"So then what?" Mace asks.
"Max stakes out the motel, sets up his telephoto, gets shots of them coming and going, snaps a kiss or two. But that's not good enough for Walt. 'I want fucking,' he says. 'I want them bare-assed naked on the bed.' So Max comes up with a plan. Since I'm used to her routine, I know when she and the teach take a day off. We book their favorite room on one of the off-days, I sneak in a ladder, then help Max mount one of his remote-control miniature cameras and a transmitter mike behind the ventilation screen above the bed. . . ."
Max knew a secret about those killings,
Chip's mother told me,
something he wouldn't tell no matter how many times I asked.
But the worst part of this, I think, is Max's betrayal.
"That fuckin' Max. What a wizard! Couple days later we take a room a few doors down. The lady and the teach check in as usual, we listen till we hear them going at it, '
oohs
' and 'ahs.' Then Max starts shooting blind. Every couple of minutes he uses this little radio device to take a picture. We're worried they'll hear the clicks, but we get lucky, there's a thunderstorm. Anyhow, to find the camera they'd have to unscrew the vent register. As it happens, they're so wrapped up in each other they don't suspect a thing. Soon as they leave, we go back in the room, Max takes out the film, and, in case he didn't get enough, reloads the camera and puts it back. Good thing too, because even though the pictures come out great, Walt still isn't satisfied. 'I wanna a crotch shot! I wanna see her snatch! I wanna see her
suckin
' his dick! Get me a suck shot and you get double pay,' he tells Max. I think he had this idea he'd blackmail the lady, then, when he squeezed out all he could, he'd mail the pictures to Cody for spite. Like 'Fuck you, Cody, take a look at your bitch sucking off her new stud!' Far as those two went, Walt had a hair up his ass. . . ."
"Did Max get the suck shot?"
O'Neill laughs. "Max couldn't see 'em, so whatever he got was a matter of luck. Anyhow, after two tries, I finally persuade Walt to calm down. 'Why go on with it? This is business,' I tell him. 'Forget your personal gripe. We got a lock.' Walt gets my point. So now it's my turn. The plan's so devious we laugh ourselves sick figuring it out. . . ."
As O'Neill recounts his role in the scheme, he again shows his sickly smirk. I decide to work it into my drawing. If I can capture that, I think, I'll have him down cold, pinned to my sketchpad like the sleazy cockroach that he is.
"Next time Barbara and the teach check into the motel, I'm in my usual spot in the parking lot. There's another thunderstorm. I give them half an hour, time to have some fun, then when the sky clears I mosey over to this phone booth inside Moe's, dial the motel, and ring through to their room. The teach picks up. 'Yeah?' 'Mrs. Fulraine please.' 'Who
is
this?' he asks, like who the hell would know she's even there. 'This is about her kids, so put her on.' As he passes her the phone, I hear him say something like 'I don't know. Something about your kids.' 'Oh, God!' I hear her say. Then, to me,
'What happened? What?'
At this point, I'm starting to feel sorry for her. But
beezeness
eez
beezeness
, so I come on tough and deliver my spiel. 'See the vent screen above the bed? We put a camera up there last week, got pictures of you fucking your brains out with your kids' teach. If you don't pay us a hundred grand, those pictures are going straight to your ex. Think about that, Mrs. Fulraine. Wanna lose two more of your kids? You'll get a sample photo in the mail.' I'm about to tell her I'll be in touch, when she fuckin' explodes. 'Listen whoever-the-hell-you-are, I know who you're working for. Tell the little creep if he
dares
play any more games with me I'll ruin him, so help me God!' Then she hangs up!"
O'Neill rubs his eyes, lights another cigarette. "Hangs up on me! I couldn't fuckin' believe it! My hands were shaking so bad I dropped the phone. She's wasn't broken, wasn't scared, instead she went crazy mad. I ask myself: What kind of blackmail can we do if the person isn't scared of what we got? The way she talked, she had far worse on us than we had on her. I go back to my car, light a cigarette, try to figure the thing out. What am I going to tell Walt? And what's he going to do when he hears? Send the pictures to Mr. Fulraine in return for a little bonus? Send them to Cody, a guy you don't mess with? Send them to both because he hates the broad? Maybe, I'm thinking, the smart move for me is to get the hell out of this while I can."
O'Neill takes a deep drag, then exhales in a long stream.
"That's when I heard the shots."
"How many?"
"Four big onesâboom-boom, a break, then two more. Something, I don't know what, tells me they're coming from that room. First thing I think is
Shit! Either she's shot him or he's shot her. Maybe my call set them off!
Then I see this guy come out, guy in a raincoat and hat. No gun, but later I figure he must have hidden it under his coat. He comes running down the outside stairs, crosses the street, then walks real fast toward my car. I don't want him to see me, so I slide down and stay still. He passes within fifteen feet. I get a look at him, not much, just a glimpse, then I watch him through my side mirror. He goes all the way through the lot, then turns toward Tremont Park. That's when I decide to get the hell out. I start my car and pull out fast. Later that night, when I meet Walt at his pub, news of the killings has been on TV for hours. As we're sitting there looking at the screen above the bar, some news bitch comes on with a guy who says he saw the shooter run into the parking lot, then a dark car come roaring out. Then somebody comes on and IDs the car as an Olds. Walt and I look at each other. We know we're in deep shit. Why? Guess what I drive? A dark blue Olds sedan."
"That's it?" Mace asks.
"That's it. We couldn't tell you guys. We were implicated; we hadn't told Fulraine what she was doing. The lady was dead so we couldn't blackmail her. We just figured if we kept quiet and nobody saw nothin', you guys would think Cody ordered the hit . . . which was peachy fine with Walt."
"What happened to the pictures?" Mace asks.
"Max burned them, negatives, too. He was scared. I think he thought maybe Walt or I
offed
those people. I know he and Walt never worked together again."
"Will Maritz confirm your story?"
O'Neill shrugs. "It's true even if he doesn't."
"No special shadings or extra touches, Jerry, to make you look better than you were?"
"I don't think I look good at all in what I told you."
"Unless you or Maritz killed them."
Jerry shakes his head. He's tired now, out of juice. "Why the hell would we do that, Inspector? Mrs. Fulraine was going to be our meal ticket. If I'd seen this guy go in there with a gun, I'd have shot him myself to protect, you know, our investment."
"So what'd he look like, Jerry?" I ask.
"Just some guy. I barely caught a glimpse of him."
"How long a glimpse?" I glance over at Mace. He nods, sits back, his signal it's my turn now to grill O'Neill.
"How long? How the hell should I know? Ten, fifteen seconds."
"That's a pretty long glimpse."
"What're you driving at?"
"You're going to describe him and I'm going to draw him. That's how the inspector's going to know whether you're telling the truth."
O'Neill laughs. "You gotta be kidding. This was twenty-six years ago. I can barely remember stuff from yesterday."
"That's what you think now," I tell him in as warm a tone as I can summon. "I'm going to help you remember. You're going to be surprised how at now much comes back."
I start in on him, helpful, empathetic, treating him as if he's a totally reliable witness. I get him to tell me what it felt like sitting in his car through that thunderstorm. Also what it felt like to spy on people then try to scare them into submission by acting tough with them on the phone. I get him talking about his smoking, how he always lit up when he felt stressed, and the stress he felt that afternoon, and the guilt and remorse and second thoughts too, what it felt like trying to be a blackmailer when blackmailing wasn't really his gig. How he was a cop at heart, a hunter-tracker, master of the urban forest, and now Walt Maritz had dragged him into this squalid Peeping-Tom blackmailer role that hurt him in his pride.
He remembers more: the stink of the inside of his car from all the packs of Pall Malls he'd smoked in it through the years. Also the smell of old pizza boxes that littered the floor in back. The way the rain puddled on the tar surface of the motel lot and the red VACANCY/NO VACANCY sign on the Flamingo roof going all purple and weird when the sky darkened during the storm.
Memories flood in: the jolts he felt as the sounds of the shots reached him inside his car and the thoughts that then went racing through his brain. The way he leaned forward as he raised his binoculars to his eyes just in time to make out the shooter rushing out of room 201.
At first he thought it was the teach, but a second later knew it wasn't. The teach was tall, moved like an athlete; this man was smaller and thin. Both his hat and raincoat were dark gray or black, and he had his hat pulled down to just the level of his eyes.
He looked kinda funny too, absurd almost, like a figure in an old-fashioned gangster film, one of those furtive Peter Lorre or Elisha Cook, Jr. types acting as though if they slink around no
one'll
notice or remember them.
What does he remember about the guy? The posture first, the stiff-back way he held himself. He picked up on that even before the guy crossed the street. Then the way he hesitated a second on the motel side. Then the way he ranâno, not ran but loped across and into the parking lot.
He remembers the feel of the vinyl seat against his sweaty back as he slipped down a little so as not to be seen. He remembers how he worried the guy might spot him. He remembers noticing a vertical bulge in the guy's raincoat as if he were hiding a gun there, not a sidearm but a shotgun maybe, because that's what the shots sounded like they were from.
There was a moment when the guy stopped cold in the lot, actually froze for a second between a Chevy and a Buick, and Jerry wondered which car he'd get into. That's when he saw the guy's eyes. They weren't the cold eyes of a pro killer or the cool eyes of a veteran who'd seen combat in Korea or 'Nam, rather they were wild, frightened, the eyes of an amateur, a guy who'd never shot anyone before, and now he'd done it and now the only thing on his mind was to get away, hide, not get caught.
Jerry approves of the set of eyes I've drawn. He recognizes them, he says. Now, he says, all we gotta do is fill in the rest of the face.
I like the sound of that. Jerry thinks he's the one making the drawing and I'm just there to lend a trained artistic hand. In fact he's right, my drawing hand's now connected to his brain. The planchette effect has taken hold. With each stroke of my pencil, the shooter's face comes more clearly into view.
Jerry remembers how the guy's eyebrows were arched, that his eyelashes were long, that his chin and lips were delicately modeled. Yeah, there was something sensitive and boyish, even pretty about the guy . . if you can use a word like that. Kinda funny, since, as it turned out, he'd just blasted two people, spattered their brains and guts all over the motel room walls.
Jerry remembers more: The guy had a narrow nose. You couldn't see the top of his eyebrows on account of his hat, couldn't see the tops of his ears either. The ear bottoms were small, evenly rounded. But the eyes and chin are what stick most in Jerry's mind. And the mouthâyeah, that's coming more clearly now. A longer mouth than most peoples', and the lips thin and delicate. And when the guy opened his mouthâ'cause he was breathing hard, breathing from his mouth when he paused there between the cars like a scared deer looking for a place to hideâyou could see his teeth weren't in good shape. Surprising for a guy that young. Yeah, he was young, twenty-five, twenty-six at most. The skin under his eyes was smooth like a kid's.
I draw, refine, fill in. Jerry watches amazed as a face slowly comes clear on the paper the way a photo will slowly emerge in a tray of developer.
"Yeah!" he says when I set down my pencil. "Yeah, that's him! I can't believe it! That's the guy I saw!"
"Do you know him?"
Jerry shakes his head. "I don't think I've seen him in all the years since. But he's the shooter, I'm sure of it."
Mace comes over, stands behind me. "Interesting . . . I think I may have seen this man."
"We've all seen him," I tell him. "He was young back then. He's changed a lot since. Back then he was lean, wiry, had a full head of hairânot that Jerry could see his hair what with that stupid, slouchy hat he wore. There was a hunger in his eyes back then, a wildness like Jerry says. But I don't think it was fear, more like a lust for power and success. He looks different now, but if you look carefully, you can see the underlying structure, the set of the bones beneath the flab. Now he's sleek, bald, middle-aged, plump, content. But every once in a while, his eyes flash and you can see that old hunger in them still."
Mace is getting annoyed. "Quit stalling, David. What's his name."
"You know him, Mace. You too, Jerry. Everyone in Calista knows who he is. He's Waldo Channing's old flunky . . . toady . . . lap dog. . .lickspittle. His name's Spencer Deval, and this is how he looked twenty-six years ago."