Riders on the Storm (16 page)

It took a while. Sunday morning is when the respectable ministers hit the radio. Their version of things is reasonable, compassionate. I rate everybody on my fantasy Snore-o-Meter. It goes from one to ten. Ten is when, in terms of radio, you not only turn it off, you spit at it. They were cruising along at about seven. I missed the weekday crew who had everything but rubbers to sell you in the name of Jesus and who wanted you to shoot your neighbors if you just happened to suspect they might be Satan disguised in a golfing outfit.

And then, thanks to my binoculars, he was walking out his door and heading to the double garage separate from the house.

Oh but wait … Who is that woman leaving his house now?

Why it's none other than …Valerie Donovan.

So much for being careful and endangering her reputation as suffering widow.

He backed the gleaming Porsche out of the garage and then she got in.

My plan could misfire if I was late or early by even five seconds. I was in place, my foot was on the gas and I was ready. It helped that I disliked him as much as I did. I had no doubt that he'd sicced Byrnes on Gordon Niven. Damn right I was ready.

He fired down the drive three times faster than was sensible and when he saw me he started leaning on his horn. The sound perfectly captured the rage he had for some rodent who was parked horizontally across his driveway, blocking him almost entirely. The next part wasn't pretty at all. The screech of his tires, the horn still blasting and even with the windows closed, Valerie's screams.

For the first time I realized that he might not be able to stop. He could smash into me at a good clip and all three of us would suffer for it.

But screeching, fishtailing, still using his horn, he came to a stop about five feet from my car.

Then he was out of his car with a pistol in his hand. His face was heart-attack red and his eyes deranged.

And then I was out of my car with my dad's forty-five in my right hand and the manila envelope in my left.

Valerie was still in the car. She was crying.

Anders and I faced off.

“You shoot me, Anders, copies of these photos get mailed by my secretary to the chief of police. He should be interested in you and Valerie having an affair.”

“For what it's worth, I could kill you right now, you little pissant, and get away with it. You were trespassing.”

“I'm on county property, you stupid fuck.”

Valerie was out of the car. In a light blue dress, her dark hair catching the sunlight, she was more stunning than the day itself.

“Will you two dumb bastards put your guns away? Aren't we all having enough trouble already?”

“I want to kill this little piece of shit.”

“Good for you, Lon. There've been plenty of times I've wanted to kill
you
but I didn't because I'm what you might call civilized. Now give me your gun.”

“You don't know how to handle a gun.”

“I know not to pull one on somebody.” To me, “We could've cut you in half with Lon's car, you dipshit. And that's what you are, McCain. A pure and simple dipshit. I couldn't think of the right word yesterday. But seeing you standing there with a gun and that manila envelope the right word just came to me.”

“The guy you had Byrnes put in the hospital. Byrnes figured out he was following you but he didn't figure out that Niven already had some photos of you. Niven sent these to me because he was scared.”

“Byrnes should've killed that bastard.” Anders.

“You may get your wish. Niven's in bad shape.”

“Wait a minute,” Valerie said. She'd been standing close to Anders but now she backed away as if she'd discovered he was toxic. Which he was, of course. “You had that pig Teddy Byrnes put somebody in the hospital?”

“Oh, for shit's sake, Valerie, don't get into one of your sanctimonious moods as usual. I did what I needed to. He was following me around. And now I learn he got photos of us. He would've blackmailed us.”

“He wouldn't have blackmailed either one of you. He's a decent guy.” Me.

“How many times have I told you that I don't want you hanging around Teddy Byrnes? He's a psychopath. When he looks at me I get terrified.”

“It's all in your head.”

“Will you say that after he rapes and kills me some night when you're not around? And give me that damned gun.”

He sighed like a diva, then handed it over.

“You too, dipshit. Bring it here.”

She was proving my suspicion that she was a one-woman liberation movement.

I walked over and handed it to her. She went to my car and opened the door and dropped them on the front seat.

“What the hell're you doing?” Anders snapped.

“I'm riding back with him.”

“What the hell're you talking about?”

“You may've had Byrnes kill a man.”

“He isn't dead. He's just hurt.”

“My God, listen to yourself, Lon. ‘He's not dead. He's just hurt.' And that's supposed to make me feel better? Maybe you had him kill Steve, too.” The idea that she might have been sleeping with the man who would go on to murder her husband—hiring it or doing it himself—broke her. She put both of her hands over her face and began weeping.

I reached out to touch her arm but Anders snarled at me.

“Don't you ever touch that woman. She's going to be my wife.”

Her weeping became cackling. “Did you hear him?” she said to me, her mascara running slivers of black down her cheeks. “He thinks I'm going to marry him after all this?”

Then came my marching orders, albeit teary ones. “C'mon. I want you to hide me someplace where this pig can't ever find me.”

“I don't believe this!” Anders was walking around in circles, throwing his hands up to the sky. “He parks in front of us and damn near kills us and you're going off with him? And he has my gun! He has my gun! This is insane! Insane!”

He was still yelling at the innocent sky when she seated herself regally in my very unregal car, the handguns in her lap.

“I can't believe I had an affair with him. I'm not stupid, am I?”

“No, you're hardly stupid.”

“And I'm not a whore, am I?”

“No, I don't think you're a whore.”

“Then what am I?”

“You're a woman who made a mistake is all.”

“I slept with the man who may have murdered my husband. That's one hell of a big mistake.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess I'd have to agree with you there.”

Three minutes later:

“Are you going to turn him in?”

“I can't prove he hired Byrnes to beat up Niven.”

“I heard him admit it. And so did you.”

“I don't know if it's enough.”

“And he also may have killed Steve.”

“That one he didn't admit to.”

“I think he did it.”

“I think so, too. But there's something I need to check out before I can be sure.” Then, “No offense, but Steve could be a jerk. Beating up Will and all.”

“I hate to say that with him gone and everything.”

“But he could be a jerk.”

“Yes; I guess I'd have to go along with that. But only sometimes. Sometimes he was the most loving man I ever knew. But then he started cheating on me—and it took its toll. It's almost as if he'd forgotten how to woo me and love me. He must've been thinking of his girlfriend all the time. And it broke my heart.”

“But even though he was a jerk sometimes he was sort of a Boy Scout at the same time. John Wayne and all that stuff.”

“I never told him how stupid I thought the war was. But he was an Eagle Scout when he was in high school. And at the top of his ROTC class in college. So this war—he was all my country right or wrong. What Cullen did infuriated him.” Then, “Where are you going to hide me?”

“I have some friends I was thinking about. They'd be happy to make you comfortable and keep you safe.”

“That sounds perfect.”

But as we rolled closer to town …

“Do you mind if I ask where your friends live?”

“Over on Fourteenth Street and B Avenue.”

“On the southwest side, then?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm” being her last word for at least two minutes….

“I really hate imposing on people.”

“Of course you do.”

“And on that side of town the houses are pretty small.”

“That's very thoughtful of you.”

“Why thank you. I was thinking maybe it would be easier to take a suite at the Royale.”

“Register under a false name.”

“I didn't even think of that. Perfect.” Then, “Could I hire you to stand guard?”

“I'm not sure what that means.”

“You know, like a bodyguard.”

“I don't think you need a bodyguard.”

“He could always bring in Teddy Byrnes.”

She was quite a female. So lost in herself she could insult you without even knowing it. But I admired her for mourning her husband. There I'd been wrong about her. And so I might be wrong about her fear of Anders. He really had looked insane back there at the bottom of his driveway.

“I know a couple of cops who'd sit in your room and keep you safe when they're off-duty. You'd have to pay them of course.”

“But they're police officers. Why would I have to pay them?”

“Off-duty, I said.”

“Well how much would it be?”

“Say five bucks an hour.”

“That could turn into a lot of money.”

“That's what supermarkets pay them to direct traffic on weekends.”

“When you have money people are always trying to take advantage of you.”

“Those bastards,” I said. “Those dirty bastards.”

I guess my humor wasn't to her taste. She didn't laugh.

T
HEY WOULDN'T LET ME TALK TO
W
ILL, SO SINCE
G
ORDON
N
IVEN
was in the same hospital I visited him.

He looked like most of the cartoons I've seen depicting some badly injured person in the hospital. Bandaged enough to make a passing reference to Boris Karloff as “The Mummy.”

“Remember now,” the nurse said as she left, “he can't talk. The doctor put him in a coma.”

I pulled up a chair and sat next to him. I had a brief fantasy of taking a machete and dividing Byrnes into five slices.

The room was a single and even for a single a small one. Someone had placed a black rosary on his bandaged white hand. He was so gauze-wrapped it was hard to see any breaks or bruises. He slept. He was a mummy.

“I'm going to get that bastard for doing this to you.”

I looked around the room. Painting of Jesus on the west wall. For once he wasn't pretty. Niven's travel bag sat under the elevated TV set. He mumbled something and I instantly snapped my head around. Was he waking up?

I sat very still and listened. More mumbling but I had no idea if he was trying to say something or these were just noises inspired by things going on in his mind. I sat there for maybe ten minutes, then I decided to check out his travel bag.

Socks, underwear, shaving supplies, two folded golf shirts yellow and green, two small photo albums of Niven and a woman who was presumably his wife and their kids and grandkids, a paperback edition of
The High Window
by Chandler (I smiled when I remembered the discussion we'd had about Chandler), and then—the surprise—the same kind of back-pocket notebooks I used. Four of them lay on top of a tape recorder not much larger than the paperback.

I lifted the notebooks out and started reading them.

Like most of us in the business he datelined everything. 8/11/71. And then writing that was largely in code. Since the words were meant only for him, he didn't care if anybody else could read them. Hell, he didn't
want
anybody else to read them.

One day he had trailed Anders for nine hours. There was one sentence that made me wonder if Anders was cheating on Valerie. He'd gone into a new “Singles Only” apartment house and stayed for three hours.

That same night he followed Anders back to his business. Anders was inside about forty-five minutes and then he appeared in the parking lot with Donovan. “Anders shoved him; Donovan swung on him.” But he couldn't pick up what the two men were arguing about.

Then I found a page that was a backgrounder on Anders.

Interview at local airport: Anders flies his plane frequently. Colgan Air Services.

Keeps a woman in Cedar Rapids condo.

In default on child support wives one and two.

Has resisted all attempts to buy into his operation or to buy him out.

“I hope you find those notebooks more useful than I did. He's never let me look through them.”

I turned to find a woman of about sixty who was svelte and knowing but with charitable blue eyes and a hint of a smile. The gray chignon, the elegant cut of the gray dress were a perfect match for the slight air of superiority that celebrated the fact that she was still a stunner at her age.

I set the notebooks down. “I apologize. I'm nosy by profession. I'm a private investigator, too. My name's Sam McCain.”

“I should have introduced myself.” She stepped smartly to me and took my hand. “I'm Gordon's wife. Are you a friend of his?”

“I just met him. But I've been hearing about him for years.”

“Well, take some advice from me. Don't ever try to figure him out. I've been married to him for thirty-three years and I never could find out what he's all about. Our children say the same thing. You can never tell what he's going to do next. I don't think
he
even knows what he's going to do next.” Another glance at him. The voice wan now. “There's a good chance he won't make it.” Then, “I drove down as soon as the hospital called me. I could barely concentrate on my driving. I didn't want him to die before I could at least kiss him one more time.” Then, “He should've quit six or seven years ago. I begged him.” Then, “Do you know who did this to him?”