Falls the Shadow (29 page)

In the interstices of the American landscape, we have built our cathedrals. Upon useless wedges of real estate they sprawl, upon the trash-strewn boundaries between one exurb and the next, upon land fit neither for human nor for beast. Squat, rectangular, with cinder-block wall and steel door, the monuments of our age have risen to embrace the very stuff of the American dream. And what is that exactly? Why, stuff itself.

E-Zee Self Store sat just off a highway near the town of Exton, Pennsylvania. I stood before the red corrugated-steel door of unit 27 as the hiss and vroom of highway traffic rose and fell behind me. Weeds to the left of me, desolation to the right, here I was, officially nowhere. Exton. But behind the red steel door, I believed, might be a message from a murderer.

It was on the plane home from Chicago, with the stink of the Pepper household still in my nose and the certainty in my gut that Dr. Bob had killed Leesa Dubé, that I realized the message might exist. I was sitting back in the seat, arms folded, trying to figure it all out, the whole horrid story, when I felt this jabbing in my chest. I ignored it as best I could as I struggled to come up with an explanation for why Dr. Bob would murder Leesa Dubé. Had she betrayed him in some way? Had she rejected him somehow? Had she failed to floss?

None of it made much sense, except that he had done it. It wasn’t François, it wasn’t Velma, it wasn’t the mythical Clem, it was Bob. The similarities were too similar to be a coincidence, two murders that somehow involved Bobby Pepper, the picture of the murderous husband gripped in the murdered wife’s hand. It was his way to deflect blame, almost a reflexive action. How do you frame the husband for a murder you committed? Reach into your past, pull out a trick. Yes, Dr. Bob had killed Leesa Dubé, but why?

Blaming the murder on the dead woman’s dentist, without a motive, wasn’t going to help François, it was just going to make us all look desperate and pathetic. I needed a why. I sat back in my seat and crossed my arms and let the question rattle about my brain. Even as I felt something jab into my chest, I ignored the pain and tried to think it through.

There was an image I couldn’t shake, hadn’t been able to shake since I left that sad Chicago house, and I let it overwhelm me for a moment. The three Pepper children hiding in the closet as the fights between father and mother rage. And little Bobby Pepper, peering out the crack of the door, wanting to step in and stop it, wanting to save his mother from the brutality of his father, wanting to do something. Yet stopped, stopped by his older brother, tied up to stop him, helpless within the closet, watching his life tear itself apart.
I like to help,
he often said, and suddenly you could understand why. But what did that have to do with Leesa? Was she stopping him somehow? Was she threatening to tell about something? What? Why had he killed her? It again all came down to the why. Sitting in that plane, I thought it through, and I came up with, and I came up with…

Nothing. Not a damn thing. Except for the point that was jabbing into my chest. I uncrossed my arms, reached into my jacket pocket, pulled out a thin piece of metal.

The key that had been sent to me as if I had lost it, except it had never been mine. I held it in my hand and turned it over and again. The bronze caught a shard of sunlight from the window and threw it straight into my eye. I had mentioned to Whit that I was worried about Beth, and next thing you know Dr. Bob was telling me all about Beth’s painful past. I had mentioned to Whit that I was wondering about François’s missing stuff, and lo and behold, as soon as my Clem defense crumbles, like a message from on high comes a key. I held it out in front of me and looked at it closely, as if maybe it had an answer for everything. And surprise, surprise, maybe it did.

E
-
ZEE
.

With that key in my hand, I leaned down and unlocked the padlock of E-Zee Self Store unit 27. I pulled up the door and stepped inside and switched on the light and closed the door behind me and found myself smack in the middle of a puzzle.

The space was about the size of a two-car garage, with cinder-block walls and a cement floor. Stuff was massed in dusty piles, all kinds of stuff, cartons, couches, a brass lamp with its pleated shade askew, spotted mattresses along with their box springs, pots and pans, strange masks, big copper bowls, a computer, a headboard, leaning towers of books, a large ceramic Dalmatian. But it wasn’t the amount of the junk in the piles that surprised—indeed, the amount was just what I expected, create a space for junk in America and America will fill it—but it was the way the piles were formed. Everything was jammed up against the walls, stacked high in teetering heaps that reached almost to the ceiling, so that in the middle of the unit was created a clearing.

And in that clearing, like a tableau of the ordinary in an avant-garde museum, was situated a La-Z-Boy chair and a six-pack of beer and a television and a VCR, the latter two connected to an extension cord that ran up to the light fixture in the ceiling.

Now, this was most peculiar. All of the contents of the unit, including the chair and television and beer, were covered in the same layer of dust, so nothing had been moved or touched in years. But why was this chair here, this television and VCR, the beer? Someone with a key had pushed everything to the walls and set up the television for viewing. Who? When? For whose viewing? And for viewing what? And even if it was clearly set up this way long before I first met François Dubé, why did I feel as if it had all been set up for me?

See what I mean about the puzzle?

In the cleared area were two boxes, one cardboard and one wooden. I opened the cardboard box first and immediately recoiled. I knew now what Mrs. Cullen meant when she talked about toys. Harnesses and cuffs, rings and electrical devices with long dangling cords, a hodgepodge of bizarrely shaped phallic toys made of metal, plastic, silicone, leather, all well worn, all enough to make me sick to my stomach. So tell me this, is there anything more disgusting than someone else’s used sexual devices?

I quickly closed it up and kicked it aside, then I stooped down to the wooden box, which sat beside the VCR. I lifted off the top. A box of videotapes, about twenty in all. I went through them, one by one.
Fantasia
?
Sillyville
?
Magical Musical Mansion
? Yes, tapes to keep the daughter happy when she came for a visit. Park her in front of the telly, press play, watch her pupils dilate.

But there were other videos, with less childlike names.
Sodomania 36. Aim to Please. Sluts with Nuts 5. Succubus. Oh My Gush 7
.And the ever-popular
Bad Mama Jama.
Nice. Let’s just hope he never intended to show his daughter
Snow White
and by accident slipped in
Nubian Nurse Orgy
instead.

And then there were a series of videocassettes without preprinted labels or covers, cassettes with French words scrawled across white labels, some of the labels badly stained with spots of something that looked like coffee. At least I hoped it was coffee. Yuck. Home movies of birthday parties and the like or something a little less innocent, though no less staged? I remembered the inventory found in the apartment at the time of François’s arrest, the video camera with tripod and lights but no videos. Now here they were, waiting for me.

I turned on the television, powered up the VCR, slipped in one of the self-labeled tapes. While I was waiting to see what was what, I sat down in the chair, pulled a beer from out of the cardboard six-pack holder, blew away the dust, twisted off the cap, took a whiff.

Skunk city. Ugh.

I twisted the cap back on, replaced it, leaned back in the La-Z-Boy, rested my shoes on the conveniently risen footrest.

Static, then the swelling music and HBO logo indicating the showing of a feature presentation, then a blank screen for a moment, before a fixed shot of a bedroom appeared on the screen. I had never seen the bedroom before, but I recognized it right off, what with the same brass lamp with pleated shade, the same headboard, the same ceramic Dalmatian that stood in the piles pushed to the walls. François’s bedroom. No clap from the clapper, no shout of “Quiet on the set and…action,” but it wasn’t needed, was it? First there’s nothing but the bedroom, then an entrance from stage left.

Gad.

Beth was waiting for me at the bar of Chaucer’s, a bottle of Bud in front of her.

I had called her from the seat of the La-Z-Boy and asked her to meet me here, and now I slipped in beside her and ordered another beer for her and a Sea Breeze for me.

When the bartender spotted me, he gave me a look. “No trouble tonight, right?”

“No trouble,” I said.

“It was bad enough cleaning up the blood from the last time you were here. Who was that creep anyway?”

“My dentist.”

“Really? Is he any good? Because I’ve been having this trouble with my…”

As the bartender described his dental issues, pulling down his lower lip to show a jumble of stained Chiclets, Beth stared at me as if I had grown a second head.

“Have you ever noticed the teeth in this city?” I said after the bartender, mercifully, had cut off his demonstration and left to get our drinks. “It’s like we’re living in England.”

“How was your trip?” she said.

“Instructive.”

“Anything I should know?”

“Just that our client didn’t do it.”

“I already knew that,” she said, and then she realized what I might have said. “You found proof in Chicago?”

“I found a strange coincidence that might be seen as proof,” I said, “if I can figure out one more thing.”

“What?”

“Why would my dentist murder Leesa Dubé?”

I told her about my trip to the Peppers’, about what I had discovered, about the coincidence of the photograph clutched in the dead woman’s hand. Beth gave me a hug when I was finished, like I had discovered a cure for cancer.

In the midst of her celebrations, the bartender brought our drinks. I lifted my glass. “Cheers,” I said.

We clinked, we drank, I drank fast. I felt suddenly better and gestured for another. Anything to get the sight of that video screen out of my head.

Beth suddenly grew pensive. “Is the coincidence enough?” she said.

“No, but it’s a start. We still have to figure out the why. But there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about. Whitney Robinson dropped in to see me the other day and he said something that troubled me.”

“I know Whit’s your friend, Victor, but I don’t trust him. He’s a little too tweedy, don’t you think?”

“Never trust a man in tweeds, is that it?”

“Yes, actually. A hard-and-fast rule that has held me in good stead over the years. And bow ties trouble me, too.”

“What about George Will?”

“Proves the point on both counts. But there’s something else about Whit, at least as it relates to François. He seems—how do I put this?—a little too interested.”

She might have been right, but just then I didn’t care. “During Whit’s visit,” I barreled on, “he told me something intriguing about François that I thought I ought to pass along.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear it.”

“He said that François, for all his charming surface, is hollow inside.”

“He doesn’t know him.”

“Maybe not. But he said there existed some physical evidence to prove his point. Our client lied about his stuff. It wasn’t all gone. It was in a storage locker. And this afternoon I found it.”

“Oh, I bet you did.”

“Beth, you need to listen—”

“No, I don’t, Victor. I don’t need to listen to anything that Whitney Robinson has to say about François. Or you either, for that matter. You said you wouldn’t give me a lecture.”

“Maybe I care for you too much to stay quiet.”

“Well, try, Victor. Tell me, how’s your friend Carol?”

“She’s fine,” I said.

“I love the enthusiasm in your voice whenever you mention her name.”

“She’s beautiful, well dressed, well mannered, and she doesn’t have cats. In short, she’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a woman.”

“But still, something’s not right.”

“We’re not talking about my love life now.”

“Maybe we should. You think you have the right to lecture me, you with your never-ending line of women, whom you complain about even as you sleep with them, women like your Carol. I might be confused, but at least I feel something. You should try it sometime.”

“And what is it exactly that you’re feeling?”

She took a swig of her beer, thought about it a bit. “Do you know that fizzy sensation you get when you first fall in love, like your brain is floating in champagne?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s not like that. It’s not romantic. It’s something different, deeper in a way. It’s as if the reason I went to law school was to someday help François.”

“Beth.”

“As if everything in my life has been leading me to him. I don’t understand it, and I’m not going to act on it now, because I’m a lawyer and he’s our client and he needs us in a different way, but I’m not going to stop feeling it. And, Victor, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“You sure about that?” I reached down into my briefcase, pulled out one of the videocassettes with French scrawled across the stained label, slid it across the bar until it was in front of her.

She looked down at it for a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t want it,” she said.

“You know what I discovered today? I discovered that you can learn a lot about a man from the pornography he creates. And I’m talking about more than the size of his cock. I’m talking about the cruelty, the pent-up violence, the way the world exists solely to satisfy his depraved needs.”

“Go to hell.”

“You ought to take a gander. This one has quite the cast.”

“People change. He’s not the same person he was before. He’s been in prison now for three years. He hasn’t seen his daughter in three years. That does something to a man. It has to.”

“One viewing.”

She shoved it back at me. “Put it away, Victor. Burn it if you want. I don’t need it.”

“Later you might,” I said.

“Remember years ago, right after your cross-examination of Councilman Moore in the Concannon case, when you told me it was never going to happen between us?”

“I remember.”

“That was your choice.”

“I know.”

“So from now on, butt out.”

“This has worked out quite nicely, don’t you think?” I said. “A pleasant drink with a friend.”

She drained her beer, slapped the bottle on the bar, dropped off her stool. “You’ll cover these,” she said, waving her finger at the empty bottles.

I raised my glass in assent.

“Thanks,” she said. “Don’t worry about me, Victor. Worry about figuring out why your dentist killed Leesa Dubé so we can get François out of jail.”

“That’s what I’m not getting paid anymore to do.”

She stood beside me for a moment and then reached over and tapped the tape. “This doesn’t change anything for you, does it? You’re not going to suddenly take a dive at the trial to protect me, are you?”

I took a long swallow. It was tempting, letting François rot, yes it was. But I had few enough lodestars to cling to in my life, and my obligation to my clients was about the only one I could trust utterly.

“No,” I said. “Once you have me on your side I’m like a leech. I might suck out all the blood I can, sure, but I’m hell to get rid of.”

“Good,” she said. “You may be an asshole, Victor, but you’re a hell of a lawyer.”

Then she leaned down and kissed me on my head before leaving the bar. I didn’t turn to watch her go. Instead I snatched down the rest of my drink and ordered another.

I was just bringing the newly filled glass to my lips when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I swiveled around. Beth was standing there, her head tilted to the side.

“Just out of curiosity…”

I laughed, she joined in, and for a moment it almost felt all right between us.

When she left for good, I tried to think it through again. I was failing to make some obvious step. That night with Bob in this very bar seemed to hold an answer for me. What had he said after all the violence and the blood?
Whom did you help today?
Yes, right, as if I were the hapless, selfish failure, all of which I admit to, and he was the saint. And then something else.
Accidents happen, Victor, remember that. Sometimes even the best of intentions go awry.
That’s right. And he said something similar earlier, when I was in the chair.
Most murders are accidents of blind happenstance,
had said Dr. Bob.
Another absurd event in an absurd world.
But even Camus knew that the absurdity of the universe could only explain so much. Even if the murder itself was an accident, why was Dr. Bob in Leesa Dubé’s apartment on the night of the murder? What was their connection, other than doctor-patient? What was going on? Why?

In frustration I tapped the black plastic of the videotape with my fingertips. Then I stopped the tapping and looked at the vile thing in front of me. I lifted it up and examined it closely. The black plastic, the French scrawled on the white label, the stains that spotted the paper. The spots. The stains.

And suddenly, strangely, the thing grew hot in my hands.