Bad Moon Rising

P ART T WO
10

T he station had been abandoned in the late ’40s, the reason being that the ones in town were new and bright and easy to get to. This was a holdover from the early ’30s, a two-pump station that sold only gas and oil, no car repairs. Kids had smashed out the windows and animals had used the drive as a bathroom. The front door had been chained shut. If you looked through one of the dust-coated front windows you could see a large movie poster advertising a Betty Grable film circa 1945 when Betty was already slipping in popularity.

Three squad cars and an ambulance were parked on the east side of the station. I pulled up behind them and walked to the back of the place where a green wooden storage shed was tucked into a stand of hardwoods. Potter was explaining to two uniforms how he wanted them to gather evidence, who would start where, and so on. The ambulance boys leaned against the open rear doors of their big white box, looking slightly bored and taking it out on their cigarettes. As usual, the joyous birdsong reminded me that the so-called lower orders could give a shit about the travails of the plodding creatures that lumbered across their land. Nature presented them with their own travails.

Potter set his men to work and then walked over to me. “I’d let you have a look at him but we’re still gathering evidence. I wanted you out here so I could tell you firsthand what I saw when I got out here. He’s in the back of the shed. He had a blanket and some sandwiches in a brown paper bag. Obviously somebody helped him. From what I could see, he didn’t have any marks on his arms or hands or face. No signs of a struggle, in other words, in case you’re thinking somebody killed him and then planted the gun in his hand. He fired a. 45 above his right ear. The exit wound is a big bastard, bigger than usual. The doc is on his way. He’ll be able to guesstimate when Cameron did the deed. Now, I’m sure you have a lot of questions, so if you want to wait around for a couple of hours-there’s a pretty good burger joint about a mile from here-we’ll probably have a lot more information for you.”

“I’m sure your boss will take this as an admission of guilt.”

“Right now I do, Sam. And if you can step back and be a little objective, you should, too. You’ll say everything’s circumstantial and it probably is, but he was obsessed with the girl, she broke it off with him, and he killed her. That’s not exactly a new story. He hides out, he’s afraid and probably sorry for what he’d done, and he kills himself.”

“Where did he get the gun?”

“Where did he get the sandwiches and the blanket? Probably the same place.”

“I’ll get to see the blanket and gun?”

“As long as the chief isn’t here. He’s still pissed off about your John Wayne crack. Being a draft dodger and all.”

“Good thing I didn’t tell him that Superman can’t actually fly.”

He shook his head and smiled. “You two really hate each other, don’t you?”

“I don’t hate him as much as he hates me.”

“Yeah, I kind of figured that was the case.” He waved to a squad car that had just pulled up. “Now I gotta get back to work.”

I drove back to town. When I saw a phone booth outside a Howard Johnson’s I pulled over. I had Paul Mainwaring’s phone number scribbled in the small notepad I carry in my left back pocket. Marsha the maid answered.

“I’m afraid he’s at the funeral home, Mr. McCain. The burial will be tomorrow. Mr. Mainwaring just wants to get it over with.”

“Well, will you please give him this message, Marsha? The police have found Neil Cameron’s body in a shed in back of that old Skelly station on the edge of town.”

Her gasp-and it was indeed a gasp-surprised me. “Oh, my Lord.”

“Are you all right, Marsha?”

“He was such a nice boy. I liked him so much.”

She was reacting as if a close friend had died. “Did you know him pretty well, Marsha?”

“He was around here a lot. Sometimes Vanessa would invite him over, but by the time he’d get here some other boy would have picked her up and taken her off. I cared for Vanessa but she was very cruel to boys sometimes. He’d look so sad I’d talk to him. Every so often, if I wasn’t busy and nobody else was around, I’d talk to him for quite a while. My own son is in his thirties and lives in Michigan with his family. I suppose I kind of adopted Neil a little bit. I know he was upset, but I don’t for a minute believe he murdered poor Vanessa-you can tell that to Mr. Mainwaring for all I care-and I just can’t imagine him killing himself, either. I’m sure you think I’m being naive, but those are my feelings.”

“I’m pretty sure what they’re saying is his suicide will close the case.”

“Not for me it won’t. Nobody’ll ever convince me he did either of those things. Oh, there’s the doorbell. People have been sending flowers to the house. I wish they wouldn’t. We’ll just have to drag them all to the funeral home and the church. You’ll have to excuse me now.”

By the time I got back to the Skelly station, the onlookers and reporters had gone. Potter was standing next to a large metal box where his officers had been putting the evidence bags they’d been filling. Potter was talking to two of his men so I had time to scan the plastic bags. A quart of Hamm’s beer, a half-finished sandwich of some kind, a pair of white socks with blood on the toe of one of them, a stadium blanket of deep blue with horizontal yellow stripes, a Greyhound bus schedule, a Swiss army knife, and a small black flashlight. There were many more items beneath these but I assumed Potter wouldn’t be real happy if he saw me pawing through his evidence bags.

“Any sign of a note?” I asked Potter when he walked over to me.

“No, but there might be a good explanation for that, Sam. Maybe he just didn’t have anything to write with.”

“It’s still strange.”

“It’s strange if you want it to be strange. Otherwise it’s as simple as my explanation.”

I nodded to where the ambulance had been. “The doc say anything unexpected?”

“Just that it looked like a suicide. He wanted to get Cameron on the table before he said it officially, but he said any other explanation was unlikely.”

“All the evidence in the bags-will his sister get his belongings at some point?”

“At some point, yes. I imagine this thing’ll end at the inquest. So it shouldn’t take long. He killed himself.”

From what Sarah Powers had told me, Neil Cameron had been a confused and angry man after he came back from Vietnam. The deaths he’d seen-and the lives he’d taken by mistake-had alienated him from not only others but himself as well. He’d come to rely on romance to redeem him, but when that had failed him, failed him because of his own obsessiveness and possessiveness, he’d started getting into even more trouble than he had previously. Then he’d met Vanessa and became even more desperate. Some of these facts would make their way into the inquest. They would convince everybody present that he’d been a prime candidate for suicide. He’d murdered his true love because she wouldn’t have him and then in remorse taken his own life.

“I’d tell your friends at the commune it’s probably time for them to move on, Sam. For everybody’s sake, including theirs. I don’t mind them as long as they don’t break the law, but after all this, the city council’s going to be on their ass for sure. They’ll come up with some ordinance to run them out or to make their lives so miserable they’ll want to leave anyway. Might as well get it over with now.”

“I’ll talk to them. But Richard Donovan has a temper and he isn’t afraid of much. I doubt he’ll listen. And I’m not sure they should be forced to move anyway. If Cameron did kill Vanessa Mainwaring, he acted alone. The others didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Just trying to help. I want a nice, peaceful life. That’s why I came out here. The hippies just seem to agitate a lot of people.”

“And you know why that is, don’t you?”

“The long hair?”

“All the sex. Everybody secretly wants to have as much sex as these kids have. But since they can’t, they take it out on the hippies.”

“You really believe that?”

I smiled. “Sometimes.”