Authors: Max Allan Collins
The Wrong Quarry (24 page)
Behind the wheel of the Pinto, halfway down the cornstalk lane, I shook my head.
“Fucking amateurs,” I said.
I went back to the Holiday Inn and showered and fell naked into bed. You might think I’d have trouble sleeping, after that horror show, but you’d be wrong. I was drained of every ounce of energy and emotion, and the idea of getting on the road that very minute was out of the question.
I slept till the seven
A.M.
wake-up call. Showered again and so on. Some of my clothing from last night was crunchy with dried blood and would have to be tossed rather than cleaned. I found a plastic dry-cleaning bag in the closet and put the things in that, and stuffed it in my suitcase, to dispose of later. My fleece-lined jacket hadn’t got any blood on it, which was a relief.
At eight-thirty, I drove downtown to the bank building, three modern stories of brown brick and glass with a little plaza in front and a big parking lot at the rear. I sat in the Pinto and thought things over, waiting for Clarence Stockwell to arrive in his big Lincoln, which he did just before nine. I fell in with him as he walked from the car toward the bank’s rear entrance.
“It’s done,” I said.
“Jesus! You startled me, man.”
“He had an accomplice. A woman in her twenties pretending to be a teenager. Enrolled at the high school.”
We paused and stepped to one side of glass doors, where other employees were entering, and a few customers, too.
“Come up to my office,” he said quietly. “I want the details.”
“No. I’m warning you, it got a little out of hand. They’re both dead, and I had to do some improvising.”
“Improvising...?”
“Can you get my money, right now?”
He nodded without hesitation. “I have cash in a safe deposit box. Why don’t you come in?”
“No. Wrap it up in something unofficial-looking and deliver it to me after lunch.”
“Where will you be?”
I told him.
* * *
Hair ponytailed back, in blue-and-green plaid shirt, acid-washed jeans, and bare feet, Jenny had met me warmly, unannounced at her door at nine-something. Now we were sitting in her kitchen watching as it started to snow a little, just a dusting on the fat pines and skeletal trees of the wooded backdrop playing postcard out the breakfast-nook window. We were both having coffee, after eggs, potatoes and muffins again.
“You have to go?” she asked. “You can’t stay for a few days, and just...chill out?”
I was in sweatshirt and jeans. “No. It was messy last night. I don’t know where it might lead. And when you see the paper, you may not be so anxious to have me around.”
She was a great woman, but the initial official reaction when the two bodies were discovered would be that some crazed murderer had “slain” a dance instructor and a local teenage girl. As opposed to a guy just dealing with what came at him.
Those green translucent eyes in the pretty, sharp-featured face—no makeup at all this morning, and yet pretty as hell— searched me with an earnestness on the edge of tears. I had admitted to her only that I was not a reporter, but an investigator, working for her father.
“When things clear over,” she said, “you’ll be back?”
“Maybe,” I lied. “You need to talk to your old man about this. I’m leaving it up to him, what exactly you know, and how much.”
“Can you spend the morning, anyway? When did you say Daddy’s coming over?”
“Around one.”
“Then why don’t we go upstairs and say goodbye?”
We did.
When her father arrived to give me the packet of money, I met him at her front door and said, “Go in and tell your daughter whatever you want to,” and left.
* * *
I don’t know what kind of local coverage it got, but the bizarre “Grand Guignol” crime scene at that slapped-together farmhouse received limited national play for about a week. Then, in a few months or so, the onslaught began.
Five bodies of teenage girls were dug up in that dirt cellar where Sally had played captive, among them Candy Stockwell. The papers did not detail whatever indignities the local girl had suffered before her murder.
Two dozen Betamax cassettes were found in one of four packed bags in the farmhouse. Contents of the tapes were never disclosed to the public, other than a brief statement from the Missouri state police that “the homemade videos confirm Roger Vale and Sally Meadows as accomplices in murder.”
Then the FBI got involved.
The back yard of a secluded house outside Incline Village, Nevada, once rented by dance instructor Calvin Dorn, gave up six dead girls.
In Sebring, Florida, a vacant lot adjacent to the one-time Corey Ellis Dance Studio surrendered five dead teenage girls, ages fourteen to sixteen.
A farmhouse outside Sparta, once rented by Louis Dane, yielded a crop of five dead girls.
A cabin rented by Rick Varney, near Rocky Fork State Park in Ohio, offered up three more in its back yard.
Roger Vale was born Louis Peck in Topeka, Kansas, an outstanding high school drama student. Sally Meadows was Lori Reif of Tahoe City, Nevada, third place runner-up in the 1972 Miss Teen Nevada pageant—Vale’s protégée from the start, nearby Burton Creek Park raising the curtain on their collaboration.
There would be speculation about what made them tick, the childhoods that shaped them, and whether mental illness played a role in the homicidal activities of either or both. To me, they were just fucking murderers.
Don’t forget: there’s a difference between a murderer and a killer. Murderers, like Roger and Sally, lay waste. A killer performs a service.
Sometimes a public service.
* * *
I called her, about a year later. Probably should have done it from a pay phone, but one evening in my A-frame cottage on Paradise Lake, when nothing good was on TV, and I’d had a few beers, I impulsively dialed her.
“Jack Quarry,” she said warmly. “I’d recognize that voice anywhere. I hope you’re calling to say you’re coming back to Stockwell for a visit.”
“Not yet. All that craziness is still unfolding, FBI and CNN. Some asshole is writing a book.”
“Oh, well, it’s quieted down here.”
“You, uh...after what you must think I did, I’m surprised you’re so...cool about it.”
But her voice bore only affection as she said, “You gave my father his life back. We’re almost friendly now, he and I. My brother is dating a widow almost as wealthy as he is, if you can imagine.”
“Good for them. What about you?”
“Not seeing anybody. Too busy. Speaking of a-holes writing books,
I’ve
been writing, really working at it. I’ve got exciting news, Jack. I actually finally
sold
a novel, and now I’m on my second.”
“Well, that’s great.”
“I figured out a handle on this romance thing. To give it a twist of my own. I’m sort of doing westerns but from a female point of view. The new book, the heroine is a schoolmarm who secretly has dark sexual desires.”
“Does a stranger ride into town?” I asked.
“Always. My first book was...you’ll laugh.”
But we already were.
“First book,” she was saying, “is about a saloon girl who’s the bastard child of the richest rancher in the valley. The second-richest rancher hires a gunslinger, and...well, I hope you’ll read it. After all, it’s dedicated to you.”
“No kidding? What’s it called?”
“Don’t laugh.
Passion Rides the Prairie.
Come visit and I’ll give you a signed copy.”
“One of these days.”
“You’ll probably think it’s corny, and I wouldn’t blame you. Gary Cooper type drifts into town, cleans up the place, sweeps a frontier gal off her stupid fuckin’ feet.”
“Why, does that sound so bad?”
“Not at all,” she said. “But I guess you only meet heroes like that in books.”
Wasn’t that the truth?
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