Hawk Moon (13 page)

The burned-out Victorian house I'd been in the other night did not appear in the book.

I looked through three different histories of the city. Many, many wealthy homes were alluded to and shown. But not the one I wanted.

I asked a woman at the reference desk if there were any more books on local architecture. She said there were, and told me where I'd find them.

It was a lazy afternoon, and it felt good and comfortable and fun to be inside the library, the way it had always felt when I was a young boy searching the shelves for science fiction and mysteries.

I spent an hour there but found out exactly nothing about the mystery house.

Then I started looking up the history of the Shipman family in Cedar Rapids. The kin of Claire Heston née Shipman had done well by themselves and the city. Local Shipmans could be found in business, medicine, government, the arts (though I wasn't sure what that meant) and law. Great-great-grandfather's first name had been Douglas and a fine-looking, generous man he'd been, helping hospitals, symphony orchestras, soup kitchens, prisons and churches with his millions. And then, in 1903, something seemed to have happened. Several stories in the main newspaper suggested trouble without saying anything specific. It was duly noted that, over a period of four months, Douglas Shipman a) resigned as President of his railroad b) resigned from his position on the Mayor's Select Committee c) resigned from the board of Trawler College (the local liberal arts school) d) took an extended trip to Europe — which proved to be longer than a year. After that, there was very little mention of the once-prominent man. Not until his funeral six years later was he depicted on the front page again.

Something terrible had happened to Douglas Shipman but what?

F
rontier historians generally complain about how money could always buy off justice on the plains. But this was no less true in any other part of the country. Of course, justice was for sale in Kansas and Texas and Oklahoma just as it was for sale in New York and New Hampshire and London and Paris.

Professor David Cromwell's Indian Journal

D
eep summer came, a time of picnics and roller-skating and boating and minstrels and, Anna's favorite, chautauquas, at one of which she heard a stirring young woman proclaim: "Away, and for ever, with the idea that a married woman can make no progress in study. It is difficult sometimes to make women believe this and to dispossess them of the idea that marriage is an insuperable barrier to education."

And then there was the murder trial.

Even with all the windows open in the courtroom, the temperatures scaled ninety degrees and over. Fans could be heard flapping, loud as bird wings.

There were only a few seats for spectators and these were allotted each morning by drawing straws.

Indians appeared in small groups every so often and stood in the back of the courtroom.

Tall Tree sat glumly, watching the lawyers perform their lawyerly tasks, rarely saying anything except once when a witness described the dead woman as 'beautiful and delicate of soul."

The curious thing was, nobody seemed to know where the young woman had come from — or where she lived.

The presumption was that she'd been raised on one of the nearby settlements. Yet nobody stepped forth to claim her.

The other presumption — since she was so often seen shopping in Cedar Rapids — was that she was from town. But, again, nobody stepped forward to claim her.

Anna attended court one day. She spent most of the time watching Tall Tree. In a way she could not explain, she believed devoutly in his innocence.

All the time she was in court, she played with the strange black moon fishing lure that Douglas Shipman had given his friends. By now, she had evolved her own theory of the crime. Douglas Shipman, for a reason Anna did not yet know, had killed the young woman.

As for Trace Wydmore, he and Anna had broken up somewhere in the vicinity of 220 times.

She would let him get to second base and then start to feel like a harlot again and then break up with him again and then miss him so much that she'd give in to him when he came around again (first base only) and then spend half the night sitting up in the kitchen talking to Mrs. Goldman.

"The terrible thing is, I enjoy it, Mrs. Goldman."

"That's only natural, Anna. To enjoy sex."

"For a woman to enjoy sex?"

Mrs. Goldman smiled. "Yes, of course. My late husband and I were quite compatible."

"You did?"

"Sure. Sex is a part of life, Anna."

"But Trace and I aren't married yet."

"Then maybe you should get married."

"That's the problem."

"What is?"

"I love him but I don't know if I love him enough to marry him. I mean, I read those women's magazines and they talk about the real thing and when I compare what they say to how I feel about Trace, then I'm not sure it's the real thing."

Mrs. Goldman yawned and then stretched her hand across the kitchen table and patted Anna's hand with great maternal affection. "Maybe I have the solution, Anna."

"Oh?" Anna said anxiously. "What is it?"

"Stop reading those magazines."

A
ccording to Ressler, Burgess and Douglas — among the most knowledgeable criminologists in the world — a homicide that involves mutilation serves several purposes for the murderer.

1. He is able to make ugly something he fears and loathes i.e. a face, breasts, sexual organs etc.

2. It is the mutilation after death, not the act of killing, that frequently brings him sexual satisfaction.

3. This type of satisfaction is onanistic i.e. masturbatory. Only rarely are sexual fluids discovered in the cavities of the victim. Far more often, fluids are found on or around the body. For the killer, the ultimate fantasy — the sexual thrill of mutilation — occurs after death.

4. There is also the phenomenon of regressive necrophilia, when the killer places foreign objects inside the victim.

I went through twenty pages of material in the book while I waited for Claire Heston to descend the steep driveway from her manor house and drive into town. I planned to follow her and talk to her, if I could. I wanted to know more about her great-great-grandfather, Douglas Shipman.

I still had an hour and a half to go before I saw Gilhooley. The overcast afternoon was humid. I ran the air conditioning until my sinuses started to protest.

The Hestons lived on a stretch of road that ultimately became Marion, a small town adjacent to Cedar Rapids. This was the preferred area for the new rich. Even if I hadn't known that, the parade of expensive foreign cars would have given me a clue.

I returned to my reading, this time learning about a fellow who had sex with his victims both before and after their deaths. Once he'd even managed to have sex while the victim was dying. The clever fellow used a garrote.

These were characteristics of the sexual mutilator. I was trying to apply them to what I knew about the two women who had been killed. This kind of sifting would be made easier with a computer.

I also needed to see the autopsy on the woman who'd been found in David Rhodes' trunk. With that information, I could tap into my home computer and do some background work.

At first I didn't recognize the driver of the red BMW. It came fast down the curving drive, paused only briefly, and then turned right on to the street.

He was headed west. My good friend Perry Heston.

I decided, just for the hell of it, just, I suppose, because I was tired of waiting for Claire, to follow him.

I
n broad stroke, Cedar Rapids used to divide neatly into two parts, the river splitting the town in half.

On the east side, the further away from the river you got, you had the middle classes and the upper middle classes and then the very wealthy. The west side was largely working class, though even that was subdivided by several factors — race, steady employment (a good factory job was worth more than menial labor) and aspirations. Men who wore neckties to work (even if they sold shoes) did not want to live in the same kind of house a truck driver did.

This all started to change in the eighties when the yuppies decided to democratize Cedar Rapids i.e. start building on the west side where land prices were cheaper. Today the east side still has the greatest number of upper-class and wealthy people, but the west side also has its share of climbers, boomers and yuppies, everybody from cut-rate dentists to advertising executives. And, because the gods of urban planning seem to like such ironies, the west side can no longer claim the roughest parts of the city. No, they're now to be found on the east side, all the Chicago drug-gang members who moved out here to tap a new market (not unlike Amway with guns) — drugs and numbing poverty and terrifying violence all now within less than a few miles of where some of the better folks live. I recently saw a little black girl run into the middle of the street. She was as ragged and filthy and frightened-looking as a waif you might see on a TV show about famine. You never used to see this in Cedar Rapids. And you didn't have one or two shootings a night, either. Drugs have turned all small cities into bad imitations of the bigger ones.

My pal Perry took me over to the west side.

I used to live out there back when there was still some pastureland and fast silver creeks and ragged piney hills. I had a horse named Buck and a dog named Timmy and a sister named Jane and we all played together and had a great grand time, especially in the fall when the leaves were turning and the air was intoxicating with a smoky scent.

You couldn't imagine any of that now. Maybe as many as 1,000 housing units packed both sides of the street. This was the new working class, better fed, clothed, housed and educated than the old one, and yet paying at least a small price for it by being packed together this way.

We drove twenty blocks and then turned right, toward the bluffs and apartment houses and condo units that the yuppies had brought along with them.

He crossed the long bridge that spans the Cedar River and then turned left, up into the highest of the piney hills. He came to a gate marked PRIVATE and stopped. He took a garage-door opener from his glove compartment and opened the gate. He drove through.

I watched all this through my trusty Swarovski field glasses, the ones the Bureau let me take along when I resigned. I sat across the road, staring.

Through the pines at the top of the hill, I could see the shape of a Chalet-style house. Perry pulled in there, got out of his car and went up to the front door. He walked very fast. He was smoking a cigarette with hard fast anxious drags.

The rest I couldn't see.

The next ten minutes, I did some more reading about sexual mutilation — not a subject you want to embrace right before dinner-time — and kept an idle eye on the house where Perry Heston had gone. I had the sense that he was on some urgent kind of mission. I often have this sense of things. And most of the time I'm wrong.

This time, however, I was right.

They came out of the house, the two of them, moving fast.

There was a very pretty young woman with him. She wore a red blouse, tight black slacks. Her outsize dark glasses, vivid red lips and perfect cheekbones gave her the look of a starlet.

Perry Heston carried a large buff blue suitcase.

He put the young woman in the shotgun seat, stuffed the suitcase in the back seat, and then got in the car and started up the engine.

He backed down the driveway very fast.

By now I was pretty sure that something was very wrong indeed.

I felt an excitement that was probably uncharitable. The grief of others shouldn't give me a thrill.

But I just kept thinking of him slamming his fist into David Rhodes' stomach. And then it was real hard to feel sorry for him. Real hard.

He disappeared behind the pines for a time.

I almost suspected that he might have turned around and gone back to the house.

But then suddenly he was in my field glasses.

He came down the hill fast and turned east.

Framed in the circles of my field glasses, he looked quite unhappy. He was smoking hard and fast again and waving a hand that frequently became a fist.

The young woman still looked quite beautiful. But now, fixed in my glasses the way she was, I noticed something else about her.

She was an Indian.

W
e drove twenty more minutes, ending up at a recently constructed apartment house out on First Avenue. I parked and watched as he pulled the BMW around the back and then toted the blue suitcase inside. She followed.