F is For Fugitive

25

The Ocean Street Motel was only four blocks away. It wasn't going to take the cops long. I kept to the pavement until I caught the sound of a vehicle accelerating up the hill. I took a dive into the bushes as a black-and-white sped into view, heading straight for Dwight's place. Lights flashing, no siren. A second black-and-white gunned up the hill after the first. Hotdoggers. The deputy in the second car was probably twenty-two. Big career ahead of him, careening through Floral Beach legally. He must have been having the time of his life.

The solution to so many problems seems obvious once you know where to look. My conversation with Dwight had generated a shift in my mind-set and the questions that had troubled me before now seemed to have answers that made perfect sense. Some of them, at any rate. I needed confirmation, but at least now I had a working premise. Jean Timberlake had been murdered to protect Dwight Shales. Ori Fowler had died because she was meant to die… to get her out of the way. And Shana? I thought I understood why she had died, too. Bailey was supposed to take the rap for all of it, and he'd fallen for it like a chump. If he'd had sense enough not to run-if he'd just stayed put-he couldn't have been blamed for everything that'd happened since.

I approached the motel from the rear, through a vacant lot filled with weeds and broken glass. Many of the motel windows were ablaze with lights. I could imagine all the uproar caused by the presence of sheriffs' cars. I suspected there was still a deputy posted somewhere close, probably just outside my room. I reached the Fowlers' back door. The kitchen light was on, and I could see the shadow of someone moving around in the back part of the apartment. A little black-and-white television now sat on the counter, a taped newscast flickering across the empty room. Quintana was making mouth noises on the courthouse steps. Must have been this afternoon. A picture of Bailey Fowler followed. He was being led, in handcuffs, to a waiting vehicle. On came the announcer, turning to the weather map. I tried the kitchen door. Locked. I didn't want to stand out there trying to pick the lock.

I circled the building, hugging the outside wall, checking darkened windows for one left ajar. What I found instead was a side door that was located just across from the stairway inside the back hall. The knob turned in my hand and I pushed the door open cautiously. I peered in. Royce, in a ratty bathrobe, was shuffling down the hall toward me, slump-shouldered, eyes on his slippers. I could hear the hum of his weeping, broken by intermittent sighs. He was walking his grief like a baby, back and forth. He reached the door to his room and turned, shuffling back toward the kitchen. Now and then he murmured Ori's name, voice breaking off. Lucky is the spouse who dies first, who never has to know what survivors endure. Royce must have signed himself out of the hospital after Reverend Haws paid his call. Ori's death had pushed him past struggling. What did he care if he sped death along?

The lights from the living room gave the uncomfortable sense of other people very near. I could hear two women in the dining room, talking in low tones. Was Mrs. Emma still with Ann? Royce was reaching the kitchen, where I knew he'd turn again, coming back.

I closed the door behind me, crossed to the stairs, and took them two at a time, moving silently. I should have put two and two together when I saw that the maid's master key wouldn't open room 20. That room had probably been sealed off, part of the Fowlers' apartment upstairs.

The second floor was dark, except for a window on the landing through which a soft yellow light now spilled. I was disoriented. Somehow this didn't look the way I'd expected it to. There was a short corridor to my left, ending in a door. I crossed to it, stopped, and listened carefully. Silence. I tried the knob and pushed the door open a crack. Cold air wafted in. I was facing the exterior corridor that ran right by my room. I could see the vending machine and the outside stairs. To my immediate left was room 20, next to that room 22, where I'd spent my first night. There was no sign of a deputy on duty. Did I dare simply mosey down, use my key, and go in? What if the deputy was waiting inside?

I reached around and tried the knob from the outside. Ah, locked. Once I went out this door, I couldn't get back in unless I jammed it open. I stayed where I was, easing the door shut. The door to my left was unlocked. I slipped inside, taking out my penlight. Like the rest of the Fowlers' living quarters, this had once been a regular motel room, converted now to office space.

Sliding glass doors along the front opened onto a second-floor balcony overlooking Ocean Street. The drapes were open and I could make out a desk, a swivel chair, bookcases, a reading lamp. I swept the room with the narrow beam of the penlight, getting my bearings. The book titles were half fiction, half college textbooks in psychology. Ann's.

On the desk was a photo of Ori in her youth. She really had been beautiful, with large luminous eyes. I searched the desk drawers. Nothing of interest. Checked the closet alcove, which was filled with summer clothing. The bathroom held nothing. The door that connected this room to room 20 was locked. Locked doors are always more interesting than the other kind. This time I got out my set of key picks and set to work. In TV shows, people pick locks with remarkable ease. Not so in real life, where you have to have the patience of a saint. I was working in the dark, clamping the penlight in my mouth like a cigar while I used the rocker pick in my left hand and the wire in my right. Sometimes I do this efficiently, but that's usually when the light is good. This time it took forever, and I was sweating from the tension when the lock finally gave.

Room 20 was a duplicate of the one I'd occupied. This was Ann's bedroom, the one Maxine was not to clean. I could see why. On the closet floor, dead ahead, was a Ponsness-Warren shot shell reloader with a built-in wad guide, an adjustable crimp die, and two powder reservoirs filled with rock salt. I crossed to the closet and hunkered down, inspecting the device, which looks like a cross between a bird feeder and a cappuccino machine, and is designed to pack a shell with anything you like. A blast of rock salt, at close range, usually ends up buried under your skin where it stings like a son of a bitch, but doesn't do much else. Tap had found out just how ineffectual salt can be in staving off the sheriff's deputies.

I had really hit the jackpot. On the floor beside the reloader was a microcassette recorder with a tape in it. I pressed the rewind button and then pressed play, listening to a familiar voice slowed down to a series of quite nasty gravel-throated threats. I rewound, switched the tape speed, and tried it again. The voice was clearly Ann's, spelling out her intentions with an ax and a chain saw. The whole thing sounded stupid, but she must have had a ball. "I am going to get you…" We used to do shit like this as kids. "I am going to cut your head off…"I smiled grimly, remembering the night those calls had come through. I'd taken comfort from the fact that someone two doors away was wide awake like me. The square of light had looked so cozy at that hour. All the time she'd been in here, dialing room-to-room, part of her campaign of psychological abuse. At this point I couldn't even remember when I'd had an uninterrupted night's sleep. I was being carried on adrenaline and nerve, the momentum of events sweeping me willy-nilly down the path. The night my room was broken into, all she'd had to do was use her passkey and jimmy up the sliding glass door afterward so it would look like the point of entry. I got to my feet and checked the shelf above. In a shoebox, I found a windowed envelope addressed to "Erica Dahl" containing quarterly dividends and year-end tax summaries for IBM stock. There must have been more than a hundred such envelopes neatly packed into the box, along with a social security card, driver's license, and passport-with Ann Fowler's photograph affixed. The statements from Merrill Lynch showed a $42,000 investment in shares of IBM back in 1967. With stock splits in the intervening years, the shares had more than doubled in value. I noticed that "Erica" had dutifully paid taxes on the interest that accrued from year to year. Ann Fowler was too shrewd to get tripped up by the IRS.

I flashed the penlight through her living room and kitchenette, doing a one-eighty turn. When the narrow beam crossed the bedstead, I caught an oval of white and flashed the light back over it again. Ann.was propped up in bed watching me. Her face was dead pale, her eyes enormous, so filled with lunacy and hate that my skin crawled. I felt as if I'd been pierced with an icy arrow, the chill spreading from the core of my body to my fingertips. In her lap she held a double-barreled shotgun, which she raised and pointed right at my chest. Probably not rock salt. I didn't think the spider story was going to work with her.

"Finding everything you need?" she asked.

I raised my hands just to show I knew how to behave. "Hey, you're pretty good. You almost got away with it."

Her smile was thin. "Now that you're 'wanted,' I can do it, don't you think?" she said conversationally. "All I have to do is pull the trigger and claim trespass."

"And then what?"

"You tell me."

I hadn't quite worked the whole story out, but I knew enough to make a flying guess. Why you have chats with killers in circumstances like these is because you hope against hope you can (1) talk them out of it, (2) stall until help arrives, or (3) enjoy a few more moments of this precious commodity we call life, which consists (in large part) of breathing in and out. Hard to do with your lungs blown out your back.

"Well," said I, hoping to make a short story long, "I figure once your daddy dies and you unload this place, you'll take the proceeds, add them to the profits from the forty-two thou you stole, and sail off into the sunset. Possibly with Dwight Shales, or so you hope."

"And why not?"

"Why not, indeed? Sounds like a great plan. Does he know about it yet?"

"He will," she said.

"What makes you think he'll agree?"

"Why wouldn't he? He's free now. And I will be, too, as soon as Pop dies."

"And you think that constitutes a relationship?" I said, astonished.

"What do you know about relationships?"

"Hey, I've been married twice. That's more than you can say."

"You're divorced. You don't know dick."

I had to shrug at that.

"I bet Jean was sorry she confided in you."

"Very. At the end, she put up quite a fight."

"But you won."

"I had to. I couldn't have her ruining Dwight's life."

"Assuming it was his," I said.

"The babe? Of course it was."

"Oh great. No problem, then. You're completely justified," I said. "Does he know how much you've done for him?"

"That's our little secret. Yours and mine."

"How did you know where Shana would be Wednesday night?"

"Simple. I followed her."

"But why kill the woman?"

"Same reason I'm going to kill you. For screwing Dwight."

"She was going up there to meet Joe Dunne," I said. "Neither one of us screwed Dwight."

"Bullshit!"

"It's not bullshit. He's a nice enough guy, but he's not my type. He told me himself he and Shana were just friends. It was strictly platonic. They hadn't even screwed once!"

"You liar. You think I don't know what's been going on? You sashay into town and start coming, on to him, riding around in his car, having cozy dinners…"

"Ann, we were talking. That's all it was."

"Nobody's going to get in my way, Kinsey. Not after all I've been through. I've worked too hard and waited too long. I've sacrificed my entire adult life, and you're not going to spoil things now that I'm almost free."

"Well, listen, Ann… if I may say so, you're as crazy as a bug. No ofFense, but you are looney-tunes, completely cuckoo-nuts." I was just making mouth noises while I thought about my gun. My little Davis was still in the holster tucked up against my left breast. What I wanted to do was take it out and plug her right between the eyes-or someplace fatal. But here's the way I figured it. By the time I reached up under my turtleneck, snatched the gun out, pointed it, and fired, that shotgun of hers would have taken off my face. And how was I going to get the gun, feign a heart attack? I didn't think she'd fall for it. My eyes had adjusted to the dark, and since I could see her perfectly, I had to guess she could see me just as well.

"Mind if I turn off the penlight? I hate to use up the batteries," I said. The beam was pointed at the ceiling, and my arms were getting tired. Probably hers, too. A shotgun like that weighs a good seven pounds-not easy to hold steady, even if you're used to lifting weights.

"Just stay where you are and don't move."

"Wow, that's just what Elva said."

Ann reached over and turned on the bedside lamp. She looked worse in the light. She had a mean face, I could see that now. The slightly receding chin made her look like a rat. The shotgun was a twelve-gauge, over-and-under, and she seemed to know which end did the hurt.

Dimly, I became aware of a shuffling sound in the hall. Royce. When had he come upstairs? "Ann? Aw, Annie, I found some pictures of your mother I thought you'd like. Can I come in?"

I saw her eyes flick toward the door. "I'll be down in a minute, Pop. We can look at them then."

Too late. He had pushed the door open, peering in. He had a photograph album in his arms, and his face held such innocence. His eyes seemed very blue. His lashes were sparse, still wet from his tears, his nose red. Gone was the gruffness, the arrogance, the dominance. His illness had made him frail, and Ori's death had knocked him to his knees, but here he came again, an old man full of hope. "Mrs. Maude and Mrs. Emma are looking for you to say good night."

"I'm busy right now. Will you take care of it?"

He caught sight of me. He must have wondered what I was doing with my hands in the air. His attention strayed to the shotgun Ann held at shoulder height. I thought he was going to turn and shuffle out again. He hesitated, uncertain what to do next.

I said, "Hello, Royce. Guess who killed Jean Timberlake?"

He glanced at me and then looked away. "Well." His gaze slid over to Ann as if she might deny the accusation. She got up from the bed and reached behind him for the door.

"Go on downstairs, Pop. I have something to do and then I'll be down."

He seemed confused. "You're not going to hurt her."

"No, of course not," she said.

"She's going to shoot my ass!" I said.

His gaze strayed back to hers, looking for reassurance.

"What do you think she's doing with that shotgun? She's going to kill me dead and then claim trespass. She told me so."

"Pop, I caught her going through my closet. The cops are after her. She's in cahoots with Bailey, trying to help him get away."

"Oh, don't be a silly. Why would I do that?"

"Bailey?" Royce said. It was the first time tonight I'd seen comprehension in his eyes.

"Royce, I've got proof he's innocent. Ann's the one who killed Jean-"

"You liar! Ann cut in. "The two of you are trying to take Pop for everything he's worth."

God, I couldn't believe this. Ann and I were squabbling like little kids, each of us trying to persuade Royce to be on our side. "Did too." "Did not." "Did too."

Royce put a trembling finger to his lips. "If she's got proof, maybe we should hear what it is," he said, talking almost to himself. "Don't you think so, Annie? If she can prove Bailey's innocent?"

I could see the rage begin to stir at the mention of his name. I was worried she would shoot and argue with her daddy afterward. The same thought apparently occurred to him. He reached for the shotgun. "Put it down, baby."

Abruptly, she backed away. "DON'T TOUCH ME!"

I could feel my heart start to thud, afraid he'd yield. Instead, he seemed to focus, gathering his strength.

"What are you doing, Ann? You can't do that."

"Go on. Get out of here."

"I want to hear what Kinsey has to say." "Just do what I tell you and get the hell out!"

He clamped a hand on the barrel. "Give me that before you hurt someone."

"No!" Ann snatched it out of his reach. Royce lunged, grabbing it. The two of them struggled for possession of the shotgun. I was immobilized, my attention fixed on the big black 8 of the two barrels that pointed first at me, then the floor, ceiling, weaving through the air. Royce should have been the stronger, but illness had sapped him and Ann's rage gave her the edge. Royce jerked the gun by the stock.

Fire spurted from the barrel, and the blast filled the room with powder smell. The shotgun thumped to the floor as Ann screamed.

She was looking down in disbelief. Most of her right foot had been blown away. All that was left was a torn stump of raw meat. I could feel heat rip through me as though the sensation were mine. I turned away, repelled.

The pain must have bee; excruciating, blood pumping out. What color she had left drained from her face. She sank to the floor, speechless, her body rocking as she clutched herself. Her cries dropped to a low, relentless pitch.

Royce backed away from her, his voice feeble with regret. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do that. I tried to help."

I could hear people pounding up the stairs: Bert, Mrs. Maude, a young deputy I'd never seen. Another kid. Wait until he got a load of this.

"Get an ambulance!" I yelled. I was pulling a pillowcase off the bed, wadding it against her mangled foot, trying to stanch the blood spewing everywhere. The deputy fumbled with his walkie-talkie while Mrs. Maude babbled, wringing her hands. Mrs. Emma had pushed into the room behind her, and she began to shriek when she saw what was going on. Maxine and Bert were both white-faced, holding on to each other. Belatedly, the deputy herded all of them into the corridor and closed the door again. Even through the wall I could hear Mrs. Emma's shrill cries.

Ann was lying on her back by then, one arm flung across her face. Royce clung to her right hand, rocking back and forth. She was weeping like a five-year-old. "You were never there for me… you were never there…"

I thought about my papa. I was five when he left me… five when he went away. An image came to me, a memory repressed for years. In the car, just after the wreck, when I was trapped in the backseat, wedged in tight, with the sound of my mother's weeping going on and on and on, I had reached around the edge of the front seat, where I found my father's hand, unresisting, passive, and soft. I tucked my fingers around his, not understanding he was dead, simply thinking everything would be all right as long as I had him. When had it dawned on me that he was gone for good? When had it dawned on Ann that Royce was never going to come through? And what of Jean Timberlake? None of us had survived the wounds our fathers inflicted all those years ago. Did he love us? How would we ever know? He was gone and he'd never again be what he was to us in all his haunting perfection. If love is what injures us, how can we heal?