The only other topic the guy with the TV grin and the TV mousse expressed any interest in was “the hole.” What happened to a fella when they put him in “the hole.” The isolation. The fear.
So it went, the show that day, taped in interminable four- and five-minute segments so dozens of commercials could be dropped in later.
Only near the end did the host say anything interesting. He raised the subject of how a number of beautiful women had recently “married” men in prison, even men on death row, despite the fact that the women knew they’d never be able to consummate their marriages.
The host then clicked through snapshots of these women with their inmate-husbands. Some of them really were gorgeous. A few of them even proved to be wealthy. Weren’t they throwing their lives away, wasting their prime years on men who could not reciprocate real love?
“I mean,” said the host, “look at what just happened in Los Angeles. You have this woman on the jury who convicted this guy of rape and murder... then she starts writing the guy in prison... and ends up marrying him while he’s still behind bars.” Then he looked at his guests and said, “What is it you guys have got in the sex-appeal department, anyway?”
The inmates snickered and smirked, and all the guys in the audience started cracking up.
“We’ll look at this topic more closely tomorrow,” the host said. “But for now we’re out of time.”
Taped three shows in one day, a ball-busting schedule.
By the time the taping was done, he was exhausted and irritable. The photos of the beautiful women had undone him. He lay on his dark bunk in his dark cell and clung to his cock like a drowning man at sea. He wanted one of those beautiful, beautiful women for his very own. He would show them a kind of sex they’d never known before, a kind of sex that would rattle and alter their very existence, and then he would show them other things, so many other things, too.
For the first time in all his prison years, he wept that night.
“Hey, man, you all right?” his cellmate said deep into midnight, the cell block all coughs and cries and furtive grunts of sex, the nightly cacophony of prison life.
“Yeah.”
“Seein’ those chicks make you lonely?”
“Yeah.”
“Me, too,” his cellmate said.
“I wonder what those women get out of it.”
“The chicks who marry guys in stir?” his cellmate said.
“Yeah.”
“You heard what the faggy host said,” his cellmate said. “ ‘A pathological need to nurture.’ I ain’t even sure what that means.”
“Which one you like best?”
“The redhead in the green sweater. God.”
“She was somethin’, all right.”
“How about you?”
“Dark-haired one, I guess. Just somethin’ about her.”
“Great legs.”
“Yeah. But not just that. Something—” And then he remembered. She reminded him of a high-school girl he’d followed home from an ice-cream store one night. She made the mistake of walking by these woods. He just couldn’t help himself. Raped and then killed her with his hands, and then raped her one more time.
His cellmate yawned. “I’m wasted, man. Gotta get some sleep.”
Two minutes later, his cellmate was snoring.
But not him. Oh, no, not him.
He stayed awake all night, dreaming, dreaming.
8
It’s crazy what you can get sentimental about sometimes. For me, on this particular day, it was field glasses. I hadn’t used this pair of Swarovskis since leaving the FBI.
I sat six car lengths down from the McNally house. Through the field glasses, I watched a man pacing back and forth in the side window, approximately where their dining room was, as I recalled. He was big and looked like he might have been tough once, before the beer caught up to him.
I assumed this was McNally. I also assumed, because of his frantic movements, that the McNallys had not gotten their daughter back. I tried not to think of what that finger in the box had looked like.
He slapped her.
She’d suddenly appeared inside the window frame with him, shouting at him, face raw with tears and fear and rage, and then he’d slapped her the way one man slaps another, enough to move her back at least a foot. Then he slapped her again, backhanded this time, and then she disappeared from the window frame.
In the small town where I grew up, there had been a young married couple famous for their battles. In the early years, he’d given her a few cut lips and a black eye or two. A little later, he started giving her broken arms and legs, once a broken nose. You know the rest, how one night, the sixth year of their marriage it was, he slammed her head too many times into an old-fashioned radiator and killed her before the ambulance arrived. She was twenty-four years old when she died. She was also my cousin. I still had the occasional dream of looking the sonofabitch up when he got out, and slamming his head into a radiator thirty or forty times. See how he liked it.
He came fast out of his house, McNally did, going around the far side to his garage. A minute later, he backed out of the driveway in a new gray Dodge. If he noticed me parked there at the curb, he gave no hint.
He headed west. I waited a minute and a half, then headed west, too.
Following people in a small town is difficult. Following them in the country is nearly impossible.
Fortunately, after only three or four miles, I sensed where he was going. He was headed in the right direction for it, anyway, and I had this feeling — I’ll spare you the lecture on “hunches” that law-enforcement officials always like to give civilians — I had this feeling that he knew something about Nora’s murder last night.
I dropped back, giving him a two-mile advantage.
I drove slowly past farms, remembering what it was like to attach milker units to cows’ teats at a frosty 5:30 A.M.; and what it was like on a sweet warm Indian-summer afternoon to rake the corn I’d just chopped up onto a conveyer belt leading to the silo; and what it was like to lie on the sun side of a summer hill and have five tiny kittens and two tiny rabbits crawling all over you and making you giddy with the pleasure of it. We’d been going to have kids someday and live on a working farm, Kathy and I, but of course it had never happened — not in reality anyway, though sometimes I could fancy it so vividly I’d swear it had actually taken place.
I pulled up on top of the hill overlooking the deserted farm where the blue Caddy had sat last night. The river, sparkling blue, ran behind the farm.
In sunlight, the once-white farmhouse was scabrous, and the ancient red barn almost comical in the way it leaned, and over all was a Poe-like pall, an unnatural silence where human life had been taken with obscene enjoyment. No animals, no flowers prospered here.
I left the car on the shoulder, grabbed my trusty binoculars, and walked down the dusty gravel for a better angle.
McNally had pulled his car down into the barn so it couldn’t be seen from the road. He had yet to emerge from the cool shadows inside.