The world is black and white for me. So you’d think I’d be
a bit more sensitive than most to tonal shifts, but it seems there’s
never any warning before the dark side of life rises up and smacks me up
side the head. No “Sharp Curve” or “Gun Ahead” signs. No death congestion
reports. If there had been, I’d have turned around and headed straight home,
missing out on all the death. Then I could have seen it like you did, a
minor diversion on the national news, antiseptic, pretty much painless.
Maybe the easy summer should have been warning enough. Maybe I won’t take a
vacation ever again.
Come to think of it, I’m really not a vacation kind of
guy. I’ve been almost everywhere I wanted, and it’s no big deal, especially
in black and white and gray. When I do travel though, it’s to fly-fish. It
had been a lousy year for trout west of the Cascades, what with the low
water, so I headed to Idaho for a couple of weeks of chasing, and hopefully
catching some grays; rainbow gray, brown gray and cutthroat gray. On the
work side, the quiet summer had blended into an even quieter fall, what with
a couple hostile divorce actions, and taking testimony from reluctant
witnesses for a criminal trial. It was like the bad guys were in remission,
which is always good news, especially for victims. So I wasn’t complaining.
The bright sun made me a bit woozy, so I stopped in the
Tri Cities and spent the night. The next day I put into a little place,
Jackson’s Cross Creek Inn, in Gannett, a couple miles north of Silver Creek.
I got to talking with the owner, he was an immigrant, in the country thirty
years but it hadn't done much for his English. His wife had been a cop. I
told him I was a private cop. He said I might like one of the rustic cabins
set against the back of the property. He showed me one, and I took it for
two nights. I still had some light, so I made my way to the Kilpatrick
Bridge and waded the edge of a wide pool. It was past the high season, so I
was the only one there. I was using a white-gray caddis and had a few noisy
strikes from rainbows, but I was too slow and missed them. Then I
hooked a nineteen-inch brown which barely rippled the water when it took my
hook, about three feet from the bank and thirty feet upstream. I worked it
in, let it go, then put my equipment away.
I heard the scream as I turned behind the motel for my
cabin. I ran to the voice, finding the young girl stooped on her knees in a
wide circle of black blood. Her hands were flat in it. She was too terrified
to move. I said something calming, then leaned forward, placed one hand on
her left shoulder and the other on her right arm to lift her. She fell back
against the wall but kept her hands away from her body. I pulled a towel
from the cart she was pushing and told her to clean herself.
While I waited for her breathing to return to normal, the
same guy who checked me in, came around the corner. “Gerrie, my God, you all
right?”
He was fifty, a stooped five-nine, with faded gray eyes,
sun lined face, wispy hair. He had sleep in his eyes. He looked at the
floor. I smelled the beer on his breath when he turned on me. “What you do
to my daughter?” His body shook under the off-white and gray Hawaiian shirt.
He raised his fists in anger, but it didn’t cover the fear in his eyes.
I held both hands up, palms out. “Hey, you know me." I
shook him a little. "I just got here.”
He jumped over the puddle of black, sending a spray of
drops at the edge with his heel. He searched the bedroom and the bath. He
looked under the beds, then rose up on his knees, his black eyes darting
around the walls as if he’d missed something. He jumped back out the door
and put his hands on the girl’s shoulders. “Gerrie, where’s Dessie?”
The girl was still crying, bobbing her head.
He got more frantic, shaking her. “Who here with Dessie?”
I leaned between them. “Your daughter’s hysterical.”
“She not my daughter. She the maid.” Like I should have
known.
Nevertheless, I put an arm around her shoulders and turned
her to the Adirondack chair at the corner of the deck-porch. She folded into
the chair like a rag doll. She cried into the towel covering her hands.
I returned my attention to the man. “Call the cops.”
His face went blank, then, “No, gotta find Desdemona.”
“Who?”
“My daughter, Desdemona. She staying in this room.”
“She could be dead.” I looked at the quantity of blood
again. “Somebody’s dead.”
“Gotta find my Dessie.” He turned to the girl. “Stop
crying, Gerrie. Clean this mess up.”
“You can’t, it’s evidence.”
He put a defiant look in his eyes, then grabbed a pile of
towels and tossed them onto the pool of blood. He used his feet to move the
towels.
I grabbed his arm to pull him out through the door. He
shook me off.
Suddenly, he changed tact, like he'd remembered who I was.
“Can you help me?”
“No, I’m calling the cops.”
He grabbed my arm. “No, they get Dessie killed.”
Ever the one with the incisive question, “Why?”
More frantic, “Can you help me?”
I pulled him away from the towels. “Maybe, but leave the
blood alone.”
“Okay, okay.” He gripped my arm and dragged me towards the
tiny office, away from the crying girl he’d already forgotten. We went
through the counter to a small studio apartment in the back. It was a neat
room, anally so. He’d been lying on the bed, on top of the covers, and the
impression of his scrawny body was fading. There was a bathroom on the right
side. It was gleaming white. An empty beer bottle was turned upside down in
the sink, drying out.
He reached for a picture on the highboy drawer, a high
school graduation shot of a pretty girl, with the name “Desdemona” in light
gray script angled across the bottom right, above the year. She was four
years out of school. He pulled the picture out of its frame and handed it to
me. “You find my Dessie. I pay.”
I sat him down across from me at a tiny dinette table.
This was getting out of hand, but I felt sorry for the guy. I let my
instincts override my brain. “Tell me about it --” I remembered the name of
the motel, “-- Mr. Jackson.”
He blurted, “Dessie, she come home yesterday, say she need
a place to stay. I never seen her since high school.” A memory crossed his
face. “Not since she run away.”
“Why’d she run away?”
Stubbornness closed his mouth.
“Why’d she come home?”
It was safer territory. “She said this man was after her,
wanted something she had.”
“What man?”
He shrugged. “She don’t say. She said he never find her
here.”
“Looks like she was wrong.”
His eyes showed surprise. “No, Dessie never wrong.” It was
a statement of fact.
“Then what happened here.”
The old man’s mind was working, contorting his face. “I
saw that Packard boy, Rex. He argue with Dessie this morning.”
“Who’s Packard?”
The face closed up again. I reached a hand across the
table and shook him. “Who’s Packard?”
“Bob Packard’s son.”
I wasn’t enlightened any. It was like forty questions.
“Who’s Bob Packard?”
A strange pride marked his face. “I killed Bob Packard. He
was screwing my wife, then he killed her. So I killed him.”
I couldn’t help myself. “Judge, jury, executioner?”
He repeated the words, like a lifelong litany,
“Did my time. Crime of passion. Dint know what I was doing.” The words
didn’t mean a thing to him.
“And your daughter?”
He shook his head at the remembered pain. “She gone when I
got out. Graduated, just left that picture. Wanted to tell her, not my
fault. Dint know how.”
“Where can I find this Packard boy?”
“Back off main road, in old shack with his mother.”
I scribbled down the directions. I made him promise not to
clean the room. I called the cops. We were a long way out, and they said it
would take an hour to get there. I said Jackson would be waiting. The old
man tried to pay me with two crisp hundred dollar bills. I wasn’t sure I wanted
to be beholden to him. I told him we’d talk about it later. He said his
daughter drove a little red foreign convertible.
I found my fishing rod by the bloody door. The girl was still in
the chair, crying. I put both in my cabin. I told her to wash up, then go
back to Desdemona's room and wait for the cops.
I zigzagged the mile to the Packard place. Jackson said
the boy’s name was Rex, his mother was Isabella.
The place was run-down, but the rambling farmhouse wasn’t
a shack, just needed a little attention. Night had fallen, but a full moon
lit the way. The lights were on in the house. There was an old rusted gray
Chevy parked in front of the garage, and a blood black Buick convertible
behind it.
I rang the bell. An old woman came to the door. She’d been
beautiful once, but time had taken its toll on her. Like the house, she
needed a little attention. I heard voices arguing in the background. I
walked right by her through the foyer, into a large living room. I could
feel her follow me like a shadow. The two men faced each other across a low
glass coffee table. The young one, presumably Rex, stood six-four, same as
me but skinny as a rail, with black hair and strong features. A good-looking
kid in his early twenties. The other man was maybe fifty, five-ten, good
shape, short gray beard, wearing professor-type duds: corduroy pants and
patches on the elbows of his hounds-tooth coat..
The older man said, “I don’t know where Desdemona ...” He
faltered as he felt my presence. Both heads turned.
“Don’t stop on my account.” I read only confusion. “I want
to know where Desdemona is too.”
The boy sputtered, “Who are you, mister?” He wasn’t
belligerent. I have a football linebacker look that stops belligerence in
its tracks.
“Her father asked me to find her. He said she was in
trouble.” They looked unconvinced. “There’s about two pints of blood on the
floor of the hotel room she was using.”
Rex looked from the older man to me and back. I saw the
decision on his face. He didn’t know me from Adam’s off ox, which said
something important about the other guy. “Her car’s in a ditch a mile down
the road. She’s not in it.”
The older man said, “Count me out of this,” and made for
the door.
The boy grabbed his arm. “No way. You don’t want to help,
maybe the cops will find it interesting that you were screwing her when she
was your student. Maybe some nasty questions about doing the whole family.”
Me, I’m usually pretty quick on the uptake, but I was a
little lost. To the boy, “You’ve seen the car?”
“No, Schindler,” he pointed at the man, “he saw the car.”
I turned to the gray teacher, “And?”
It came out reluctantly. “There’s a dead man in the
passenger seat.”
“No sign of the girl?”
A quick “No.” His eyes darted over my shoulder to the
woman behind me.
The woman backed out of the room.
Things were getting hairy. “Show me.”
They preceded me in Schindler’s car. The man drove slowly,
like he didn't want to get there. I could see the boy arguing with him. In
the moonlight her tiny Porsche looked like a shadow against the dying gray
blackberry bushes. The man’s head was flattened against the window. I turned
it for a better look. I knew him. Not in any personal sense, but I knew who
he was. He’d been in the news lately, a gangster putting the squeeze on an
Indian Casino near Spokane.
The boy turned a hard stare on the teacher. “Where is she?”
A car squealed to a stop beside us. A reedy voice called
out, “Aaron, is that you, Aaron?”
Even in the dark I saw the older man’s face harden. “I’m
over here, Helen. You just wait.”
She wasn’t taking orders. "No, I've been driving all over
hell's half acre looking for you." The hatchet-faced woman with the
white-grayed hair looked more severe than my first grade teacher, and that’s
going some. Her eyes were black, black eyebrows seemed to swoop away from
her face, and a black line of roots made the hair look like a wig. Her body
was thin and dried up, like the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz.
She gasped at the body. Her knees buckled, but no one
caught her. I helped her up.
She moved unsteadily to grasp her husband’s arm, taking
ownership. “You come home right now, Aaron. You can’t be mixed up in a mess
like this. What’ll the school board say?”
I turned to her. “A mess like what, Mrs. Schindler?”
“Why, the dead man. And Desdemona Jackson.” She turned
pleading eyes to her husband. “Please, Aaron, we’ve got to get out of here.”
The man turned to me. “I’ve got to take her home. I’ll
give her a sedative and be right back?” He made it a question.
I nodded, glad to have them out of the picture. I gave my
attention to the boy. “So, Mr. Packard, what’s going on here?”
He shook his head, more in disbelief than anything else.
“It’s happening again.”
It must be a strange town, what with no one ever answering a
question. “What’s happening again?”
“Death --” His eyes looked empty, the voice sounded hollow.
“-- and more death.”
I turned him away from the body and pushed him into a
sitting position on the car’s tiny trunk. I calmed my voice. “Tell me about
it.”
His eyes came back into focus. “About what?”
“The death.”
The beams flashed across us as another car skidded to
stop. It was some kind of serendipitous traffic jam. The frantic motel
owner ran to the car, saw the dead man, then yelled, “Where’s my daughter?”
He raised a pistol and pointed it at the boy. Hysteria tinged his voice. “I
want my daughter.”
I shoved the kid, and the bullet found empty air. I
tackled the old man and wrestled him to the ground. I took his gun away. He
was on his knees, crying. “They’s killing my family. Them Packards is
killing my family.”
I looked at the gun in my hand. “Looks like you got that
backwards.” I'm a strong believer in justice, but justice must
be certain. Mr. Jackson believed in revenge, and certainty had no place
in it.
He pleaded, “They’s killing my family.”
“Somebody is.” I left him bent over the dewy grass and
returned my attention to the boy. “Let’s go to my car.” I took his arm and pushed him. He started to resist, but I had twenty
years and forty pounds on him.
I repeated my question, “Tell me about the death, Mr.
Packard.”
“There’s too much of it.”
“That’s not telling me anything.”
The silence grew between us until he had to fill the void.
“Dessie, she called me yesterday, to come to the motel.”
“Her father said you were arguing.”
“No . . . Yes. She wanted me to protect her from this man
who was chasing her."
"Why you?"
He looked right through me.
I shook him. Again, "Why you?"
"She knows I still love her. She said she worked for this
gambler, that she stole some papers of his, his ‘second set of books’ she
called them.” It hurt him to say the rest. “I told her no.” It was
matter-of-fact, like a death sentence.
“And?”
His face seemed to crumble. “She went to Schindler. It was
my fault.”
“What are you talking about?”
The past and present were merging for the young man,
“Schindler, he was the one having sex with Dessie’s mother, not my father.”
A long pause. “At the same time he was having sex with Dessie.”
The obvious question fell from my lips: “Why didn’t you
tell the cops?”
“My mother wouldn’t let me.” He saw the disbelief on my
face and answered it. “Helen Schindler is my mother’s sister.”
I tried to imagine the kid’s mixed feelings of grief and
guilt. I couldn’t do it.
I was sounding like a broken record, “Where’s Dessie?”
He shook his big head. “I don’t know. Schindler said he
didn’t see her, but I think ...”
I finished it for him, “He lied, Rex.”
I started the engine, and Rex gave me directions to
Schindler’s house.
I pulled up behind the Buick. I told the kid to wait,
but he wasn’t made that way. Anyway, it was time he confronted his demons.
We could hear them on the back deck. There was an
incoherence to the words, nothing to learn from them. I went up the steps,
the boy right behind me.
They were eyeball to eyeball. Pain, shame, hate marked
their faces, the stance of their bodies. When they saw us, it was like
someone said ‘cut’, and the scene was over. A forced calm returned to their
faces. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
She spoke first, like I wasn’t there. “Rex, what are you
doing here?”
I answered for him. “We’re here for Dessie Jackson, Mrs.
Schindler.”
A doughy look smoothed her face, softened her features.
“What do you mean?”
It was one of them. I took a shot in the dark. “You killed
her.”
She looked shocked, but didn’t deny it.
When you’re shooting from the hip, you might as well empty
the gun. “Just like you killed her mother.”
A spasm contorted her face. She pointed a finger at her
husband. “No, he killed them.”
The man hissed through clenched teeth, “Helen, shut up!”
Disgust pulled her features together. “How can I ever shut
up again, Aaron?”
I wasn’t fooled. “Why did you kill them?”
She shrugged her emaciated shoulders. “Hey,” she pointed
her finger at her husband again, then laughed, “he was poking them, I just
filled the holes.”
The boy blurted, “But why Dessie? Why now? That was so
long ago.”
The woman’s laugh was borderline hysterical. “They were in
the garage when I got home. They didn’t see me. He had that man’s blood on
his hands, and he was sticking it in her. All over again. Those Jackson
women, they’re like animals in heat. I’m just killing animals.”
Schindler collapsed onto the bench built into the deck. I
told the boy to call the motel and have someone redirect the cops. The woman
had entered some kind of catatonic state. She wasn’t with us any longer.
The cops showed up. We found Dessie’s body in the
backyard, under a tarp next to the woodpile. They gave me a lot of grief,
but nothing I couldn’t handle. Except for Jackson's shooting at the boy, I
told them everything I knew. I think they were
glad to get it all tied up. Still, they kept me until eleven the next
morning. The wife was in a padded cell in Boise by that time, and Schindler
was being held for killing the hoodlum.
I drove back to my cabin and packed my things. Jackson
nodded when I went to the counter to check out. He offered me money again,
much more than before. His eyes wouldn’t meet mine. I told him to keep it.
He had no wife. He had no daughter. He didn't even have a crime of passion
to fall back on any longer.
I barely knew any of them, and what I knew was probably
the smallest tip of the iceberg. I felt sorry for Jackson. I felt sorry for
Rex Packard, and his mother. I felt sorry for Dessie and her long-dead
mother. I felt sorry for the teacher and his sick wife. No happy endings.
I headed back to Portland. Fishing didn’t seem so
important right then. I was feeling more than a little noir. Maybe I needed
a little more color to my world.
-the end-
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