The Killing of Bobbi Lomax (6 page)

By the time they reached the Mission offices Big Tex was rolling out the cable that connected a control box to his robot, or Baby as he called it. It looked like a cumbersome oversized skateboard with an unwieldy Meccano arm precariously balanced on it. Marty bit down into one of the fresh bacon ’n’ cheese burgers Al had liberated, courtesy of a cop-loving waitress, from the diner behind them, right after he’d shooed its customers, necks craning, out of their comfy booths and back up the street away from what could be the center of an imminent blast. Being cleared out of range of flying glass and shrapnel, but out of view of the drama, didn’t seem to make any of them happy. Less than thirty minutes had passed since they got the call but every building in the half-block, including the Faith’s sprawling HQ, had been evacuated.

Now Al was crouched back down beside him and they watched as Big Tex switched on the screen that monitored Baby on her ops. The picture was fuzzy with lines running up and down on it like you’d see on your TV if you didn’t have cable, right before the aerial completely lost its signal and ruined the end of your favorite show. Marty thought it looked pretty hopeless. But he figured it was better than sticking your face into a bomb which might be about to explode, better for the Meccano to take the hit.

The call had come in from a limo driver. He’d had a busy morning shuttling people from the airport downtown and back, for some convention or other. He’d stopped for a coffee when a woman approached him. He shouldn’t have taken the ride off the grid, but felt he was having too good a morning to resist. He’d already made a hundred bucks in tips, double the usual, forty of it from a young Korean kid. He didn’t feel bad that the kid couldn’t understand the currency, mistaking twenties for tens. He’d thanked him for the tip and bowed like some of his Japanese customers bowed. He wasn’t sure if they did that in Korea or not. The fact the woman in need of a ride to the other side of town was hot might have swayed his decision to agree to take her far from his airport route, way over the other side of the canyon. But his fantasy as to what might lie ahead for him in lieu of payment and/or tips when they’d got to the canyon was dampened before it had even got to the good bit. As she got in, with him holding the door open for her, she’d noticed a white gift box with a red ribbon tied around it wedged right behind the driver’s seat. When he’d reached in to retrieve it he suddenly remembered the descriptions of the bomb packages he’d heard over the dispatch radio. Next he’s shouting to the woman to get out, there’s a bomb, and they’re out running down the sidewalk yelling and warning everyone else. From the payphone up the street the driver had called it in. The woman had hopped in a cab and he’d lost the fare and who knows what else, and now it looked as if his fantasies and his limo would both turn to dust.

‘OK, Baby. Do your thing,’ cooed Big Tex in Baby’s direction.

Marty, Al and what looked like most of the precinct were crouched down behind a slew of squad cars which had slammed to a halt across the street, blocking it off. Marty peeked around the exhaust of one of the cars as Tex toggled what looked like the gear stick of an old racing car, pushing and pulling it in the direction he wanted Baby to go. After a hesitant start, Baby was now racing at a speed of about five miles an hour toward the open rear driver’s-side door, where, in the footwell, Marty could see a white shoe box and cascading red ribbons, exactly like the bomber’s other packages. Baby slowed down about twenty yards from the cab and began to inch forward. Marty guessed that was to do with not causing too much ground vibration that might set the bomb off before Baby and Tex got a closer look.

Marty looked around at Al. He was crouched down, back to the cruiser, chin tucked into chest and his hands over his ears, expecting the worst. Marty tugged Al’s hand away from his ear.

‘What did she say, the widow Gudsen?’

‘You want to know
now
?’

Marty smiled at him. ‘Talking will make you less tense.’

‘She said a bunch of stuff. Not sure if any of it will be any use. But basically, she didn’t know much about her husband’s business. She was in college, met Peter the husband through friends in the Faith. He was a senior, tipped for the Faith’s top job even back then.’

‘Interesting.’

‘Yeah, I thought so. Although that widens our suspects to jealous colleagues from the Faith.’

‘Correct. Ideally, we’d be narrowing the search, not increasing it ten-fold. What else?’

‘She really had no idea, or she should win an Oscar, about their finances, business transactions. None of it. Said she was totally shocked when she heard on the news yesterday that the business was going to fold. Gudsen had never mentioned it was in any trouble, although she did say he’d been very stressed about something for the past couple of months.’

‘But didn’t know what?’

‘This, I’d imagine.’

‘Maybe this. Maybe that. Could be anything. What about another woman? Or Mrs Houseman?’

‘Nothing. She said he wasn’t that kind of man. Very devout. They were both virgins when they married.’

‘Maybe he was a slow starter.’

Al smiled. ‘She doesn’t know any Mrs Houseman, or Mr Houseman. When I asked her if Gudsen went out a lot, unexplained places, maybe even at night, she said he’d had even more meetings at the Faith’s offices in the past few months, mostly in the evenings, than ever before. She figured that was a good thing.’

‘Well, at least, that’s what he wanted her to think. The Faith, not unfaithful.’

Marty smiled at his own joke. Al continued. ‘She didn’t know of any offshore accounts or unusual transactions. But, as she said, Gudsen dealt with all that, even the household expenses, gave her housekeeping.’

‘Cash?’

‘No. Check. Monthly. Into a dedicated account for the house. Four hundred bucks, for shopping, small emergencies, that kind of thing. Wrote a check direct to the cleaner himself once a month.’

‘They sound duller than ditchwater.’

‘Yep.’

‘Somebody didn’t think so, or they wouldn’t have blown him to smithereens.’

‘I asked the widow where he kept the check-books, it’d be good to get a look at the ledger, you know, in the back, see if he kept it up to date, see where any monies might be getting siphoned off. She thought just domestic ones, maybe, not business he would keep in the house. But . . .’

‘She didn’t really know.’

‘Right. In his desk drawer, maybe. It was locked. All the other drawers were open, but no sign of the key. When she was looking I thought I saw a couple of safe keys, tied together with a little scrap of ribbon, in amongst a pen set in one of the other drawers. I don’t think she even saw it and if she did, it didn’t register.’

‘Doesn’t know what it is?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘She a suspect?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Well, I guess we narrowed the suspect list, huh?’

‘By one.’

‘It’s a start. We’ll get a search warrant. For the house,’ said Marty.

‘What, on a victim’s place? This guy was going places, with the Faith.’

‘Maybe this financial stuff put paid to that.’

‘And maybe it was the cause of him getting killed.’

Marty thought that was definitely a possibility. And maybe so did the Faith. They were known to invest heavily in projects brought to them by the Faithful. The higher up the Faith tree, the more likely it was they had some kind of financial hold on you by way of investment. From what Marty had seen at the Gudsen house there was certainly a Faith presence, over and above a simple show of support for a fallen Brother’s widow. He’d seen the Faithful loitering by the phone, and he’d spotted one guy sat in a car parked opposite the house, clocking the comings and goings at the entrance. They were easy to spot. They didn’t mingle, they observed. Mingling was not their thing.

Marty stuck his head around the edge of the car again. As he did, he could see in the monitor Big Tex’s Meccano hand reaching down to a corner of the ribbon, pushing towards it as if it was going to tease it open. Marty nudged Al to cover his ears back up, and covered his own. As he did so, out of the corner of his eye, he saw a young Korean guy, clad in the uniform of the Faithful, pushing through the police line outside the conference centre, an equally young cop trying to hold him back. Marty took his hands from his ears, looking to the guy and the box, just as the Meccano snagged the ribbon, lifting it up, the ribbon not strong enough to hold the dangling box together. It fell open and the vase inside crashed to the floor and smashed into tiny pieces.

‘What fool left that fucking vase there!?’ yelled Tex to no one in particular as he took off fast towards Baby.

Al stood up, brushed his trousers down, turned to Marty who was doing the same: ‘So that puts Houseman, Hartman and half the city back in the frame.’

Marty moved past him, head shaking, moving toward their car. ‘Come on. We don’t have time for this false alarm crap.’

‘Where we headed? The hospital?’ said Al.

‘No point. Houseman’s still in a coma. I told Grady Jnr to let me know if that changes. We’re back to the better side of town to visit with the grieving widower. He seemed pretty genuine yesterday. But maybe he knew what was coming, had time to prepare. So, let’s try and find out why the high school prom queen married an ageing businessman. And how that may or may not fit into the investigation. Especially if there was a good life-insurance policy out on her. The kind of settlement that might help a guy onto a plane headed towards a place we can’t extradite from and with a chunk of change left over so he doesn’t ever have to come back to this place.’

‘You think Lomax tried to bomb his way out of trouble?’

‘Why not? I’ve seen crazier. It would sure deflect attention – even for a little while.’

‘I’ll second that. But what about the others? Houseman and Gudsen.’

‘Gudsen’s the business partner. Most likely he knows where the bodies are buried.’

‘And Houseman?’

‘Maybe he was their silent partner.’

‘Maybe.’

‘No evidence of that so far, though, hey?’

Al shook his head.

‘Some kind of collateral damage then,’ said Marty.

‘That could make sense.’

‘And if not Lomax the Old Fool, how about the Old Fool’s ex? She can’t have been happy to be cast aside for a wannabe beauty queen fresh out of high school.’

‘She wasn’t.’

‘Messy divorce?’

‘Carnage.’

Marty looked at him. ‘Maybe literally.’

‘Mrs Lomax the First was mighty pissed, sued him for the house, the company, everything – but he had it all tied up in trusts, offshore corporations everywhere. At least that’s what he claimed. She didn’t get a bean.’

‘And now we know why. It was a bust.’

‘Where the hell did all that money go?’

Marty shrugged, ‘You got the court papers through already or did Mrs Gudsen spill all that?’

‘Neither. The whole saga was in the papers. But I’ll get the family court transcripts and check.’

Marty looked surprised. ‘It was in the locals?’

Al shook his head. ‘No.
Nevada Herald
. Last year. Lomax is a property tycoon. Was, anyhow. Local boy made good.’

‘And look how that turned out.’

‘Folks were interested.’

‘Or just plain nosey. Guess the Faith wanted to keep it out of their press.’

‘That’s why I read the out-of-state press – it hasn’t been censored,’ said Al.

‘Not by the Faith, anyhow.’

‘You got that right.’

‘Make sure that kid doesn’t go anywhere, Al.’

Al followed Marty’s gaze over to where the young Korean follower was sat slumped down on the curb, his head in his hands.

They got a translator pretty quickly, considering. An older Korean guy. Faith, naturally. He looked ready to give the young guy shit. But Marty just wanted to know if anyone had given the kid the package. No. Anyone asked him to leave it in the back of the limo? No. Where did he get the package? Seoul airport. The lady behind the counter had wrapped it for him when he’d told her it was a gift for his host family. What was he doing in America? He was a new member of the Faith. Obviously expanding their territories. After his plane had been delayed, he’d been so worried about being late for the start of the conference that he’d headed straight there instead of to the host’s house first. He’d totally forgotten about the package until he got to the registration hall and ran back out, pushing through the crowd until he saw ‘that man’, Tex, about to blow up his $200 gift.

Tex was pissed. He liked to blow stuff up. Particularly if he’d been waiting hours to do it. After, as the kid stood with delayed shock, sobbing on the sidewalk, Big Tex gave him a lecture on securing your belongings at all times. It didn’t matter the kid could barely understand a word.

Welcome to America.

He’d been stood in the dark for what felt like a lifetime. Engine and lights off. He hardly dared breathe, but he had to wait there until they settled again, then maybe one or two would edge back towards the fence. If so, he might be able to just reach over and grab one. No such luck.

Instead, spooked maybe by his scent or something, a whole gaggle of the fuckers were shifting quickly again now, heading for the coop. He couldn’t wait any longer: he had to move fast up and over the fence.

He was on the outskirts of the gaggle now, felt the beginnings of even hastier movement and frantic noise amongst them. He was primed to react, but so were they. More so than him. And faster. He pushed forward, reached down amongst them, deep into the huddle. One was all he needed. His hand connected with a neck and he pulled its wriggling body out of the melee around him. They were all squawking and fleeing, flapping their useless wings in a concerted effort to frighten off this predator in their midst. He waded out through the racket back towards his car. As he did so, he placed his hands tightly around its neck and it wriggled furiously, evolution must have warned it what was coming. Soon its body went limp.

He headed for the car, back up the track to where it was parked close to the perimeter fence, its dark silhouette barely visible. He was grateful for the fact there hadn’t been the usual September rain, otherwise the entire field around the coop would have been a giant shit-fest. Grateful because he’d remembered to wear his old tennis shoes, knowing he could just sling them in the washing machine when he got home. Get them washed and dried under the boiler before Edie and Jack got home in the morning. When he was working on one of his special projects, any nights he could subtly persuade Edie to spend at her sister’s – and take Jack – were like a gift from the gods. He liked to work knowing he wouldn’t be interrupted by the unpredictable rhythms of other people’s lives.

He had a clean trash bag ready. He shoved it inside and slammed the lid of the trunk back down. He had to get out of there fast before the squawking woke the turkey farmer and brought him, armed and irritated, out of his house.

He plucked the best feathers out of its left wing. He was right-handed so it had to be the left wing, that way the feathers wouldn’t be in his sightline as he wrote. The long, fine feathers had the sturdiest of tips. He’d washed them and dried them, slicing them like a flower stem diagonally across the base, and now he was dipping the first one into his ink-pot, squeezing and drawing it out, careful not to waste any of the precious ink.

Probably the ink had been the most perilous ingredient to obtain. Following instructions from an old ink recipe he’d found in a library book, he had been burning pages he’d ripped out of another book when Edie and Jack had come back early from a Faith-organized Saturday playgroup. Jack had eaten too much cake, guzzled too much OJ and trampolined until his brain hurt. Triple whammy. He’d been violently sick in the Mission side hall and Edie, apologizing profusely, had hurriedly bundled him out the door and into the car as some of the other Faith mothers kindly took to cleaning up the mess.

When he’d heard them pull up to the garage Clark quickly slammed down the hood of the barbecue, sending smoke seeping out the sides of it. He’d yelled out to Edie he was just cleaning it in case she got the idea he might be prepping a cook-out. Not today, he had more pressing things to attend to. She didn’t look like she believed he was cleaning anything, but he didn’t have time to worry about it. As Edie ushered Jack through the front door and upstairs towards the bathroom Clark quickly wrenched open the barbecue hood before all the ash from the precious pages evaporated to nothing. He gathered up as much of it as he could. This would be the base ingredient with which he would make his ink. He’d sliced the blank back pages out of an 1840s book he’d found in the folio section of the university library. That way the carbon and thus the ink would be genuine nineteenth-century, not some hokey late-twentieth-century version. It was true what he’d told Edie: he had cleaned the barbecue, right before he’d burnt the papers in it. He didn’t want 1982’s burger fat sullying his pristine, freshly made 1849 ink.

Over the past month he’d spent a few days in various university libraries across the state acquiring copies of the author’s signature, plus samples of his handwriting: verified, genuine copies. He had found ten in all, from various stages of the author’s life, and he had traced them out again and again and again. Then he’d homed in on a particular year, a year when the author had been most prolific in his letter writing, and Clark had focused on perfecting – as near as possible – the signature of that year. He noticed that each period in the writer’s life had generated slight, almost imperceptible, changes to the signature. As little as a decade later it was very different to how it used to be. After he dispensed with the tracing he concentrated on generating the signature himself over and over. Almost five hundred times. It was vital to perfect the signature first, before embarking on anything more ambitious. He wanted to be ambitious. But he would be patient.

But he couldn’t get the signature down. Every time the damn ‘tell’ gave him away. Every time there was a hesitation mark somewhere in the signature no matter how hard he tried to relax, free his hand, his arm, his shoulder of tension. He knew from his research it was what forgery experts looked for – and always found – it was the one thing that marked out the forger from the forgee. Hesitation. No one ever thinks about their signature, they just do it. It is one of man’s rare hesitation-free zones. Even crossing the road doesn’t come without either hesitation, thought or some awareness of danger unless you are completely distracted. Genuine signatures just flow. But no matter how much he attempted to discard mechanical thought, when he placed his efforts under the microscope, there it was: the hesitation, every time, even the faintest of tremors, but a tremor all the same and so he would start again. Until it was perfect to the human eye he wouldn’t bother to dig out the high-grade microscope he’d bought at the city university’s yard sale last year, for he knew that under its unforgiving gaze the hesitation would look less like a tremor and more like a devastating earthquake marked out on a seismograph.

When he wasn’t prepping the technical side of his plan, for every moment of the past month Clark had completely immersed himself in the author’s life. He felt that if tomorrow he had to write a PhD proposal he would know more about the author’s life than the professor assessing it. Now with his research complete he had everything. It had taken over a month, but it had to be done right. Perfect, that’s what it had to be: perfect. He knew what he had to do next. What he didn’t know was if it would work or not.

He had already recorded the tape he would use to hypnotize himself. Not the same tape as before, but a different one, unique to his subject, the very subject he knew he must become, just like Dr Mesmer’s subjects had – temporarily – become jockeys, expert dancers and, even, dogs. Clark didn’t like to think his little experiment might go awry and he might spend the rest of his life as man’s best friend. He really hoped that wasn’t possible.

He had prepared a safe word. So even if somehow his life became a living resurrection of the author’s, if he followed the plan as he had clearly set it out on the tape then the name would be repeated by himself and others, and that repetition would hopefully release him from a hypnotic life of surreal servitude to the strange ghost of a long-dead author.

For authenticity’s sake, and in the hope that it would help him get under quickly and deeply into the mind of a man who last breathed in 1849, Clark had voiced the recording with heavy traces of a Bostonian accent. Even though Clark’s was a strained twentieth-century approximation of the accent, not a nineteenth-century version, he hoped it might still have on it the lick of the pilgrim fathers.

On the desk in front of him sat a first edition of one of the author’s collections – Clark put his hand on it as if he were at a séance, attempting to summon the soul of the author from within it. He turned up the headphone volume and closed his eyes. As the tape instructed him, he began to follow the clearly defined instructions it had taken weeks to hone, and soon he began to repeat the words of a familiar poem:

Minutes later, as instructed, he took up the turkey quill, dipped it in the ink and wrote the name.

Edgar.

Allan.

Poe.

The words written so close up to one another there was barely room for the paper to breathe between the lines as the quill traveled high and writ large:

Clark filled the sheet of blotting paper in front of him and had just begun to write on another when the control word halted him mid-flourish.

Raven
.

He looked down at the page. Even without the high-powered microscope he could see the tell. He had figured out that in his previous attempts at mesmerizing himself he had been unable to let go of him, of Clark, kept getting stuck in his childhood because he was still doing things that he, Clark Houseman, did. Things like drinking JD. And so, he had thought of a simple switch that might unblock him from his own past and perhaps help him get deep into the lives of others. He would switch his tipple for theirs. In the glass he was about to take a hit from was cognac: pricey French cognac – Poe’s favorite – from a company that had existed for over three hundred years and which Kenny had gotten him a case of, from one of his booze-mafia buddies.

He took a swig from the glass, then another. It warmed his mouth and his throat as it traveled into the far reaches of his stomach. Soon it would be in his veins. He pressed rewind, then play. As he did so, he stared at the hand-drawn vortex he had pinned to the wall in front of him and, once again, he repeated the words of the poem until this time they became their own rhythm: napping, rapping, rapping, tapping, napping until the drawn lines of the vortex seemed imprinted on his mind.

Clark soon felt his entire being alter – everything from his posture to the way he held the pen shifted and resettled until he felt like he owned the quill, the ink and the signature that flowed from it. Each time his hand moved across the page more confidently than the last, until it moved completely without hesitation.

Clark Houseman was dead. For now. Edgar Allan Poe was alive and living in his body, his resurrected lifeblood coursing through Clark’s veins, down into his fingers, into his grip and writing upon the page as Poe himself. Poe’s hand now wrote the familiar words over and over and over.

Raven.

Raven.

Clark looked down at the page, saw what he had done. He needed to see, see it quickly up close just to make sure, but he was sure it was right, at least to the naked eye. He searched the workbench next to him and the floor around it for what seemed like the longest time until he found the university microscope buried under a pile of research material. He grabbed it, shoved the paper under the glass and peered down into the latest batch of signatures, checking through each line, every movement, every flourish of the quill. And when he was done he checked each and every one again.

They were perfect.

Flawless.

There were no hesitation marks.

Not one.

He had done it.

He wanted to yell it from the rooftops. But he couldn’t risk telling another living soul. This was no party trick. This was his life. His new life. If he could replicate this success with other characters, other personalities, not just Poe, and write real script, real documents, not just the signatures of historical characters, authors, even presidents, in doing so he might be able to rewrite history itself.

Rewrite history.

Clark smiled. Sat back down at his desk. The Bible he’d picked up near the Last Call Tavern was sat there – he had been meaning to write a family history onto its inside cover pages, related to some figure in the church. With its age and that added provenance, if it could be even halfway verified, it might fetch maybe as much as twenty five hundred bucks. But now, now he had a different idea – he would give the Faith exactly what they needed. History. And in doing so he would write and rewrite their history. Write and rewrite it so they wouldn’t know what to believe any more. He leant back in his chair and stared at the vortex. His hands settled on the back of his head and he smiled.

He would fuck with the Faith, maybe enough to destroy it, or die trying.