at First Sight (2008) (15 page)

I glanced at my underdressed companion and found him still staring at me with those sharp gray lasers. Except for the eyes, he didn't look all that smart. Maybe the steel glint I was seeing was just mean, North Carolina stubbornness. After all, the brothers in this state had been marrying their first cousins since the Civil War. Inbred people are supposed to be stupid, stubborn, and mean. At least that's what I was hoping.

I kept trying to ease my way out of this, but for the moment I was stuck in the conversation, so I plunged on. "So you're investigating Chandler's death?" I said, trying to make it conversational.

"Not his death. Coroner investigates the death. I'm investigating his murder."

"Murder? I thought it was just a hit-and-run."

"Second-degree homicide."

"Oh."

Silence descended while I tried to decide what to say next. "Why are you at the funeral?" I finally asked.

"Always go to the funeral."

"Really?"

"Yep . . . yep, ever time."

He actually said "ever" instead of "every?' I was starting to feel slightly better. He obviously had never gone to college. If you'r
e g
onna commit a second-degree homicide, I guess it's better to be investigated by an undereducated, inbred, southern cop than some knuckle-cracking Harvard criminologist.

"You're here because you think the killer might show up?" I asked. I don't know what I was doing. Why was I leading him on like this? It was almost as if I was intentionally trying to get myself caught. Of course, acting dumb but interested could also serve to throw him off. After all, like I said, . . . Make that as I said, . . . he didn't look too bright.

"Yep . . . more times than I can tell you, the killer shows up. These perps think they gotta put flowers on the coffin. Sometimes, it's a complete stranger. Sometimes it's a good friend, sometimes just a recent acquaintance:' He paused, smiled, then added sleepily, "Like you."

I smiled back, but my heart, I swear, was pounding on the walls of my chest like a deranged mental patient trying to get out. Then he went on, still smiling, "There's something, some inner force that seems to make these people want to come to the funeral."

"Really?" I was scrambling for a casual attitude.

"Yep."

"What do you suppose it is?"

"Well, I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm just an underpaid flatfoot, but I expect it's two things, maybe three."

"This is fascinating."

"Ya think?"

"Like, yes . . . " I said and then smiled at him. "So come on, wha
t a
re they?"

"Like, okay," he smiled back. "One is hubris. Some killers just want to put it all out there. They're sayin"I'm smarter than all a you blue flannel assholes. I can watch the coffin go into the ground, stand right here out in the open and you'll never get me.' So, hubris is the first one."

"And the next?"

"Stupidity comes next. Some killers are just plain box-a-rocks stupid. They want to experience the funeral because they hated the victim, or they had some fiscal or personal reason to commit the murder, and they don't think any cops are gonna be here looking at who shows up. So stupid is the next, pure and simple."

I nodded. Of course, this was the category I so neatly fit into. But I was committed to this line of questioning, so I asked him what the third was.

"The third is 'cause it would be inappropriate not to come. Cause suspicion. Brother, husband, wife . . . that kinda thing. Course everybody in that category is gonna get a hard look from me anyway."

"Paige obviously didn't do it," I said, rushing to her defense.

"Pretty sure a that, are ya?"

"You kidding? She loved him. She worshipped him."

He took out a notepad and started writing.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm writing that down. Don't want to forget it," he said, and right then I had a shiver of fear. It went down my spine and chilled my balls.

Why did this smartass remark frighten me? I'll tell you why. It frightened me because this cop had obviously decided to start fuckin
g w
ith me. He was being sarcastic and offhand. Two things about that: One, it told me he had already formed a healthy dislike for me, and of course this is the last thing I needed. The second thing was even more distressing than the first. That little piece of sarcasm gave me a glimpse of the man looking out at me from behind those gray eyes. He was not some stupid, inbred country bluecoat. He was a shrewd, smart, cold-blooded son-of-a-bitch.

In that brief second, I saw this ending badly. In that moment, I suspected that this narrow-shouldered man in the fifty-dollar sport coat might one day actually arrest me for Chandler's murder.

Chapter
17

BY THE END OF MAY, THE ANGER THAT HAD SPORADIcally been hitting Paige settled on her like a vengeful cloak. She needed to get it out, so despite her painful back, she enrolled in a full-contact martial arts class. Her instructor was a half-Asian, half-German roughneck named Hans Mochadome--Moch. She was athletic, and the four hours a week she spent in the dojo helped to take the rage away as she methodically tried to beat the shit out of her quick, agile classmates.

Paige also decided to take the next school year off. She was in no frame of mind to teach kindergarten. Whether she even wanted to stay in Charlotte was still up for grabs. It had been her hometown after her parents died, and when she and Chandler decided to get married, he had agreed to relocate there for her.

But now she felt maybe she needed a change. The loneliness since Chandler's death was overpowering and the anger debilitating. She knew she was terrible company and in a bad place emotionally.

Six weeks had passed since the funeral and she was still clobbered anew every morning by the stark realization that he was gone, that she was all alone.

Her religious beliefs precluded suicide, but her memories made going on seem pointless. She had two general conditions--sad and angry. When sadness hit, she more or less just sat. Sat in her house with all of Chandler's things. Sat in the park watching other people's children play. When she was angry, she went to the dojo and tried to kill anybody stupid enough to stand in front of her.

She slept on Chandler's side of the bed, not changing the sheets for the first two weeks because his smell was still there. She sat in the back of his closet with his clothes hanging over her, crying until she had no more tears.

Bob Butler made weekly visits and brought her up to date on the investigation. At first these visits seemed to calm her, to take her out of these two polarized moods. With Bob Butler, she was seeking retribution. With him, she could look toward the future. Admittedly, that future only encompassed catching the asshole who ran down Chandler. But it was still a step out of lethargy and anger.

"The paint is from a blue Taurus," he told her a week or so after the funeral. They were sitting in a little cafe across from th
e d
ojo where they often met. She was in her sweats; he was wearing the same outfit he always wore, the frayed blue blazer and tan pants.

They stirred their mochas as he continued. "The good thing about it being a Taurus is, Hertz, Budget, and Avis all rent 'em. Buy 'em in bulk. If our killer rented the car, that could be a break 'cause they keep records of every rental. I'm working that angle."

"That's great, Bob," she said, trying to find some enthusiasm. There had to be thousands of blue Tauruses.

"Well, it's a lotta damn cars, but I'm gonna take that time period around the killing--the tenth through the fifteenth of April--and send an e-mail to the district headquarters of all a them companies, and ask 'em if any cars came back smashed up around those dates. Then we sort through those and check the names back."

"Do you think that will tell us who did it?" A useless, dumb question, but she asked it anyway.

"Well . . . might . . . can't never tell. They're pretty careful checking cars back in, lookin' for damage, so if it was some rental and it was dented, there'd be a record. Course maybe it ain't a rental. It could just be some civilian car, but hey, it's a place to start."

She smiled and took his hand. "Thanks," she told him.

He embarrassed easily and now he looked away. His ears, which stuck out badly, turned bright red. "It's no trouble. Least I can do, Mrs. Ellis."

"Paige," she instructed softly.

He always wanted her to call him Bob, but insisted on calling her Mrs. Ellis, almost as if he needed the formality to define the relationship. He was humble and sweet and his motives were pure. He wanted only to catch her husband's killer. She knew he was doing it for his dead wife, Althea, as much as for her. There was something very Old World and sentimental about Bible Bob Butler.

Next, he went over a list of names he had collected at the funeral. There were half a dozen people he was curious about--most of them out-of-town friends of hers and Chandler's. Somewhere toward the end he looked up and said, "What about this guy, Charles Best?"

"Chick?" she said. "What about him?"

"He said he met you guys in Hawaii less than a year ago, then he comes all the way from L
. A
. for the funeral:'

"Yeah?"

"Recent acquaintance seems kinda funny, is all."

"He's just a very caring person. Actually, it was sweet of him to come.

"So there was nothing strange going on there?"

For the first time since the funeral, she thought about the way Chick had wanted to help her with the probate of the estate--how he seemed almost desperate about it, and how he had pleaded with her in the parking lot of the church. It definitely seemed unusual then, but now she decided it was nothing. Everybody had been acting strangely. "He's just a good friend," she said.

Bob Butler put the list away. "Okay, then. Guess far as I can see, the killer didn't show at the funeral. Don't tell Angela Lansbury."

They sat quietly for several minutes and sipped their coffees.

"Are we really going to find out who did it?" she asked, hopefully. "'Cause with all this karate I'm taking, if you catch him, I want the first two out of three falls."

Bible Bob smiled at her as he absently stirred his mocha. The spoon clicked dully in the thick pottery mug. "Then stay in shape, Mrs. Ellis," he said softly. "'Cause I'm gonna set that meeting up for you."

Chapter
18

I DON'T MEAN TO SOUND LIKE A WHINER, BUT THE
months following Chandler's funeral were more painful for me than you can imagine. We finally found Melissa. In typical Melissa "go fuck yourself" fashion, she was sleeping under a bridge off the 134 freeway. The way we found her was, one of her whacked-out, homeless girlfriends overdosed on a spoonful of Mexican Brown, curled up in a ball, and caught the big bus. Melissa was asleep near her when the cops and the paramedics arrived to bag and tag the body, then started pulling that sad bunch of runaways out of their cardboard boxes and rolled-up blankets. There was enough space paste hidden under that off-ramp to lift the whole bridge ten feet off the ground and set it down sideways.

So we got Melissa back. Blessing, or curse? You decide. Since her court date hadn't come up yet, she technically hadn't skipped bail, but her bondsman, a tattooed, gap-toothed, ex-prizefighter named Easy
Money Mahoney, told me he knew that Melissa planned to split, and that in his opinion, she had no intention of meeting her court date. If he was going to continue to hold her paper, his insurance company wanted the whole twenty grand in escrow--a no-fault bond, he called it. See how this is going? Everything was hitting me at once. So now I had to convert the last of my company IRA account to keep her out of jail. And what did I get back from Melissa in return? A lotta fucking attitude, that's what.

"They're just my friends," she snarled when I asked why she was hanging with a bunch of addicts under the bridge.

"Your 'friends' have more tracks than the Southern Pacific," I said accusingly.

"My dad, the great seventies drug guru. You got all the fucking answers, don't you?"

It went on like that. It was endless.

Melissa was just being Melissa--pissed off, making us bleed. It seemed to amuse her that I'd had to cash in our last worthwhile asset to keep her from being put back in jail. Amused Melissa--pissed-off Evelyn. There was no way to win with those two.

Speaking of Evelyn, I was seeing less and less of my scowling wife.

Here's the story on the Mr. USA Contest. Mickey D had come in fourth, and for Evelyn, that was a big deal. She got to wear his cheesy runner-up medal around the house occasionally.

"Mickey shoulda won," she'd grumbled. "It was supposed to be an all-natural show, but they only did random drug tests, so this other guy--who anybody with eyes could see was on steroids--didn't have to take a piss test, and he stole it."

Like Mickey doesn't shoot enough gym-juice to bench-press a school bus. Our daily conversations had started to become short and angry.

"Where you going?" Me.

"Out:' Her.