Chapter 15

A Really Nice Guy

Wayne saw her coming. Was he dreaming, or was that really Kris Wells getting out of the car, coming into the Cabin? He wasn’t dreaming. Now he heard her voice.

“Aw c’mon,” she was saying to the group that was getting out of the car. And he certainly recognized Kris’s voice. He liked the friendly, efficient upturn of it, just as he liked the precision cut of her hair, which she wore pixie style. He was mesmerized by her clear, direct manner with people. She was all business, just like him. And she was the only petite, blue-eyed blonde at Conlin’s. Of all the women at the store, Kris Wells was number one in Wayne’s eyes. And here she was, coming to the Cabin.

“Wayne!” she greeted him, leading her husband, Doug, and a handful of friends to the door. Kris and her party were coming from a wine-tasting party. It had been a little fancier event than the run-of-the-mill wine-tasting parties that their group usually held. Kris was a little tipsy, exuding camaraderie, perhaps more than she typically would, because after all, Kris was Wayne’s boss.

She had started as a saleswoman in June of 1982, just a few months before Wayne went full time. Then, she’d been twenty-nine years old, and one of the first things he noticed was that she wore a wedding ring. Two years later, in the summer of 1984, she had been made sales manager. Now she was manager of the store, and it was no secret that Wayne was crazy about her.

“We thought we’d show our friends visiting from California a real cowboy bar,” Kris said, igniting her words with a twinge of hometown pride. “So here we are!”

Wayne couldn’t have been more gracious. There would be no cover charge.

“It’s on me.”

“Oh, Wayne, thank you.”

“Hey, save a dance for me,” he called to Kris as she began to melt into the crowd inside the door.

“Sure,” she answered, disappearing.

The music was loud. The crowd was authentic. And before long, Kris and Doug and their friends were falling into the scene. The Cabin packed a pretty good reputation. Besides being a bona fide trucker, biker, and cowboy bar, it also attracted a voyeuristic, adventurous middle-class clientele. White-collar types looking for a thrill brought their wives and girlfriends to the Cabin for a little rough-edged fun. There were other cowboy bars in town, but this was the real thing. The Cabin didn’t have a dignifying Western name, like the more studied Duelin’ Dalton’s, or any of the extraneous and phony, stylized Wild-West decor. It was a Friday night mecca for secretaries and dental hygienists and assistant store managers, who could go out as girls-en-masse to the Cabin and live to brag about it on Monday morning in the office, eliciting “oohs” from co-workers who would want to hear all about it.

“I’m gonna ask Wayne to dance,” Kris said into Doug’s ear, knowing that her husband wouldn’t dance, because he never did. She also didn’t think he would mind, because he never did mind when she danced with other men.

“I don’t know if I would egg him on,” Doug said.

What was this? It seemed he was scolding her.

“Aw c’mon. Just one dance.”

“I wouldn’t do it. I just wouldn’t do it. Not this guy.” Doug stood his ground. He really didn’t mind when Kris danced with other men. If she wanted to dance, fine. But not with Wayne. Doug sensed that it would mean a lot more to Wayne than it would to his wife, and that was why he was displeased when Kris ignored his advice and went up to Wayne anyway.

The next day, Kris was sitting at her desk when Wayne asked if he could come in for a minute. In the few steps he took into the room, Doug’s admonition flashed in her mind.

“I have something for you,” Wayne said, holding a small card in his hand, which he then placed on her desk. It was a watercolor drawing done on a small paper card. Kris felt a tightening as she looked down at the mildly erotic image. Wayne had drawn a scantily clad woman, and he had posed her, in a not so subtle way, legs up in a wine glass. The inscription he wrote was: “First wine-tasting.”

Kris was embarrassed and offended. She didn’t know how to react, but she knew she would throw this thing away as soon as he left. She knew Doug would say, “I told you so.”

For the next three nights that Wayne worked at the Cabin, he brought flowers with him, prepared to give them to the girl he had put in the wine glass, the one he adored.

It was not hard for anyone to see how much Wayne liked Kris. All they had to do was look around the store, especially in the back warehouse, where Wayne had inscribed the walls in giant script, making the initials KZ. That was the way Kris signed off on orders.

Born Kristen Zimmerman on August 10, 1953, in the small Illinois town of Moline, she was the bright, blue-eyed apple of her father’s eye. By the time she entered high school and was elected to the cheerleading squad at Riverdale High in nearby Cordova, (population 900), this baby of the family was well on her way to becoming the fully grown girl next door. An outsider would have found it hard to disagree with her father that his daughter Kris, who didn’t drink, didn’t use drugs, who loved football and basketball games and sock hops and Sadie Hawkins Day dances, was anything less than the American ideal. After all, Harold Zimmerman read the newspapers. The year was 1968. The streets of Chicago—no more than 160 miles away—were filled with the obscene chants of a generation that was laying siege to the 1968 Democratic national convention, and somehow managing to catalyze a response that, through its own police violence, succeeded in shaking the very foundation of the Establishment.

Harold Zimmerman and his wife, Patricia Coe Zimmerman, were, they had no doubt, that Establishment. He was an engineer at American Air Filter. She was a secretary for the superintendent of schools. Their children, Wes, the oldest, Kathie, and Kris, never had cause to doubt what that meant. Nobody was making a lot of money in Cordova. Nobody had a lot of time to do anything much else but work in this down-to-earth town.

Kris’s parents hadn’t gone to college, but it was taken for granted that all three of their children would, and they did. Kris attended the University of Iowa in Iowa City, an hour and a half drive from home, and earned a bachelor’s degree in interior design and related arts. After graduation she worked in the custom drapery department of a local department store, then moved on to a local supply house where she tried her hand at kitchen design. Then, at odds with her career, she became a stewardess for Trans-World Airlines. Her TWA stint would last only six months, because the man she was getting serious about was in Montana. She had known him since high school. His name was Douglas Wells. He was a football player who was two years her senior. Everybody called him Doug.

He was a kind of quiet, down-to-earth type, a plodder, whose ordinariness was a disguise for the poetry in his simple approach. The dull-thudding moments in his life were not to be overlooked. They were like soundings off bedrock. They always yielded an inspiration.

Born in Van Nuys, California, on September 27, 1951, to Warren and Lucille Wells, he was named Douglas because both his parents worked at Douglas Aircraft Company. Their son, with the obvious company name, was the second-oldest of five. Joanne came first. In the winter of 1953, the Wellses moved back to Illinois, where Dale, Dennis, and Peggy were born. The family settled in Hillsdale (population 395), and Warren Wells quickly set to work building a family logging business while Lucille raised the children.

From the time the boys could understand anything, Warren Wells lectured them about work. He always was brief and to the point.

“You work. That’s what you do,” he would say. “No summers off. You work.”

In time, the logging business had grown up to include a respectable hardwood sawmill, plus there was the family farm. After the boys did the chores, they cut brush to keep pastures clear, or they mended fences.

The work ethic was infused in the father’s sons just as thoroughly as a walnut grain is densely whorled, and Doug wasted no time when he graduated from Riverdale High in the spring of 1969 in getting down to business. He started a small trucking enterprise with a rattletrap pickup, hauling sawdust and splitting wood. Then, after a year of ups and downs, he decided to try college. In the fall of 1970 he enrolled at the University of Montana in Missoula as a forestry major.

The following summer, while home from college, he met the girl he had eyed from afar in high school. Then she had been the sophomore cheerleader. Now, just graduated, the two of them fell together. He was bound for Missoula in the fall, and she was due in Iowa City. At least they had the summer together.

Doug’s career at the University of Montana was short lived. After the fall semester, he quit. But his love affair with Big Sky country was to endure. He returned briefly to Illinois, but then almost as quickly returned to the high valleys and even higher mountains that he missed. An avid outdoorsman, he seized upon the world-class hunting and fishing that is a treasured way of life for Montanans. Roadside billboards, paid for by local taxidermists, beckoned: “Preserve Your Hunting and Fishing Memories.” For big game, there was elk, antelope, white-tail deer, muledeer, grizzly bear and black bear, Rocky Mountain Big Horn sheep, mountain goat, mountain lion, fox and coyote. There was ringneck pheasant, waterfowl of all kinds from teal to mallards, upland birds that included three species of grouse. Montana was and still is among the five states that give swan permits. Fishing in the clear lakes and streams was equally gratifying, due to abundant lake trout, cutthroat, largemouth, and, to a lesser degree, smallmouth bass, pike, and brown, rainbow, and bull trout.

Doug was a bachelor, living in a sportsman’s paradise, driving a forklift in a warehouse for money. For awhile, he signed on with a logging crew cutting timber. It was a good life, but something was still missing. He didn’t want to work for wages the rest of his life, and after he was witness to a tragic accident one day—his boss fell from a truck, broke his back, and died on the spot—Doug decided to go back to school. He applied to a gunsmith school in Denver, and returned home to Illinois to cut wood for his father and rekindle the romance with Kris. When the time came to leave for Denver, to enroll in the Colorado School of Trade, he knew he would hate the city-boy life. But it would only be for a year, and he would write to Kris. The letters she wrote back would make the separation a little easier.

After graduation, Doug returned to Illinois and opened a small gunsmith shop in Moline, but it was a false start. Montana still beckoned, and he was on his way. Back in Missoula, he returned to the back-braking jobs he had left, but he had plans this time, and he hoped Kris would soon join him. The wait wasn’t long. In the fall of the year, Kris loaded her car and drove to Missoula, where she found work for awhile in a department store, and then as flooring, cabinet, and wallpaper saleswoman.

But after the winter came and went and spring was upon them, the two transplants found themselves taking stock of their lives. Doug was twenty-seven. He ostensibly had a trade, but he wasn’t practicing it. Kris was twenty-five. She was a college graduate but was still sweating it out in sales. They were living together, but they weren’t married. They wanted to stay in Missoula for all the same reasons that people had moved there in droves, but they also realized they would never make their fortune on the local pay scales. So once again they shuttled back to Illinois.

Doug gunsmithed and Kris took a job in the insurance department at John Deere in Moline, but it didn’t take long for them to discover that they weren’t happy. Doug, as was expected of him from his old-fashioned parents, lived on the farm. Kris had taken a small apartment in Port Byron, where Doug spent a lot of time. After almost a year of this in-between life, on April 14, 1979, in a courthouse ceremony in Rock Island, they made it official. Kris’s father and sister, Kathie, were there, and so was Doug’s brother, Dale. Afterward, there was a reception in the home where Kris had grown up. Within two weeks of the marriage, as if some invisible filament had once again exceeded its stretch point, destiny yanked them west again, back to Montana, where they had been the happiest, even if they were the poorer for it. Alone, in a fully packed car, Kris drove out first. She had a job lined up and was needed immediately. Two weeks later, having packed the rest of their belongings, Doug followed. This time it was for good.

Doug started Lock, Stock & Barrel, his own gunsmith business, and Kris went to work for Home Interiors, where she was perfectly willing to sell the store’s carpets and cabinets until something better came along. The following June, when she joined Conlin’s sales staff, she had found it.

Within two years, Kris was promoted to sales manager. Doug’s gunsmithing business had taken hold, and in the short four years since their last return, though the Wellses were not making the fortune they had sought in Illinois’s Quad Cities, they had made a solid beginning, and they were comfortable. Kris was able to begin furnishing a new home on Parker Court that they bought in a small tract development on Missoula’s western periphery. Doug was independent enough as a businessman to arrange his life around the hunting and fishing calendar: The first Saturday of September begins bird season; antelope season starts on the first Sunday of October, followed by big game season on the third Sunday of the month. They had collected a set of friends, whom they socialized with over chicken barbecue dinners or at Grizzly football games at the University or over dinner at one of their old-standby restaurants.

The Wellses had aspirations, but only to a point. They worked harder than they played. They were hardly yuppie types, but if neither of them felt like making dinner, they might pop out for nachos and beers. And they could, at the drop of a hat, because there were no children in their life. Before work, or after work, whichever time suited her, Kris could slip into her nylon jogging shorts and go for a run on the quiet roads around her neighborhood. She would already allow herself to think ahead, to the day when they might even get a bigger house, a little farther out in the country, where they would have more land, where Doug could test-fire his guns without having to get in his truck and drive somewhere. She had no way of knowing that her free-associating, aerobic privacy was being invaded, that Wayne Nance was watching in the bushes, snapping pictures of KZ.

The man Louise Lightener had hired to work in Conlin’s warehouse was not the run-of-the-mill local boy described in awkward, stiff pencil scrawl on the job application. Wayne Nance was a mercurial, seething psycho, who in due course would earn everyone’s complete trust, especially when it came to the women at the store.

The female side of Conlin’s was represented on the sales floor, the vast high-ceilinged showroom that appears to the wandering customer as an impassable maze of mauve-colored La-Z-Boys. A handful of saleswomen typically were on duty at any given time, and besides selling the customers, they arranged for deliveries and generally kept the public space of Conlin’s stocked and ready. Their duties brought them into regular contact with the warehouse, a world surfaced in cardboard and plywood just feet away through a doorway. The men were the grunts who took the paperwork orders from the saleswomen. The saleswomen were half-apologetic when they inquired of the men about whether a delivery could be made on a certain day, maybe a day earlier than scheduled. Maintaining peace on the common ground of that doorway was crucial for Conlin’s success.

Customers came in the front door and the furniture went out the back. It all had to go smoothly at this juncture, which on busy days became a stress point, where the men in blue jeans and work boots intersected with the women in moderately upscale casual business attire and costume jewelry. On hot days, the warehouse ached of sweat. The showroom betrayed the wilt of perfume.

The sales force at Conlin’s was a cross-section of single, married, and divorced women. Some of them absolutely needed a paycheck. Some of them were biding time here while they fashioned modest entrepreneurial dreams. Some were making careers here. Others just liked the work, and were grateful to have such a good job. Most of them were older than Wayne, some old enough to be his mother. But he found them fascinating, and they became the objects of his affection.

They had grown accustomed to Wayne’s outward weirdness as much as they had come to appreciate his flattery. He remembered everyone’s birthday every year, and would bring them each a present. Often it was flowers or a pair of inexpensive earrings or some other trinket, which he frequently picked up at the Hallmark store in the mall where his sister, Veta, worked. Wayne remembered wedding anniversaries. He did it up on Saint Patrick’s Day, bringing in green ice cream and shamrock-trimmed cups and saucers.

The women tolerated his gift giving and listened to him complain that he couldn’t get a girlfriend. They assured their husbands and one another that this was all harmless. This was puppy love. They felt a little sorry for him and they played along. Sure, he was different, but the world is full of people who are different, whose idiosyncracies might just as easily be ignored. Here was a sweet boy with a crush.

Cindy Bertsch, a pretty brunette, was twenty-four when she joined the Conlin’s office staff in September 1982. Recently graduated from the University of South Dakota with a degree in criminal justice, she had been offered a position at the state penitentiary at Sioux Falls, but her previous experience as an intern with probation work ultimately dissuaded her from taking the job. Instead, she followed her sweetheart to Missoula, got married, and in time became the office manager at Conlin’s. She was in charge of the books, payroll, servicing the work orders, and whatever else didn’t fall into someone else’s in-basket.

Cindy’s husband, Carey, an insurance adjuster, thought it was definitely out of the ordinary when his wife came home one day with a new pink belt that a man at work—Wayne—had given to her as a present. It matched a pink sweater that she had worn the day before.

“Nice jacket,” Wayne often said to Cindy as he passed her office en route from the warehouse to the showroom.

“Thank you, Wayne.”

“Nice dress, you look great in that,” he would say on another day, when Cindy was wearing one of the couple of outfits that caught Wayne’s attention. It was always polite flattery, and it cemented the impression Cindy formed of Wayne as a really nice guy, a friend.

Once, when Wayne invited Cindy and her husband to join him at the Cabin for a night out, he tapped his old connection and got them in without a cover charge. Cindy and Carey felt a little special.

Without thinking twice about it, the women at Conlin’s would hand Wayne the keys to their houses, so he could deliver something for them while they were at work. They trusted him completely.

Ruth Ann Rancourt, who worked with Cindy in the office, didn’t for a second worry about giving Wayne her keys. She had bought a new mattress for her daughter Stacy, who was fourteen. It was ready to be delivered, but neither she nor her husband, Lee, would be home. So Wayne delivered it, putting the mattress in Stacy’s room, as Ruth Ann had requested.

Later, when Wayne asked to see a picture of Stacy, leading Ruth Ann on with a tease about how he liked young girls, the woman played along.

“Oh, Wayne, she’s too young for you,” she teased back. Then, though still engaged in the lightness of the moment, she remembered that in Stacy’s room, where Wayne had put the new mattress, there were photographs of her daughter, and they were right out for anyone to see.

“No, she’s not too young. I like young girls. I’d like to see a picture of her,” Wayne insisted.

“Her father says she can’t date ’till she’s thirty.” Ruth Ann played along some more. “Anyway, if you had looked in the bedroom there were pictures of her there.”

Wayne stopped.

“Oh, no,” he said after a pause, pulling away from the conversation, heading for the warehouse, adopting a neutral, righteous tone now. “If I’m in a customer’s home, I never look around. I don’t do that.”

They knew he was impossible. But they also knew they could count on him to do them a favor. He was such a nice guy.

Sheila Claxton, another Conlin’s saleswoman who started at the store during the same month Wayne did, found less reason to despair over Wayne’s eccentricities and his peculiar definition of reality. An attractive, dark-haired divorcée in her late thirties, mother of two boys, she was a little wiser in the ways of the world, and being a child of the Sixties, her temperament was geared to letting Wayne be Wayne. They became good friends, and Sheila didn’t hesitate to ask favors of him. On occasions when her aging Pinto was out of commission, Wayne was always ready to swing by her house and give her a lift to work. Once, she had asked Wayne if he could get a small tree for her sister Vicki, who wanted it for a window display at the store where she worked. There was no hurry.

“Whenever you’re out in the woods again, you know, something about this high,” she said, gesturing with her hands to show him how big the tree ought to be. Vicki wanted to drape handbags off the branches, Sheila explained.

The very next day, Wayne delivered the perfect tree to Vicki’s store. Sheila was surprised that he did it so quickly, but not really. It wasn’t out of character. Wayne really aimed to please.

In the next few days and weeks, when Vicki told her sister that she thought somebody was watching her house at night, Sheila never made the faintest connection to Wayne.

Nor did Joyce Halverson, another saleswoman, when she lost a regular customer after Wayne had gone to the woman’s house to pick up a loveseat that needed repair. The customer complained to Joyce about obscene phone calls that she had started to receive after the Conlin’s pickup. The woman swore to Joyce that she was sure it was the delivery man, Wayne, who was harassing her. She was furious about it, and after she had her telephone changed to an unlisted number, she never came back to Conlin’s. Joyce was sorry to lose a customer, but she certainly didn’t believe Wayne had anything to do with it.

Other customers of Conlin’s had similar problems. They would get a delivery and then be haunted by obscene phone calls. One customer had to get her phone number changed twice. After she got the first new, unlisted number, the calls stopped for a while, but then the caller was at it again—after she had taken another delivery from Conlin’s. The customer was sure now that calls had something to do with the deliveries from the store, so she had her phone number changed again to a second unlisted number, and refused to do any more business with Conlin’s. The calls stopped.

Wayne told everyone at Conlin’s that he didn’t like to talk on the phone. If he and Sheila made arrangements for him to give her a ride to work the next day if she couldn’t get her car started, she would offer to call him first.

“No, I’ll call you,” he would say. And then when he did call, he more than once pretended to be an obscene caller.

Ruth Ann once took a call for Wayne, and when she went into the warehouse to get him, he blew up at her.

“I told you I don’t take phone calls!” he yelled. “Go back and tell whoever it is I don’t take phone calls.”

So Ruth Ann did. “I’m sorry,” she told the party on the line, “he doesn’t take phone calls.”

“You go back and tell that sonuvabitch it’s his dad,” came the angry imperative.

When she returned to the warehouse the second time, repeating his father’s words to him, Wayne sailed for the phone.

“You can tell anybody I won’t take a phone call,” he said. “But not my dad.”

Wayne’s family was known to the sales staff at Conlin’s. His brothers and sisters bought furniture from the store. Bill Nance bought a dining-room table from Sheila shortly after he was married. Desirée and Veta, who were both married now, would come in and buy things and say hello to the staff, who knew them as Wayne’s sisters.

It seemed everyone in Missoula, at one time or another, bought furniture from Conlin’s. Most of the time, the arrival of Wayne Nance on a customer’s doorstep was nothing more than an ordinary delivery made by an anonymous driver who came in, set the furniture in place, got a signature, and left. But after Deputy Sheriff Stanley Fullerton, Wayne’s high school classmate, who had investigated the scene of his mother’s suicidal crash, bought a sofa from Conlin’s for his apartment up in the Rattlesnake Canyon, he was mighty surprised when Wayne showed up at his front door, delivery receipt in hand.

“Wow, Wayne, God, it’s been years,” he greeted him, now face-to-face with the acquaintance from his past who had stayed with him all these years like some recurring tailwind. Since he had joined the sheriff’s department, Fullerton had known that Wayne had been more than a routine suspect in the Donna Pounds murder, more than just a neighborhood boy who had been brought in for questioning. When any of his buddies would learn that he had gone to Sentinel with Wayne, they would find it intriguing, and they ribbed him about it: “Jeez, you knew Nance?”

The two 1974 alums talked a bit about old times as Wayne and his riding partner carried the new sofa into the living room. As they made conversation, Stan made what he considered to be a requisite but nevertheless empty promise to get together sometime for a beer. After Wayne was gone, Fullerton was uneasy, thinking to himself: God, I really don’t want this guy to know where I live.

Missoula’s resident FBI agent, Dale Willis, was a good customer at the store, and he and his wife, Rosalie, had a not-so-ordinary experience with Wayne, the delivery man.

Rosalie Willis had found a strange pair of sunglasses on the sink in an upstairs bathroom off the couple’s master bedroom. Whose were they? How did they get there? The glasses, it turned out, belonged to Wayne. How he had managed to boldly sneak up to the second floor and poke around in the bedroom and bath was never figured out. Nothing was missing. Nobody made a federal case out of it.

After all, everybody knew that Wayne was the best worker in the warehouse. He was a really nice guy, too. They trusted him completely.