The Poet (40 page)

“No problem,” I said.

“I’ll be here. I’ll tell the front that your calls can come through. No one else from the press.”

“There will be a lot of those calls.”

“My intention was to let public affairs handle it anyway.”

“If the statement they put out includes the origination of the case, tell them not to use my name. Just say inquiries from the Rocky Mountain News started it rolling.”

Backus nodded.

“One last thing,” I said and then paused a moment. “I’m still concerned about the leak. If I find out the L.A. Times or any other media outlet also got the Poet fax today, then I’ll put everything I know into the next story. The profile, everything. Okay?”

“Understood.”

“You weasel,” Thorson said angrily. “You think you can just come in here and dictate what-“

“Fuck you, Thorson,” I said. “I’ve been wanting to say that to you since Quantico. Fuck you, okay? If I was betting, I’d say you were the leak, so don’t tell me anything about being a weas-“

“FUCK YOU!” Thorson roared as he stood up to challenge me.

But quickly Backus was up and putting a hand on his shoulder. He gently pushed him back down into his seat. Rachel watched the whole thing, a small, thin smile on her face.

“Easy, Gordon,” Backus soothed. “Easy. Nobody’s accusing anyone of anything. Let’s keep things cool. Everybody’s a little hot and bothered today but it’s no reason why we can’t cool down. Jack, that’s a dangerous accusation. If you have something to back it up, let’s hear it. If not, you’d best leave things like that unsaid.”

I said nothing. I only had my gut instinct that Thorson had leaked the story to fuck me over because of some paranoia about reporters in general and my relationship with Rachel in particular. It wasn’t the kind of thing to bring up for discussion. Everybody eventually took their seats and just stared at each other.

“That was entertaining as hell, fellas, but I’d like to do some work today,” Rachel finally said.

“And I have to go,” I said. “What line do you want to hold back on the fax?”

“The riddle,” Backus answered. “Don’t mention Best Pals.”

I thought a moment. It was one of the better lines.

“Fine. No problem.”

I stood up and so did Rachel.

“I’ll give you a ride back to the hotel.”

“Is it that bad, getting scooped like that?” she asked as we were headed back to the hotel.

“It’s bad. I guess it’s like with you guys, the ones that get away. I hope Backus busts Thorson for this. The asshole.”

“It will be hard for him to prove anything. It’s just going to be suspicion.”

“If you told Backus about us and told him that Thorson knew, then he’d believe it.”

“I can’t. If I told Backus about us I’d be the one who’d go down.”

After some silence she changed the subject back to the story.

“You’ll have so much more than he had.”

“What? Who?”

“I’m talking about Warren. You’ll have a better story.”

“First with the story, first with the glory. That’s an old newspaper saying. But it’s true. In most stories, the one that’s there first is always the one who gets the credit, even if the first story is full of holes and bullshit. Even if it’s a stolen story.”

“Is that what it’s about? Getting credit? Just being first, even if you don’t have it right?”

I looked over at her and tried to smile.

“Yeah, sometimes. Most times. Pretty noble job, huh?”

She didn’t answer. We drove in silence for a while. I wished that she would say something about us and what we had or didn’t have but she didn’t. We were getting close to the hotel now.

“What if I can’t convince him to let me stay here and I have to go back to Denver? What happens to us?”

She didn’t answer for a while.

“I don’t know, Jack. What do you want to happen?”

“I don’t know but I don’t want it to just end like this. I thought …”

I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to tell her.

“I don’t want it to end like this, either.”

She drove to the front of the hotel to drop me off. She said she had to get back. A guy in a red jacket with gold braid on the shoulders opened the door for me, robbing us of any privacy. I wanted to kiss her but something about the situation and being in the G car made it seem inappropriate and awkward.

“I’ll see you when I can,” I said. “As soon as I can.”

“Good,” she said, smiling. “Good-bye, Jack. Good luck with the story. Call me at the field office and let me know if you are writing from here. Maybe we can get together tonight.”

That was a better reason than any I had come up with for staying in Phoenix. She reached over and touched my beard like she had done once before. And just before I got out of the car she told me to wait. She took a card out of her purse and wrote a number on the back of it, then she gave it to me.

“That’s my pager number in case something happens. It’s on the satellite, so you can beep me wherever I am.”

“In the whole world?”

“The whole world. Until the satellite falls.”

32

Gladden looked at the words on the screen. They were beautiful, as if written by the unseen hand of God. So right. So knowledgeable. He read them again.

_________________________

They know about me now and I am ready. I await them. I am prepared to take my place in the pantheon of faces. I feel as I did as a child when I waited for the closet door to be opened so that I could receive him. The line of light at the bottom. My beacon. I watched the light and the shadows each of his footfalls made. Then I knew he was there and that I would have his love. The apple of his eye.

We are what they make us and yet they turn from us. We are cast off. We become nomads in the world of the moan. My rejection is my pain and motivation. I carry with me the vengeance of all the children. I am the Eidolon. I am called the predator, the one to watch for in your midst. I am the cucoloris, the blur of light and dark. My story is not one of deprivation and abuse. I welcomed the touch. I can admit it. Can you? I wanted, craved, welcomed the touch. It was only the rejection-when my bones grew too large-that cut me so deeply and forced on me the life of a wanderer. I am the cast off. And the children must stay forever young.

_________________________

He looked up when the phone rang. It was on the counter in the kitchen and he stared at it as it rang. It was the first call she had gotten. The machine picked up after three rings and her taped message played. Gladden had written it out on a piece of paper and made her read it three times before it was recorded on the fourth. Stupid woman, he thought as he listened now. She wasn’t much of an actress-at least with her clothes on.

“Hello this is Darlene, I … I can’t take your call right now. I’ve had to go out of town because of an emergency. I will be checking messages-uh, messages and will call you as soon as I can.”

She sounded nervous and Gladden worried that because of the repeat of the one word that a caller would know she was reading. He listened as a male voice left an angry message after the beep.

“Darlene, goddamnit! You better call me as soon as you get this. You left me in a big lurch over here. You shoulda called and just might not have a job to come back to, girl, goddamnit!”

Gladden thought it had worked. He got up and erased the message. Her boss, he assumed. But he wouldn’t be getting a callback from Darlene.

He noticed the smell as he stood in the kitchen doorway. He grabbed his matches off his cigarettes on the living room coffee table and went into the bedroom. He studied the body for a few moments. The face was a pale green but darker since the last time he had checked. Bloody fluid was draining from the mouth and nose, as the body purged itself of decomposition fluids. He had read about these purges in one of the books he had successfully petitioned to receive before the warden at Raiford. Forensic Pathology. Gladden wished he had the camera so he could document the changes in Darlene.

He lit four more sticks of jasmine incense, placing them in ashtrays at the four corners of the bed.

This time, after he had left and closed the bedroom door, he laid a wet towel along the threshold, hoping it would prevent the odor from spreading into the area of the apartment where he was living. He still had two days to go.

33

I talked Greg Glenn into letting me write from Phoenix. For the rest of the morning I stayed in my room making calls, gathering comments from players in the story ranging from Wexler in Denver to Bledsoe in Baltimore. I wrote for five straight hours after that and the only disturbances I had all day were calls from Glenn himself, nervously asking how I was doing. An hour before the five o’clock deadline in Denver, I filed two stories to the metro desk.

My nerves were jangling by the time I shipped the stories and I had a headache that was almost off the scale. I had been through a pot and a half of room service coffee and a full pack of Marlboros-the most I had smoked in one sitting in years. Pacing the room and waiting for Greg Glenn’s callback, I made a quick call to room service again, explained that I couldn’t leave my room because I was expecting an important call, and ordered a bottle of aspirin from the hotel’s lobby shop.

After it arrived I downed three tablets with mineral water from the minibar and almost immediately started feeling better. Next I called my mother and Riley and alerted them that my stories would be in the next day’s paper. I also told them there was a chance that reporters from other media outlets might try to contact them now that the story was out and to be prepared. Both said they didn’t want to talk to any reporters and I said that was fine, not missing the irony that I was one myself.

Lastly, I realized I had forgotten to call Rachel to tell her I was still in town. I called the Phoenix field office of the FBI but was told by the agent who answered that she was gone.

“What do you mean ‘gone’? Is she still in Phoenix?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Can I speak with Agent Backus then?”

“He’s gone, too. Who may I ask is calling?”

I hung up and dialed the hotel’s front desk and asked for her room. I was told she had checked out. So had Backus. So had Thorson, Carter and Thompson.

“Son of a bitch,” I said after hanging up.

There had been a break. Had to be. For all of them to have checked out, there had to have been a major breakthrough in the investigation. And I realized I had been left behind, that my moment on the inside was surely over now. I got up and paced the room some more, wondering where they would have gone and what could have made them move so quickly. Then I remembered the card Rachel had given me. I dug it out of my pocket and punched the paging number into the phone.

Ten minutes surely seemed enough time to bounce my message off the satellite and then down to her, wherever she was. But ten minutes came and went and the phone didn’t ring. Another ten minutes passed and then a half hour. Not even Greg Glenn called. I even picked up the phone to make sure I hadn’t broken it.

Restless, but tired of pacing and waiting, I fired up the laptop and logged into the Rocky again. I called up my messages but there were none of any importance. I switched to my personal basket, scrolled the files and called up the one labeled HYPSTORIES. The file contained several stories on Horace Gomble, one after the other in chronological order. I began to read from the oldest story forward, my memory of the hypnotist coming back as I went.

It was a colorful history. A physician and researcher for the CIA in the early sixties, Gomble later was a practicing psychiatrist in Beverly Hills who specialized in hypnotherapy. He parlayed his skill and expertise in the hypnotic arts, as he called them, into a nightclub act as Horace the Hypnotist. First it was just appearances on open-mike nights at the clubs in Los Angeles but the act became immensely popular and he started taking it to Las Vegas for weeklong gigs on the strip. Soon Gomble wasn’t a practicing shrink anymore. He was a full-time entertainer appearing on the stages of the nicest palaces on the Las Vegas strip. By the mid-seventies his name was on the billing with Sinatra’s at Caesar’s, albeit in smaller letters. He made four appearances on Carson’s show, the last time putting his host in a hypnotic trance and eliciting from him his true thoughts on his other guests that evening. Because of Carson’s caustic comments, the studio audience thought it was a gag. But it wasn’t. After Carson saw the tape, he canceled the airing of the show and put Horace the Hypnotist on his blacklist. The cancellation made news in the entertainment trade papers and was a knife in the heart of Gomble’s career. He never made another network television appearance until his arrest.

His shot at TV gone, Gomble’s shtick got old, even in Vegas, and his stages moved further and further away from the strip. Soon he was on the road, working comedy clubs and cabarets, then finally it was the strip club and county fair circuit. His fall from fame was complete. His arrest in Orlando at the Orange County Fair was the exclamation mark at the end of that fall.

According to the trial stories, Gomble was charged with assaulting young girls whom he had chosen as volunteer assistants for matinee performances at the county fair. Prosecutors said he followed a routine of seeking a girl ten to twelve years old from the audience and then taking her backstage to prepare. Once in his private dressing room, he gave the intended victim a Coke laced with codeine and sodium pentothal-a quantity of both was seized during his arrest-and told her he must see if she could be hypnotized before the performance started. With the drugs acting as hypnotic enhancers, the girl was placed in a trance and then assaulted by Gomble. Prosecutors said the molestation primarily involved fellatio and masturbation, actions difficult to prove through physical evidence. Afterward, Gomble repressed memory of the event in the victim’s mind with hypnotic suggestion.