Ronnie and I saw each other a couple times in the next few days, and we took trips out to the dry lake to look it over, as if at some moment there would be a revelation. None came.
We made love at her place. It was better each time, but we didn’t see each other much due to her work, her hours having been expanded to deal with domestic squabbles, drunks, petty robberies, and too much paperwork. But I felt good with her and she with me. Seemed to me that love was blossoming or, in my case, had already arrived by jet, the blossoms on board.
As for what the law found out about the bones in the trunks of those cars, it was no more than what we had already determined. The remains lay cold and silent in the morgue, their deeper mysteries so far unanswered. Chief Dudley didn’t seem to have any thoughts or words of wisdom on the matter.
Some nights my father came to me, his ghost both real and unreal, clutching my ankle. Occasionally I could swear he spoke to me in his wet voice, his words as cryptic as Sanskrit to a squirrel. I always awoke upset and a little frightened, but when I turned on the lights or bathed in the light of the rising sun, the spectral feelings faded away as swiftly and easily as cotton candy melts in the mouth.
And then on Sunday, my first article came out in the newspaper.
It sold a lot of papers, and fast, not only in New Long Lincoln but in satellite communities and small towns all around.
In my article, I didn’t mention that there might be a killer roaming East Texas, as that had already been suggested by the discovery of the bones. I didn’t mention my father was a suspect, but at some point in the article series, I intended to. I didn’t try and suggest what Shirley thought, that the bones in the trunks had been exhumed and weren’t murders. I didn’t know enough to agree or disagree with her theory.
Tuesday morning, I had been up only long enough to shower and get dressed when Mrs. Chandler, not wishing to come up the stairs every time the phone rang, yelled up at me that I had a phone call. It was Christine.
Christine said I should bring myself immediately to the newspaper office as something important had occurred. She didn’t tell me what, but I had no doubt it had to do with the article I had written. A certain amount of fallout had been expected. That was all right. I had hoped to stir both the sympathetic reader and the flies.
When I got there, Christine’s office had three people in it that I didn’t know. There was a cool, clean man about the size of a half-track. He was in his forties, wearing a dark blue suit that didn’t come from any store in East Texas. He wore it with a hot-pink tie that lay crisp against a blue shirt several shades lighter than the suit and fastened to it by a stickpin as white-silver as a star. He was seated where I had sat the day before. Christine, wearing gray and blue, was behind her desk looking as if she couldn’t decide if she should dissolve into a puddle or leap over the desk and go for the man’s throat.
The other two people in the room were attractive women who were somewhat interchangeable in appearance and dress, their outfits being dark, man-style suits with equally dark open-at-the-neck shirts and no ties. Their shoulder-length hair matched their suits. They were long-legged and eager-looking, cautious scavengers waiting to eat the scraps that the seated man might leave for them once he had made his kill.
When I closed the door behind me, the man looked at me. It was like watching an owl turn its head; it unsettled me, but his eyes were not owl-like at all. There was something feral in his glance, as if he were anticipating the slow devouring of a helpless field mouse. His black hair was slightly oiled and shone in the light like a lubricated mop. His feet were flat on the floor. His spine was stiff and his shoulders were squared. A painting or photograph of him might have made him look handsome, but his actual presence gave you the impression that he was somehow not quite fastened together right.
“Danny,” Christine said. “This is Jack Manley Jr.”
“The lawyer,” I said.
“Exactly,” she said. “Insurance and real estate as well. Ladies, I don’t believe we’ve actually been introduced yet.”
“No need for that,” Jack Jr. said. “You don’t need to know them. They’re not major players.” He had a voice as flat as Kansas and simultaneously as sour as old milk.
The women had leaned forward at Christine’s offer of introduction, but now they rocked back like bowling pins resettling. They seemed neither insulted nor disappointed. They hardly seemed real. I think he scared them even more than us.
“Only person you need to know is me. Mr. Russell, you and Miss Humbert have written and printed some rather vile stuff about my father and other members of the city council, and they find it disturbing. Disturbing enough for them to consider legal action.”
“I don’t remember saying they did anything,” I said.
“It was easy to read between the lines.”
“All kinds of things might be between the lines—turds and flowers, depending on perception—but it’s the lines themselves that count. I merely said what has been said about the town council for years about what happened the night the lake filled. People were drowned, that’s a fact. As for the city council, or the city dictatorship, I didn’t say that the things said about the council were true, only that they were said. I quoted from a book.”
The new look Jack Jr. gave me made me feel less like a mouse anticipating consumption and more like I had already been consumed whole and was lying in his stomach being dissolved by digestive juices.
“That rubbish by Natural Wilson?” he said. “I certainly doubt Natural is his name, and he hasn’t come forward to explain himself or that book. And it’s years old. Lies then, lies now.”
“Might be rubbish, but it’s part of your city’s lore, and the article made it clear it’s lore, not facts. The facts are being researched and may come out over time, and they might not fit the legend. Or they might. Way I saw it, so many years have gone by since the new town was built, it was high time for a retrospective, including bits of lore, which, again, my article makes clear.”
“Walking the line, aren’t you?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Well, I don’t like it. The city council doesn’t like it.”
“Sounds like a personal problem,” Christine said. “But not a legal one. Tell you what, Jackie, why don’t you pack up your ladies, taking care to maintain the creases in your pants, and heel-toe yourself and your Italian shoes on out of here. When you have a true legal matter, then you can come back. Bring the ladies again, pull the plugs out of their asses, and bring their names with them next time.”
“Miss Humbert,” he said. “You don’t want to get on my wrong side.”
“That was really scary,” Christine said. “The little sneer when you finished, that capped it off. I might even remember it five minutes from now. But, so we’re clear, you and me, we were on different sides before we ever met. What I think is, if you’re bothered this much by quotes from a book that contains regional folklore, then it might be more than folklore you’re worried about. I’ll even say this—you’re really going to shit your knickers full of stinky when the whole story gets out. We might mention how you came here to threaten us over something you feared we might say. That will sell some fucking papers, won’t it, you well-dressed piece of dog shit. Pardon my language.”
“You are coarse, Miss Humbert.”
“What can I say? Someone drags dog shit into my office, I’m willing to say it stinks.”
“It’s the innuendo of the article we’re discussing,” Jack Jr. said. He turned those feral eyes on me again. “And your mention of the bodies in the trunks of those cars. I think it’s a distraction from the obvious thing here. Your father was a serial killer.”
“You think that, do you?” I said. I wasn’t surprised that came up. New Long Lincoln’s word of mouth worked faster than the telephone wires. It hadn’t been in my article. That had been a short piece in the paper the day before, and there wasn’t any mention of my father being responsible for anything other than driving off a bridge ten years back with his son in the car.
“I do think that,” he said.
“We can talk about what might be said or what might be true for hours,” Christine said, “but nothing in that article gives you the right to bring yourself in here with your two pull-toys and aggravate me at my work or have me call in one of my reporters when he could be home writing the next article for next Sunday’s paper. Even pulling his johnson would be a better use of his time than this.”
“I was, in fact, in the middle of that,” I said.
“Saddle your bitches and head out, Jackie,” Christine said.
“Don’t call me that,” he said.
“It’s better than what I want to call you.”
“I’ll throw in a nickel and two cents and ask if you know a couple of boys that like to play dress-up,” I said. “One with white greasepaint on his face, the other with cork and orange clown hair. Sports red lipstick. Not really his color. One of those guys totes around a mean left hook. Both like to wear hats and dark suits and strut like gangsters high on hog tranquilizer. Ring any bells?”
“What in the hell are you talking about?” Jack Jr. said. He was almost convincing.
“It’s just a quiz I’m giving everyone. Ladies?”
They didn’t say anything. They didn’t even look at me.
“You may be a little too smart-ass for your own good, Mr. Russell. And you, Miss Humbert, you call yourself a lady.”
“I wouldn’t dare,” she said.
“You know,” I said, “you strike me, Mr. Manley, as one of those people who see everything around you as something to consume. I get the idea a lot is not enough for you. I also get the feeling that my article is stirring something full of blood and shadows.”
“That’s supposed to somehow make me feel bad, guilty? I’m a capitalist, Mr. Russell. If it’s there to consume, I consume it, and smack my lips when I finish. I eat and eat until I’m so full, I think I’m going to blow, and yet I keep eating. There are those who can, and those who can’t, those who do, and those who don’t.”
“I’m a capitalist too,” I said, “but with a small c. A comfortable portion for me is enough.”
“Everything in life is a banquet. That’s the kind of nutrition that makes you big, Mr. Russell. I can tell by the way you stand, the way you wear your clothes, you’ll always be small. A little man close to the floor yelling up to his betters, wondering why he too can’t be tall.”
He smiled at me, and it was like something you might see in the tiger cage at the zoo at feeding time.
“I suggest both of you consider what you write next. If it continues in the tone you’ve set with the first article, you will hear from me.”
“Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out,” Christine said. “You too, ladies. Nice suits, by the way. Who says crime doesn’t pay?”
Jack Jr. stood up so slowly an entire new species of humans could have developed, invented fire and tools, and died out. The creases in his pants were not in any way wrinkled as he rose. He took a moment to show me how intense he could stare, then started for the door.
I stepped aside and opened it. The three of them, without saying a word, went out in single file, him smelling of Brut cologne, them hinting of different perfumes. The cloud of mixed scents made my nose hairs twitch. I closed the door gently behind them, let out my breath, went over to the visitor’s chair, and collapsed into it.
“It’s like the devil and two of his imps have left the room,” I said.
“Oh, hell, Danny,” Christine said, it being her turn to let out her breath and collapse deeper into her chair. “I nearly messed myself. You have stirred the hornets’ nest, and they are eager to sting.”
“You didn’t seem that afraid.”
“I do a bit of community theater, so you’d be surprised how I really felt. My legs were trembling under the desk.”
“They sue me, all they get in return is the remains of a not overly impressive book advance, a typewriter, and two ax handles.”
“I’m worried about me, not you. Listen, be damn sure whatever you write next isn’t an execution warrant for the both of us.”