"Why did you tell me that story?"
"Because Cherry started believing he was some kind of a hero, instead of just plain lucky. Do you get my drift?"
I met his eyes and nodded. "I think so. You don't want me to go charging off foolishly, thinking nothing bad can happen to me. Something like that?"
"Exactly."
I shifted on the long, wooden bench. I had been stiff and motionless for a long time. The adrenaline from the fight had dissipated, so my muscles were starting to cramp up. "How many tours did you do, Sheriff?"
"One. That was enough for me."
"And you what, came back and got married?"
"Most of us did, back then."
"What happened with her?" I asked. "Just curious."
Bass stared at me. He moved in his chair and the wood cracked and moaned like a campfire. I saw his gears working. He decided to level with me. After a moment, he whispered: "I was crazy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs."
"Post Traumatic Stress Disorder," I said.
"Whatever," Bass said. "I'd wake up screaming in the middle of the night. I drank too much, and sometimes I went crazy for no reason at all."
I understood better than I wanted to admit. "Sounds familiar."
Bass eyed me. He shrugged. "I hauled off and hit my wife a couple of times, got busted down and out. They discharged me. That's it, beginning and end of story."
"Still have a temper?"
"Hell, it's been a long time since I teed off. I like it that way. Let me ask you a rhetorical question. Do you think a man needs to be ready to do violence in this world?"
"Yes."
Bass leaned forward, elbows on the desk. "Damn straight. The world hasn't changed all that much in a thousand years."
I choked out the question I'd been sitting on the whole time. "Sir, how well did you know Sandy Palmer?"
Bass moved the shotgun around so it was pointing at me. He resumed cleaning it; no sounds but the nylon brush against metal and my thumping heartbeat. Bass took his time, looked up. "You're a lot like Cherry," he said. "Born to be a chalk outline."
"I'm waiting."
"I knew her, Callahan. We talked. In fact, she was starting to open up to me when . . . but I wasn't sleeping with her, okay? Loner McDowell did, and Jesus, damn near everybody else did, but I didn't."
"I had to ask."
Loner, too?
"Look here," Bass sighed, "when I asked you to keep your mouth shut about that body, I had my reasons. They just may have something to do with what happened to Sandy."
"What are you holding back, Bass?"
He glared at me. "You know something, smart ass? It has crossed my mind that if the coroner's report does indicate foul play, it very well might have been you that done it. You were the last one to talk to Sandy."
"Why don't you pin the other one on me while you're at it?"
"Maybe I can, Callahan. Let's think about this for a minute. Who's to say you
didn't
pop that man? Maybe I got there before you could finish bashing his teeth in, so you ran off and came back to act all innocent."
I nodded. "Or who's to say you didn't shoot him yourself, before I ran up? Then you considered killing me to cover your tracks, but decided to trust me, call in an old debt of honor instead."
"Listen to me," Bass said urgently. "I didn't hurt Sandy Palmer."
"You didn't seem all that upset when she died."
Bass started putting the shotgun back together. "That's probably because I wasn't too surprised."
"Excuse me?"
"Look, Sandy slept around, and some of the people she got around with were pretty powerful. She was asking for trouble. I kind of had an idea what might happen sooner or later."
As Bass sighted down the clean barrels, right towards my face, I said: "Just out of curiosity, sheriff, you do
plan on telling the State Police you knew her when they get here on Tuesday, right?"
"You mean do I plan on withholding potentially vital information in what might turn out to be a murder investigation?" Bass pulled the triggers. SNICK. SNICK. I flinched. Bass said, "Leave this to me, Callahan. I'm on top of it. Quit poking around things you don't understand. Your mouth is starting to write checks your body can't cash."
"Maybe so," I said, truthfully, as I got to my feet. Bass rose too. Suddenly the room seemed a whole lot smaller. "But I'm sticking around anyway."
"You know what? You look a lot like another stubborn Irish kid I served with. He died too. I am going to say this one last time, in as friendly a way as I can. Leave town. I will straighten this out."
"I'd have to believe you folks would do the right thing on your own," I said. I put out my hand to shake. "No offense, but I'm starting to have trouble trusting anybody." He ignored my hand. I lowered it again. "Besides, what's going to happen if I don't leave?"
"You will find out that you're no hero," Bass said. "Like Cherry, you've just been lucky so far."
I limped out into the afternoon sunshine. Annie was sweeping her front porch, half a block away, and she waved to me. Small puffs of dust spun around her ankles. Bass slammed the door shut behind me.
Sixteen
Sunday Afternoon, 4:20 PM
I limped on back to the motel room, turned on the noisy air conditioner and stripped. I examined my body for bumps and bruises. My chest ached. Bobby Sewell and his boys had put a hell of a lot more miles on my odometer. Finally, I took a long shower and let the hot water massage my sore muscles. I toweled dry and sat down to think things over.
I had stirred up a lot of trouble, taken a pounding, and collected a lot of biographical information, but in the end all I had learned was that Sandy was promiscuous. The answer, if there was one, was hiding in the psychological profile of someone who was secretly a murderer. But who?
To a therapist, the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
is the Bible. I had a battered, dog-eared, soft-cover copy of DSM IV in my luggage. I sat in my underwear, thought about various people in and around the Dry Wells area, and drank a cold can of soda. Then I reviewed some sections in the book. I thought some more, then slipped into a fresh pair of jeans and a clean shirt and opened my copy of
Paradoxical Interventions in Existential Psychology
by E.M. Markoff.
"It may be said that death anxiety, ergo the attempt to avoid confronting the impossibility of further possibility, is the underlying cause of all character disorder. The three other difficult existential givens of (a) assuming responsibility for the self, (b) constructing meaning from meaninglessness, and (c) coping with the isolation of the human experience, all arise from the fourth; the reluctance of the ego to face its own fragility and impermanence. Also, as all addictive behaviors are clearly avoidant in nature, they are ultimately traceable back to this one root cause."
I closed my eyes for a moment, pondering the concept of unconscious death anxiety. Something Loner McDowell had said kept nagging at me. I read for a bit to refresh my memory, and then meditated. Finally, I replaced the book in my suitcase and went back out into the sunshine.
The radio station's front door was unlocked, so I let myself in. The red "ON AIR" light was lit, but that probably meant that Loner was taping an interview. There was a small monitor box above the head of the stairs. Loner: "I'm glad you could take the time to be with us today. I know you have a busy schedule."
A female-sounding voice, very low and husky: "I'm delighted to be here Mr. McDowell, and it is exciting to meet you in person."
"Before the commercial break, Loretta, you were telling me about the first time you had the . . . experience."
I stopped by the huge fish tank at the foot of the stairs. The tropical fish were hungry, so I fed them and listened to the interview. It was vintage Loner. "Now, I believe you said you had been reading in bed? A romance novel?"
"Yes," the guest gushed. "I was still just the teeniest bit awake and suddenly the lights in my bedroom began to flicker on and off, on and off. The television had a picture but there was no sound at all, just this strange moaning."
"Moaning."
"Yes, and I couldn't imagine where it was coming from. And then the closet opened and out came a creature tall as an average-sized man, but smooth and hairless. It had a round head on it, with one big eye. I don't mind telling you I was scared to death."
"I'm getting scared just listening."
I grinned and began to poke around the office. The interview droned on. The small desk in the cubbyhole behind the fish tank held nothing but a fountain pen and some notepaper. The large front window had recently been cleaned. The wooden arms of both the couch and stuffed chair placed strategically in the waiting room smelled of polish. There were several storage cabinets downstairs, and a random assortment of metal and wood structures and bookcases. I searched them.
The woman said: "It was terrible. I'm almost too embarrassed to go on. He . . . it . . . forced me to have sex."
"My stars."
I opened a storage cabinet, went through some papers. The woman with the low voice continued: "When he had had his way with me, he went back into the closet. The lights came back on as if nothing had happened."
"So you never actually saw a spacecraft?"
I looked carefully at some of the titles on the tape boxes in one cabinet. The shows contained titles too absurd for the National Enquirer. MY SON HAD AN ALIEN BABY, THE ALIENS BUGGED FIDEL'S UNDERWEAR, MONICA LEWINSKY WAS NOT OF THIS EARTH and more. I put one pile to the side and picked up another.
"Oh, yes! I looked out the window into the night and saw it floating straight up towards a large mother ship. It was quite beautiful, all big and round and milky to look at, almost transparent, and it had a long tail that wiggled."
"Sort of like a sperm."
A chilly silence followed. Then: "I suppose you could say that."
"I think I just did say that. Now, was that the only time you were visited by a lover from outer space, or did he come back for seconds?"
"I did not come here to be disrespected," she said.
A fat manila envelope spilled open. It was stuffed with hotel brochures targeting Vegas 'high rollers,' and also held several signed markers, or gambling notes. One, from a Reno casino called the Wagon Wheel, was for over forty thousand dollars. Loner owed some serious people some very serious money. I put the envelope back where I found it, feeling guilty. Meanwhile, upstairs, the show was falling apart.
"You owe me an apology," said the guest.
"I'm sorry to have offended you," Loner protested, but his voice was trembling with mirth.
"You certainly should be."
I was running out of time. I briefly examined some videos. There was only one unmarked cassette. I slipped it into the small TV/VCR and used the remote to fast forward. Somehow I knew what I would find. A woman's face swam into view. It was Sandy Palmer and she was masturbating for the camera. I closed my eyes, rewound the tape, and put it away again.
I closed the video cabinet, started up the steps. The second stair made a loud squeaking noise, and I paused. I looked beneath it, saw that one side of the board was coming loose and a nail was bent. I left it alone. No sense in hammering something down during the taping.
Loner was wrapping up, so I went back to the couch and sat on one arm. After a few moments I heard Loner's big finish, the patented Halloween music and vocal button. A tall, morbidly obese man with white hair pulled back into a ponytail came bumping and thumping down the stairs. He was dressed as a woman, in a garish and loose-fitting dress, but clearly had a five o'clock shadow. Now I understood why the second step had sprung loose and started squeaking so loudly.
"Well, I never!" the guest said. "You were mocking me!"
"No, Loretta," Loner chuckled. He was following him/her down the stairs. "I was only making some observations."
"Look, McDowell, I'm trying to make a buck here just like you," the guest shrieked. "You could have cut me some fucking slack." He spotted me on the couch and immediately went back into character. "And when the aliens finally come for us,
you
will be left behind, Loner McDowell. I can personally guarantee that!"
He glared at me. "Don't you go on this program? This man is a cynic and a fraud and I intend to expose him."
I somehow managed to keep a straight face, nodded in agreement. "He is kind of an asshole, ma'am."
The guest slammed the door hard enough to run a fingernail crack along the bottom edge of the front window. Undiscovered dust flew everywhere. After a few face-twitching moments Loner began to laugh, and then so did I. It was that good, gut-wrenching kind of laugh between friends that relieves tension and clears the air. When it was over we were both close to tears. The two of us ended up sitting on the floor, panting.
"What a way to make a living," Loner wheezed.
"You're out of your mind."
"I have to be. Jesus, Mick, I'm glad you were here to see that. Not a soul on this earth would have believed I didn't fake it. I'll tell you something, I can't wait to figure my way out of this business."
"What do you have up your sleeve?"
"Me and my partner, we got some ideas, but I can't talk about them yet."
"Partner?"
"A 'beaner' name of Manuel," Loner said. "I'll tell you about him sometime."
"I've always meant to ask you how you got into doing this. I've told you my story a couple of times over. What was
your
first job?"
Loner stretched out flat on the floor. "On the air? An FM station in Dallas, back in the early eighties. I did that middle-of-the-night, Barry freaking White low voice thing. Most of the listeners were devastated to find out I was a white bread cowboy from right there in Texas."