“Then there are two association policies. The rest must be private.”
“Yeah, looks like. Hmmmm, interesting. It seems the good Dr. Fletcher was carrying about-”
“Two million,” I said.
“Which leaves, after paying off the debts-”
“Maybe a million, three. Would you kill somebody for that, man?” I asked.
Lonnie leaned back in the chair, looked at me in amazement. “Only my mother, man, only my mother …”
I fell against the wall and slid down to the floor. Damn, could it really be? An overwhelming fatigue enveloped like a sudden onset of flu. I saw Rachel in my mind, her face floating out in front of me, her body, her hair. I smelled her in the air, heard her deep inside my brain. She was part of me, and while I hadn’t exactly figured out how big a part yet, I knew it was going to be something important.
“No, Lonnie. It can’t be.”
“You told me she’s a nurse, right? She’d know what to get, how much to shoot into him, right?”
“But that still doesn’t answer how it happened.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Why did Conrad Fletcher simply lie there and let her shoot him full of the stuff?”
“You never said anything about him laying there.”
I looked at him intently. The expression on his face was blank. Apparently he really didn’t know what I was talking about.
“I told you. Remember? I found him lying back on a bed. No sign of a struggle, no marks on him. They didn’t even find anything in the autopsy.”
Lonnie shook his head. “No, man, you never told me that. All you said was he got shot up with some kind of synthetic curare. I figured he was knocked down, tied up. Hell, I don’t know.”
I pushed against the wall and stood back up, my hands out in front almost in supplication.
“No, see, that’s the mystery here. How did it happen? How come he didn’t fight? I asked Marsha Helms if it could have been a TASER or a stun device, and she said every one she’d ever seen left a mark where the darts hit you.”
Lonnie laughed, more of a snort, really. “Then she hasn’t been keeping up with the literature, my man.”
I went cold. “What are you talking about?”
“Follow me, bud.”
He hopped out of the chair, back out into the hall, and down to the living room of the trailer. He pulled open a wooden desk drawer, dug around in a pile of stuff, then found what he was looking for.
“Latest generation, man. State of the art. Close support self-defense weapon. Small, hand held, you can’t fire it at anybody. You have to be close enough to jam it into them. It’s just a capacitor circuit, actually. Like the ignition coil on a car. Takes a nine-volt alkaline battery and turns it into a 65,000 volt charge. No darts. Doesn’t leave a mark on you. No permanent damage. It just short circuits every nerve in your body, and you drop like a rock.”
He held up the device in the palm of his hand, a small black plastic box with four metal prongs poking out of the end. Lonnie pushed the button; there was a crackling noise in the air. An inch-long blue spark danced between two of the contacts. Right out of Frankenstein.
“Completely legal, and only fifty bucks at your local gun dealer’s. Disables a mugger for about five minutes. Gives you time to get away, call the cops. Maybe get a tire iron out of your trunk and tap dance on the sucker’s head.”
He tossed the black box toward me. “It’d also give you time to press the plunger on a syringe,” he added.
I caught the stun gun, held it in my hand. The edges of the plastic rectangular box were molded to provide a good grip, the button right under my thumb. It was comfortable, at home in a hand. I held it up and took a long, close look at it.
Damn thing looked just like a beeper.
28
Outside, the rain came down in sheets, the layers of water pounding so hard the sky was completely obscured. I splattered through the mud, fumbled with the chain link fence gate, and was thoroughly soaked when I got back to my car.
Lonnie was right, of course. It was all there. Maybe had been from the start. I just refused to see it, which made me feel like an even bigger yutz. I still didn’t want to believe it. How could that petite, blond, middle-American, Betty Crocker-cute woman take another human life? How did she get the alibi? It didn’t make sense, or if it did, then all the basic fundamental illusions we depend upon to get through from one day to the next are just useless drivel.
Or maybe her alibi was good. Maybe it was a contract killing. People killed for cheap these days, or so my deep background sources used to tell me at the paper. Didn’t make any difference. If Rachel paid somebody to ice him, it’s the same as if she did it herself.
I had to sit in the Ford for a couple of minutes to get myself together. The defroster on the car had long since gone to meet its maker; whenever the humidity gets within a few degrees of the dew point, fog settles in over the inside glass so thick it’s like flying by instrument. I started the car, turned on the defroster full blast out of hope and habit, and sat there while the car warmed up. It was no good though; the only way those windows were going to be clear was for me to wipe them that way. Even then, visibility was so bad I was afraid to pull out into the street for fear of being T-boned.
It didn’t matter, anyway. I wasn’t going anywhere, literally or metaphorically. I found myself alternately angry and depressed, believing and disbelieving. Somebody I once loved, maybe still loved, was a murderer. And I had to figure out what to do with that.
That, then, was the most frightening part; the notion that I could sit here and even consider letting her slide. Had I gotten that desperate, that cynical, that I’d know who did a murder and let them get away with it? If Rachel got away with the murder, she was going to be rich. But she and Walter had something going now. Was I going to be a part of her life, her rich, sheltered, safe life?
This prospect made me feel even lower. Not only was I considering keeping my mouth shut about a murder, but if I did talk, it would be at least partly because I wouldn’t get any benefit from it.
Sometimes I don’t feel like a very nice person anymore. We grow up with these little, safe notions about the lives we want to lead, the people we want to love, the work we want to do, and how we’ll be rewarded for our hard work. Then we get out there in twentieth-century urban America and it’s Dodge City all over again. The spoils go to the ones with the best aim, the quickest draw, the biggest guns. It tends to make one want to be as big a bastard as the rest of the world.
“Quit thinking, damn it,” I said out loud. “Stop this ridiculous pontificating. The world’s the world, that’s all, and there’s no use in pouting because it isn’t what you think it should be.”
What I had to do was figure out how I was going to handle this. Any way I looked at it, all the options sucked.
In a blind leap of faith, I pulled out onto the roadway and made the curve around to Gallatin Road, then out into the heavy traffic. Up ahead, the brake lights of a large, mid-Sixties Chevy suddenly glowed cherry-red, then oscillated back and forth across the road as the car hydroplaned. The thunderstorm pelted us with rain so hard it was like staring through a shower spray. I pumped the Ford’s brakes carefully, feeling for that moment when the wheels lost contact with the road and you became simply a passenger in a two ton chunk of out-of-control metal. The Chevy ahead of me slid into the oncoming lane of traffic, slammed into a rock wall, and came to a floating stop in six inches of water, blocking both lanes of traffic. I slowed the car to stop, but there was a semi behind me, the driver laying on his horn, letting me know that if I slowed any further I was going to wind up roadkill tartare.
Yeah, I thought, the world’s a dangerous place. It seems more so now than it did when I was young. Or maybe I just notice it more.