Such a Good Girl and Other Crime Stories

1

Matt Shea always smiled when he walked into the house he’d bought his mother. It was a perfectly fine little house, a standard development little house, central air, attached garage, core appliances including self-cleaning oven and ice-making machine in the fridge.

But she’d turned it into a church. And the thing was, she wasn’t of that generation. You know, you see them at mass all the time, those generations of Irish and Czech and Hispanic women for whom it was common to turn houses into shrines or grottos. Framed religious pictures everywhere. Palm drooping from behind the pictures. Crucifixes large and small throughout the house. Three or four Bibles scattered around. Holy cards on end tables. Even, on certain occasions, the scent of incense.

Incense, Matt associated with covering up the smell of grass in his college dorm room.

The funny thing was, his mother had been a regular normal human being all the time he was growing up. There was even the family suspicion that she’d had an affair or two back in the seventies when it seemed everybody was having affairs. She walked around in halter tops and Levi cut-offs. She liked Clint Eastwood movies. She and his father put away a goodly amount of wine most weekends, and could frequently be heard banging around on their bed upstairs while he and Don were downstairs watching sci-fi on the tube.

But then his father got a brain tumor, forty-one years old and a fucking brain tumor, and his death was so agonizing, so prolonged that Cassie just flipped out. Couldn’t deal with it. Was drunk a lot. Threw up a lot. Stayed in bed and slept a lot. Anything to escape the fact that her beloved husband — and even if she had had those affairs, it was clear that she loved Rick above all others — was dying. And then he was dead and she went even more to shit, it was her college-age boys carrying her instead of the other way around, and then one day, they were never sure why, she got religion, maybe some minister she saw on TV or something, and started wearing dowdy dresses and telling the boys to watch their language and admonishing them not to practice “free love” or to use drugs. She was living in the old house at the time, the big Tudor that had been lawyer Rick’s pride-and-joy, but it was too much house as the realtors liked to say, and so she sold it and put the profits in the hands of stockbroker Matt, who saw to it that she’d never have to worry about money. This being the end of the eighties, Matt was hauling ass financially, making so much in fact that he could afford to make the grand gesture of setting Mom up in her own little tract house.

The house that was now a religious shrine.

The house Matt stood in now, warmed by late afternoon May sunlight.

His mom was on the couch. She’d aged, many long years past her halter and cut-offs stage. She wore a faded house-dress, prim little white anklets, and brown — if-you-could-believe-it — oxfords. She’d gone all the way, mom, fifty-one years old, a child of the upper middle-class, now looking like a cleaning woman in somewhat ill health.

“Do you ever watch Channel 28?” she said.

His smile. “You always ask me that, Mom.”

“I just think Sandy and you and the boys should make a point of watching it. You know, as a family.” Channel 28 was the religious channel.

“We’re pretty busy.”

“You should never be too busy for God.”

And just how are you supposed to respond to that?

“You’re right, Mom,” he said, “we should never be too busy for God.”

“I just wish Sandy was more religious.”

Another running battle. “She’s religious in her way, Mom. She really is.”

“She doesn’t go to church.”

“That doesn’t mean she’s not religious.”

“She doesn’t take the boys to mass. And you don’t either.”

“Sandy’s Jewish, mom. If she attended any kind of services, she’d go to synagogue, not to mass.”

“Then why doesn’t she go to synagogue? There’s nothing wrong with being Jewish.” Mom’s first major love affair had been with a Jewish kid.

“I’ll talk to her about it.”

“People should go to church. If they’re truly good people, I mean.” How could the college girl who’d spent many, many long hours smoking dope and listening to Led Zeppelin possibly have turned out this way?

“I brought you something,” he said. He reached in the suit coat pocket of his gray Armani and brought forth a small white jeweler’s box. “I got your necklace fixed.”

For her thirty-fifth birthday, Dad had given Mom a beautiful old chain necklace. But it had gotten broken and Mom had never gotten around to getting it fixed. She held it now, smiling. “I can still feel your father putting this on my neck. It was the first time he’d ever been able to afford anything really nice. He had such big fingers.”

“I thought you’d like it.” He leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. She was getting older, the texture and feel of her flesh was changing, and it startled him a moment. She was getting older, and just now that realization scared and saddened him. “Say, would you let me use your bathroom if I gave you a dollar?”

This was an old gag between the two of them. “Dollar-and a-half.”

“Dollar-and-a-half it is,” he said. Then, as he started back toward the bathroom, “You hear from Jim lately?”

“Just the other day.”

“How’s he doing?”

“He says he likes his new job. I just hope he can last at this one.”

Matt and Jim Shea were as different as brothers could be. Matt, handsome, self-confident, family man. Jim, pale, nervous, luckless. He’d worked sales in the computer department of a number of different local department stores. He was running out of stores. He always got fired and for reasons that were at best vague. He always seemed vaguely relieved, too. He didn’t mind living in his drab little apartment on unemployment insurance. Matt was always suggesting motivational speakers Jim go see but Jim always just grinned and shook his head. Though Matt thought of himself as a major player in the world of the local establishment, Jim saw him as a just one more Mercedes-driving Nazi. Jim called a lot of people Nazis.

Matt came back after a few minutes. He’d freshened up. He had a meeting at the club with some potential investors for a small shopping mall he was trying to develop. Time for a little hairspray, a little breath spray, a few eyedrops to take the red out.

Mom was still holding the necklace when he came back. “Say hi to that brother of mine.”

“I just wish you two boys got together more often.”

“Oh, that’ll happen as we get older, Mom. I’m sure it will.”

“Why don’t you take that box of paperbacks in the closet to Sandy? They’re Harlequins. She reads almost as much as I do.”

He smiled. “You two and your Harlequins.” He said it not with contempt but with a kind of awe. He had, in his life, finished reading exactly two novels, The Great Gatsby and Ethan Frome. Gatsby he liked — even though the narrator sounded sort of fruity — because of the love story, which he had to admit made him tear up a time or two, him having had a terrible love affair once himself; and Frome he liked simply because it was short and because of the irony of the ending. Every other novel he’d “read” had come in the yellow-and-black form of Cliff Notes. He’d been a 4-point student. He just preferred non-fiction was all. He got the box from the closet, kissed his mom once again as she opened the front door for him, and was then out the door.

He liked the way the new Mercedes four-door sedan stood so proudly in Mom’s driveway. He liked the way the men and women driving home from work to their little housing development here glanced at it. Envy. That, not imitation, was the sincerest form of flattery. Envy. I want what you have. He couldn’t think of a higher accolade, and hell, he’d be the first to admit he felt it, too, the way Giff McBride, ass-bandit of all ass-bandits out at the club, wheeled around in that little Brit classic car of his, Austin-Healy it was called, wheeled around and got 20 % of the married women at the club to spend time with him, not to mention an even higher percentage of the waitresses, even, it was rumored, a few of the college gals who worked there during the summers. College gals, sleek and slender and sun-brown. Now that was something to really envy, Giff McBride being in his early fifties.

He opened the trunk and set the box of romances inside. He had to be careful not to knock over the sloshing full red can of gasoline. It had already spilled some on the newspaper it rested on. He looked at the headline. Talk about irony.

He took another look at the red gas can. It looked so harmless most of the time sitting in garages to run power mowers and clean up paint spills.

But there were other uses for it, too. Yes, indeed.

2

They didn’t like me much and I guess I didn’t blame them. Nobody likes “experts” brought in from the outside to tell you that you’re doing a lousy job.

There were four of them, detectives, two male, two female, one black, one Hispanic. They sat at a plain table in a plain room and listened to me as long as they could stand. Then their eyes would look out the window that displayed the downtown across the narrow river and they had to be thinking longing thoughts about this gentle and colorful Iowa autumn afternoon. Football weather. They could be raking leaves, playing touch football with their kids, washing the new car, or sitting in a cop bar talking about the recent union meeting about the unpaid overtime hassle with the city council.

Instead, like school children being punished, they had to sit here, a narrow room painted city-sanctioned green, listening to me play at being a psychological profiler and private investigator for a large law-firm.

While they had their own individual cases, Captain Davidson, who’d introduced me, had put them all on the arson case, which was why I was here. The arsonist had burned his third dance club to the ground three nights ago. The first fire, two people had been killed, trampled in the melee. The second fire, nobody had died, but a number of people were in the hospital. The third fire, there’d been one more fatality, a just-divorced suburban housewife out celebrating with her girl friends. An upscale downtown dance club; a gay dance club; a black dance club. No pattern.

I said, “One thing distinguishes the arsonist from other serial murderers. The typical serial killer wants direct contact with his victims. So direct that sometimes he’ll reach in and take out a vital organ with his bare hands. He’ll also photograph or videotape what he’s done. He wants to remember the moment. He’ll masturbate to it later. The arsonist, however, wants the impersonality of setting a building on fire and standing back and watching what happens. A lot of the time, he’ll hide across the street so he can masturbate while watching the fire. Totally impersonal. Except for the fluid he uses to ignite the fire, he never gets his hands dirty as it were, never faces the victims. There’s an interesting note here. When you look into the background of the average serial killer, you see a dysfunctional boyhood often marked by cruelty to animals. You find that with serial arsonists, too. But with them you have to add bed-wetting. We don’t know why this is but from the hundreds if not thousands of cases we’ve catalogued, we’ve seen it play out time and time again.”

Detective Gomez raised her hand. “Who does this arsonist think he’s killing when he sets these fires?”

“Good question,” I said. “I just wish I had a good answer. As we know, many if not most male serial killers have real relationship problems with females. Even killing their victims isn’t enough. They’ll defile the corpses — make hideous slashes and cuts in the faces, cut off breasts, mutilate the genitals. So while we don’t know which female exactly the serial killer is destroying — a girl he is attracted to, his mother, maybe even his sister — we do know that in general he has a real problem with women.

“This particular arsonist, though, we just don’t know. Even in the male gay bar there were a few dozen women. But that still doesn’t tell us a lot. Based on what we know generally, we know he’s angry, we know he wants to kill people, and we know that in all likelihood, he’ll do this again.”

Detective Henderson, who looked like the poster-boy for clean-cut WASP detectives everywhere, said, “I take it he’s shy and withdrawn.”

“That’s probably right. Every profile I’ve ever seen on this kind of arsonist, he doesn’t have many social skills and he’s frequently unnoticed, even though he may hang around a lot. Almost invisible in some ways.”

They were paying attention now that the afternoon had gotten interactive. I should’ve done this earlier.

Detective Wimmers, the black man, said, “Are there any kinds of jobs this arsonist would be attracted to?”

“No job category, if that’s what you mean. But they’re likely to be low-level, relatively unsuccessful, whatever line they take up. These aren’t aggressive people. Not usually, anyway.”

Detective Holden, a red-haired, bulky man in shirtsleeves, loose tie, and an air of belligerence, said, “What if we waste our time looking for somebody like this and it turns out he isn’t anything like this at all?”

“Then he can sue the city,” I said. Nobody laughed. “This is isn’t an exact science. I make mistakes, no doubt about it. But generally profiling is helpful. And I think it’ll be helpful to you here. Any questions?”

There weren’t, of course. They just wanted out of here. All but one of them, anyway. Detective Wimmers, the black man. “Don’t pay any attention to them.”

I smiled. “Kind of hard not to. They always this pleasant?”

“They just don’t like outsiders.” He was tall, tending to beef, with a large, imposing face and a gold-toothed smile. With his red regimental-striped tie and herringbone slacks and polished black loafers with the tassles, he looked more lawyer than cop. Except lawyers don’t wear guns and badges on their belts. He pinched some skin on the thick black arm shooting from his short-sleeved white shirt. “I bring my sorry black ass in here six years ago — first black detective this city ever had — and you should’ve heard ’em, man. Always whisperin’ and jokin’ and pokin’ each other in the ribs. I coulda written all their jokes myself. Lots of watermelon and pork chops in the jokes, you know what I’m saying? They’d even leave notes in my locker. Death To Niggers. Shit like that.”

“I’m sorry.” And I was. That had to be a special hatred, to be singled out and despised that way.

“My wife and kids, they’d cry and beg me to quit. But I wouldn’t, ’cause I just wanted to piss these guys off. Stay in their faces. You know what I mean? I just wore ’em down. I didn’t go to the civil rights board. I didn’t complain to the police review board. I just stayed in their faces. And one by one, they started bein’ nice to me. The first guy, when he was nice, they started givin’ him more shit than they gave me. But one by one, we started bein’ friendly. And now they pretty much accept me. Our wives and kids get together. And we bowl and stuff after work. So it’s pretty good here, now. And the young black cops comin’ up say they aren’t havin’ much trouble at all, especially with the cops their own age.”

“I guess I’ll have to take your word for it, that these are really swell people.”

He grinned with his gold tooth. “I guess they weren’t real friendly, Mr. Payne. I’m sorry. Maybe if you could spend a little more time with ’em—”

He held up a manila envelope.

“What’ve you got?” I said.

“Photos from the crime scene. I was going over them this morning and I found something. Captain Davidson said you were going to be here the next few days consulting on the case so I thought you might want to ride along with me this afternoon. I’ll tell you about it on the way.”

“Fine.”

3

Wimmers handed me a manila folder while we sat at a traffic light. He was a fast, savvy and aggressive driver. At one point he’d grinned and said, “You want to wear a crash helmet, fine with me.”

I’d said, “And I want to make sure my insurance is paid up.”

“I grew up in Chicago. My old man was a cabbie. He taught me how to drive.”

I’d spent three years working out of the Chicago FBI bureau — before going private as a profiler and investigator— so he didn’t need to say any more.

Just as the traffic light changed, I said, “Same guy.”

“Same guy at all three fires. Just standing around watching things.”

We were off. Wimmers wanted to be in the right-hand lane so we could get on the Interstate that cut through the city. God help anybody in his way.

“How many people you killed in your lifetime?” I said.

“Killed? You kidding, Payne? Hell, I’ve never even drawn my gun.”

“Not with your gun. Your car. You didn’t even notice that you ran over a couple of nuns back there.”

“Yeah?” he smiled. “Serves them right for wearing black. They should wear brighter colors.”

I decided to give up on my subtle drive-safely messages.

He said, “I know who the guy is.”

“In the pictures?”

“Yeah. Matt Shea. Country club set. Runs his own brokerage. Lots of money, lots of clout. Reporter on the Gazette I know happened to notice Shea when he was filing the photos. He sent them over to me.”

“Maybe Shea just likes to look at fires.”

“Maybe. But what’s he doing out so late, pillar of the community, family man, all that happy horseshit? The earliest any of those fires were set was 1:00 A.M.”

“Good point. So where we going?”

“His brokerage.”

“God, can it really be this easy?”

“Seems wrong, don’t it?” he said.

“You see a guy in some photos—”

“—and you drive over to where he works—”

“—and you ask him some questions and—”

“—case is closed. And you got your man.”

“I’ve never even heard of it happening like this.”

“Well,” he said, wheeling the police car into the parking lot of a new six-story steel-and-glass building, “there’s always a first time.”

The decor was designed to do one thing: intimidate you with its quiet good taste, right down to the quiet, gold-framed Rembrandt reproductions and the quiet DeBussy on the office music system. The receptionist complemented her setting perfectly, lovely in a slightly fussy and disapproving way, the only hint of earthiness or carnality found in the oddly erotic sag of her bottom inside the discreet gray Armani upscale fifty-year-olds were wearing this year.

Matt Shea did not fit quite so well into his hallowed surroundings. There was a rough-neck quality to his movements that no high-tone suit, no $125 haircut, no $25 manicure could quite disguise. It wasn’t a class thing, it was a testosterone thing. He’d look rough-neck in a tutu.

He said, “Sit down, sit down.”

Old-firm law school office was the motif in this particular room, cherry wood wainscoting, built-in bookcases packed with tomes bound in leather for theatrical effect. The small fireplace snapped and popped with autumnal balm, the wood smell sweet and melancholy.

“Police, huh?” Shea said. “Wow, now this is a surprise.” Despite his linebacker size and his big-man poise, he sounded nervous.

I didn’t like him in the way you abruptly do or don’t like somebody you’ve just met. He was too much obvious cunning and too much obvious after-shave. The perpetual overachiever who was not without a certain frantic sweaty sadness.

After we were all seated, he said, “So how can I help you?”

“Those fires,” Wimmers said. He was the man here.

“Fires?”

“Dance club fires?”

“The dance club fires in the papers.”

“Right.”

He looked at me and shrugged his shoulders and smiled his practiced cunning smile. “Hey, I’m a family man.” He winked at Wimmers and smiled. “You can ask my rabbi.” He wasn’t, of course, Jewish. He was just a lounge act. “I don’t even go into places like those.”

Wimmers carefully set the manila envelope on the desk and pushed it across to Shea. “How about looking inside?”

The smile again. He couldn’t sustain it for much longer than two seconds. “You going to be reading me my rights or something?”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d just look inside the envelope, Mr. Shea.”

“Sure. Be glad to.”

He looked inside and then pulled the photos out one at a time. When he’d seen all three, he said, “Wow. I can see why you wanted to talk to me.” He held his arms up in the air. He was still doing stand-up. “I’ll come along peacefully, officer, sir.”

“This isn’t funny, Mr. Shea. Two people died in those fires. Another one is clinging to life.”

“I was coming home. Just saw the fire trucks and stopped by.”

“I see. All three times?”

“Working late. Honest. As innocent as that.”

“The fires took place in different parts of the city, Mr. Shea. You take different ways home every night?”

“Fuck.” Shea looked grim. He shook his head, as if chiding himself. The way you do when you’ve done something really dumb.

“Pardon me?”

“I said fuck,” Shea snapped. “I take it you’ve heard the word before.”

Ugly, awkward silence. Shea stared down at the two big fists he’d planted on his desk. “I didn’t set those fires,” he said after a while.

“I didn’t say you did.”

“No? You just came out here to show me these three photos but not to make any accusations?”

“I’m trying to figure out who did set the fires. You being there doesn’t necessarily means it was you.”

“It doesn’t, huh?”

“No. But it may mean that you know something I should maybe know.”

Shea looked at me. Fellow member of the white race. “You probably think I’m one of those candy-asses.”

“Which candy-asses would those be, Mr. Shea?”

“You know. Inherited wealth. The right schools. You know something? I grew up on the west side of this city — and in those days, you told people you were from the west side, they started treating you just like you were some inferior species.” He looked back at Wimmers. “Something you’re probably familiar with, Detective Wimmers.”

Wimmers smiled sadly. “I’ve heard rumors about some human beings treating other human beings that way.”

“You know damned well what I’m talking about. Well, that’s just how it was when you were from the west side. No Choate. No Wharton School of Business. That’s where my two best friends at the club went — Choate first then Wharton. But not me. I went to the community college here before I could afford the University in Iowa City. I bussed dishes there at the frat houses. All the rich fraternity boys.” To me, he said, “I’ve worked for every dime. Every dime. And now my pathetic fucking brother goes and spoils it.”

“Your brother?” Wimmers said.

“Yes, my brother,” Shea said sadly. “Who do you think’s been setting those fires?”

4

The middle of a vast, calm sea on a sun-golden day on a sun-golden ship. The destination was Atlantis or some other fabled land where they would know peace and security and love for the rest of their lives, where their children would prosper, and their children’s children, and all would meet again in the sunny, leafy paradise that lies just beyond death.

The sound of a distant siren woke Jim Shea.

The dream vanished. The perfect dream.

Sway and jerk of moored boat. Stink of river water. Voices up on the dock. At day’s end everybody with a houseboat here descended on this place. One of the last few warm days before harsh prairie winter. Most of them didn’t even take their boats out. Just hauled out the aluminum tube chairs and sat there on Ellis landing listening to the Cubbies on the radio and laughing well into the work night. It was a pretty democratic place, the houseboat marina. You had lawyers talking with guys who worked on the line at Rockwell, doctors talking to guys who sold electronics stuff at Best Buys.

The boat belonged to Ella. It’d been her Dad’s. She’d inherited it when he died a few years back. Jim kept the curtains closed. They had as little to do with their neighbors as possible. Couple months back a few of the kids who belonged to a houseboat down the way laughed at Ella. Saw her face and laughed at her. She stayed in the houseboat bed for four days. Kept the place totally dark. Wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t even talk. Just kept herself unconscious with sleeping pills. Finally, he forced her to take a shower and eat the oatmeal and toast and strawberry jam he’d fixed for her. She couldn’t take it when people laughed at her. Unlike Jim, Ella had never had any practice at being ugly, at being the outsider. Indeed, she’d always been the beauty. Cheerleader. Homecoming queen at Regis. Prime U of Iowa heartbreaker. Two rich husbands, both of whom had begged her to stay. And then a year-and-a-half ago when her rich friend (and possible husband #3) had been all coked up and accidentally smashed his big-ass Caddy convertible into a bridge abutment north of Iowa City, her life changed. How it changed. He’d died instantly. The seat belt had saved her life but hadn’t done anything for her face. She’d gone through the windshield. Nearly a thousand stitches in her head and face. You ever see anybody with a thousand stitches in her head and face? We’re talking your basic Frankenstein’s monster here. The face now a series of slightly puffy sewn pockets, angled scars, red remnants of stitching. Snickers from little kids. Gasps from adults. She stayed in bed a lot. A lot. They were supposed to fly to Houston next month — there was a plastic surgeon there who’d developed some new techniques he thought might possible help her — but in the meantime Jim was still trying to get her to resume something like a normal life.

You’re beautiful to me, Ella. That’s all that matters.

You know, I don’t even notice the scars any more, Ella. I really don’t.

Don’t worry, Ella. I’m paying them back. Every one of them.

These were the things he said to her over and over here in the course of their dark houseboat days.

He lived for that gentle drifting time after they made love and just held each other. Complete peace. The golden ship on the ancient sea, drifting toward Atlantis, just the two of them.

He wanted to be thinking of Atlantis right now — even awake he could sometimes conjure up that ship and that sea — but instead all he could think of was the missing gas can and that stack of Cedar Rapids Gazettes he’d kept about the fires he’d set. Somebody had gotten into the trunk of his car and taken them. He wondered who. He wondered why.

Four days ago, it had been. Opened the trunk to put some groceries in and — gone. He hadn’t told Ella, of course. She didn’t need any more grief. It was up to him to find out what was going on here. But how to start? Who to suspect?

He wanted to be one of them, one of the children running along the dock outside, laughing and having a good time. He wanted that for Ella, too. God, if only this Houston surgeon could do what he said he could do.

He eased himself off the bed, not wanting to wake her. He had a lot to do tonight. Time to visit the fourth and final dance club. Now, he’d have to buy a new can and fill it with gasoline. He’d also have to scope the place out. There were sure to be extra cops posted around clubs these days. He might even have to wait a few days until the story faded from the headlines. He’d just have to see.

5

Matt, Jim’s older brother said, “It was pretty funny to us — to me and Mom and Dad, I mean — for a while anyway. We lived in this real bad part of town and this really beautiful little girl named Ella Casey moved in down the street and Jim — he and Ella were both in sixth grade at the time — it changed his whole life. He was obsessed with her right from the start. And he didn’t care who knew it, either. I mean, you know how boys don’t like you to know that they’ve got a crush on somebody? He’d come right out and tell you. I can still hear him sitting in the kitchen with Mom after school, talking about all his plans for when he and Ella got married. Mom tried to help him with it — tried to make him see that she was just too, you know, beautiful for him, I mean, Jim isn’t a handsome guy, I got the looks and he got the brains our Dad always said — but he didn’t listen. He got this paper route and he spent all the money he earned from it on Ella. He was always buying her stuff. She’d take the stuff but she’d never go to a movie with him or go for a walk with him or anything. She was so beautiful, she’s in ninth grade and she’s got senior boys literally fighting over her. She was the fucking trophy, man. She was the trophy. And Jim was always there for her. Always. She’d invite him over when she was depressed or didn’t know which boyfriend to choose or had some errand she needed run. And, man, he’d do whatever she wanted. He was like her shrink and her servant rolled into one. We thought maybe once he got out of high school, maybe one of them would go away to college. But Jim stayed here and went to the community college and she stayed in town and married this rich kid two days after she got out of high school. Eloped, because the kid’s parents were against it. (Grinning) They were part of the Cedar Rapids jet set, you know what I’m saying? and they just didn’t want their very special little boy laying it to white trash every night. All the time they were married, poor Jim was her confidante. She was always calling him, crying and bitching about how unhappy she was. He got so caught up in her problems, he dropped out of school. He lived at home so all he’d have to have was a part-time job. He wanted to be there when Ella needed him. Finally, Ella couldn’t handle the rich boy’s family any more, so she divorced him and got a very nice settlement out of it.

“That’s when she first started hitting the bars and the clubs. She’d never really done that before. Hadn’t had to. But she was mid-twenties now and starting to slip, looks-wise, just a little. Still very, very sexy, but not the new kid on the block any more, either. She becomes the queen of the local clubs. Guys literally line up along the bar to talk to her. Only the best clubs, only the best guys, young lawyers and young docs and young investment bankers, guys like that.

“She ends up finding hubby number two in a club. Advertising guy who’d just sold his agency to a bigger shop out of Chicago. Plenty of cash and recently divorced. Mid-forties. Real fading ass-bandit type. But with pretensions. Guys like him used to get involved in charities so they could show everybody how cool they were. This decade, they dabble in the so-called arts. Local art museum board. Symphony board. Reading endowments for the underprivileged. Previous wife had been big in the Junior League so he’s connected that way, too. And our little Ella is really taken in by all this. She thinks it’s very sophisticated and elegant and all. She asks Jim — she’s told her husband that Jim is gay, you know how a lot of women have male gay friends, and this fits right in with hubby’s image of himself, the local New Yorker-type is how he sees himself, tells him Jim’s gay even though he’s not because this is the easiest way to explain the friendship — she asks Jim to start giving her some background on all the great painters and composers and like that. And he does, of course. And that’s how things go for a few years until she starts having this thing with this college kid who buses dishes out at the club. Everybody in the club knows this is happening except her husband. She’s one of those women who doesn’t hit thirty well. The rich ones head to the plastic surgeons; the poor ones just have affairs. Ella does both. And then the new husband finds out and dumps her. He’s cheated on every woman he’s ever known but the one time he’s the cheatee, his ego absolutely can’t handle it. He gives her a lot of money on the condition that she gets out of his life immediately, which she does. But she’s already sick of the college boy, even though he’s real serious about her.

“She’s kind of in a panic, actually. Needs reassurance. This is the first time she ever lets Jim sleep with her. He told me about it, said she was having her period and everything, but he didn’t care, even had oral sex with her, told her he wanted their blood to ‘commingle.’ Of course, he had to explain to her what ‘commingle’ meant but that was all right because she said it was ‘beautiful.’ She went back to the clubs. Of course, by this time, there’s a whole new raft of beauties younger than she is. She’s still got men lined up along the bar but the lines aren’t quite as long as they once were. She’s thirty-one now. And there’s one thing she can never be again — and that’s new. And that’s what clubs like these always want. The new band. The new girl. The new drink. You know what I’m saying?

“Then she does the dumbest thing she’s ever done in her life, she falls in love with this bartender whose putting it to every babe in the place. He’s got lines of women around the block, including all the newest and the hottest. And she falls in love with him. He goes out with her a few times — hammers her like she’s never been hammered in her life — but then he dumps her; She’s not used to being treated like this. In her life, it’s supposed to be the other way around. She panics. Getting dumped undermines her whole life. She has money, a nice house, she can have all the plastic surgery she wants— but she knows that her time has passed as babe-of-the-moment.

“She starts stalking the bartender. She calls him night and day, she e-mails him, sends him flowers and candy, even gives him a car — a frigging Firebird, if you can believe it — and two or three times, she breaks into his apartment while he’s hammering some other babe in his bedroom. One night, he’s so frustrated, he punches her, gives her a black eye. Another night, she literally attacks his date in this restaurant. Throws her down on the floor and starts kicking her like some home boy would. And the coup de grace. She hides in his car, the car she bought him and he was asshole enough to accept, and at gunpoint forces him to take her for a long drive. She is very, very drunk. They drive around and around and she tells him all these plans she’s got for when they get married. The first thing she wants with him, she says, is children. One boy, one girl. She’s got access to enough cash to set him up in his own bar. An upscale one. No more club bullshit working for bosses who deal coke out their back door. And all of a sudden, he starts laughing at her. Which is not a good idea, somebody has a gun on you the way she does. By this time, they’re up in the red clay cliffs. And she grabs the wheel from him and stomps her foot on his on the gas pedal and they go shooting right off the cliff. And we’re talking a forty foot fall to the road below. He dies, her face is totally destroyed.

“Six, seven plastic surgeries in three years and there’s not much improvement. The last one, though, she kind of convinces herself that she’s looking better. And that’s when she starts going back to the club scene. And it’s a catastrophe. I only saw her once but she looked like a monster in a bad sci-fi flick. I mean, a $1.98 monster. But this monster is for real. People are so repelled by her, they don’t even laugh at first (she tells Jim all this later on), they just shy back from her like she’s got something contagious. Or she’s like an omen that’s going to bring them bad luck or something. Anyway, every place she goes, they just stare at her. The waitresses come over and they kind of smirk at her. And then people start getting mean. All the hotshots start asking her to dance. And some chick comes up and asks her what kind of makeup she’s wearing. Not even the people she used to think of as friends want anything to do with her. She was a pretty ruthless little bitch when she was young and beautiful, and they’re not all that sad to see her cut up this way. And every night, she goes up to her nice fancy lonely house and tells all this to Jim, who is by this time sort of her live-in shrink. And Jim is so pissed by what she’s telling him — how she was treated in these clubs — that he starts setting the places on fire, the clubs I mean. For her, that’s why he’s doing it. For her. Because he wants her to know how much he loves her, how much he’s willing to protect her. Because he knows that she’ll marry him now. Ever since he was a kid, that was all he wanted. For her to marry him. And now it’s finally going to happen.”

6

Wind rattled the warped wood-framed windows. The linoleum was so old it was worn to floor in several places. The one big room smelled of cigarettes and Aqua Velva and whiskey, and a bathroom smelled of hair tonic and toilet bowl cleaner. There were doilies on the ragged armchair and the wobbly end tables and even on top of the bulky table model TV that dated from the sixties. The windows were so dirty you could barely see outside. If you listened carefully, you could hear the spectral echoes of all the lonely radio music that had been played in this shabby for-rent room down the decades, Bing Crosby in the Thirties and Frank Sinatra in the Forties and Elvis in The Fifties, and God only knew what else since then. A lot of animals crawl away to die in hidden shadowy places; this was a hidden shadowy place for humans.

“It’s only $150 a month is why he lives here,” Matt Shea said.

“They should pay him,” I said.

“Yeah, it is pretty grim.”

We’d spent three hours trying to find he and Ella. No luck. The times we’d called the landlady, she’d said he wasn’t home. I finally said we should check out his apartment anyway. Shea agreed and here we were.

“We need to go to the police,” I said.

“I know.” He made a sour face. “This gets out, I’m going to have a hell of a time holding on to some of my clients. You don’t want your lawyer having a god damned whacko for a brother.”

He didn’t seem unduly concerned about the people who’d died, or what fate awaited his brother.

He said, as if reading my mind, “I know I sound pretty selfish. But I came from the west side. I just don’t want to see it all go to hell.”

I started looking through the faded bureau. The mirror atop it was yellow. There were ghosts trapped in the mirror. You could sense them, dozens, maybe scores, of working men and women who died out their time in this room, staring at their fading lives in this mirror.

There was a bundle of photographs inside a manila envelope. There were maybe thirty pictures and every one of them was of the same person. Ella at ten, Ella at fifteen, Ella at twenty and so on. She was a true beauty, all right. Her smile could jar your teeth loose and give you a concussion. She was innocence and guile in equal measure, and she probably couldn’t tell the difference between the two, and neither could you, not that you gave a damn anyway, she was trophy blond, eternal blonde, slender and supple goddess blonde, with just enough sorrow in the blue blue eyes to give her an air of fetching mystery, not ever completely knowable or possessable, this Ella girl and Ella woman, not ever.

I found it significant that there were no photos of them together. Ella was always alone. Beautiful and alone. The stuff of myth.

“Maybe he left town,” Shea said.

“Maybe.”

“She’s got plenty of money. They could go anywhere.”

“He isn’t finished yet.”

“Finished with what?”

I showed him the piece of Yellow Pages I’d just found in the bottom drawer. It had been ripped out, jagged. Under DANCE CLUBS, there were six names. He’d crossed off four of them.

“Looks like three to go,” I said.

“That crazy son-of-a-bitch.”

“We need to find him fast.”

Then I saw the edge of another photo sticking out from beneath a sack of cheap white socks that were still in their plastic bagging.

“You find something else?” Shea said, as I stooped over.

“Uh-huh.”

I snatched the photo and stared at it. “He a fisherman?”

“No way. Why?”

“He’s got a photo of the marina here.”

He took the photo from me. “Hey, I forgot about her houseboat.”

“Ella’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Big-ass houseboat. Really fancy. Out at the Ellis marina.”

“Sounds like it’d be worth checking out,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “It does.”

7

Ellis Park was the place to go to see summer girls. At least it used to be when I’d visit my Cedar Rapids cousins back in the sixties and early seventies. The girls came in all colors and shapes and sizes and they were probably just as afraid of you as you were of them but their fear was more discreet than ours, and they passed by on bare sweet grass-flecked feet and tire-thrumming ten speed bikes and in the backs of shiny fine convertibles and on the rear ends of motorcycles driven by boys with biceps like softballs.

The summer girls were long gone now. Autumn was on the land, and on the water too, and the bobbing boats, mostly cabin-style or house boats, looked lonely in the dusk and the first faint light of winter stars. Here and there you saw cabin lights. In the summer they would have been welcoming and beacon bright but now there was something faded and desperate about them.

We pulled up on the ridge above the marina. Matt said, “I want to go down there alone first.” Wimmers had been pulled on an emergency case, a bank robbery.

“The one you pointed out, there aren’t any lights on.”

“She doesn’t want any lights on. Ever. Her face. He told me that. She gets pissed when he turns lights on.” He shook his head. “All this shit comes out at the trial, I’m fucking dead meat. My father-in-law’s a wheel at the country club. They’re gonna be all over his ass.”

“Maybe you should concentrate on your brother right now.”

He glared at me. “Oh, I’m concentrating on him, all right. He’s some psycho and he’s going to destroy everything I built for myself in this town. So don’t fucking tell me about concentration, all right, Payne?”

He got out of the car and then ducked his head back in. “If he’s down there, I’ll bring him back. You got any handcuffs or anything like that?”

“No.”

“Great,” he said. “Fucking great.”

8

Every so often, Jim’d realize the significance of the moment. How long he’d loved her. How long she’d been denied him. And now, how free she was with him.

Lying in the big double bed on the house boat. In the darkness so she didn’t feel bad about her face. Right next to her in that silk sleeping gown of hers. God her body. Such a perfect body. No reason for her to feel bad about her face when she had a body like that. No reason for her to feel bad about her face when he loved her so much. And someday, she’d understand that. That her face didn’t matter as long he was there to protect her and comfort her.

Slight sway of boat, lying there; slight wind-cry outside in the night sky.

He worked himself against her spoon-fashion; a perfect match. Her sleeping. Careful not to wake her.

And then he heard it.

Somebody on the wooden walk of the marina. Footsteps coming this way.

Somebody.

He reached down to the floor where he kept the gun.

Somebody coming.

She’d argued with him about the gun at first. Guns scaring her. Guns going off when you didn’t want them to and accidentally killing people. A gun was something only bad people owned. (Forgetting that she’d pulled a gun on the loverboy bartender.)

Now, he was glad he’d talked her into letting him keep it.

9

By the time Matt Shea reached the dock, he was lost in the dusk. Only as he passed lighted boats did I get a glimpse of his silhouette.

I wanted to be somewhere else. In a nice restaurant with a nice lady. Or in my Cedar Rapids apartment with my cats reading a book and dozing off under the lamp.

But not here with Matt Shea and all his country club concerns, and his sad crazed brother, and the once beautiful Ella. Sometimes, it’s fun, the pursuit; but sometimes it’s just sad, you learn something (or are reminded of something) you’d just as soon not know — the knowing changing you in some inalterable way — and then you wish you drove a cab or bagged up people’s groceries.

He was gone fifteen minutes before I started to think about going down there.

All sorts of possibilities presented themselves. I’d kept the window rolled halfway down so I could hear shouts or screams. The marina was settling in for the night. A few cars wheeled into the parking lot. Men and women with liquor bottles tucked under their arms trekked from cars to boats. They laughed a lot and the laughter seemed wrong, even profane, given the moment, crazy Jim and scarred-up Ella. I waited another few minutes and then went down there.

The board walkway pitched beneath my feet. I could glimpse people behind houseboat curtains. They were searching for summer, even if it was only the memory of summer their boats offered them.

Ella’s boat was three slips away from its nearest companion. This gave it a privacy the others lacked. No lights as I approached, no sound except the soft slap of water, and the tangle of night birds in the tangle of autumn trees.

I jumped aboard and went to the door. Locked. I walked to the window to the left of the curtain. The curtains were pulled tight. I listened carefully. Nothing.

And then I heard the sobbing. Male sobbing. Throaty and uncomfortable, as if the man didn’t know how to sob, hadn’t had sufficient practice.

I went to the door. Tried the knob again. Useless. “Matt? Are you in there?”

The sobbing. Barely audible.

I got out the burglary tools I keep in my pocket most of the time. I went in and clipped a light on.

Smell of blood and feces. And something even fouler. He brought it with him when he staggered up off the chair and fell into my arms. Matt Shea.

The knife was still in his chest. Just to the right of his heart. A long, pearl-handled switchblade. The sobs were his. “This is really going to look like shit in the papers tomorrow.” All this, and his primary concern was still his rep with the country club boys. “Son-of-a-bitch stabbed me. His own brother.”

I half-carried him back to the chair he’d been in and sat him down. There might still be time for an ambulance. I went to the phone and dialed 911.

The boat was laid out with bunks on both sides, a tiny kitchen, and a living room arrangement dominating the center of the room. The couch had been opened up to become a bed and now there were two people in it. One of them was alive. That was Jim Shea. The other was dead, six, seven days into death judging by what I could see of the lividity and rigor mortis. The body was bloated and badly discolored. There were flies and maggots, too. The facial flesh itself had separated and spoiled but even so you could still see the scarring. Jim Shea didn’t seem to notice any of this. He wore a black T-shirt and chinos. He lay up against her, an arm wrapped around her hip with great proprietary fondness. She was his woman, the woman he’d dreamt of most of his life, and he wasn’t going to let go of her even now. He probably didn’t even know she’d been dead for nearly a week. Or maybe he didn’t care. She wore a white blouse and a dark skirt. No blanket covered them. There was a bullet wound in her right temple. I was going to say something to him but then I looked at his eyes and saw that it was no use. Certain mad saints had eyes like his, and visionaries, and men who believe that God told them to go down to the local school and open fire on the children on the playground.

The note was still on the small dining table. Simple enough. She couldn’t handle it and killed herself. But he’d kept right on taking care of her, killing those who had made fun of her at the clubs.

“I work my ass off and make something of my life and this is what I fucking get for it,” Matt Shea said somewhere behind me.

10

After the DA decided to go with a plea bargain and a reduced sentence — Jim Shea’s defense attorney deciding to drop the insanity defense even though Jim was clearly insane — I got a call from Matt Shea thanking me for everything. He said things hadn’t gone so badly for him, after all. In fact, ironically, some of the members feeling badly for him, he’d been nominated to sit on the board of the country club. First time a west sider had ever been nominated.

Then he said, “You hear about Jim?”

“No.”

“Killed himself.”

He was so calm, I thought he might be talking about some other Jim. “Your brother?”

“Yeah. Started squirreling socks away in jail. Made a noose for himself.” Pause. “I know you think I’m a callous bastard, Payne. But it’s better for everybody.”

“He belonged in a psychiatric hospital.”

“You know what that fucking trial would’ve done to me? All those headlines day after day? They wouldn’t’ve done my mother any good, either, believe me.”

“That’s touching, you caring about your mother and all.”

“Believe it or not, Payne, I do. And Jim was never anything but a burden to her. His whole life. If he’d lived, she would’ve had to go up to the penitentiary and see him every month.”

“You wouldn’t have?”

“Sure, sometimes. When I had the time, I mean. But prisons spook me. Like hospitals. Or graveyards. I just think it’s bad luck to be anywhere around them. Well, I just thought I’d catch you up on some things. You get my check by the way?”

“Very generous. I appreciate it.”

“You helped me, Payne, and I appreciate it. Well, listen, gotta run.”

My first thought was to have one of those dramatic little moments you see in bad movies and tear his check up into a thousand pieces. Moral outrage.

But then I realized that I badly needed the money, the old cash flow not being so hot lately.

I went down and deposited it right away. Just the way Matt Shea would have.