An Occasional Hell Read online

  She crossed the room and handed them to DeWalt. He asked, “How in the world did you find these?”

  “I came up here one time,” she said, “I don’t remember the reason. But anyway I guess he didn’t hear me coming. It was, I don’t know, five or six months ago. And I saw him kneeling there with his head under the display case.”

  DeWalt looked at the photo envelope but he did not yet remove the photographs. The cassette tapes were untitled, marked only as number I, II, and III.

  “When I asked him what he was doing, he said the display case felt wobbly and he was checking the bolts. At the time, I believed him. Then later, when I found out about the girl.…”

  DeWalt knew even before he looked at the photos what they would show. Elizabeth Catanzaro stood with her eyes averted, mouth unsmiling.

  The photographs had been taken with a 35mm camera and developed at a one-hour processing shop in a mall nearly forty miles away, a place that provided double prints for the price of one. There were twenty-four photographs in all, a full roll. They were dated December of the previous year.

  When DeWalt turned the first photo over to check the date printed on its back, Elizabeth said, “He seems to have had a very Merry Christmas that year, didn’t he?”

  All but four of them were shots of Jeri Gillen, taken inside Alex’s car. In some, Alex had apparently been standing outside the car, shooting in through an open window or door. In others she lay across the back seat as he shot from the front. The four taken outside the car included Alex as a subject. In two of these, the girl was fellating him; in another, their positions were reversed; and in the final one—all of these four with the woods as background, and therefore accomplished, DeWalt guessed, by positioning the camera on the car’s trunk lid and setting the automatic timer—the photo showed Alex standing sideways to the camera, the girl clinging to his neck, her legs circling his thighs, head thrown back, mouth agape.

  DeWalt slipped the photos into their envelope and handed the packet to Elizabeth. “I assume that the police don’t know about these,” he said.

  “I can’t think of any good reason why they need to.”

  “Then why show them to me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  And he thought, Because it hurts too much to keep them to yourself.

  “And these?’ he asked, picking up the cassette tapes.

  “The movie soundtrack,” she told him.

  She started to turn away, then stopped for a moment. She dropped the packet of photographs onto Alex’s desk. She seemed ready either to cry or to explode in rage; the same emotion, different responses.

  You might at least take her hand now, DeWalt told himself. Show a little compassion.

  He said, “There’s no reason why you need to hang around and listen to these again.”

  She nodded. “I’ll go put some fresh coffee on.”

  “How about something cool instead?”

  “Iced tea okay?”

  “Perfect.”

  As soon as she was gone, he turned on the air conditioner.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “How about another one?” Della asked. She picked up the saucer that had held DeWalt’s Colony Roll, a softball-sized pastry of cinnamon, raisins, pecans and sticky caramel sauce, the saucer empty now but for a smear of caramel.

  “You want to see how I’ll look with three chins, is that it?”

  “You don’t have a double chin, Ernie. That’s just baby fat. I think it’s cute.”

  “If you think I’m so cute, then sit down here a minute and talk to me. I need some information about Jeri Gillen.”

  Della flashed a look toward the kitchen. Then she slid in across from him in the booth. He had timed his visit for the restaurant’s final half-hour of business, hoping that just such a conversation would be possible. Of course he could have met Della outside after work, could have sat with her in one of their cars, but he preferred these days to meet with women in public places, especially if the woman was as flirtatious as Della.

  There was only one other customer here now, a student more interested in his Wall Street Journal than in the resident novelist schmoozing with a waitress fifteen years his junior.

  She was one of the first people he had met when he moved to Menona five years ago. She had served him his first cup of coffee there. On his second visit to the restaurant she surprised him by bringing out a copy of Suffer No Fools and asking him to autograph it. She had said, “Write something like, ‘I’ll never forget all the crazy times we’ve had together.’ It’ll drive my husband nuts.”

  Della was a plain-looking girl, a woman actually, already into her thirties, the mother of three. Her oldest, a boy, was in high school, tenth grade, the same approximate age as his mother when she gave birth to him. She was one of those women who appeared to have been put together in haste, by a god inattentive to his work. She had thin shoulders, small breasts and a narrow waist, but from the waist down she became another woman, broad-hipped and thick-ankled, splayfooted. She moved heavily, almost waddling, as if the upper body had a hard time keeping the lower half in motion. But DeWalt had never known her to greet a customer with less than a smile and an ebullient, “Hey! It’s about time you came by to see me!”

  DeWalt liked her and often asked about her children. They were all fine, she would tell him, except for Travis, the oldest, a bright boy destined either for the penitentiary or the governor’s mansion. When DeWalt asked about her husband, she would answer, “My what? You mean that skinny baldheaded guy who uses my bathroom? Geez, and I thought it was the TV set he was married to. He sure plays with it a lot more’n he plays with me, I’ll tell you that!”

  “Tell me about Jeri,” he asked her now, his coffee cup resting in both hands, the cup still nearly full, coffee cold. He had to restrict his fluid intake and so allowed himself only an occasional sip, but the cup was a comfortable prop, a legitimization of his fondness for coffeeshop ambiance. The Colony Restaurant in particular was always clean and seldom noisy and the people who worked here never hurried him to leave.

  “I still can’t believe what happened to her,” Della said.

  “What happened to her?” he asked.

  “You don’t believe she’s still alive, do you? I don’t.”

  DeWalt shrugged. “Did any of you know that she was dating Dr. Catanzaro?”

  “Hey, Jeri used to flirt with every second guy to come through that door. She made more in tips than the rest of us put together.”

  “Did she ever mention Alex Catanzaro in particular? Ever hint that she was involved with him?”

  “Not that I remember, no. She did seem to have a thing for older men, though. I mean a guy your age would come in and she’d say something like, ‘I bet that one’s got a lot of notches on his pistol,’ or maybe, ‘Old guys are better because they take their time, they always think their next one might be their last.’ But I don’t know, we all say things like that. What else is there for us to talk about in here?”

  “She ever talk about her husband?”

  “Only to say what a loony bird he is.”

  “In what way?”

  “Take your pick.”

  “Give me an example. I’m an old guy, remember?”

  “Well, you know, he did a lot of drugs and stuff. According to Jeri, you could never tell how he was going to act.”

  “What kinds of drugs?”

  “What kinds are there? Anything he could get his hands on.”

  “Jeri too?”

  Della shrugged. “We got high together a couple times after work, so I know she smoked. She said she had stopped using coke, but I’m not so sure.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I just don’t think she did is all. I never saw her doing it or anything, but she could be moody, you know? Plus, she was always complaining about how she and Rodney never had any money—so where’d all their money go? They never bought anything, that’s for sure. You ever see the furniture in that apa
rtment of theirs?”

  “You’ve been in the apartment?”

  “A couple of times, yeah.”

  “Was Rodney there?”

  “Yeah, but he never came out of the bedroom. She’d be all bitchy and complaining when we’d get there, and then she’d go into the bedroom and close the door, and a couple minutes later she’d come back all smiles and ready to take on the world.”

  “But Rodney always stayed in the bedroom?”

  “According to her, that’s where he practically lived. He’d be in there half the day with his headphones on and plugged into one of those electric keyboards of his.”

  “So you think she’d go in there and do some coke with him.”

  “Well what’s it sound like to you? I don’t know, though; I guess it’s none of my business. She was a good waitress, no matter what she did at home.”

  DeWalt nodded. “Other than staying in the bedroom all day, what other things about Rodney made him a loony bird?”

  “He had certain … quirks, I guess.”

  “Such as?”

  “I guess weeknights were kind of weird for him,” she said. “When his band wasn’t playing somewhere, I mean. And he had to spend all night at home?”

  “Weird how?”

  “This is just what she’d tell us, you understand? I have no idea whether she was making it up or what.”

  “I understand.”

  “Well, the thing he liked to do best, I guess, after it got good and dark outside, was, he’d go out on their balcony, you know? And she was supposed to stay inside and pretend that she lived there alone.”

  “I don’t think I follow.”

  “She was supposed to act like he was dead, like he had died and she lived there all by herself. Rodney got a real charge out of that. Pretending he was dead and then peeking in through the curtains to see what her life was like without him.”

  “And what would Jeri do while he was outside?”

  “Watch TV, read a magazine, paint her toenails, I don’t know. Probably the same things she did when he was holed up in the bedroom. The difference was all inside his head, you know what I mean?”

  “Did this have anything to do with their sex life?”

  Della grinned. “The way Jeri told it, it was their sex life.”

  “Tell me how Jeri told it.”

  “You want me to go into detail about this?”

  “Not if it makes you uncomfortable, Della. I know how shy you can be when it comes to talking about sex.”

  “Okay, smart guy. Rodney didn’t seem to have much interest in sex. Not in the usual way, that is. Once in awhile he’d ask her to go down on him, but that was about as typical as they ever got.”

  “He had a preference for oral sex,” said DeWalt.

  “I wouldn’t call it his preference, no. It was one of the few things they did together though. Until, that is, Jeri kind of discovered one night how to really turn him on.”

  “And how was that?”

  “Well, this one night, see, there he was out on the balcony, pretending to be dead and all. And Jeri, I don’t know, just to see what he’d do, I guess, she started touching herself. She said it was kind of exciting to know that he was out there watching her. So anyway, she’s there on the couch, having a good time with herself, and pretty soon the balcony doors slide open. She stops, because she thinks he’s going to bitch her out. But instead he goes and stands over in the corner and takes his own pants down and tells her to keep going! And to talk about it out loud, you know? Like there’s somebody actually doing it to her? And the dirtier she talks, the more excited both of them get.”

  “And?” said DeWalt.

  “Now you’re excited, aren’t you?”

  “Della, please.”

  She laughed and patted his hand. “So anyway, that was the only way she could get him worked up enough to do it. The only problem was, he wouldn’t put it in until he was almost done. So it was like, what good was he doing her?”

  “Do you think Rodney was capable of killing her?”

  She considered it a moment. “I think he could kill Dr. Catanzaro. But I don’t know, now that I think about it, I’m not so sure he could kill Jeri.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “She tried to break up with him once. It was, lemme think, early last fall sometime.”

  “She was going to divorce him?”

  Della nodded. “And Rodney just fell apart. He started crying and crawling after her all the time, begging her not to leave him. He’d call or come by here five or six times a day. She said it was even worse at home. He started getting up before she did every morning, ironing her uniform, polishing her shoes, making breakfast, waiting on her hand and foot. He even shaved her legs and washed her hair for her! And I guess she loved it at first—she said she made him screw her three or four times a day for awhile. Jeri did love to screw, there’s no question about that. But anyway, eventually she got sick of him threatening to kill himself if she left, so finally she just told him okay, no divorce.”

  “You think maybe they had some kind of agreement after that? That she could do what she wanted with other men?”

  “All I know is, she stopped talking about getting a divorce. She said it was easier just to let him stay. Plus, I think she was a little bit afraid of him too. Because he was so unpredictable and weird, you know?

  “But you still don’t believe he could actually kill her, is that right?”

  “I don’t know, I guess it’s hard to say. I guess, in the end, a man might do just about anything. Don’t you think?”

  Yes, DeWalt, you do.

  Now that he was wholly and inextricably involved in the case, it was time to let the police know. In the past he might have delayed this longer, knowing how private investigations can be handcuffed by the enmity of certain police officers. But rural police, he had learned, are not so immediately affrontable, not so tense. In the rural areas are places where an angry heart can go to be alone; space and solitude to spew out one’s bile without embarrassment; the privacy to throw off for a moment the mask of manhood, to get oneself clean, and emptied; to expunge the surplus hate or grief and get back to that level of emotion one can live with. But in the city if you find an empty space you can never be sure there is not someone lurking in the darkness, someone even angrier than you; and such suspicion exacerbates instead of heals.

  And so, crimes in the country tend to be simpler crimes, unpremeditated and therefore lacking the convolutions of claustrophobic planning. Rural cops, therefore, are easier to get along with. They are less suspicious of the con. More willing to accept a man at face value. Plus, they share an attitude of their constituency that it is unbecoming to ask for help but churlish to turn away a proffered hand. Which means that the adversarial element need not be so intrinsic to an investigator’s relationship with a country cop, but depends to a large measure on how smoothly the investigator intrudes himself.

  In this case DeWalt would be working with the State Police, for which he was grateful. He might be inclined to wonder about the motivations of a small town cop who will put in long hours for $14,000 a year, but it could be assumed that a state trooper earning twice that amount is not necessarily a bully, an incompetent, or a physical reject from the academy.

  A state policeman might ignore a traffic violation in exchange for a half-hour of afternoon delight but he would not risk his career for a handful of food stamps. Most of the state boys DeWalt knew were motivated to keep people out of jail rather than to put them in. They placated rather than antagonized. Held in at least moderate esteem by the people they served, they remained salt of the earth, reasonably paid, moderately feared and respected; somewhat Godlike in their aloofness and deadpan compassion.

  DeWalt knew one such individual here. Trooper Larry Abbott had introduced himself to DeWalt at the autograph party the English Department organized to welcome DeWalt to Shenango College. The reception had been held in the Student Union, a dim windowless basement
room that housed a half-dozen tables and chairs, four vending machines, and a jukebox. Abbott had seemed an anomaly in the small crowd gathered to hear DeWalt’s reading, an audience of nine females and three other males, three pale men whom DeWalt would come to know as fellow English professors, men who spent a great deal of time reassuring one another that they wrote far too well to ever get published.

  Abbott’s posture as he sat attentively in a metal chair was tall and straight without appearing forced; a goodlooking young man in his late thirties, suntanned and blue-eyed, his short blonde hair parted neatly on the side. He was dressed that night in blue jeans, moccassins with no socks, a short sleeve pale blue cotton shirt. DeWalt pegged him as either the baseball coach or a campus cop.

  After DeWalt’s brief talk, when everyone else had left except for Dr. Andrea Banks, the English professor who had organized the reading, Abbott purchased a copy of Suffer No Fools and collected DeWalt’s signature on the flyleaf.

  “I read your book a couple of months ago,” Abbott told him. “I’m a State Trooper, and it seemed to me that you told things pretty much the way they are.”

  It was the kind of compliment DeWalt most appreciated—no fawning, no sychophanous slavering. “Thanks,” DeWalt said.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a question, though? It says on your bio that you worked in Los Angeles. Is that where you’re from? I mean, were you born there?”

  “I was born and raised in Ohio. A little town just this side of Columbus.”

  “I thought so,” said Abbott. “I couldn’t imagine, after reading your book, that you grew up in California. From my observations, and I spent over two years in San Diego, if you lived your childhood in Southern California, you’re fucked for life.”

  DeWalt laughed. He felt as if, here in this foreign land, he had finally found someone who spoke his language. “How about a cup of coffee somewhere?” he asked.

  “Sounds great.”

  DeWalt was relieved not to be left alone with Professor Banks. He knew what she was up to with her meticulous wrapping and packing of hors d’oeuvres. Her attention to detail bordered on psychosis, especially when she began to return walnut crumbs to their original places on the cratered cheese ball. But she was not a psychotic, she was stalling for time. As some people are aroused by pornographic films, Professor Banks was aroused by poetry and fiction readings. Her passion for words was literal as well as figurative. If books came with penises, she would have been a librarian.