The End of the Pier Page 7

  Sam sat and smoked and wondered who was in there now, having a “session.” The mayor, most likely. He was one of the regulars—always consulting Hubert about the next election, or what they should do about the potholes on Tremont Street, or the council session coming up. But it was (according to Bunny) really the past that they came for: to be in touch with their loved ones; to hear the grave and gravelly voice of Hubert issue from Bunny’s lips and raise the curtain back up in a dead play. “To speak to one’s long-lost loved ones, Sammy,” she’d told him, her eyes sequined with tears, her little ferret-nose sniffling. “Imagine, Sammy dear!”

  Sammy dear could well imagine that the mirrors got a pretty good workout and that the thumpings and bumpings and occasional crashes meant the loved ones were definitely connecting.

  According to Bunny, the mirrors in her two-room asbestos-shingle cabin had been installed at the request—no, by demand—of Hubert, who in his former life had been a prince of Liechtenstein and had liked to see himself, in full regalia, from all sides.

  Leaning against the doorjamb on one of his rare “checkout” visits, Sam had chewed his gum slowly, enjoying almost more than the mirror story itself hearing Bunny trying to wrap her tiny pink tongue around the word “Liechtenstein.” He would have invited himself in except he wasn’t sure if Bunny’s customer could get himself together as quickly as Bunny herself had. Anyway, Sam didn’t want to see himself reflected endlessly in the Caruso hall of mirrors.

  Not that Bunny never invited him in. When she visited the police station, she’d talk about Sam’s aura, go through some routine of clutching her knobbly elbows, and shiver “deliciously” (as she put it) at what Sammy couldn’t sense. It was because she had second sight and a sixth sense. And Hubert.

  Some of these visits were duty visits, although they both kept up the pretense of sociability. Sam kept a rein on Bunny: he’d suggested she bring in a medical report every two months or so. It was, naturally, understood that he was just a little worried about her and acting not as an officer of the law but in simple friendship. He was worried about her nerves, that her bouts with Hubert were probably exhausting, and from what he’d seen in the movies, mediums could have a pretty rough time of it. They could collapse from their exertions. If she’d rather not go to their local doctor, any doctor would do—maybe one in Hebrides.

  Sam even elaborated upon this unnerving business of Bunny’s by telling her about a famous writer (Maud had gone on about) named Georges Simenon, who always had a total, complete physical examination, a complete check-up, before he trotted off to hole himself up in some hotel or other to write his next book.

  Bunny was fascinated. Wide-eyed fascinated. “How many books did this George write?”

  Sam tried to remember what Maud had told him. He leaned back, nodded gravely, and said, “Somewhere around two hundred.”

  “Jee-sus.” Bunny had clasped her hands over her tiny tits—but not as a come-on, just because she was probably used to grabbing at them—and said, “Sammy, do you think I could?”

  Sam frowned, pushed his dark glasses back on the bridge of his nose. He always put them on, even inside, when he saw Bunny coming along the sidewalk; otherwise she’d see the laughter in there. “You don’t have to have a total physical. Just a little blood test, maybe.”

  She waved her hands like a woman drying her nails. “No, no. Write a book. You think I could write a book like this George?”

  He quickly folded a stick of gum into his mouth so it would have something to work on other than the laugh that threatened. Bunny was never even sure how to spell her name: sometimes she did it with a y, sometimes with an ie. She was only a couple of years younger than Sam, and he remembered how, when they’d been in La Porte High School together, people had tittered over Bunny not even being able to spell her own name—the old joke come true.

  “Well, Bunny,” he’d said as he opened and shut a couple of drawers, “why don’t you try? The thing is, we need to watch your nerves. Okay?”

  Between them they’d never mentioned that blood tests generally weren’t a requirement for dealing with imminent nervous collapse. There’d never been a case of AIDS in the county, and Sam wasn’t particularly worried about the men in La Porte carrying it around, but God only knew who Hubert might be dragging in from worlds as yet untested, and Sam sure as hell was taking no chances.

  The spelling of her name might once have been problematic for Bunny, but she wasn’t so dense she didn’t know that Sam knew her body wasn’t being used as an empty vessel through which Hubert, Prince of Liechtenstein, could speak in the voices of the dead. Thus, she also knew that the invitations to Sam to put him in touch with his dear departed would always be declined. But the ritual visits to the police station were somehow, for Bunny, therapeutic, like confession—as if Sam were the priest, and she the anonymous penitent, screened from full view by Hubert and the crystal ball. Both priest and penitent really knew who the other was (didn’t they usually, in the church?), but the pretense, helped along by both of them, relieved Bunny from strict allegations—not from Sam so much as from herself.

  The fantasy was nurtured by both of them. The clean bill of health she slipped across his desk in the little brown envelope might have been like the fifty cents for a parking fine.

  And the allegations of others, Sam ignored. Mabel Sims and her bridge cronies most likely had a high old time around the table talking about the goings-on in that cabin on Swain’s Point. If Mabel (and Helen Haines) knew who Bunny was going on with, they might have sung a different tune. As it was, the penny-colored eyes of Mayor Sims’s and Dodge Haines’s wives tracked Bunny’s every step from Tremont to First Street before they went into Cooper’s Drugs to strangle their soda straws and talk to each other in the big mirror behind the counter. The Sims contingent referred to Bunny as a “loose woman.”

  That actually made Sam smile, sitting out here in the dark, butting out his third cigarette in an ashtray that wouldn’t close; it made him smile to think that some of the La Porte townspeople were stuck back in the fifties somewhere, watching reruns of “Father Knows Best” and surprised to hear Liberace had been dead for all these years.

  As far as Sam was concerned, Bunny Caruso was doing La Porte a hell of a lot less harm than the Red Barn, where his deputy, Donny, had told Sam he wasn’t at all sure what was really in one of the glass sugar holders and should he get a search warrant? They’d had Darryl Dubois in twice for possession of crack and angel dust, and he’d managed to unload the stuff someplace between the bar and the door of the Red Barn.

  Running his fingers through that meringue-cloud of hair, Bubby Dubois had expressed the opinion that Sam DeGheyn was out to get him, and the expression in his eyes had added, “And we know why, don’t we?”

  Bunny, with her clean bill of health, was dealing in fantasy, not cocaine or crack.

  And god only knew, everyone, Sam was thinking, needed some kind of fantasy to get through this life.

  • • •

  “Loose woman.”

  Helen Haines had used the same words about Eunice Hayden.

  It was this, and not curiosity about whether Dodge Haines or Winfield Sims or any other loose men were in there, that had Sam sitting here for fifteen minutes in the dark watching Bunny’s cabin.

  About ten months before the murder of Nancy Alonzo, there was a woman by the name of Loreen Butts found in the woods behind the Oasis Bar and Grille outside of Hebrides. She was found with her panties down, her clothes ripped off her, and her throat and stomach slit. And nine months before that, Antoinette Perry was killed the same way and in very nearly the same place. The thing that was different about Tony Perry’s murder, though, was that her body was found in a section of the wood that made it hard to tell just whose jurisdiction it fell into. The Oasis Bar and Grille was near the county line. Sedgewick had claimed the Perry murder—had done so rather heatedly, Sam thought. But he’d been forced to share it, and Sam never did think he’d really gotten to
see all of the evidence Sedgewick had turned up.

  Boy Chalmers had been the chief suspect in the Butts murder. He was a handsome young fellow who’d been in the Oasis with Loreen several hours before she was killed. He’d been with her and fighting with her, fighting inside and out in the parking lot, according to some of the customers. He hadn’t had an alibi for those few hours when he claimed he’d just gone on home. Well, there was, supposedly, motive, the fight having been pretty rowdy; there was, supposedly, opportunity, too, given his inability to prove he’d left the Oasis grounds. But Sam thought he’d been convicted on flimsily put-together circumstantial evidence, nonetheless.

  And, of course, when Boy Chalmers had been taken in for the Loreen Butts murder, there’d been a lot of talk about Antoinette Perry. Boy had hotly denied even knowing Tony Perry, which might have been a tactical error on his part, since just about every man in Hebrides knew her. Still, there was absolutely no evidence to show he did know the Perry woman; no one had ever seen him with her in any circumstances, much less intimate ones. But since the method was identical in both killings, lack of evidence connecting Boy and Tony Perry wasn’t going to stop his being charged with that murder too.

  There wasn’t much question about Tony Perry’s being tight or loose. Tony Perry had “companioned” (as some had heard her put it) a number of men within the twenty-mile radius that took in both Hebrides and La Porte. She was very good-looking—very; indeed, she’d reminded Sam, when he saw her lying in Francis Silber’s mortuary, a little bit of his own wife, Florence. Even dead, Tony Perry exuded heat and smoke, as if her body was not so much breaking up, but was instead sending out a sexual effluvium that not even death could dampen down.

  Tony Perry had left behind her two small children, who in the end had been transported upstate to a home. Probably, life would go on for them much the same as always, for it was well-known they’d gotten little care from their mother. There was no father—that is, no man who would own up to it.

  Loreen Butts had lived in a mobile home with her little boy, Raymond, and her husband, a truck driver who was away a lot. There was some talk about Loreen, also, speculation that she too had been bestowing her favors on more than one man in and around Hebrides. It wasn’t Sam’s county and it wasn’t his case. They’d let him talk to Boy Chalmers, though, and Sam just had a feeling about the kid—he was twenty-two or -three—that he was telling the truth. One of the reasons for this feeling was that—for all Chalmers’s height, girth, muscle, and golden-boy looks (hence the nickname: the kid’s mother had adored William Holden in Golden Boy)—he sensed that the kid was gay. And fighting it every step of the way; he couldn’t admit it even to himself. All the time Sam had been sitting there at the table in the incident room, he’d talked about his mother. Mom. Mom was wonderful. Mom was Alexis Beauchamp Chalmers. Mom was from the South, from Charleston, and he ought to meet her sometime, she was beautiful.

  If there was anyone Boy Chalmers wanted to kill it was Mom, Sam had decided.

  Boy and Loreen: well, they’d had this fight in the Oasis and he’d walked out. Yeah, he knew there were plenty of witnesses to the fight. He’d walked out around ten o’clock and Loreen, fuming, followed him outside.

  “Shit, man, she was mad. No one—Loreen thinks—walks out on Loreen. Shit, she starts fooling around with this wank at the bar, and what am supposed to do? Take it? You don’t know Loreen.”

  According to the sheriff, Loreen had hung around until nearly closing time, which, that night, had been near one a.m. Sam wondered why the Chalmers kid would stand around for three hours outside waiting for her to leave, when the fight (according to the witnesses) was pretty routine for the Oasis clientele, even if it was also pretty loud. It consisted mostly of shouting on both sides and Chalmers’s banging out the door red-faced, with Loreen Butts going after him, into the parking lot. So what puzzled Sam was, why would Boy then come back to stick around for three hours? If he was going to kill the woman, why not then and there, in the heat of battle? And some “wank at the bar” putting moves on your woman hardly seemed a great motive for murder. Unless she’d done it to you again and again and you were her long-suffering husband. Maybe then you might brood, walking around in the woods, brood and stew and come back with a knife. But Boy? A casual date and some drinks in a tavern? No, it just didn’t figure.

  Sam wondered a lot more about the husband’s having an alibi than Boy’s not having one. Carl Butts had been nearly a hundred miles away with his rig, sleeping at a truck stop just this side of Meridian. No one, Sam had suggested, had stayed awake all night to make sure that Butts was actually sleeping like a baby while his wife, Loreen, was being raped and carved up outside of Hebrides. You think we’re idiots? asked the Elton County sheriff. You think we don’t know it’s usually close to home? You think we didn’t check the mileage? You think we—?

  Husbands, Sam had agreed, generally don’t bother raping their wives before they kill them, though he imagined it happened sometimes. Hadn’t everything? He didn’t go on to say: Christ, any truck driver could set back an odometer; any truck driver had so fucking many good ol’ buddies along the route he could probably produce enough witnesses to fill the back of his rig.

  Sam didn’t say it because he didn’t really believe it. It felt too much like a story he himself was constructing because he thought the Chalmers kid had been railroaded into the county jail. Sam didn’t mind telling them—Sims and the state’s attorney, Billie Anderson—he thought it was a disgrace. He thought no one had been overly zealous in a search for the murder weapon (never found, but the pathologist thought the blade was that of a common kitchen knife). He thought the FBI should be called in. County lines were being crossed, and none of them had the forensics experience of the FBI people.

  Just the mention of taking this matter out of her hands was enough to drive Billie Anderson crazy. And Billie, cold sane, wasn’t really anyone Sam wanted to deal with. She was worse than Sims because she was smart, she was shrewd.

  But the Eunice Hayden killing—no, they couldn’t hang that one on Boy, because Boy had an alibi: he’d been in his bike shop with four kids whose bikes he was repairing. Boy had four witnesses to his whereabouts for the entire afternoon and part of the evening of Eunice Hayden’s death.

  Sedgewick and State Attorney Anderson had tinkered in every way they could with that alibi; the four kids had been talked to again and again, and their testimony questioned because they were, after all, only ten or thirteen. But they all remembered, because one of the kids was going into the hospital the next day, and Boy had fixed their bikes, no charge. Boy Chalmers was popular with kids; that in itself told Sam something.

  If one-tenth of the effort spent in trying to break down Boy’s alibi had been spent in trying to find the truth of Carl Butts’s, Sam thought they might have gotten somewhere. Cuckolded husbands were pretty likely suspects. The police in Meridian had checked out the truck stop, but without much assiduity; after all, the Highway in the Skyway truck stop was their own favorite eating joint, and they weren’t about to yank around their friends there.

  Sedgewick was not at all pleased that Sam was messing in the Butts case: it wasn’t Sam’s case, and he was sorry if Boy Chalmers had charmed the pants off Sam DeGheyn (Sam just chewed his gum at that one), but get the hell out of the Elton County jurisdiction. Tony Perry might have been half his, but Loreen Butts was all Elton County. Sedgewick said it as if the two of them were bickering over prom dates.

  So Sam had waited for over three months before approaching the Elton County sheriff again, hoping that Sedgewick would have forgotten his massive irritation by then.

  Sam had stopped in the sheriff’s office in Hebrides to invite Sedgewick for lunch at the Stoplight Diner, a popular little place at a crossroads just the other side of Hebrides and one Sam knew Sedgewick liked. He had a case on a waitress they called Tater, some holdover nickname from the “One potato, two potato” childhood game that Tater had been particularly adept
at.

  Sam had deliberately left his uniform behind and worn jeans and a quilted hunting jacket over a checkered woodsman’s shirt, and a cap with a brim. He hated hunting; Sedgewick loved it. Sedgewick was a hell of a lot better at stalking deer than men, had more patience with it, had more respect for the intelligence of what he hunted. Men, he’d often say to Sam, couldn’t teach him no new tricks. He was a great hunter and a sloppy cop. Fortunately, he had no ax to grind, had no career ambitions, or he’d have been more suspicious of Sam’s casual request to be allowed to talk to Carl Butts.

  The request was made over the third mock-frosted mug of Coors, and Sedgewick was very busy watching the swaying rump of his henna-haired waitress, Tater. Sam only wanted to satisfy himself as to the character of Loreen Butts, that was all. Just curiosity, nothing official. Sedgewick told him it damned well wasn’t, and maybe he could have a word with Carl Butts, but not if he was going to harass that poor man. Boy Chalmers was in the county jail, with his next stop the state prison. Appeal turned down; case closed and neatly tied up. The discussion of the two murders was casual, what with the sheriff dividing his time between his beer and Tater; he’d reach for her thigh, growl, and look lecherous as she passed by, giggling. Sedgewick was a lecher; indeed, Sam wondered if the talk about Sedgewick and Tony Perry had anything to do with the sheriff’s vehemence in wanting so much to claim that first murder.

  Right now, the sheriff was happy enough to go one step further and be helpful by telling Sam that Butts was probably home because he’d seen him in town that morning. He drove his rig four days and got off three.