Final Notice (18 page)

A big ex-marine turned peace officer, Cal wore a Texas hat and carried a silver-plated .45 and had been county sheriff for as long as I could remember. Someone once told me that all it takes to become a county sheriff is part-ownership in a bowling alley and a bit of pull with the local branch of the Republican party. Well, Cal owned a whole bowling alley and a car dealership, to boot. But he was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a party man who had actually worked, albeit with a scowl on his granite face, for George McGovern's election back in '72. Nobody held it against him, because, in spite of his politics, he was a damn good sheriff. And after all, how many Republicans in southern Ohio wear Stetsons and carry silver-plated revolvers?

He walked into the trailer and came back out a few minutes later, looking unnerved. Then one of the patrolmen pointed me, out to him. Levy walked across the yard to where I was sitting on the stoop of Pop Warner's block house.

"Your name Stoner?" he said in a crusty, down-home voice.

I said I was Stoner.

He pushed the Stetson back from his forehead and looked over his shoulder at the Reaves trailer. The sun was setting in an orange band beneath the storm clouds. Yellow lamp light had begun to spill softly from the tiny kitchen window.

"Helluva thing," he said to himself. "Never saw one like it before." He resettled the hat on his head and looked down at me. "I hear you discovered the body."

I nodded.

"I also hear you came looking for this woman and that you had a little run-in with her brother earlier in the day."

I told him all of it -about the books and about Twyla Belton and about Hack Lord, the man who'd turned that trailer into a charnel house. The man I'd come looking for.

"Brother," Cal Levy said. "You got a bitter job ahead of you, judging from what he did to that woman in there."

"I know it," I said. "The thing is he's on speed, and he might be so wigged-out he could kill again tonight."

"I'll put out an A.P.B. on him right away," Levy said. "That tattoo on his arm ought to be easy enough to spot."

"It hasn't been so far," I said gloomily.

He grunted. "At least it's a starting point."

"Do you know the time of death?" I asked him. "Or how he got into the trailer without being seen?"

"Let's go see what the lab team's got to say."

We walked back across the yard, which had dried into furrows in the cold evening air, and up to the door of the trailer. I hesitated a second before gripping the handle, then jerked it open.

They'd cleaned up most of the blood and waste. All that was left to show that Effie Reaves had been butchered on the trailer floor was a chalk outline behind the door, shaped vaguely like a human body. I hadn't really seen the inside of the trailer before; so while Levy talked to his forensic officer, I took a look around. The front door opened on a small living room, decorated with cheap pine furniture stained chocolate brown. There was a couch on the right wall and an arm chair opposite it and a coffee table between them. The table and chair had been overturned; the chair cushions were stained with blood. Beyond the living room area was the kitchen -just a plank breakfast table, a couple of canvas chairs and an L.P. range. The table was lying on its side and there was a large blood stain on the straw mat beneath it. The door to the bedroom was closed. It must have started in the kitchen, I thought, while they were sitting at the table. Then they'd worked their way forward to the living room, until she'd gone down behind the door and he'd pounced on her.

"She'd been dead almost two hours when you found her," Levy said to me. "It happened in the thick of that rain storm we had. Old man Warner says he didn't stick his head outside his hut until after it cleared up. And then he's a juicer anyway. Your boy Lord must have walked up to the front door during the storm. She let him in and then they sat down at the table in the kitchen. He used some kind of razor in case you wondered. Cut off one of her hands with it. We also found a breadknife stuck inside the body. Got it bagged over there if you want to take a look."

I shook my head.

"Don't blame you. Anyway he did his business, then went out through the bedroom window after he got through. There's a rest stop on the other side of this pasture. We figured he might have had a car stashed over there. Just walked across the field, cut her up, then walked back again the way he came. Nobody in any of the other trailers seen a thing. But they were probably glued to their radios. We had a twister come through Xenia one October killed several people. Folks living in trailers always keep that sort of thing in mind. The lab team found some pills in the bedroom. Dexedrine."

I looked at him and said, "I'm surprised he didn't take them with him."

"He could have taken a handful," Levy said. "The jar's halfempty, so there's no telling who took what. They also found a high school yearbook back there, lying open on the bed. 1973. Withrow. Couldn't have been the woman's, so it might have belonged to your boy. And there's a painting on the wall in there with his initials on it -H. L."

"Could I take a look?" I said.

"Sure."

We edged past the forensic men, who were packing up their evidence kits, past the overturned kitchen table, and through the door into the bedroom at the rear of the trailer. Cal Levy flipped on the overhead light. There was a small mirrored bureau on the left wall and a double bed on the right. The window that Haskell had used to make his escape was set beside the bed.

"Picture on the south wall," Levy said, reading from a notepad. He pointed to the rear wall of the trailer.

It was a watercolor sketch of the Overlook, framed and matted by an expert hand. Everything was spongy and melting in the drawing -the trees, the bridge, the statue- like an Oldenberg sculpture, as if the work, as Hack Lord saw it, was just so much wax held too close to a fire. Maybe the fire inside his own violent mind. It gave me a chill to look at it and then to look at the bed and to think that that's what must have been in his head as he lay there beside Effie Reaves.

A girl with a face like a child's drawing of mother, that's what Aamons had said. Another woman who had, in fact, been old enough to be his mother -a death-mother who had fed him drugs and God only knew what kind of twisted love. Neat symmetry, like the two drawings of the Overlook. So neat, it unnerved me.

"Where's the yearbook?" I said.

Levy glanced at his notes. "They put it on the bureau."

I walked over to the bureau and examined it.

It was Haskell's, all right. And it was open to the page of his senior picture. He'd had a bull neck even then. Coal black hair and those heavy-lidded eyes. He looked young and tough and handsome in that picture. But that was before the tattoo and the speed and Effie Reaves.

I flipped to the rear of the yearbook and found him again, looking tough in the front row of the wrestling team picture. And again, paradoxically, in an art club photograph. Still looking tough. He'd been a complicated boy. A true Capricorn, as Miss Moselle had described him.

I looked again at the picture on the wall. Benson Howell had said that Hack and his kind wanted to be caught, that that was why they left clues and sent notes to the police. And the drawing and the yearbook picture were certainly giveaways to anyone who could read their meaning. He'd signed his name to each and, by means of the drawing, marked a path that could be traced to Twyla Belton. In fact, he'd been leaving a trail of evidence behind him for better than two years -a trail that had been lying cold until I happened across it. It had been an accident on my part, a concatenation of my own instincts and Kate's dogged research and a good deal of luck. But I had found the trail and, in some irrational way, I'd begun to feel responsible for it and for him, as if I'd been chosen "it" in a game far older and more grave than hide-and-seek. It was up to me now. Somehow, I felt I knew that and felt, as well, that he was out there, somewhere in the night, waiting almost eagerly to learn whether I had the skill to match him move for move.
 

THEY WERE waiting for me when I got back to the library at half-past nine that night. Miss Moselle and her gray-haired friends in their dowdy print dresses and high-topped shoes. Leon Ringold, sitting in one of those orange chairs with his feet barely skimming the rug and a look of smug impatience, on his face. And, of course, my girl Kate. Best of all, my girl Kate. Who came rushing around the circulation counter to greet me as I came through the door.

I gave her a big hug and whispered, "God, I'm glad to see you."

"Me, too," she said and kissed me on the lips.

I looked over her shoulder. "Why the reception?"

"They were worried about you, Harry," she said under her breath. "Miss Moselle heard about Effie Reaves's murder on the news and they decided to stay here until they found out if you were all right. Even Leon."

"I'm touched," I said. And meant it.

I looked over her shoulder again at that odd crew of little old ladies and grinned. They'd smiled as one when I'd come through the door. And when Kate had run up to me, they'd turned away as one and started sorting through catalogue cards and stamping overdue books. It was low-grade sentimental comedy, but damn sweet and satisfying.

"I'm all right," I proclaimed to one and all. "And thanks for worrying."

"I must say Harold," Miss Moselle said without looking up from her pile of index cards. "You lead an exciting life. Perhaps a little too exciting?"

"After today," I said, "I think I might agree with you."
 
 

It was like a family gathering. All of us sitting around one of those huge varnished oak tables, sipping tepid coffee and discussing what we were going to do about the family problem. Because that's what Haskell Lord had become to them -a family problem.

I hadn't wanted it that way. But what are you going to do? I asked myself, as I sat there planning strategy with seven old ladies and a fussy little man with the well-scrubbed face of a freshman advisor. They were involved whether I'd wanted them to be or not. They'd been involved from the start, working through whatever grapevine they'd established over the years. They'd known before I did why Ringold wanted to hire me. They'd known about Leo Sachs and about Twyla Belton. And now about Haskell Lord and Effie Reaves. Picked it up and transmitted it to one another the way plants are said to transmit the slightest vibrations. A kind of Brownian movement of gossip and rumor that was impossible to defeat. So I quit trying to fight it and accepted the fact that, whether I liked it or not, my little old ladies were involved in the case.

I gave them a bowdlerized account of what had gone on that day, from Norris Reaves Auto Repair Shop to Pop Warner's Trailer Park. And they took it all, murder and mayhem, with a stoic calm. That surprised me a bit, although at that point I don't know why I should have beeu surprised. Those seven old ladies were probably tougher than, say, your average professional football team. And Jessie Moselle was the toughest of the lot.

"We're all librarians here, Harold," she said when I'd finished telling them about what I'd found in the Reaves woman's trailer. "We haven't seen much of life, outside of what a few great minds have written about it. And certainly nothing as terrible as what you've described. But I think there is a certain courage that comes with education, don't you? Not a physical courage, like your own. But an intellectual one. And it is our library and our patrons that this man has been preying on. I don't think any of us will tolerate that."

"No, indeed," another old lady said.

"So we want to help," Jessie Moselle said. "In any way we can. After what you've told us, I'm not so sure that Haskell Lord himself wouldn't want us to help you stop him."

"It seems odd to me," Leon Ringold said, "that he would have killed this older woman. After the Belton girl I would have expected someone younger."

"I don't think he's through, yet, Leon," Jessie said daintily.

Ringold blanched. "You're not serious?"

"I'm afraid she is," I said. "The Reaves killing simply doesn't fit the pattern we've been developing with the books. The whole motive for killing younger women like Twyla was to deflect the sexual and emotional rage Lord felt for the older ones like Effie Reaves and his mother. To kill them instead of committing matricide. I think we have to look upon what happened this afternoon as an unplanned homicide. Either Haskell Lord was so stoned on speed that he lost his mind entirely, or something the Reaves woman said or did pushed him over the edge. According to Pop Warner, the guy who runs the trailer park, they'd had a bad fight two weeks ago and Effie'd thrown Haskell out. Maybe that's what triggered it."

"So the defaced art books have nothing to do with Ms. Reaves?" Ringold said. "She was not his intended victim?"

"I don't think she was," I said. "But I wouldn't say that the books had nothing to do with her. Judging from the sketch that was found in the trailer, Haskell was apparently something of an artist himself before he met Effie Reaves a couple of years ago. And he was a body-builder, too. After he got hooked on speed and on Effie, I'm guessing that both skills went down the drain. Since the pictures he cut up were a sort of melding of physical and artistic excellence, it's possible that cutting them up and cutting up Twyla Belton was Haskell's way of getting back at the Reaves woman and at his mother for what they'd done to him."