Dead Bang (40 page)

“Must be some contract,” I said.

“He took the
The Mark Behler Show
national,” said Leonard. “I think everybody tunes in to see if he's going to get blown up again. Besides, watching Chet on air is like watching paint dry on a tombstone.”

“I never liked Behler's show much.”

Leonard finished his soda and crushed the can in his hand. “Them bags you're sitting on?”

“Yeah?”

“Behler's fan mail. ‘Come back, Mark.' ‘We love you, Mark.' ‘Mark, we forgive you.'” Leonard pointed his finger at his open mouth and made gagging sounds.

• • •

Mark Behler lived among the horsey set in Ada—ten acres of pasture surrounded by a white post-and-rail fence with a barn. Four Roman columns guarded the porch of his white-clapboard colonial. I knocked on the door and stared up at the black wrought-iron chandelier, hoping it wouldn't fall on my head.

The door squeaked open, revealing a Hispanic girl, maybe sixteen, with raven hair tied in red velvet ribbon and lush eyelashes fanning smoldering dark eyes. She wiped her hands on her apron and said, “Jez?”

I gave her my card and said, “Art Hardin for Mrs. Behler.”

“Miss Rosey is no seeink anyone,” she said, rolling the “R.”

“This is about her husband, Mark Behler. The TV station sent me. Please give her my card.”

She took the card and closed the door. I heard the deadbolt snap and looked out into the pasture. Behler had three head of buffalo and no ponies.

I had time to crack out a cigar and smoke about half of it, standing on the lawn and checking out the bison, before the door opened again. The girl said, “Miss Rosey will be seeink jou now.” I left the cigar in the yard.

Mrs. Behler met with me in the library. The walls were books; the fire was a DVD playing on a plasma screen in the fireplace. The sofa and chair had been faux-cows in their first incarnation. “Miss Rosey” was fashionably thin, and her honey-blond hair draped onto her shoulders. She wore a powder-blue blouse made of fabric so delicate that the lace of her brassiere showed through. The hem of her navy-blue A-line skirt brushed just above her knees. Repeated facelifts had left her with nearly feline eyes.

“You're Mrs. Behler?” I asked.

“Roseanne Behler,” she said dreamily, her pupils much too large for the light. “Juanita calls me Miss Rosey. I'm afraid her English isn't very good.”

“Her English is better than my Spanish,” I said. I looked at my watch. “Shouldn't she be in school?”

“Juanita is the sole support of her mother and siblings in Honduras. Her father died in a commercial fishing accident.”

I still thought Juanita should have been in school but I asked, “Has Mark come home?”

“No,” she said. “It's been three days. I filed a missing-persons report. The police called me and said Mark had been seen at the TV station and our bank. They said he was an adult and didn't have to come home.” She
leaned on the sofa to catch her balance. “I get phone calls but no one talks. I think it's Mark.”

“Mark borrowed a revolver from the TV station,” I said. “If you know where he put it, I need to take it back.”

“A gun!” she said. “Goodness, no! Mark would never touch a gun. He works hard to rid society of those terrible things.”

“That's the point,” I said. “He was working on a gun-control segment. He borrowed the gun from the security office.”

“He wouldn't bring a gun into the house.”

“Perhaps he has it with him,” I said. “Could he be visiting family? Your children, maybe?”

Miss Rosey lowered herself into the easy chair she'd been leaning against. “Do you have children, Mr. Hardin?”

“Yes,” I said. “Three boys.”

She folded her hands in her lap. “I admire your courage. Mark and I decided early on that we'd never bring children into a world filled with so much hate and violence.”

“We all make choices,” I said. “For the most part, my sons have been a joy.”

Miss Rosey moved her legs slightly and gave me a flash of a blue-lace-covered crotch. I made a show of fumbling out my notepad while I took a couple of side steps to my right. “It's an Ivor Johnson top-break .38. Perhaps you could look in his dresser, perhaps in his office, if he has one here in the house.”

“Juanita would know what's in his bedroom,” said Miss Rosey, making an innocent face. She picked up an old school bell from the coffee table and gave it a single shake. “She certainly knows what's in mine.”

Juanita scurried into the room. “Jez, Miss Rosey?”

“Have you seen Mr. Behler's revolver?”

“A pistola?” asked Juanita, her eyes large. “I have no seen such thing.”

“Very well, Juanita,” said Miss Rosey. “Thank you.”

Juanita made a flash pump of the knees and left.

“Could Mark be visiting friends?” I asked.

“Mark hasn't any friends,” she said. “Just sycophants that fawn over him, hoping for favors.”

“What's this about? Why did Mark leave?”

“Mark is really very fragile,” she said and swung her knees toward me. “I know he doesn't seem that way on the show. He has been working very hard. That ugly scene at the end of the last show he aired simply was the last straw.”

More crotch. I tried to concentrate on her face and the fact that her overworked eyes made my stomach roll. “What was he working on?”

“The woman you shot,” she said, and opened her legs slightly. “Mark was stunned.”

Look at the eyes. Look at the eyes. Not the boobs. Yes, the brassiere is probably the same color as the panties.

I took a seat.

“Did you know she left a list of people she planned to kill?”

“Vague whispers,” I said.

“The prosecutor, a judge, and I don't know who else,” she said. “Mark found out. He has ways.”

I stared at my pad and pretended to scribble a note. “The woman said something to him before she died. Did he tell you what it was?”

“He never told me that,” she said. “He was quite shaken—shattered, really.”

“What was Mark doing?”

“The woman was under a psychiatrist's care,” she said. “Mark went to see her, the psychiatrist, I mean.”

“There's no way a doctor would have revealed anything.”

“He made up a story and went as a patient. Deep cover, he said—you know, he could do that because he looked so different on TV. Anyway, she gave him a prescription for some drugs. Mark's always been tempted by drugs. It started in college. He took them—said it was a test.” She turned her head, tugged at her earlobe, and mused, “They actually helped—for a while.”

“And then?”

“He started to brood,” she said. “He started to carry the pills in an aspirin bottle in his pocket.”

“Did he take more than he was supposed to?”

She searched my face and then looked at the floor. “I didn't want to ask him. Mark is a very private person.”

“Does he still have the drugs?”

“I don't know,” she said. “The prescription bottle isn't in his medicine cabinet.”

“Does Mark have an office in the house?”

“Yes, but he keeps it locked,” she said. “Rather juvenile about it, actually.”

“I think I can probably open the door,” I said. “This is important. I won't disturb anything, but we do need to look.”

“This should be fun,” she said with a flash of eyebrows. She walked me
out of the den to the stairway. “You shall have to steady me. The doctor has given me some pills.”

I put my arm around her waist. She held the handrail and meowed, “You're very strong.” At the top of the stairs she leaned her head against my chest and asked, “You'll help me come down as well, won't you?”

I peeled myself off of her, and she pointed left to a door at the end of the hall. I slipped the lock with a plastic bank calendar. We found the room neat and the top of the desk organized. Mark had decorated with TV memorabilia.

“That's odd,” said Mrs. Behler. “Mark had a wig that Granny wore on
The Beverly Hillbillies.
He displayed it in the glass case with Red Skelton's hat.”

“I thought you didn't come in here,” I said.

Her already feline face added a shimmer of Cheshire cat. “Well,” she said. “Sometimes.”

“Perhaps he sold it or traded it for something else.”

“No,” she said, taking the black fedora out of the case. “Mark would have told me.”

I searched the desk and found skin magazines featuring models in short plaid skirts and bobby sox, but no pills or revolver. Miss Rosey settled the hat on her head and pulled the brim low over one eye, checking her reflection in the side of the glass case. The telephone rang, and she rushed to pick it up.

“Hello? Hello?” she said and pushed the brim of the hat high on her head. “Mark, is that you? Please talk to me.” She looked at me and shook her head.

I took the telephone. “Listen, Mr. Schoolgirls-in-bobby-sox, you're scaring the shit out of your wife.”

Mark spoke slowly, with a thick tongue. He asked, “What are you doing in my study?”

“Trying to return the revolver you borrowed before management gets snotty about it,” I said.

“I have the gun,” said Behler. “I have something to do.”

He hung up. I hit star sixty-nine and learned that he'd called from a pay telephone.

“Will you need to search my bedroom?”

“That was Mark,” I said. “He says he has the gun.”

She pulled on my wrist with both hands. “What will we do?”

“I'm going to find Mark, get the gun back, and send him home.”

She tilted her head up, gave me the big Bette Davis eyes, and asked, “But what shall I do?”

“Wear bobby sox,” I said. “The skirt is short enough.”

• • •

People being creatures of habit, I went to Ned's Sport Shop on Division Avenue, where I had taken Mark Behler gun shopping.

Ned said, “Yeah, that weasel was here. Yesterday. Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. Looked like shit, though. Needed a shave.”

“What was he wearing?”

“Gray slacks and a gray Windbreaker.”

“What did he buy?”

“Said he picked up a revolver somewhere else,” Ned said and smacked his forehead with his hand. “I almost choked on my own spit wondering what that meant. He bought a box of .38 specials. I kept my eye on him. You can bet on that.”

“He say anything about where he was going?”

“He missing or something?”

“Do you watch his show?”

“Not since he was in here shoplifting nickel-and-dime crap.”

“He hasn't been at the studio or home for three days.”

“Jeez,” said Ned. He put his elbows on the counter and his head in his hands. After a moment of making a low hum he said, “He left in a cab.” He looked up and added, “One of those red and blue ones.” He snapped his fingers. “Metro Cab.”

“Fantastic,” I said. “What time?”

“Right after lunch,” said Ned. “One o'clock. Thereabouts.”

I
HUSTLED BACK TO MY CAR
, trying to conjure the location of the Metro Cab garage in my head. As I cranked up the engine, a man with a shaved head opened my passenger door and piled himself onto the front seat.

“Drive,” said Manny's voice. “Take me to the FBI.”

I stepped out of the car, squatted next to the seat, and studied Manny over the front sight of my Colt. He'd been beaten like a rented mule. His left eye looked like a purple volcano bisected with slashes of lava. His nose angled off center, and his upper lip had been split twice.

“What the hell happened to you?”

“We have had an organizational consolidation,” he said. “I could not believe my luck to see your car. I ran from them at a stoplight. They cannot be far away.”

“Why is it I don't believe you?” I said.

Manny reached under the seat and pulled out the purple GPS locator watch Wendy and I had sent to him.

“Hoisted by my own petard,” I said.

“I am happy to return the favor.”

“FBI put one of those on my car,” I said. “Probably a lot slicker than that one.”

“A small black box with a magnet,” said Manny. “A blond woman put it under your car. It is now making the rounds on a beer truck.”

“So why did you come talk to me?”

“I am to gain your confidence and stab you with an ice pick so you are less troublesome to capture,” said Manny.

“I'll most likely shoot you,” I said.

“This is not of much concern to Shamil,” said Manny. He tossed an ice pick onto the seat in front of me. “Shamil has a video camera and plans to make a film of cutting off your head. Your car is very fast. We can escape! Take me to your FBI!”

I holstered my weapon, scooped up the ice pick, and climbed back into the car. “Shamil has lost his mind,” I said. “He can't operate here like he's in the Middle East.”

“Shamil is from Kashmir. He has little experience in the West, but he also has few inhibitions. He is angry that the American Zionists send airplanes to bomb us in our beds and helicopters with rockets to blow up an old man in a wheelchair.”

I dropped the ice pick out the door and started the Buick. “Americans gleefully murder each other over finger gestures on the highway,” I said, backing out of my space. “You flew airplanes into buildings and murdered thousands of people. What did you think was going to happen?”

“Palestine belongs to the Arabs the same as England belongs to the English and France belongs to the French. You know who said that?” Manny didn't wait for an answer. “Mahatma Ghandi!”

I looked in the mirror and a white van hurried to take my space—or it was Shamil. I cranked the Buick into gear and hustled for the exit.