem, and we’re looking for the wrong guy. But so far he’s our only lead, so we might as well follow it. Right?”

  “If you insist.”

  “What’s your problem? Wait, I get it. You’re just pissed because you didn’t think of it first.”

  “Am I that transparent?”

  “Yes.”

  He waved the contact sheets. “So what do we do with these?”

  “We scour them for anybody who might be Gravink. Then we get Melissa or Wendell to blow them up for us.”

  “Scour them? They’re so small, I can’t make out a damn thing.” I handed him one of the loupes I’d lifted from the darkroom.

  “Bernier, has it escaped your little brain that we have a story to finish?”

  “Oh, right. I sort of spaced.”

  He threw the loupe and prints on the desk. “Not a good time for it.”

  “You finish the interviews?”

  “I was just getting off the phone with your boyfriend when you came running in with your titties in a twist.”

  “He is not my… Oh, hell, what did he say?”

  Mad screwed his face up into something resembling pity. “He wants you to call him.”

  “So he can wring my neck?”

  “Probably.”

  “Oh, fuck. I knew this was going to happen. How the hell did I manage to get myself into this crazy goddamn mess? I swear, I’m never dating another cop as long as I…” I stopped ranting long enough to notice that Mad was trying not to laugh, and failing. “Are you messing with me?”

  “Totally. Truth is, I got the impression he was rather proud of his little sweetie.”

  “Now I know you’re setting me up.”

  “No shit.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “What did you expect, that he’d go all macho on you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well he didn’t. Can we finish the story now?”

  “Hmm…”

  “You still got something up your skirt?”

  “You men are very vexing.”

  “We like to keep you guessing, cutie pie.”

  “And at that,” I said, “you are damnably adept.”

  28

  IT WAS AMY SUE GRAVINK. THERE WAS NO DENYING IT, and the cops had no desire to try. They’d gotten a tip from a student intern in the Ag school admissions office—someone considerably less paranoid than the woman who’d called me—and went barreling up to campus. There, they’d proceeded to mess up a year’s worth of files, without managing to unearth Amy Sue’s application. (And one of their number had, presumably, found the time to leak the whole story to Gordon, thank you very much.) Within hours they’d faxed Sugarland for her dental records, made the match, and notified a great-aunt in Minneapolis whose main concern was whether she was going to get stuck paying for the funeral.

  Mad and I filed our story, whereupon he declared that he wasn’t doing a damn thing until he got himself a beer, and not one out of a bottle either. So we moved over to the Citizen Kane (arguably the worst place in Gabriel to do something you don’t want every other reporter in town to know about), huddled in a back booth, and tried for the first time in our lives to be inconspicuous. But our favorite watering hole isn’t known for quiet contemplation; we would have blended in better with a drunken shouting match. Mack came over twice to ask us what the hell we were doing—
which, frankly, was a good question.

  “Tell me again what we’re looking for?” Mad said after Mack was safely back behind the bar.

  “You know. White guy in his early twenties.”

  “Yeah, he’ll stand right out on a college campus.”

  “Okay, a white guy in his early twenties who looks criminally insane.”

  “Maybe I ought to switch to tequila.”

  “Look, I’ll bet my boots this guy’s no joiner. I seriously doubt he’d get in the cops’ faces with that civil disobedience crap. All I’m saying is, let’s look through the crowd shots and see if we can find somebody who looks like a loner.”

  “Somebody in the crowd who looks like a loner?”

  “Oh, hell, you know what I mean. Hanging back. Watching but not participating. Strangely fascinated, but not quite…”

  “Okay, okay, I get the idea.”

  But after twenty more minutes of squinting through a haze of secondhand smoke, all I was getting was a headache. I didn’t need Mad to tell me this might very well be the most pointless tangent I’d ever sent us on.

  “Oh, crap,” I said finally. “You win. I give up.”

  “Are you saying uncle?”

  “Uncle, aunt, and all your goddamn cousins.”

  “At last.”

  He poured out the rest of the Labatt’s, stretched his enormous wingspan toward the ceiling, and managed to elbow the girl behind him right in the head. She turned around with a very bitchy look on her face, which promptly melted into a toothy smile.

  “Sorry about that,” he said.

  “Oh, wow, no problem.” She slithered into her seat and turned back to her girlfriends. They all giggled, and one of them said, “What a hottie.”

  My mood was deteriorating rapidly.

  “You want me to leave you alone with your new friends?”

  “Hey, I was just being nice.” He held the empty pitcher over his mug in case he’d missed a few molecules. “Time to fill the trough. You want another soda?”

  “I’m thinking something stronger.”

  “G and T?”

  “Tanqueray, two limes, not too boozy.”

  “But of course.”

  He went to the bar, leaving me to choose between staring at the Bessler cheerleading squad or the headache-inducing photos. I opted for the photos.

  Even with the loupe it was hard to distinguish one person from another, or just tell the men from the women. (Come to think of it, they look pretty much the same around here even when they’re life-sized.) And since all I’d ever seen of Gravink was a couple of lousy profile shots, I had no prayer of picking him out. I decided to suck it up and mark every frame that someone of his description might possibly be in—which meant just about all of them.

  “You find something?” Mad said when he sat back down to find me circling frames in red grease pencil.

  “Nah. I’m just marking these so Meliss can blow them up.”

  “All those? It’ll take her four hours.”

  “I know. It’s gonna cost us.”

  “Us?”

  “Jeeze, your enthusiasm for this story goes up and down like the Assyrian Empire. One minute you’re dragging me to Texas, the next you don’t give a damn.”

  He shrugged and looked at the contact sheets again, then tossed them away. “Christ, these guys make me want to heave.”

  “Because?”

  “Because to them it’s all so fucking facile.”

  “Yeah, well, they’re not much into ambiguity. They think animal testing is just evil, no matter what.”

  “Never mind that some actual good might come out of it.”

  “I guess they don’t think the ends justify the means.”

  “And how about this joker?” He jabbed his finger on a close-up of a screaming protester. “Didn’t you tell me he won’t even talk to his own parents because they own a goddamn Burger King?”

  I glanced down at the picture. Even in miniature and in black and white, you could tell the guy was apoplectic. “David Loew? Actually, he’s just about the most reasonable of the lot. Most of the time, anyway.”

  “Yeah, I’d still like to—“

  “Wait a minute. That’s it. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.”

  “What?”

  “David Loew.”

  “You think this big-mouth hippie is your serial killer?”

  “Oh, Christ, of course not. But he’s the ringleader. If Gravink…”

  “Hey, what are you guys up to back here?”

  We looked up from our confab to find Gordon Band standing over us, and taking what I would definitely call an unhealthy interest in our contact sheets. Before he could lay his paws on them I scooped them up and shoved them into my backpack.

  “Just got a new pitcher,” Mad said, suddenly every inch the jolly pub-crawler. “Get yourself a mug.”

  “Already got one,” Gordon said, pulling the frosty object from behind his back. Mad raised the pitcher, and Gordon extended his mug. Then he sat down next to me, forcing me to scoot over or have him half on my lap. “Hey, Alex, what’s news?”

  “Not much. You file yet?”

  “Just did. Ten-incher. How about you?”

  I reached across him to relocate my drink. “Hour ago.”

  “How about that Amy Sue Gravink shit? What a rush, huh? Poor little country girl comes up here to the mean streets of New York and gets herself dead. My editor totally gobbled it.”

  “Gordon, the girl came from Houston, and she got whacked in the middle of the woods. I think you’re mixing your metaphors.”

  “Yeah, whatever. Guess where they’re running it.”

  “Gee, I don’t know. Page one?”

  His face fell, and even farther than usual. “Uh, no. Guess again.”

  “They’re holding it for Sunday Styles.”

  “No, it’s on the front page of the Metro section. Stripped across the bottom.”

  “Jeepers.”

  “That’s twice in a row. I’m doing a follow-up for tomorrow too.”

  “With your real name on it and everything? You must be so proud.”

  “Hey, Band,” Mad said when he tired of the spectacle, “I gotta know. Where did you come up with the Canine Killer crap? Brilliant.”

  “Source.”

  “Oh, twaddle,” I said. “Nobody’s calling him the Canine Killer, and you know it.”

  He wiggled his eyebrows at me. “They are now.”

  “You know, I remember when you were Mr. Ethics. And now you’re chumming the waters like you’re reporting for the Post, and I don’t mean the one in Washington.”

  “You’re just jealous.”

  “Of what?”

  “That I broke the Canine Killer thing. And that you didn’t get the scoop on Amy Sue.”

  “Poor little white boy. Wait until you read tomorrow’s Monitor.”

  That got him. “What?” He gave me a pleading look, then tried it out on Mad. “Come on, please tell me. What’ve you got?”

  “Paper costs thirty-five cents, Gordon. Enjoy it with your morning coffee.”

  Mad made a meowing sound. “Ouch, Bernier, pull in those claws. No reason to torture the man.” He said this, but made no move to relieve Gordon’s agony.

  “So?” he said in a voice that came perilously close to a whine. “Come on already. I’m groveling here.”

  “Band,” Mad began slowly. “Do we look tanned to you?”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, do we?”

  “Yeah, I suppose so. What’s your point?”

  “Doesn’t it make you think maybe we might have spent some time in a very sunny place recently? Hmm?”

  When he wanted to, Mad could be plenty bitchy himself. Even I couldn’t stand to watch the poor guy squirm much longer. “Gordon,” I said, “who the fuck do you think dug up Amy Sue Gravink in the first place?”

  He gaped at us. It was very satisfying. “No. Oh, God, no. You’re not serious. Are you serious?�
��

  “Yep.”

  “I’m sure that ten-incher of yours is dynamite,” Mad said with a nasty smirk. “But it just so happens that we have a whole package on the little lady running tomorrow. Quotes, color, the whole shebang.”

  Gordon made a strangling sound. It wasn’t pretty. “Oh, crap,” he said once he’d gotten a hold of himself. “And me kvelling about my lousy ten inches.”

  “In your dreams you’ve got ten inches,” I said. They both ignored me.

  “Don’t sweat it, Band.” Mad topped off Gordon’s mug, his version of offering the olive branch. “You scoop us, we scoop you, you scoop us back. Keeps life interesting.”

  “I feel like such a schmuck.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Let it go. Have a beer nut.” He pushed the bowl across the table, and Gordon nibbled a few.

  “Can I tell you guys something?” he said after a while.

  “Sure,” Mad said. “Shoot.”

  “It’s not exactly easy for me. I don’t talk about my, you know, feelings very much.”

  Mad looked queasy all of a sudden. I recognized the expression as one I’d often seen on his face upon exiting the men’s john. Uh-oh. “Oh, man, Band,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’re queer.”

  “Mad! Don’t be such a jerk. If Gordon wants to come out to us, we should…”

  “Stop,” Gordon shrieked. “Oh, God, just stop. If my mother heard you, she would’ve had a coronary by now. And no, I am not gay.” His eyes darted from me to Mad and back again. “Did you really think I was gay?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Mad just thinks any guy who shares his feelings is a member of the man-boy love club. Go on.”

  “I can’t even remember what I was going to say.” He watched as Mad tried to top off his glass again. It was full, so all he could do was go through the motions. Gordon ate another conciliatory beer nut. “Oh, right. What I was going to say was that, well, last year was the best year of my life.”

  It was my turn to stare at him. I couldn’t have been any more surprised if he had come out to us. “Are you out of your mind? For the record, last year was the worst year of my life. And since when do you have such romantic memories of this place, anyway? Need I remind you that you spent last year living in a town you hated, working at a paper you said was hardly good enough to wrap a fish in, and stuck two hundred miles away from any decent corned beef? Or have you had some sort of seizure?”