Eventually that work was done. There seemed to be no more questions. Now the cowboy ordered a sweetened ice tea. After that he talked for nearly an hour. From a distance he looked strong and sexy to Debra Melissa, determination all over his salt-and-pepper bearded face. After the tea he drank water, which she refilled several times. The two businessmen sometimes interrupted. The cowboy answered each question very slowly, taking his time, selecting his words carefully. When the cowboy was done they all looked at each other-not like businessmen do, but into each other’s eyes for an awful long time. Debra Melissa didn’t quite know what to make of that. Then they stood and started hugging, patting each other’s backs. Each man went from one to the other until everyone hugged everyone else. The nervous guy held on to the cowboy the longest. He didn’t want to let go. This was really something special, something she had only seen in the movies; movies about the mafia.
The cowboy put on his jacket and hat. The skinny one who came alone, the one who had all the papers on the table, left first. The gray-haired, distinguished-looking one, the oldest of the group, put his hand on the cowboy’s cheek, touching it gently like they were kin, caressing the face like the waitress had seen wives do when the 101st deployed and they worried they’d never see their men again. The skinny-necked younger man paid the bill with his credit card and, sure enough, put down a 25 percent tip. Then the older guy, who knew the bill was already paid, put cash on the table, two twenties. He never looked back, but if he had, Debra Melissa Wallis would have offered her very special smile. She’d had it in mind all along that he was a gentleman you could be proud to know.
In the morning the two Atlanta lawyers checked out, drove back to Nashville, and flew home. The skinny one who stayed at a different motel one exit farther east on I-24 hit the road before six and planned to drive straight through the whole way home. The cowboy awoke from his hard, wooden sleep at seven. He showered and then enjoyed the complementary continental breakfast offered at his motel. He thought about why they called it that: a continental breakfast. He was sure Europe was the continent, and he’d never heard it called that there. He read USA Today with his coffee. The New York Times isn’t sold at the Motel-6 near Clarksville. With coffee, cantaloupe, a small, round waffle, and three hard-boiled eggs inside him, he tossed his tall hat onto the seat of his SUV, turned west onto I-24, and headed for New Mexico.
West Texas
Leonard Martin was smiling.
Meeting with Isobel Gitlin had been a risk. He’d gone into it aware of the danger, unable to fully discount it. There were other ways he could have made his point, protected Harlan Jennings, prevented future cops under pressure from putting up other patsies. He could have done all that without compromising himself. If she had seen him… but she hadn’t, had she? Had he, even by accident, revealed his strikingly different physical package, he might well have risked his anonymity. Leonard had taken a gamble, all right. And now, drinking coffee in a west Texas roadside diner, a day west of Clarksville and less than another’s drive from Santa Fe, he knew he’d won.
Isobel Gitlin was no enemy. She might even be a friend. He’d just learned as much from the front page of today’s New York Times. Isobel’s two-column story ran in the upper right, the spot reserved
for the day’s number one event. E. COLI DISASTER SURVIVOR ADMITS 4 CORPORATE SHOOTINGS
And below, in a smaller face: LEONARD MARTIN OF GEORGIA VOWS OTHERS WILL DIE
What pleased him most was the picture above the fold, middle of the page. It was taken at a closing, one of the last he’d attended. It was cropped to show only him and the shoulder and arm of the buyer or seller-whoever was standing beside him. Leonard didn’t remember the man or the closing. The picture showed him in a tan suit. The buttons were open, the double-breasted jacket parted over his bulky stomach and torso. His dark tie had flown away from his shirt. It stuck out crookedly over the front of his suit. The knot of his tie was askew and the top shirt button open. The suit was clearly wrinkled. He looked awful, and thought the paper’s reproduction process made him appear even worse: pathetic. So much the better.
In the picture, Leonard looked distant and dazed. He was not smiling the way he always did in closing shots before. His face held only a vacant gaze. Nothing meant anything to him after, and it showed. His long hair was straggly, messy, uncombed. He was very fat. Even now he took a small shock on seeing how fat he had been. The caption read: “Leonard Martin in a Photograph Taken Three Years Ago.”
The story told how Isobel had been blindfolded throughout the interview. She was unable to describe his appearance or confirm his identity as Leonard Martin-visually. Despite that limitation, she wrote that there existed no question the man she met was Leonard Martin. She was betting her reputation and future on it; so too, if to a lesser extent, was the New York Times. No need now to shave his beard, grow his hair, or keep the bottle of Grecian Formula bought on a fearful impulse somewhere in New Jersey. Meeting Isobel Gitlin had not given him away.
He assumed that faced with a situation in which Isobel could not or would not say she saw Leonard Martin, her editors had grilled her hard on her identification and bought into her position. He was absolutely correct. The photo editors at the Times had plenty of pictures to choose from, and Leonard was sure Isobel Gitlin was not consulted about which one to run.
He found no surprises in what she wrote. She described in detail how a gray sedan picked her up and drove her to the meeting. She did her best to draw a picture of the driver. She identified the meeting place as “an undisclosed location in New York City.” She called Leonard simply “a well-to-do real estate lawyer from Alpharetta, Georgia.” Isobel wrote about Nina Martin, Ellen Lawrence, and Ellen’s two sons, Mark and Scott. She wrote that Leonard Martin had lost them all to an especially virulent and new strain of E. coli poisoning carried by Knowland amp; Sons’ tainted meat. She described, very accurately he thought, Leonard’s implacable anger, his determination to kill those he held responsible. Leonard was more than content with what she wrote and how she wrote it. She’d told the world what he told her.
The article described the deaths of Christopher Hopman, Billy MacNeal, Floyd Ochs, and Pat Grath with details that could only be attributed to the killer. He’d mentioned his practice on a small trampoline-a preparation vital to shooting Pat Grath from a small boat bobbing in the waters of Lake Mead-and she printed it. Her article stated that the New York Times had handed over “vital physical evidence” to federal authorities. It described the rifles and ammunition Leonard used and then left with Isobel’s doorman. She wrote that the Times had also retrieved the Pat Grath murder weapon-an expensive, one-of-a-kind, Holland amp; Holland double rifle. It was found in the Nevada desert several miles east of Las Vegas (where he’d told her to look), and had also been put, by the New York Times, in the hands of the proper authorities. Leonard’s second letter was printed in full within a half-tone margin. Reading it, Leonard did not think she could have done better.
Of course, she didn’t tell everything she knew. Leonard correctly assumed that she was looking to other days and editions. En route to New York from St. Thomas, Isobel had in fact remembered a senior editor whom she met once, in her first week at the paper. He did his best to impress her in thirty seconds or less by saying, “Never forget, we have to print another one tomorrow.” It sounded like tinny wisdom then. She’d made it an iron precept by the time the plane touched down.