Bag of Bones (36 page)

“It wouldn't seem so.”

“The son, Roger, is . . .” I heard a faint fluttering of notebook pages. “ . . . fifty-four. So he's not exactly a spring chicken, either. Still, there are lots of guys who become daddies at that age nowadays; it's a brave new world. But Roger is a homosexual.”

I thought of Bill Dean saying,
Rump-wrangler.
Understand there's a lot of that goin around out there in California.

“I thought you said sex doesn't matter.”

“Maybe I should have said
hetero
sex doesn't matter. In certain states—California is one of them—
homo
sex doesn't matter, either . . . or not as much. But this case isn't going to be adjudicated in California. It's going to be adjudicated in Maine, where folks are less enlightened about how well two married men—married to each other, I mean—can raise a little girl.”

“Roger Devore is
married
?” Okay. I admit it. I now felt a certain horrified glee myself. I was ashamed of it—Roger Devore was just a guy living his life, and he might not have had much or anything to do with his elderly dad's current enterprise—but I felt it just the same.

“He and a software designer named Morris Ridding tied the knot in 1996,” John said. “I found that on the first computer sweep. And if this does wind up in court, I intend to make as much of it as I possibly can. I don't know how much that will be—at this point it's impossible to predict—but if I get a chance to paint a picture of that bright-eyed, cheerful little girl growing up with two elderly gays who probably spend most of their lives in computer chat-rooms speculating about what Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock might have done after the lights were out in officers' country . . . well, if I get that chance, I'll take it.”

“It seems a little mean,” I said. I heard myself speaking in the tone of a man who wants to be dissuaded, perhaps even laughed at, but that didn't happen.

“Of course it's mean. It feels like swerving up onto the sidewalk to knock over a couple of innocent
bystanders. Roger Devore and Morris Ridding don't deal drugs, traffic in little boys, or rob old ladies. But this is custody, and custody does an even better job than divorce of turning human beings into insects. This one isn't as bad as it could be, but it's bad enough because it's so
naked.
Max Devore came up there to his old hometown for one reason and one reason only: to buy a kid. That makes me mad.”

I grinned, imagining a lawyer who looked like Elmer Fudd standing outside of a rabbit-hole marked
DEVORE
with a shotgun.

“My message to Devore is going to be very simple: the price of the kid just went up. Probably to a figure higher than even he can afford.”

“
If
it goes to court—you've said that a couple of times now. Do you think there's a chance Devore might just drop it and go away?”

“A pretty good one, yeah. I'd say an excellent one if he wasn't old and used to getting his own way. There's also the question of whether or not he's still sharp enough to know where his best interest lies. I'll try for a meeting with him and his lawyer while I'm up there, but so far I haven't managed to get past his secretary.”

“Rogette Whitmore?”

“No, I think she's a step further up the ladder. I haven't talked to her yet, either. But I will.”

“Try either Richard Osgood or George Footman,” I said. “Either of them may be able to put you in touch with Devore or Devore's chief counsel.”

“I'll want to talk to the Whitmore woman in any case. Men like Devore tend to grow more and more dependent on their close advisors as they grow older,
and she could be a key to getting him to let this go. She could also be a headache for us. She might urge him to fight, possibly because she really thinks he can win and possibly because she wants to watch the fur fly. Also, she might marry him.”

“
Marry
him?”

“Why not? He could have her sign a pre-nup—I could no more introduce that in court than his lawyers could go fishing for who hired Mattie's lawyer—and it would strengthen his chances.”

“John, I've seen the woman. She's got to be seventy herself.”

“But she's a potential female player in a custody case involving a little girl, and she's a layer between old man Devore and the married gay couple. We just need to keep it in mind.”

“Okay.” I looked at the office door again, but not so longingly. There comes a point when you're done for the day whether you want to be or not, and I thought I had reached that point. Perhaps in the evening . . .

“The lawyer I got for you is named Romeo Bissonette.” He paused. “Can that be a real name?”

“Is he from Lewiston?”

“Yes, how did you know?”

“Because in Maine, especially around Lewiston, that can be a real name. Am I supposed to go see him?” I didn't want to go see him. It was fifty miles to Lewiston over two-lane roads which would now be crawling with campers and Winnebagos. What I wanted was to go swimming and then take a long nap. A long
dreamless
nap.

“You don't need to. Call him and talk to him a little.
He's only a safety net, really—he'll object if the questioning leaves the incident on the morning of July Fourth. About that incident you tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“Talk to him before, then meet him on Friday at . . . wait . . . it's right here . . .” The notebook pages fluttered again. “Meet him at the Route 120 Diner at nine-fifteen. Coffee. Talk a little, get to know each other, maybe flip for the check. I'll be with Mattie, getting as much as I can. We may want to hire a private dick.”

“I love it when you talk dirty.”

“Uh-huh. I'm going to see that bills go to your guy Goldacre. He'll send them to your agent, and your agent can—”

“No,” I said. “Instruct Goldacre to send them directly here. Harold's a Jewish mother. How much is this going to cost me?”

“Seventy-five thousand dollars, minimum,” he said with no hesitation at all. With no apology in his voice, either.

“Don't tell Mattie.”

“All right. Are you having any fun yet, Mike?”

“You know, I sort of am,” I said thoughtfully.

“For seventy-five grand, you should.” We said our goodbyes and John hung up.

As I put my own phone back into its cradle, it occurred to me that I had lived more in the last five days than I had in the last four years.

*   *   *

This time the phone didn't ring and I made it all the way back into the office, but I knew I was definitely
done for the day. I sat down at the IBM, hit the
RETURN
key a couple of times, and was beginning to write myself a next-note at the bottom of the page I'd been working on when the phone interrupted me. What a sour little doodad the telephone is, and what little good news we get from it! Today had been an exception, though, and I thought I could sign off with a grin. I was working, after all—
working.
Part of me still marvelled that I was sitting here at all, breathing easily, my heart beating steadily in my chest, and not even a glimmer of an anxiety attack on my personal event horizon. I wrote:

[NEXT: Drake to Raiford. Stops on the way at vegetable stand to talk to the guy who runs it, old source, needs a good & colorful name. Straw hat. DisneyWorld tee-shirt. They talk about Shackle-ford.]

I turned the roller until the IBM spat this page out, stuck it on top of the manuscript, and jotted a final note to myself: “Call Ted Rosencrief about Raiford.” Rosencrief was a retired Navy man who lived in Derry. I had employed him as a research assistant on several books, using him on one project to find out how paper was made, what the migratory habits of certain common birds were for another, a little bit about the architecture of pyramid burial rooms for a third. And it's always “a little bit” I want, never “the whole damn thing.” As a writer, my motto has always been don't confuse me with the facts. The Arthur Hailey type of fiction is beyond me—I can't read it, let alone write it. I want to know just enough
so I can lie colorfully. Rosie knew that, and we had always worked well together.

This time I needed to know a little bit about Florida's Raiford Prison, and what the deathhouse down there is really like. I also needed a little bit on the psychology of serial killers. I thought Rosie would probably be glad to hear from me . . . almost as glad as I was to finally have something to call him about.

I picked up the eight double-spaced pages I had written and fanned through them, still amazed at their existence. Had an old IBM typewriter and a Courier type-ball been the secret all along? That was certainly how it seemed.

What had come out was also amazing. I'd had ideas during my four-year sabbatical; there had been no writer's block in that regard. One had been really great, the sort of thing which certainly would have become a novel if I'd still been able to write novels. Half a dozen to a dozen were of the sort I'd classify “pretty good,” meaning they'd do in a pinch . . . or if they happened to unexpectedly grow tall and mysterious overnight, like Jack's beanstalk. Sometimes they do. Most were glimmers, little “what-ifs” that came and went like shooting stars while I was driving or walking or just lying in bed at night and waiting to go to sleep.

The Red-Shirt Man
was a what-if. One day I saw a man in a bright red shirt washing the show windows of the JCPenney store in Derry—this was not long before Penney's moved out to the mall. A young man and woman walked under his ladder . . . very bad luck, according to the old superstition. These two didn't know
where
they were walking, though—they were holding hands, drinking deeply of each
other's eyes, as completely in love as any two twenty-year-olds in the history of the world. The man was tall, and as I watched, the top of his head came within an ace of clipping the window-washer's feet. If that had happened, the whole works might have gone over.

The entire incident was history in five seconds. Writing
The Red-Shirt Man
took five months. Except in truth, the entire book was done in a what-if second. I imagined a collision instead of a near-miss. Everything else followed from there. The writing was just secretarial.

The idea I was currently working on wasn't one of Mike's Really Great Ideas (Jo's voice carefully made the capitals), but it wasn't a what-if, either. Nor was it much like my old gothic suspense yarns; V. C. Andrews with a prick was nowhere in sight this time. But it felt solid, like the real thing, and this morning it had come out as naturally as a breath.

Andy Drake was a private investigator in Key Largo. He was forty years old, divorced, the father of a three-year-old girl. At the open he was in the Key West home of a woman named Regina Whiting. Mrs. Whiting also had a little girl, hers five years old. Mrs. Whiting was married to an extremely rich developer who did not know what Andy Drake knew: that until 1992, Regina Taylor Whiting had been Tiffany Taylor, a high-priced Miami call-girl.

That much I had written before the phone started ringing. Here is what I knew beyond that point, the secretarial work I'd do over the next several weeks, assuming that my marvellously recovered ability to work held up:

One day when Karen Whiting was three, the phone had rung while she and her mother were sitting in the patio hot tub. Regina thought of asking the yard-guy to answer it, then decided to get it herself—their regular man was out with the flu, and she didn't feel comfortable about asking a stranger for a favor. Cautioning her daughter to sit still, Regina hopped out to answer the phone. When Karen put up a hand to keep from being splashed as her mother left the tub, she dropped the doll she had been bathing. When she bent to pick it up, her hair became caught in one of the hot tub's powerful intakes. (It was reading of a fatal accident like this that had originally kicked the story off in my mind two or three years before.)

The yard-man, some no-name in a khaki shirt sent over by a day-labor outfit, saw what was happening. He raced across the lawn, dove headfirst into the tub, and yanked the child from the bottom, leaving hair and a good chunk of scalp clogging the jet when he did. He'd give her artificial respiration until she began to breathe again. (This would be a wonderful, suspenseful scene, and I couldn't wait to write it.) He would refuse all of the hysterical, relieved mother's offers of recompense, although he'd finally give her an address so that her husband could talk to him. Only both the address and his name, John Sanborn, would turn out to be a fake.

Two years later the ex-hooker with the respectable second life sees the man who saved her child on the front page of the Miami paper. His name is given as John Shackleford and he has been arrested for the rape-murder of a nine-year-old girl. And, the article
goes on, he is suspected in over forty other murders, many of the victims children. “Have you caught Baseball Cap?” one of the reporters would yell at the press conference. “Is John Shackleford Baseball Cap?”

“Well,” I said, going downstairs, “they sure
think
he is.”

I could hear too many boats out on the lake this afternoon to make nude bathing an option. I pulled on my suit, slung a towel over my shoulders, and started down the path—the one which had been lined with glowing paper lanterns in my dream—to wash off the sweat of my nightmares and my unexpected morning's labors.

There are twenty-three railroad-tie steps between Sara and the lake. I had gone down only four or five before the enormity of what had just happened hit me. My mouth began to tremble. The colors of the trees and the sky mixed together as my eyes teared up. A sound began to come out of me—a kind of muffled groaning. The strength ran out of my legs and I sat down hard on a railroad tie. For a moment I thought it was over, mostly just a false alarm, and then I began to cry. I stuffed one end of the towel in my mouth during the worst of it, afraid that if the boaters on the lake heard the sounds coming out of me, they'd think someone up here was being murdered.