“What’s he like?” Janice asked me.
“He seems gentle, sincere,” I said. “He’s not practicing anymore, which is easy to understand. He’s quiet about it around here; he doesn’t want anyone to know. He says he doesn’t want to explain it all to people he doesn’t consider close friends. Also understandable.”
“What’s he told you about the crime?”
“The bare facts. He testified against the defendant, the defendant was remanded to a mental-health facility from which he harassed Tom, and Tom’s family was killed. He wasn’t released? The defendant?”
“Not at the time of the murders. I could find out when. What’s your stake in this?”
“I’m thinking of dating him.”
She laughed in a subdued sort of way. “Tell me, Jackie, what sort of dates does one do in Coleman? Town picnic? Trail ride? Hay ride?”
I stiffened while on the phone, which of course she couldn’t see. She could hear it in my voice, however. “Well, he offered to cook dinner for me.”
“Ah, dinner. Good-looking?”
“Yes, in a way. He seems honest, straightforward. Mostly, he’s engaging; he seems to have a good sense of humor and a compassionate nature. He seems solid... But jeez, what he’s been through. I don’t know what to think.”
“You’re thinking of sleeping with him.”
It was a possibility; why else would any of this matter? What I was thinking was that I liked him and he was making himself available to me. A friendship that wasn’t strictly superficial had begun to appeal to me, since I was feeling lonely in my new town. I had stumbled upon him. Had I not happened upon a man who was intelligent, sensitive, attractive, and entertaining, I wouldn’t be looking for someone to sleep with. Tom was, however, those things. I didn’t need a relationship — I didn’t need to not have one.
“He’s a carpenter now,” I told Janice. “A builder of sorts who has been helping me with some of the renovations on my house. Not for free, mind you — I hired him. He’s the only unmarried man I’ve met here. I’ve known him over three months now, so he’s not exactly giving me the rush. He moves slowly, carefully. I haven’t even held hands with him.”
“Does anything about him bother you?”
“Him? No. His ‘case’ bothers me, though. I’m curious to know how he’s been affected. Being the victim of a violent crime can be a diseased situation.”
“I could get some details on this for you, before you get, you know, more involved. I could get court stuff and police stuff.”
“I don’t know if that’ll be necessary. I feel like I’m peeking in someone’s windows.”
“Well, Jackie, you’re thinking of dating a guy with a bizarre and complicated past; you ought to at least know what’s in it. Huh?”
“Okay,” I said reluctantly. I had a pang of guilt. I would hate being checked out. My need to know the facts was greater than the guilt. “Let me know what press you find.”
“You going to cool it until I have something?” she asked.
“There’s not a big rush. Listen... I don’t need this talked about. Don’t build this into a serious investigation. This guy has apparently had a safe, quiet, anonymous life here in Coleman; I don’t want to cause him any trouble.”
“Sure, fine.”
***
I was glad, later, that Janice had taken that on. I think the big inner battle I was fighting was that maybe I didn’t want to know. Was it possible to have an ordinary, pleasant friendship with a guy and not dredge up the past? I couldn’t find a rational argument for turning down information. Ignorance might be bliss, but it’s irresponsible and dangerous too.
Tom and I were both scarcely known in Coleman. Neither of us had a single other intimate friend. I realized I was being romantically pursued by a man with a short history. All the long-term checkpoints — family, friends, job — were inaccessible. All I knew of him was what he told me.
What I had wanted, I realized, was to be told he was all right. That it was perfectly safe to get to know him better.
As I left my house the next morning, I found a bunch of flowers on my back step. Not a vase, not a floral arrangement. A bunch, tied with a shoelace. No note. I had begun using my back door to enter and leave the house because it was more convenient to the driveway. Sometime between my return from work at seven the previous night and seven in the morning, someone had been in my backyard, at my back door. While I was home. No knock. I hated this. I took the flowers to work with me and, not knowing what else to do, stuck them in a coffee cup.
“Bodge said he was out at your place Sunday night,” Roberta mentioned. It was only Tuesday. If I could tap the Coleman hotline, I could get what I wanted fast. I still didn’t know how that was done.
“What a big mouth,” I said, still writing. “Did he tell you why?”
“He said you thought you had someone in your house while you were gone.”
“I did have,” I said, putting down my pencil. “Someone had lifted the toilet seat and left an imprint on my bed. Tell me the truth, Roberta — did Bodge ask you if I was a flake?”
“No.”
“You mean he just mentioned that I called him and thought I had someone in my house and didn’t say anything else?”
She took off her glasses. “That’s right,” she said. “And I told him that if you thought you had, you had.”
I was temporarily quieted. “Thanks,” I finally said. I expected her to have some comment for me, but she didn’t say anything more.
“See these flowers?” I asked her.
She lifted her specs and made a face. “Homey touch.”
“They were on my back step this morning. Tied with a shoelace. No note.”
There was a long silence. She looked back at her work before she asked, “Secret admirer?”
“Beats the hell out of me. Is Billy capable of anything like leaving flowers? Going in my house? Either or both of those things?”
“I don’t think so,” she said thoughtfully. “Billy is not the least bit secretive or sneaky, and he’s shy. I’ve never heard of him acting like that around anyone else.”
“What if he has a crush on me or something?” I asked.
“You could do worse,” she said, closing the subject. She had nothing more to say. She didn’t ask me if I was nervous about this, if I had discovered anything more, or if I needed advice.
We locked up at six o’clock and stood on the sidewalk outside the office. She asked, “You have had the locks changed?”
“Yes. Yesterday.”
“Good.”
“It’s strange, isn’t it?”
“Yes, strange. There are stranger things around here that after time we come to accept as typical rather than unusual. Idiosyncratic or eccentric. Elizabeth Trewell is agoraphobic and hasn’t been out of her house in seven years — and we all know about it, do nothing about it, and enable it. She’s generous and helpful; when the community needs something like volunteer work, donations, whatever, we go politely to her door, do not enter, do not expect her to exit, and ask her a favor that she can fulfill without leaving the house, which she good-naturedly does. Now, that’s strange.
“George Stiller’s father goes for long walks in the middle of the night in his nightshirt. He’s eighty and he’s been doing this for years. He’s not a sleepwalker, he isn’t a pervert, and he doesn’t drink. He’s been chauffeured home by the sheriff from the cemetery, the park, and various street corners, and has never given a single explanation other than he’s getting some air. That’s strange. I wonder if he’s gotten into lying down on people’s beds.
“And of course there’s Billy, who is brain-damaged and can be a burden to us sometimes; we all watch out for Billy. We’ve learned to accept most of his childlike behavior, but he has been known to give people who don’t know him the creeps. He likes babies; he’s upset a young mother or two by staring too closely at the babies. Some of the kids are terrible to him, running from him screaming, teasing h
im, having their laughs over his clumsiness and mistakes. Poor Billy; he takes it so well. He’s become another strange fixture around here. He’s never done an aggressive thing in twenty years, so if he’s your admirer, feel complimented.”
She lit a long, slim, brown cigarette. She is the worst chain-smoker in the world. Her voice, deep and masculine, evidences years of this abuse.
“What about His Honor — Bud?”
“Oh, there’s nothing wrong with Bud. He’s got a come-on for the young women, but he’s harmless. I’ve never known him to act on his flirtations. He even invites Peggy out to lunch now and then; maybe he has a thing for chubby women.”
“He’s obnoxious. Obvious.”
“Not in court,” she said, which was true. Dress
Bud in his robes and he turned into an authentic judge.
“Strange things somehow become commonplace by virtue of the entire town’s awareness of them. We have hermits, drunkards, incestuous families, and —”
“Incestuous families?” I interrupted.
“I told you — the Driscolls have been intermarrying for years, for generations. Well, that’s not true. I don’t think they have had a legal wedding. There are plenty of kids and you can’t tell who’s whose. Elvin and Polly Driscoll are actually brother and sister.”
“God. I guess I thought they were intermarrying cousins.”
“Not cousins. Aunts and nephews; uncles and nieces; brothers and sisters; fathers, stepfathers, et cetera, and anyone.”
“Doesn’t the law step into a situation like that? That’s disgraceful!”
Roberta gave a hoot of laughter. “You’ve brought all this commendable social order from Los Angeles; how tidy. Yes, the law has been to visit, as have the country social welfare and a state agency or two. They’ve been separated, reprimanded, and once one of them even went to jail for a while. Nothing changes. There’s no complaint other than the fact that there’s low IQ running rampant through that family because of the inbreeding. Why don’t you run out there to their trailer park and stand guard to keep them from screwing each other?”
“Blllkkk,” I said. Roberta laughed harder, coughing at the same time. Her laugh was a cough.
“You really ought to see the compound,” she chuckled, inhaling. “It’s about six trailers surrounding a garbage pit that’s decorated with a lot of auto parts and various appliances.”
“What do any of them do for a living?”
“Piecework. Construction gangs, road-crew work now and then, seasonal stuff, sell off junk, maybe they steal. They don’t bother Coleman people because Bodge won’t tolerate any infraction in his town. He might be a county sheriff, but Coleman is his home. They’re all on welfare and they know that Bodge can get the dole yanked.”
“Nice little town,” I said. Sounded to me like beyond the trees there were a bunch of degenerates who lived like animals. Yet my experience had substantiated that any social class in Los Angeles could produce such lifestyles as easily. The emotions with which we accompanied these finds in the big city were shock, distaste, and abomination. Roberta sounded mildly amused and generally unflapped.
“It is a nice little town,” she said, refusing to be baited into extolling its virtues. Some of them I knew. Great football team. Some interesting, affluent residents — a couple of 747 captains with big homes up on the ridge; a novelist who lived here half of every year; Eagle Scouts, family softball league, clean air, and beauty that I found rapturous.
“Bodge told me something else. Some hunters found a decomposed body near the gorge by Canon City.”
“Where’s Canon City?”
“South of here. It’s off the freeway west of Pueblo. He got it on teletype — thinks there’s a chance it’s a resident of Coleman who’s been missing for about four years now. A woman who left her husband and two kids and was suspected of running off with an old boyfriend, except that the boyfriend turned up in Denver and... Oh, long story. All gossip. Long and short — she disappeared. The teletype describes a woman who could be her. I didn’t know her.”
“Cause of death?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Roberta said. “Driscolls notwithstanding, we haven’t had a good crime around here in twenty years. Nothing but little shit. I find this discovery frightening. Ominous.” She tossed her cigarette butt onto the sidewalk and ground it with her old, box-shaped leather shoe. “There are a lot of unlit, potholed country roads around here. Make sure your car is in good running order.
“Tomorrow I’m going into Colorado Springs to see a client about defending him in a personal-injury suit filed against his auto-parts franchise. Why don’t you come with me? Get your feet wet. Get out of here for a day.”
“All right,” I said. There wasn’t anything urgent to keep me in Coleman. “Want me to drive?”
“You probably don’t allow smoking in your car,” she said.
“Fine, you drive.”
***
The woman’s name was Katherine Sullivan Porter and she was twenty-nine years old at the time of her death. Her children were seven and four when she disappeared. Her husband, Bob Porter, an active high-school teacher and basketball coach, had reported to Bodge that his wife was missing and she had not contacted anyone in her extended family. He could think of only one person she might have left with, an old boyfriend from Denver.
Bob had met Kathy in Denver, married her, and brought her back to Coleman, where she was a housewife and he was a teacher. They had experienced only the typical, short-term marital scraps. She had confided in a friend, a few days prior to her disappearance, that she found her personal life lacking in excitement and romance. Bob Porter’s suspicion had not been aroused, as Kathy had had such symptoms every spring since they married.
She had been strangled — the hyoid cartilage was fractured — her hands were bound behind her back with twine, and a clear plastic bag was tied over her head. Whatever else had happened to her, the coroner said, was impossible to determine from skeletal remains that were four years old.
What made this case most interesting to Bodge were the things that hadn’t happened. Her body was clothed, her clothing was intact and undamaged, her wedding and engagement rings were on her finger, and she still had barrettes in her hair. She had been buried, not dumped. Hunters discovered her eroded gravesite. There was no evidence of a struggle. This smelled premeditated, personal; the most reasonable motivations for such a crime were limited to issues of domestic violence, acquisition of insurance, or revenge. Such issues did not fit with Kathy Porter’s life. Her marriage had been typical if not exciting; there was a small insurance policy, no substantial property, nothing to be gained. And Kathy was well liked, though not well known. She was quiet, domestic, and shy.
When Bodge came to tell Roberta what he knew about this, I listened in with rapt interest. Bodge had taken the disappearance seriously because Kathy seemed to have been lifted off the earth into thin air. Her death and burial were horrifying.
“Well, I sure didn’t know who she was,” Roberta said in her deadpan way.
“Who were her friends?” I asked.
“She was well known in her neighborhood. Her closest friend was the woman down the block, who had children the same age. They were both involved in the co-op preschool,” Bodge said. “Thing is, her girlfriend wondered if she’d been having an affair, but she didn’t wonder that out loud till after Kathy was gone. We were able to establish without any difficulty that she wasn’t with the guy her husband knew of in Denver. Bob contacted him, found him uncooperative, and we stepped in. He hadn’t heard from her since they broke up and he was covered at the time of her disappearance. Phone records didn’t show any phone calls, long distance or otherwise; she wasn’t planning anything that we can see. Nothing was missing. Nothing was left behind by whoever took her away.”
“What about the husband?”
“Bob was devastated. We never found him suspect and so we checked out the affair angle. Bob was unaware of any discon
tent, any withdrawal, or increasing domestic arguments at the time. After he talked to her girlfriend, Leah, he remembered only minor complaints. The old boyfriend came to mind, but Bob doubted even that. Leah came up with this idea of an affair because Kathy stopped spending time on the phone with women for a couple of weeks before she disappeared, which might have indicated that she was busy in some other way. Leah came up with this idea of an affair because Kathy stopped spending time on the phone with women for a couple of weeks before she disappeared, which might have indicated that she was busy in some other way. And she did some complaining about Bob's inattentiveness with comparison to the kind of attentiveness she wanted ... or was getting.
“Bob conducted as much of the search as we did, if not more. He's the one who has thought from the beginning that there was foul play. She was seen dropping her son off at preschool and failed to pick him up three hours later. Bob was with his students all that morning.”
Bodge pulled a beat-up pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. “I'm nowhere.” He lit one and took a long draw.
“The coroner doesn't think she was raped or mutilated, unless her attacker raped her without hurting her clothes and dressed her after she was dead. There's no blood on her clothes. It's like she was hitchhiking and got picked up. No one can imagine Kathy getting into a car with a stranger; she was cautious to a fault. Overprotective mother. More like someone she knew took her quietly out of town, killed her, and disposed of her.”
“Was she pretty?” I asked.
“No, I didn’t think so. Ordinary. Her picture is going to run in tomorrow’s paper — she was five-four, fair, blue-eyed, slight bone structure. She wore her hair plain,” he said, moving his hands to indicate a nondescript ponytail. “I need some new information.”
“Some will certainly develop,” Roberta cynically predicted. Because, as Roberta must have guessed, the town glommed onto this scandalous, scary incident and worked it worse than a hangnail.
Speaking of which, I decided upon manicures at this time. I have trouble sitting still for an hour while someone plays with my hands and talks nonstop about little or nothing, but I wondered if I might find the Coleman grapevine in Nicole’s Beauty Parlor. I hit pay dirt. It was a hotbed of gossip that was considered reliable by few. Nicole’s was like the National Enquirer, no one necessarily believed all that stuff — but they listened to every last word.