The Killing of Bobbi Lomax (5 page)

He’d waited thirty seconds before he’d followed her. And now he stood on the doorstep waiting for her to answer his knock. He didn’t look over his shoulder, but he knew the hacks gathered in a small tight pack near the cruiser were watching him, curiosity probably killing them. He’d seen the patrolman’s hand stay them as he moved past. He’d ignored their shouted questions, which only made them shout louder.

Behind the door, the click clack of high heels on a parquet floor.

‘Who is it?’

‘Police, ma’am.’

‘Oh.’

The door swung open.

‘I’d just like to ask you some questions.’

She looked at the badge. And then at him. She smiled a sad, inevitable kind of smile.

‘About Peter?’

‘Peter Gudsen. Yes ma’am. Detective Sinclair.’

‘Please.’ She swung the door wide open and watched as he over-wiped his feet back and forth on the doormat. He followed the flow of her hand towards the back of the house as, behind him, she softly closed the door.

He sat at the kitchen table in what looked like a suburban spaceship, all white, chrome and glass. Futuristic, he guessed some might call it. She stood at the counter, a cross between the spaceship’s glamorous captain and a kind of domestic Barbarella. ‘You have a lovely home, ma’am,’ he offered as he took out his notebook and searched his pockets for his pen. Or a pencil.

‘Thank you . . .’ He could tell she was deliberating over what to call him. ‘Would you like a coffee, Officer? Is it Officer?’

He smiled. ‘Detective, ma’am. Thank you, coffee would be great.’

‘Coffee coming up.’ She almost sang it. She already had one of those Turkish coffee pots on the stove.

He’d found a pen. ‘Your name, ma’am. If I may.’

‘Marion Rose. Mrs. Do you take creamer?’

‘No thank you, ma’am. Just strong and black.’

‘I’m divorced, but Ms just sounds far too radical for around here.’ She laughed as she put the coffees down, pushed the sugar bowl towards the centre of the table. He didn’t take any. Instead, he watched as she plonked three cubes in her pale coffee and stirred it almost endlessly.

Marty wasn’t one for taking notes. But he liked to have the notebook open, the pen out, lid off, ready. People expected you to take notes, but he preferred to watch them talk. How could you make or break any connection between the speaker and their words with your head buried in a notebook? ‘And this is 2346 Kenner Avenue?’

‘It is.’

‘Did you know Mr Gudsen well?’

‘Him and Betty. His wife. Their boys play over here all the time. I have two of my own, Zach and Michael. The age of their middle boys. Especially after Peter started working from home, before he got that office, the one where the bomb . . .’ Her voice trailed off and she stared down at her coffee, stirred it again a few times before looking back up at him. Marty was glad for her that she hadn’t seen what he’d seen that day. ‘We’ve got a hoop out the back. I told them they could come over any time. Keep out of their dad’s way.’

‘When was that, ma’am?’

‘Please, Detective, call me Marion.’

‘When was that? When he started to work from home?’

‘Oh, the summer. August sometime. Right after August thirteenth. The day my divorce got finalized. Who said the thirteenth was unlucky?’ She smiled at him. It was hard not to smile back.

‘Did you socialize with Mr and Mrs Gudsen, Marion?’

‘Not that much, mostly through the boys.’

‘Mr Gudsen, did he come over here often?’

‘Over here? Peter? What on earth for?’

Marty let her find the answer.

‘What are you suggesting, Detective?’

‘I’m just trying to build up a picture is all, ma’am.’ He averted his eyes back to his empty notebook.

‘Jumping to conclusions, you mean. They’re my neighbors, Detective. That’s all. I felt sorry for Betty. Four boisterous boys and all she wanted was girls in candy pink. Don’t get me wrong, she loves those boys, would die for them. But a houseful of boys is not what she wanted.’

‘So, you think she was unhappy? Mrs Gudsen?’

‘Unfulfilled, more like.’

Marty thought they might be one and the same.

‘How did her husband feel about that? His wife being unhappy?’

‘Do you think husbands notice when their wives are unhappy, Detective?’

He was tempted to look back down at the notebook.

‘Do you think Mr Gudsen didn’t notice?’

‘Peter was a good man, a thoughtful man. But if you’re looking for a reason why someone went and blew a loving husband with four kids to pieces I don’t have the answer for you. Look.’

She reached out to the windowsill where a bunch of cookery books were piled up high. From beside the pile she took a small leather-bound book, the edges of its pages unevenly cut.

‘He bought me this. Just the other week.’

Marty took it from her, opened it up. It was written in some language he couldn’t read. He must have looked blank.

‘It’s Hebrew. The Old Testament.’

He let her continue.

‘We’re Jewish. It was a thoughtful gift. It’s pretty old I think. A beautiful little book. They wanted to thank me for looking after the boys over a weekend last month when Betty’s father was rushed into the hospital down in Phoenix. Are you married, Detective?’ She looked at the wedding ring on his finger.

‘Married?’ Something made him not want to lie to her. ‘No, Marion, I’m not married.’

‘You just like wedding jewelry?’ She half smiled, half frowned at him.

‘It’s easier here this way. I took it off, right after the divorce. Soon put it back on. People figure I’m more reliable with it, I guess. Somehow, it seems to make people more comfortable.’

‘Reassures them you’re one of them?’

‘I guess. No one would have cared back in LA. Probably the opposite.’ Here it made them talk and he was grateful for it. Stopped him having to.

‘You lived in LA? I love it there. It’s not the natural state here though, is it? Not encouraged.’

‘Unmarried? Divorced?’

‘Either. I’m glad I didn’t come here to open a singles bar. The Faith seems to have its own.’ She threw her head back. Watching her laugh made him forget to ask her what had brought her to a sleepy little city thousands of miles from New York. A sharp rap on the front door ended her laughter. She looked curiously at Marty.

‘Expecting someone?’ he asked.

‘No, I sent the boys to their father’s. Peter, the bombs . . .’

He understood. He was glad she hadn’t asked him if he had children. It all might have come spilling out.

She was at the door now, opening it. He heard Al’s voice. Moved toward the corridor.

‘Hey, Marty! We gotta go. Suspect package down at the Mission offices.’

Marty moved fast towards the door. He gave her his card. Al was already halfway down the path.

‘Anything you think of, Marion, no matter if it seems irrelevant. Call. They can page me. We really got to stop this guy.’

He could feel her green eyes trying to find his as she looked up over the card. But he didn’t look, didn’t speak.

He was down the path now. Behind him he heard her call out, ‘Stay safe, Officer,’ before correcting herself, ‘Detective. Stay safe, Detective.’

Al drove up alongside him, barely stopping the car long enough for him to get in. With the hack pack advancing on foot, they took off.

As they slid into the first corner, Marty turned to him: ‘So, Al, how you feeling about Big Tex’s theory now?’

It hadn’t worked the first time – he was too awake, too aware, all keyed up and expectant – and so he’d slugged back some JD he kept stashed deep in the back of the third drawer of his file cabinet and sat back down at his desk. It didn’t work the second time either. The silence around him had been broken by a high-pitched faraway sound, Jack he thought, screaming blue murder at the top of the house.

The third time, three grand slugs of JD later, somehow the voice on the tape, his own voice, began to seem further and further away and his brain began to see images, until he found himself sitting in a church pew behind young Clark, aged nine. He could see the white of the collar under his blue cardigan. He couldn’t see his legs but he knew the boy was wearing khaki shorts. He had jumped off a tree, snagged them on a branch on the way to the ground. It had ripped the base of the hem. So his mother, having sworn him to secrecy, had rolled them up and stitched a new hem so his father wouldn’t notice and then rolled up the other side and stitched that as well, so they matched.

Next to young Clark sat his family, like three shiny pins. All stared, chins forward, listening intently to the Father and his weekly sermon. Except young Clark. His face was down, reading his prayer book.

Clark could hear the Father now, a Faith Bible in hand, repeating the words of the Prophet who had declared their holy book ‘the only book on earth, for all man’ and said that man ‘would ascend to heaven if he adhered to the gospel the Prophet had transcribed’.

Clark’s eyes wandered over to the flickering flame of a large altar-side candle. The service was over. Now he watched as young Clark and his family were out into the aisle, moving slowly with the other Faithful. Clark moved out from his seat, into the aisle behind them. They didn’t notice him. He shuffled along behind them, toward the light at the end of the aisle, blinding light pouring through the doorway of the Mission. Urgent movement, fast behind him, two young boys broken free from family reins storming through toward the sunlight. As they did so, they bumped into young Clark and he watched as the child’s hands reached out to grab the book, but it kept falling, falling, falling down onto the floor where its pages fluttered open. Young Clark froze, like he was cast in stone, or salt. His father, half blinded by the sunlight, bent to retrieve it, but when his hand brought the Bible back into view there were two books, not one. And one had pictures in. It was as if a cloud had put out the sun. Clark watched young Clark, knew that he wanted to run as fast as he could with those other boys, run outside to where he knew the sun shone. Out, out and away.

The Faithful halted in their tracks to stare as his father held the book aloft for all to see. Clark could see his father’s lips move, but couldn’t hear him. Saw him turn to his mother, as spittle flew from someplace beneath his moustache – his angry mouth twisted and turned, his eyes flared. Clark remembered how it had hurt, his father’s hand pressed down, gripping his shoulder as if he knew he would run.

And then the sound came back.

‘There’s no such thing as dinosaurs, son. NO. SUCH. THING. This filth is worse than fiction. It’s blasphemy, that’s what this is. BLASPHEMY.’

And now Clark watched as his father dragged young Clark over to the candle, picked up the anointing oil from the altar and poured it over the book.

He saw young Clark reach out helplessly as his father touched the book on top of the candle and held it aloft. Flames began to lick up the dinosaur’s tail, consuming Stegosaurus and his friends in penitential fire.

It was February 23, 1964. He didn’t know precisely what time, but about the moment the second hand was encroaching upon the 3. That moment, as he watched his burning book arc through the air and land outside on the Mission’s concrete path, was the precise moment he had begun to truly hate his daddy and his Faith.

Numismatic.

Clark began to come out of the trance, drawn out by that man’s voice. His voice. As he did, through the earphones and the now static hum coming from the tape deck he could hear some other noise invading his eardrums.

Hammering.

It was Edie, bang, bang, banging on the door with what sounded like a jackhammer. He heard her shoulder make contact with the door. What was she trying to do, she was five foot nothing and barely a hundred pounds.

‘Clark, Clark, are you alright? Answer me or I’m gonna call 911. Clark!’

Finding his way slowly out of 1964 he couldn’t remember if he’d locked the basement door properly or not. He moved fast as he could up the wooden steps. She must have heard him. She went silent, probably expecting him to open the door. He didn’t.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Research,’ he said.

‘What kind of research? It’s late.’

He didn’t answer. Instead, he was looking at the white-painted door panels around the top bolt, smeared with dried blood. His blood. When he’d dragged the bolt shut earlier his hand must have bled on it. And then he realized it was him that was the problem. His baggage. His blood. That’s why his hypnotic state was stuck in limbo in his childhood.

Her knock. Soft now.

‘Go to bed, Edie.’

‘But . . .’ He heard her sigh, wait for a moment, and then without saying anything else he heard her move back along the corridor towards the staircase.

Back in the trance state he’d been both himself and his younger self, divided not by place, but by time. Alice had been sucked down into the rabbit hole and found Wonderland, another world where she had been tall and short and then herself again. Clark had fallen into the centre of the vortex and fallen back into hell, but just like Alice he was stuck there as various distortions of himself. Perhaps to escape himself and his past and create a new self, first he had to become someone else? Breathe as them, think as them, even just for a few moments. Fake yourself to find yourself.

He was stood at his workbench now, where the Poe volume he’d gotten from Vegas awaited his attention. Earlier, he’d been crafting a protective cover for it, before adding it to the growing collection of first editions he kept stashed away in a locked cabinet, not too dissimilar to Dougie Wild’s. But Clark’s cabinet had two locks, not one. Clark picked up the book with his bandaged hand and carefully, with his good hand, thumbed through it.

What if it were possible in the trance state to become someone else, someone that wasn’t the younger, fatter or taller you, and by becoming that person, even for a minute, you could
be
them? Just like Mesmer’s jockeys and ballroom dancers. Clark’s mind filled with the possibilities of that. Put unspoken words in the mouths of the famous, the infamous, write their signatures, their letters, their words. Become them. Perhaps even
create
their words in their style. Surely that was impossible. Or was it? If you could counterfeit coins, then why couldn’t you counterfeit people?