Cinnamon Skin (15 page)

"So let's say Coralita started making it with the kid when he was seventeen. It wouldn't be any big problem to get him started. Kids that age don't think of very much else. So she would have him whenever she could when he was eighteen and nineteen and twenty. He must have felt real guilty about not being able to stop. A good strong boy that age could give Coralita a pretty good run. Maybe she tried to end it too. Who knows? But the old man would be away, and they would be alone in the house, eat supper, watch the TU, maybe try not to look at each other. Go to bed. Each one thinking of the other one in the other bedroom, both of them getting hornier and hornier. Both of them with the perfect excuse. What harm can one more time do? Who's to know? Then one or the other coming cat-foot down the dark hall, sliding warm into the bed, all arms and mouths and groans and shudders."

He shook his head.

"Human sexuality. A hell of an engine. Let it get out of control, and it can kill. You ever hear about the doctor that got asked to speak to the PTA about human sexuality? No? He went home and told his wife he was going to talk to the PTA and she said what about, and he didn't want to get into some kind of discussion with her about what he should or shouldn't say, so he told her he was going to talk to them about sailing. She was out of town the day he gave the speech, and when she got back a friend came running up to her and said, 'Mary, your husband gave the most wonderful talk to the PTA yesterday! You should be very proud of that man.' The wife stared at her and said, 'I don't understand. George just doesn't know anything about it. He only tried it twice in his life, and once he got motion sick and the second time his hat blew off.'"

After our dutiful and politic laughter, Meyer said, "What you are telling us about Cody and Coralita, Sergeant, is that you don't see them as evil people."

"What's evil? They got thrown together. She had the hots and he was just a kid. They were weak and they were stupid, and they happened to get caught. Maybe the best answer would have been if Bryce Pittler had killed them both and then himself. Not because of the punishment or anything like that, but just to keep from turning Cody loose on the world. You talk about psychology, I don't know shit from Shinola. All I know as a law officer is that there would be no way in God's world Cody T. W. Pittler could ever feel okay about himself. And the worst crimes I get are the ones done by people who are trying to punish themselves. I think they want to be dead, and they can't go at it direct, so they keep circling it, giving it a chance to happen."

All of a sudden there was a coughing roar that steadied into a loud hum, and cold air began coming out of the vents in the side wall. Paul Sigiera jumped up and closed the small window. He went and stood in front of the vents and bared his chest and said, "Ahhhhh. Finally."

"We've taken up a lot of your time," Meyer said.

He turned and shrugged. "This is Thursday morning, friend. The quiet time. Last weekend's wars have been ironed out. The troops are regrouping. Tomorrow night there'll be some skirmishes, and by Saturday the fire fights will start and I'll be busy as a little dog in a big yard. This has been kinda interesting."

"For us too," I said. "One question. Did you develop a set of prints?"

"Sure did. Nice and clear. Beer bottle, bathroom glass, countertop, lots of good surfaces. They must have gotten a lot of sets of his and then picked the best and classified them and sent them in to FBI Central records. The theory is he gets picked up for something and the prints go in and they are cross-indexed in some damn way, and they identify him-sooner or later. It used to work better than it does now. But it didn't work too well, I hear, way back when."

"What happened to the car?"

"From the file they had hopes they could trace the kid that way. It was an almost new DeSoto, off white. It turned up finally near Alpine. It was at the bottom of a steep cliff out of sight of the highway. A backpacker reported it." He flipped the folder open again. "Says here they estimate it had been down there six weeks. I don't know how they worked that out. There was no body near it or in it. It was a place where there was a kind of scenic lookout, where he could have got out and pushed it and let it roll over the edge."

I looked questioningly at Meyer. He knew what I meant. He gave a shrug of acquiescence. "What if, using the name Larry Joe Harris, he killed a young girl over in Cotulla eighteen years ago? What if, five years ago, using the name Jerry Tobin, he ran off with a girl from Dallas and killed her in a fake automobile accident down in the hill country? What if, as Evan Lawrence, he married Professor Meyer's niece and blew her and two other people to bits. He made over two thousand dollars off the killing in Cotulla, two hundred thousand off the Dallas girl, three hundred thousand off his bride from Houston. What would you say to that?"

"Identification okay?"

"Through the picture we showed you. Total certainty."

"Like I said, I don't want to get artsy-fartsy fancy, like the psychiatrists in the courtroom. But isn't what he's doing, maybe, is killing Coralita over and over, killing his stepmother?"

"Punishing himself by killing her," Meyer said. "I could agree."

"So then there's more," Sigiera said. "It adds up to four years between Coralita and the girl in Cotulla, then a gap of twelve years? He counted with his fingers, tapping them on the edge of his desk. "No, thirteen. Then five years until this one, this month. There'd be more in there. God only knows what his cycle is. If it's every two years, that makes three you know about and eight you don't."

"Women seem to be strongly attracted to him," Meyer said.

"Okay, he's a compulsive. You take a rapist. They go on and on until you catch them. But that's a crime of violence, not sex. They want to hurt and kill. This is different. He wants to love and be loved. He wants romance. He wants to heat somebody up until they're as hungry for it as Coralita was. Then he's got the excuse to punish himself and her for that kind of sex by killing her, depriving himself."

"Meyer and I had dinner with them aboard my houseboat."

"That's the first time you didn't throw in the word Professor, so now I'll buy the idea you're friends. Go ahead."

"I remarked afterward to Meyer there was a kind of almost tangible erotic tension between them, almost visible, like smoke in the air."

Sigiera shook his head slowly, making a bitter mouth under the droop of the mustache. "All the years," he said. "All the years on the run. Roaming among the women, all smiles. Taking little jobs and then moving on. Roaming and killing, and in pain all the time. By now he must be damn well expert at picking up new identities. It's never hard if you start with cash and with the smarts. But it can go wrong. Some little thing. He'd have to be ready at any time to fold the tent and run. I don't think a man can stand that much tension for too long."

"What do you mean?" I asked him.

"When you're a working lawman, you get used to every kind of criminal having a pattern. I got to know a very classy thief. I made a practically accidental collar when I was in Beaumont. He did rich people. Private homes. Coins and stamps and collectibles and jewelry. Portable stuff. He went to the big auctions in New York and Los Angeles. He got a line on his marks there. Would track one to, say, Atlanta. Research the house, the floor plan, the alarm system, the movements of the people who lived there. When the time was right and the house was empty, he'd park a rented van in the drive, with a sign he'd taped to the side saying BUGS-OFF INSECT CONTROL, and he'd walk in in his white suit carrying his spray equipment. Fifteen minutes after he'd bypassed the alarm system, he'd walk out with a pillowcase full of good stuff which he could fence for a very good score. Twice a year he did the same kind of job. I was cruising the neighborhood in an unmarked car, looking for an address of somebody we wanted a statement from. He had trouble busting into a safe and his time got so short he came out nervous, backed out of the blind driveway right into the side of my car. He thought I was a civilian. He came on very hard, but when I showed the badge and the gun he just wilted and sat down on the curbing. All the life went right out of him.

"While we were holding him, I used to go in and talk to him. Know what? He had a wife and kids in Cincinnati. He was an investment adviser. He had an office in a bank building. He belonged to a downtown club and a tennis club, the Junior Chamber and the Kiwanis. He did a lot of investment advising, and he was good at it. He washed his own money by feeding it in through the office, as consultant fees. He lived good. He had respectability. He told me that every time he made a good score and got back to home base with the money, he'd say to himself, Never again. He was safe. He could breathe. When he was out on a job, his wife and everybody else thought he was off taking a first-hand look at some of the companies where he was thinking of recommending the stock. He told me that he'd say never again, and in a couple of months it would start to build. He'd begin to get restless. And he'd remember how it' was when he was inside a rich home. It was a kind of excitement he never could find anywhere else."

"I see what you mean," Meyer said. "This man, Pittler might well have a base somewhere, a permanent identity he goes back to."

"I think he would have to have," Sigiera said. "A place to catch his breath. Stash money. Get his ducks in a row. Home base, where they don't know about his hobby."

"Would the sister know?" I asked.

"Who?"

"Helen June whatever."

"Good thought," he said. "They used to go grill her every few weeks until she moved away. She claimed she had never gotten a card or even a call from Cody. Let me see. Her married name ought to be in here someplace." He looked and grunted when he found it. "Mrs. Kermit Fox. Kermit was called Sonny. But this address is way out of date. Helen June got to be forty-seven by now. There must be somebody in town still sending her Christmas cards. Old Boomer might know. He's been working for the city for ninety-nine years. You like a little Mexican hot groceries? It's about that time."

He made a call, and then we went out to eat. It was a drive-in called Panchos. We sat at a table in the back. The specialty was chili with chunks of Chihuahua cheese melted in it and on it. Meyer, one of the world's great chili experts, was under close observation by Sigiera as he tasted it. Sigiera expected a gasp, tears, a mad grab at the ice water. Meyer smacked his lips, looked thoughtful, reached for the Tabasco bottle, put a dozen drops into the chili, stirred it well, tasted again, nodded at Sigiera, and said, "Just right, Paul."

"Professor, I'm beginning to like you."

He told us about the trials and foul-ups of working with the border patrol on immigration and drugs, and about his adventures as an undercover man in Beaumont.

We were on second coffees when an erect old man with ample belly, white mustache, white goatee, arid a fifty-nine-gallon straw hat came to the table. Sigiera kicked a chair out for him. "Boomer, this here is McGee and this is the Professor. They're the ones want to know about Helen June Pittler Fox."

His handshake was big, dry, and muscular. He must have given his order on the way in. The waitress came with a glass of milk and a small order of tacos.

Boomer crunched a taco and washed it down with milk, wiped his mouth and whiskers, and said, "After Cody shot his step-ma and pa, about a year after, Sonny and Helen June moved clear out of the state. They moved on all the way up north. Sonny's folks had original moved down from there and he had some kin up there. Rome, New York. No point in giving you that address, because it isn't any good any more. Sonny and Helen June had but the one kid and it died in the first year from something wrong with its breathing. Sonny is the best auto mechanic I ever come across. He could make a living anyplace at all. They broke up. Can't say if there's a divorce. Anyway, she calls herself Helen June Fox and here's the address."

He put a scrap of envelope on the table. I held it so Meyer could read it as I did: Route 3, Box 810, Cold Brook, New York.

"Said to be someplace north of Utica," Boomer said.

"Long way to go to come up empty." Sigiera said.

"No place is too far," Meyer said. "And why empty?"

"Because most old cold leads turn out empty, that's all. The new hot ones pay off a lot more often."

We bought the lunch over Sigiera's protests, and we promised to let him know if we learned anything.

I estimated on the map that we were a little less than three hundred and fifty miles from Houston on Route 57, then I-35 and I-10, and so should make it back to the Houston apartment by midnight.

A brassy sun filled half the sky, and with the air on full blast it was still warm inside the van. At speed the van was just noisy enough to inhibit conversation. We were both involved in independent guesswork. When either of us came up with something, we would yell across to the other side of the seat to check it out.

"Hideout in Mexico?" Meyer shouted. "Got the language. Use the same papers going back and forth to the States. Change identity once he's across the border?"

"He was using Evan Lawrence down there, working with somebody named Willy in Cancun."

I glanced over at him. He looked disappointed. Once, when we stopped for gas, he said, "If I had a hide-out I would use trip wires and tin cans and cow bells to let me know if anybody was approaching."

"If we ever get close, we can expect that. And expect him to be dangerous."

"I still like the idea of Mexico. Maybe Evan Lawrence is his hideaway name."

"So why would he call attention to it by arranging to have himself killed?"

"I see what you mean. I'm not thinking well."

"We're doing okay. Thanks to you, we know the name he started with. And we know what started him."

"It seems incredible to me that we could have had dinner with him and Norma, and there wasn't the slightest hint of violence under that friendly face."

Then we were back on the highway, booming along through the end of the day, the sunset behind us, our shadow long, angling to one side or the other as the road changed subtle directions. I grunted and pulled into the next rest stop, parked with the motor running, and turned and faced Meyer. "We make it too complicated."

"How do you mean?"

"It just came to me. He had to destroy Evan Lawrence."

"Why?"

"The money."

Meyer frowned and then suddenly said, "Of course! It would be too risky to hang around as the mourning husband and wait for the legal procedures to clean up the details and hand over the money. When he talked Norma into gradually moving all the cash out of the trust, he knew he was going to stage a common disaster. Otherwise, if he could have risked staying right there, he would have left the money in the trust and it would have come to him on her death. But that would have meant a more careful research job on him by the law and the lawyers."

"Wouldn't you have inherited under the terms of the will?"

"Wouldn't it have been an easy job for him to get her to make a new will? And then that too would have been significant. You're right, Travis. Evan Lawrence was a temporary person. He could only last so long. How long was it, a half year maybe? And now he's back in his safe place. And sooner or later he'll come out again, as someone else. On the hunt. Prowling. Searching. Smiling."

Back up to speed, each of us thinking, adding up the little morsels we had discovered, from Christine Statzer, Martin Eagle, Betsy Ann Larker, Bunky Boomer, Paul Sigiera. Like a child's game in the Sunday comics. Connect the dots and find the animal.

"Common disasters are hard to stage," Meyer shouted.

So I worked on that one, through the end of daylight into night, into late quarter-pounders at an almost deserted McDonald's at Seguin. "You can arrange it with fire," I said, "if you can find somebody approximately the right size. Hitchhiker. Backpacker. A transient is best, because he won't be missed for a long time, if ever. Chunk them both on the head, drive off the road into a tree, jumping liree at the last minute, the way he probably did in Ingram. Then toss the match. Put your ring on his finger before you toss the match. Take off any rings he might have. Car fires are hot. Water is easier. Overturned boat, drowned woman, man missing presumed dead. Explosives are good too, except it takes an awful lot. Send her up in a plane with a bomb in the luggage, after buying two tickets. Last minute excuse. Join you later honey. But you kill a lot of other folks that way."

Suddenly a small elderly woman jumped up out of a booth across the way. I hadn't noticed her. She glared at me. "Monsters!" she said in a breathy whisper. "Monsters!" She scuttled out.

And Meyer started laughing. It was the first genuine laugh I had heard from him in a year. His eyes ran. He hugged his belly and groaned. "Oh, oh, oh." I levered him up and aimed him toward the car. He staggered with laughter. The little old lady might call the law, and it would be well to be up to speed in reasonable time.

On Friday morning at a travel agency in the shopping mall near Piney Village, we discovered that if you want to get to Utica, Houston isn't a good place to start from. Maybe there aren't any good places to start from. But they could get us to Syracuse by six that evening, with a long wait between flights at Atlanta.

A few minutes from Houston we came up through hot murky clouds into a bright white blaze of sunshine. At Atlanta we took a train from our gate back to the terminal. I wandered back and forth past a row of phone booths and finally went in and phoned Naples.

She answered on the first half of the first ring. "Yes?"

"Me," I said. "Where are you?"

"Atlanta, heading north pretty soon. I wondered about the job."

"You didn't wonder enough to call me on Sunday, or Monday, or Tuesday, or-"

"I thought about it every day."

"I bet."

"I really did. We've been doing a lot of scuffling. Okay, tell me how it came out."

"The job was offered and the terms are marvelous. They gave me until Monday to think it over, so I did, and I phoned them and said yes."

"And if I had phoned Sunday?"

"McGee, I would like to stick you with it. I would like to tell you that if you'd called, maybe I would have said no. But it just ain't true, darlin'. I want that job so bad I can hardly breathe."

"When will you be leaving?"

"The man I'm training to replace me reported this morning. They want me in Maui on August fifteenth."

"How's the guy they sent?"

"Howard is a little bit slow to catch on, but once he has something firmly in mind, it stays there. I think he'll be okay. Cornell hotel school. They made him very well aware of the records I set here, so he knows he'd be a fool to make any big changes."

"Seems awful soon."

"It is soon. I've been a little bit depressed ever since I said yes, as a matter of fact. Not just about you but about the whole thing here. It's been a wonderful part of my life."

"Past tense."

"What's over, as they say, is over. How are you doing?"

"We learned the name he started with. Cody T. W Pittler. And we think we know why he is a congenital murderer."

"More murders?"

"Lots we don't know about, probably."

"Do be careful, will you?"

"We may never get any closer to him than we are now. We're going up north to see his sister. She hasn't seen him in twenty-two years, probably. We think he has some safe place from which he ventures forth from time to time, to evil do. The great lover. He sets up passionate affairs with women and then does them in."

"At least they die happy. Sorry. That was bad taste."

"I encouraged it. I was giving it the light touch. But I don't feel light at all inside. I'm depressed by how soon it is going to be the middle of August."

"I'm glad, at least, that you finally called. I was beginning to get really annoyed with you."

"I've been basking in garden spots, like Freer, Encinal, Cotulla, and Eagle Pass."

"City life, huh? Excuse, Travis. I was on my way out when the phone rang. I'm to have a rum something with Howard by the pool, and we are going to talk about getting the east forty rezoned. We really need it if we're to have any room at all to grow here. Phone me, please, when you get back home. The minute you get home, okay?"

"Okay. Good luck with the rezoning."

"Good luck with your mass murderer, baby."

I hung up and went over to where Meyer was sitting. He was fatuously content. He had found a copy of The Economist on the newsstand and was learning all about economic crisis in the NATO countries.

By the time we reached the Avis counter in the Syracuse airport, it was six thirty on a hot sticky Friday evening, the sun still high. We'd reserved the car in Atlanta, on Meyer's card, and it was waiting for us out in slot 20, a burgundy two-door with a drooped nose and a memory of cigar smoke inside. The Avis woman had given us instructions as to how to get on the Thruway. It was still bright daylight when we took the Utica exit and found, on the way toward downtown, an elderly and overpriced Howard Johnson motel. I could stomach the motel but not the restaurant, so Meyer studied the yellow pages. He has good instincts.

"What they seem to have the most of here is Italian," he said.

"So one goes with the tide. Objection?"

"Not at all."

"Grimaldi's, I think. Let me see. Yes. Grimaldi's." When we finally found it, the daylight was almost gone. It was on a corner, with a public park across from one side of it and some sort of yellow-brick public housing project across from the front entrance. We had a hard time finding a parking place. Meyer said that was a good sign. The doors opened onto smoke, loud talk, laughter, a general Thank God It's Friday flavor. The bar was off to the left, the dining area to the right. A slender, grave, darkhaired woman led us to a table for two against the far mall and gave us over-sized menus. A small bald elderly waiter came trotting over and took our order for extra-dry martinis with twists. They came quickly. Meyer sipped, he smiled, he relaxed. "The food will be good," he said. "You never get a generous and delicious cocktail in a proper glass in a restaurant where the food is bad." Another Meyer dictum. They seem to work out.

And the veal piccata was indeed splendid, and went well with the Valpolicella.

Over coffee, Meyer said, "It's like coming back to life. All this. I was shut down for a year. Now there is a kind of internal pressure that every now and then pops another area of me wide open the way it once was. When I take pleasure in it, then I feel guilty that I owe this conditional resurrection to Norma."

"Conditional?"

"Of course. How long does it last? Only until the next animal gives me a choice between acting like a man or sitting on the floor and forgetting my name. At times I am anxious to find out, and at other times I hope there will never be another confrontation."

"You'll be fine."

"My words to myself exactly. Meyer, I say to myself, you'll be fine. Just fine." His smile was wry.

I looked around at the patrons of the restaurant and the bar. Politicos, many of them young. Lawyers and elected officials and appointees. Some with their wives or girls. It looked to me as if a lot of the city and county business might be transacted right here. They had a lot of energy, these Italianate young men, a feverish gregariousness. I wondered aloud why they seemed so frantic about having a good time.

Meyer studied the question and finally said, "It's energy without a productive outlet, I think. Most of these Mohawk Valley cities are dying, have been for years: Albany, Troy, Amsterdam, Utica, Syracuse, Rome. And so they made an industry out of government. State office buildings in the decaying downtowns. A proliferation of committees, surveys, advisory boards, commissions, legal actions, grants, welfare, zoning boards, road departments, health care groups… thousands upon thousands of people making a reasonably good living working for city, county, state, and federal governments in these dwindling cities, passing the same tax dollars back and forth. I think that man, by instinct, is productive. He wants to make something, a stone ax, a big ger cave, better arrows, whatever. But these bright and energetic men know in their hearts they are not making anything. They use every connection, every contact, every device, to stay within reach of public monies. Working within an abstraction is just not a totally honorable way of life. Hence the air of jumpy joy, the backslaps ringing too loudly, compliments too extravagant, toasts too ornate, marriages too brief, lawsuits too long-drawn, obligatory forms too complex and too long. Their city has gone stale, and as the light wanes, they dance."

"Very poetic, Professor."

"Valpolicella tends to do that to me."

"I've missed your impromptu lectures."

"Be careful what you say, I may try to make up for the lost year."

"I haven't missed them that much."