"I'm calling about Sandy Moore."
There was a pause. "Who is this, anyway?"
"My name is Robert Payne."
"Well, Robert Payne, Sandy Moore is dead."
"I know that. I want to talk to somebody about her."
"Why?"
"I'm doing some work for a client of mine. I'm a private investigator."
"They got the guy who killed her. That bastard Rhodes."
"You knew Sandy?"
"Knew her? Is this a joke or something?"
"Ma'am, I just need to talk to somebody who knew her. About her background."
"I'm her daughter."
"I'm sorry for all this trouble but could I stop over and see you?"
"This place is a pit."
I thought of Gilhooley. Nothing could be more of a pit than his place.
"I'm sure it'll be fine."
"Don't try and tell me that bastard didn't kill her."
"Why don't we talk when I get there?"
"He killed her. He killed her for sure."
A
s a boy, I always used to go for Sunday drives with my mother and father. This was usually one of the neighborhoods we passed through when we drove around Cedar Rapids. But as the middle classes pushed further out Mount Vernon Road, the drug-pushers and muggers moved in to prey on the poor who now filled the houses and apartments.
I locked my car up nice and tight and tapped my shoulder-holster to make sure it was in its proper place.
The address was a crumbling stucco two-story. According to the mailbox, she lived on the second floor.
I climbed the stairs up through a haze of marijuana smoke, greasy cooking smells and the rot at the center of this old house.
She was playing something country and western when I knocked and she didn't bother to turn it down when she came to open the door.
She was short and dumpy in a loose, dirty housecoat. A cigarette burned in the same hand that held a can of generic supermarket beer. You could see she'd been pretty once, just like the house she lived in.
"You Payne?"
"Right."
"Tole you this was a pit."
"It's fine."
She laughed with great harsh self-loathing. "Yeah, a real fucking palace, isn't it?"
I walked in and sat down in a bean-bag chair that gave me a good look at the two rooms where she did most of her living.
The front room was depressing enough, with its sprung worn couch, two garish orange bean-bag chairs and black velvet painting of a brave Indian warrior who looked as if he'd spent some time in Las Vegas, but the dining room was even worse. All it contained was a collection of cardboard boxes piled haphazardly wall-to-wall. A skinny calico kitten sat on top of the boxes watching me. She was one of the very few kittens I'd ever seen who looked unhappy.
"I'm moving in a couple of weeks," Patricia Moore explained as she plopped herself down on the couch across from me.
The only light came from a small table with a buff blue shade that had several stains on it.
This place made Gilhooley's look like a cover subject for the next
Good Housekeeping.
"I'm moving, that's why the mess. I mean, I'm a slob but not that much of one." She hit on her beer and then smiled. "I'm gonna do exactly what my mama always told me not to do."
"What's that?"
"Rodeo. Lot of Indian girls dream of that. They see all these sexy Indian guys ridin' broncs at rodeos and fall in love with 'em. First time I ran away with a rodeo guy I was fourteen."
"I'll bet that didn't make your mother too happy."
"Are you kidding? She done a lot worse things than that when she was young. I mean, I loved her and all but I didn't have no illusions about her." Sad smile. "Plus, her and my Aunt Karen, they got all the looks." Shook her head. "Fucking Rhodes, anyway. He killed them both."
She started crying. No warning. Full, angry tears. "And then that bastard goes and cuts off their noses, too."
"Why would he do that?"
She looked up, enraged. "If you've come here to defend him, mister, you can sashay your ass right out my door."
"I'm not defending him. I just want to know why he would have killed them."
"Because they had somethin' on him, Mom and Aunt Karen did, and he was afraid they'd tell somebody." Then, "You mind if I turn on the TV?"
"It's your place"
"I just feel better when the TV's on. I can't explain it, I just do."
She punched the button on the remote control; a color image of a country and western singer filled the screen. She put her head back momentarily, closed her eyes, listened.
"Patty?"
"Uh-huh."
"Why would he want to kill them?"
She was pretty drunk. Her eyes were still closed.
"I used to have a boyfriend named Running Fox," she murmured, without moving. "When we was in high school, he asked me to marry him — and you know what I did?"
"What?"
"Run off with a rodeo rider again."
"And that finished you with Running Fox?"
"Uh-huh. He wasn't even pissed. He was just real, real hurt and I felt like shit about it but no matter what I did, he wouldn't take me back. You know what he's doin'
today?"
"Huh-uh."
"He's a doctor. Surgeon."
I wasn't sure what to say.
"I seen his wife once."
"Running Fox's?"
"Uh-huh."
"Nice-looking?"
"Gorgeous."
She brought her face down and stared at me. "My mom and David . . ."
"Yeah?"
"I don't know why they hated each other so much, but they really did. I seen him throw her up against the wall one night and slap her. I thought he was gonna kill her."
"This was where?"
"Right here. This apartment."
"But you don't know what it was about?"
She shook her head. "She wouldn't tell me and he wouldn't either. This state should have the death penalty."
"A lot of people seem to think so."
"Somebody should kill that bastard."
Her reverie had given her thoughts and voice a temporary clarity but now she was sliding back into the bottle. And she was also getting groggy.
"I appreciate your time."
I wasn't going to learn anything else here tonight. I stood up.
"I used to sleep with David. While he was still living with Cindy, I mean. You mention my name to her and she'll tell you I'm just some rummy old whore."
David certainly got around.
"I wasn't good enough for him, though, you know that? He'd never take me any place in public. He was ashamed of me except when he was drunk and he'd sneak up here. I always wanted to tell Cindy, just to watch her face."
"Well," I said, wanting to leave, "good luck with your move."
Then she surprised me. Her head fell against the back of the chair again. This time she was snoring.
10:00 P.M.
T
here was a hard wind whipping up silty silver dust outside the police station. Clouds covered the moon and you could taste rain on the chilling air.
Not that the posse was deterred. That's how they thought of themselves, I'm sure. A posse right out of a pulp magazine where a guy with a flinty face and a white hat pumps bullets into a guy with a grizzled face and a black hat.
Three pick-up trucks, each with a shotgun rack in the back, and the radio tuned to a right-wing radio show.
The buildings on Main Street were all dark except for the furious light and noise of the two taverns — one neon Bud, one neon Coors — sitting like bookends on either end of the street. Down a few doors, two stone lions and two stone gargoyles decorating the front of the tiny Carnegie-grant library sat watching us all with a kind of weary contempt. Generations of human folly had been played out before them.
During the first day, yesterday, the Highway Patrol had lent a helicopter, and several other small town police departments had lent officers. But now it was back to business so Chief Gibbs had to use some locals.
By the looks of them, he couldn't have been too happy about it. The men had beer guts and cowboy boots and big silver belt buckles and beery crazed eyes. There had always been types like them, eager for blood and lynching, as far back as the Bronze Age and as recently as 1964, when a few dozen brave men hunted down three civil-rights workers and castrated and killed them. Interesting to know what political commentator Rush Limbaugh would have had to say about that.
Chief Gibbs was giving them orders. The posse looked bored.
"You've all got cellulars. That's why I got them for you. You see him, you call me. You don't shoot. You got that?"
"What happens if he shoots at us first?" one of them said.
"Then you shoot back. But only," Gibbs said, "if he shoots first."
The door opened behind him and two deputies, including the chunky one who'd been operating the radio on the other night, came out.
They wore uniforms and jackets and badges and bore shotguns. Their heads were angled away from the whipping wind. Raindrops bit like gnats on my face now.
"Where the hell they goin'?" one of the truck-driving men said.
"With you."
"You didn't say nothin’ ‘bout no deputies," objected another.
"You sure as hell didn't think I was going to let you three boys go out there alone, did you?"
One of the men smirked. "Clarence here gonna give us orders, is he?"
I would have felt sorry for Clarence — his roly-polyness cast him as the most incompetent boy at Scout Camp — but I couldn't forget his meanness towards Cindy.
"He's an official deputy and you're not," Chief Gibbs said.
Clarence held a pudgy hand up to the sky. "It's raining."
"Hey, no shit," one of the men said. "Clarence said it's raining."
The other two sniggered.
"You'll be fine," Chief Gibbs said to his nephew. "Little rain shouldn't slow you down. If you had the dogs, that'd be another matter." He looked at the three men. "You have any questions?"
"Yeah, how come Clarence is such a dork?" one of them said.
The other deputy, who looked snake-quick and snake-mean, said, "You boys keep this shit up, they're gonna find one of you dead in a ditch by morning. You understand?"
They changed then, the way bullies do whenever they meet a more formidable bully. There were some momentary smirks
and quick glances but they knew better than to push it.
"I guess I don't need to remind you boys that Tom Rand here was Green Beret in 'Nam, and that he broke both of Spider MacAtee's arms the night Spider cut up his wife," Gibbs said. "And since Clarence and Tom are cousins, and since Tom has always sorta stuck up for Clarence, he will be real, real pissed off if any of you boys hassle Clarence in any way whatsoever, if you catch my drift. You catch my drift?"
He was addressing the tallest of the three, the one with the Hank Williams Jr. T-shirt.
Rand said, "You catch his drift, Slocum?"
Slocum had to decide whether to look weak in front of his pals or risk Rand's temper which seemed, just from looking at the guy, psychotic.
"I catch his drift," Slocum said.
"Good," Gibbs said. "Then we won't have any problems tonight, now will we?"
Over a cup of hot, bitter coffee in his office, I listened as Gibbs said, "The good ones — the family men and the decent men and the law-abiding men — they'll go out during the day to hunt for Rhodes, but at night they want to be home with their wife and kids so that's when you end up with the hillbillies and the rednecks. Kinda like huntin' squirrel to them, except here they just might get a chance to shoot an actual human being, which tickles the shit out of them."
"No idea where he is so far?"
"Not a clue."
"Maybe he got away."
Gibbs shook his head. "Indians don't run. I know you're not supposed to generalize about a group of people like that, but they don't. For one thing, there's really no place for an Indian to run to, when you think about it. Full-blooded the way Rhodes is, he'd get spotted pretty easy in truck stops and places like that. And for another thing, nobody knows this land like the Indians do. Rhodes will know a hundred places to hide I never heard of — and they're all within five, ten miles of town."
"How's Cindy doing?"
"Not so good. She went out with the search party this morning. She's afraid somebody's gonna kill him. And they
probably will if they get half a chance."