Big Driver (15 page)

The obvious mountain had a name: Betsy Neal. A pretty woman with an oval face, mismatched Picasso eyes, and a cloud of dark hair. She had recognized Tess, had even gotten her autograph, but that wasn't the clincher. The clincher was going to be the bruises on her face (
I hope that didn't happen here,
Neal had said), and the fact that Tess had asked about Alvin Strehlke, describing his truck and recognizing the ring when Neal mentioned it.
Like a ruby,
Tess had agreed.

Neal would see the story on TV or read it in the newspaper—with three dead from the same family, how could she avoid it?—and she would go to the police. The police would come to Tess. They would check the Connecticut gun-registration records as a matter of course and discover that Tess owned a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver known as a Lemon Squeezer. They would ask her to produce it so they could test-fire it and do comparisons to the bullets found in the three victims. And what was she going to say? Was she going to look at them from her blackened eyes and say (in a voice still hoarse from the choking Lester Strehlke had given her) that she lost it? Would she continue to stick to that story even after the dead women were found in the culvert pipe?

Tess picked up her borrowed pen and began writing again.

. . . what she says once in every book: murderers always overlook the obvious. Doreen also once took a leaf from Dorothy Sayers's book and left a
murderer with a loaded gun, telling him to take the honorable way out. I have a gun. My brother Mike is my only surviving close relative. He lives in Taos, New Mexico. I suppose he may inherit my estate. It depends on the legal ramifications of my crimes. If he does, I hope the authorities who find this letter will show it to him, and convey my wish that he donate the bulk to some charitable organization that works with women who have been sexually abused.

I am sorry about Big Driver—Alvin Strehlke. He was not the man who raped me, and Doreen is sure he didn't rape and kill those other women, either.

Doreen? No,
her
. Doreen wasn't real. But Tess was too tired to go back and change it. And what the hell—she was near the end, anyway.

For Ramona and that piece of garbage in the other room, I make no apologies. They are better off dead.

So, of course, am I.

She paused long enough to look back over the pages and see if there was anything she had forgotten. There didn't appear to be, so she signed her name—her final autograph. The pen ran dry on the last letter and she put it aside.

“Got anything to say, Lester?” she asked.

Only the wind replied, gusting hard enough to make the little house groan in its joints and puff drafts of cold air.

She went back into the living room. She put the hat on his head and the ring on his finger. That was the way she wanted them to find him. There was a framed photo on the TV. In it, Lester and his mother stood with their arms around each other. They were smiling. Just a boy and his mum. She looked at it for awhile, then left.

- 42 -

She felt that she should go back to the deserted store where it had happened and finish her business there. She could sit for awhile in the weedy lot, listen to the wind ticking the old sign (YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU), thinking about whatever people think about in the final moments of a life. In her case that would probably be Fritzy. She guessed Patsy would take him, and that would be fine. Cats were survivors. They didn't much care who fed them, as long as the bowl was full.

It wouldn't take long to get to the store at this hour, but it still seemed too far. She was very tired. She decided she would get into Al Strehlke's old truck and do it there. But she didn't want to splatter her painfully written confession with her blood, that seemed very wrong considering all the bloodshed detailed within it, and so—

She took the pages from the Blue Horse tablet into the living room, where the TV played on (a young man who looked like a criminal was now selling a robot floorwasher), and dropped
them in Strehlke's lap. “Hold that for me, Les,” she said.

“No problem,” he replied. She noted that a portion of his diseased brains was now drying on his bony naked shoulder. That was all right.

Tess went out into the windy dark and slowly climbed behind the wheel of the pickup truck. The scream of the hinge when the driver's door swung shut was oddly familiar. But no, not so odd; hadn't she heard it at the store? Yes. She had been trying to do him a favor, because he was going to do her one—he was going to change her tire so she could go home and feed her cat. “I didn't want his battery to run down,” she said, and laughed.

She put the short barrel of the .38 against her temple, then reconsidered. A shot like that wasn't always effective. She wanted her money to help women who had been hurt, not to pay for her care as she lay unconscious year after year in some home for human vegetables.

The mouth, that was better. Surer.

The barrel was oily against her tongue, and she could feel the small nub of the sight digging into the roof of her mouth.

I've had a good life—pretty good, anyway—and although I made a terrible mistake at the end of it, maybe that won't be held against me if there's something after this.

Ah, but the night wind was very sweet. So were the fragile fragrances it carried through the half-open driver's side window. It was a shame to leave, but what choice? It was time to go.

Tess closed her eyes, tightened her finger on the trigger, and that was when Tom spoke up. It was strange that he could do that, because Tom was in her Expedition, and the Expedition was at the other brother's house, almost a mile down the road from here. Also, the voice she heard was nothing like the one she usually manufactured for Tom. Nor did it sound like her own. It was a cold voice. And she—she had a gun in her mouth. She couldn't talk at all.

“She was never a very good detective, was she?”

She took it out. “Who? Doreen?”

In spite of everything, she was shocked.

“Who else, Tessa Jean? And why
would
she be a good one? She came from the old you. Didn't she?”

Tess supposed that was true.

“Doreen believes Big Driver didn't rape and kill those other women. Isn't that what you wrote?”

“Me,”
Tess said. “
I'm
sure. I was just tired, that's all. And shocked, I suppose.”

“Also guilty.”

“Yes. Also guilty.”

“Do guilty people make good deductions, do you think?”

No. Perhaps they didn't.

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“That you only solved part of the mystery. Before you could solve all of it—
you,
not some cliché-ridden old lady detective—something admittedly unfortunate happened.”

“Unfortunate? Is that what you call it?” From a
great distance, Tess heard herself laugh. Somewhere the wind was making a loose gutter click against an eave. It sounded like the 7Up sign at the deserted store.

“Before you
shoot
yourself,” the new, strange Tom said (he was sounding more female all the time), “why don't you
think
for yourself? But not here.”

“Where, then?”

Tom didn't answer this question, and didn't have to. What he said was, “And take that fucking confession with you.”

Tess got out of the truck and went back inside Lester Strehlke's house. She stood in the dead man's kitchen, thinking. She did it aloud, in Tom's voice (which sounded more like her own all the time). Doreen seemed to have taken a hike.

“Al's housekey will be on the ring with his ignition key,” Tom said, “but there's the dog. You don't want to forget the dog.”

No, that would be bad. Tess went to Lester's refrigerator. After a little rummaging, she found a package of hamburger at the back of the bottom shelf. She used an issue of
Uncle Henry's
to double-wrap it, then went back into the living room. She plucked the confession from Strehlke's lap, doing it gingerly, very aware that the part of him that had hurt her—the part that had gotten three people killed tonight—lay just beneath the pages. “I'm taking your ground chuck, but don't hold it against me. I'm doing you a favor. It smells spunky-going-on-rotten.”

“A thief as well as a murderer,” Little Driver said in his droning deadvoice. “Isn't that nice.”

“Shut up, Les,” she said, and left.

- 43 -

Before you
shoot
yourself, why don't you
think
for yourself?

As she drove the old pickup back down the windy road to Alvin Strehlke's house, she tried to do that. She was starting to think Tom, even when he wasn't in the vehicle with her, was a better detective than Doreen Marquis on her best day.

“I'll keep it short,” Tom said. “If you don't think Al Strehlke was part of it—and I mean a
big
part—you're crazy.”

“Of course I'm crazy,” she replied. “Why else would I be trying to convince myself that I didn't shoot the wrong man when I know I
did
?”

“That's guilt talking, not logic,” Tom replied. He sounded maddeningly smug. “He was no innocent little lamb, not even a half-black sheep. Wake up, Tessa Jean. They weren't just brothers, they were partners.”

“
Business
partners.”

“Brothers are never just business partners. It's always more complicated than that. Especially when you've got a woman like Ramona for a mother.”

Tess turned up Al Strehlke's smoothly paved
driveway. She supposed Tom could be right about that. She knew one thing: Doreen and her Knitting Society friends had never met a woman like Ramona Norville.

The pole light went on. The dog started up:
yark-yark, yarkyarkyark
. Tess waited for the light to go out and the dog to quiet down.

“There's no way I'll ever know for sure, Tom.”

“You can't be certain of that unless you look.”

“Even if he knew,
he wasn't the one who raped me.
”

Tom was silent for a moment. She thought he'd given up. Then he said, “When a person does a bad thing and another person knows but doesn't stop it, they're equally guilty.”

“In the eyes of the law?”

“Also in the eyes of
me
. Say it was just Lester who did the hunting, the raping, and the killing. I don't think so, but say it was. If big brother knew and said nothing, that makes him worth killing. In fact, I'd say bullets were too good for him. Impaling on a hot poker would be closer to justice.”

Tess shook her head wearily and touched the gun on the seat. One bullet left. If she had to use it on the dog (and really, what was one more killing among friends), she would have to hunt for another gun, unless she meant to try and hang herself, or something. But guys like the Strehlkes usually had firearms. That was the beauty part, as Ramona would have said.

“If he knew, yes. But an if that big didn't deserve a bullet in the head. The mother, yes—on
that score, the earrings were all the proof I needed. But there's no proof here.”

“Really?” Tom's voice was so low Tess could barely hear it. “Go see.”

- 44 -

The dog didn't bark when she clumped up the steps, but she could picture it standing just inside the door with its head down and its teeth bared.

“Goober?” What the hell, it was as good a name for a country dog as any. “My name's Tess. I have some hamburger for you. I also have a gun with one bullet in it. I'm going to open the door now. If I were you, I'd choose the meat. Okay? Is it a deal?”

Still no barking. Maybe it took the pole light to set him off. Or a juicy female burglar. Tess tried one key, then another. No good. Those two were probably for the trucking office. The third one turned in the lock, and she opened the door before she could lose her courage. She had been visualizing a bulldog or a Rottweiler or a pit bull with red eyes and slavering jaws. What she saw was a Jack Russell terrier who was looking at her hopefully and thumping its tail.

Tess put the gun in her jacket pocket and stroked the dog's head. “Good God,” she said. “To think I was
terrified
of you.”

“No need to be,” Goober said. “Say, where's Al?”

“Don't ask,” she said. “Want some hamburger? I warn you, it may have gone off.”

“Give it to me, baby,” Goober said.

Tess fed him a chunk of the hamburger, then came in, closed the door, and turned on the lights. Why not? It was only her and Goober, after all.

Alvin Strehlke had kept a neater house than his younger brother. The floors and walls were clean, there were no stacks of
Uncle Henry's Swap Guide,
and she actually saw a few books on the shelves. There were also several clusters of Hummel figures, and a large framed photo of Momzilla on the wall. Tess found that a touch suggestive, but it was hardly proof positive. Of anything.
If there was a photo of Richard Widmark in his famous Tommy Udo role, that might be different.

“What are you smiling about?” Goober asked. “Want to share?”

“Actually, no,” Tess said. “Where should we start?”

“I don't know,” Goober said. “I'm just the dog. How about some more of that tasty cow?”

Tess fed him some more meat. Goober got up on his hind legs and turned around twice. Tess wondered if she were going insane.

“Tom? Anything to say?”

“You found your underpants at the other brother's house, right?”

“Yes, and I took them. They're torn . . . and I'd never want to wear them again even if they weren't . . . but they're
mine
.”

“And what else did you find besides a bunch of undies?”