Shakespeare's Counselor (15 page)

So I began scanning. Author of true-crime bestsellers
Baby Doll Dead
and
Mother and Child
, reclusive Gibson Banks…blah, blah, blah…real name kept completely secret by his publisher…only picture his publisher is allowed to release…“He probably rented the dogs for the picture,” said Gary Kinneally, the photographer. “He didn't seem to care for them at all.”

I examined the picture again. I whipped out the little magnifying glass that attached to my key chain, a stocking stuffer last Christmas from my sister. I'd never had occasion to use it before, but now I was glad I had it. It took a moment's practice to learn how to use it effectively, but finally I had it on the man's face. I looked at his skin very carefully. The picture was not in color, but I could tell the hair was not dark. No mustache. I analyzed his body.

He was probably five foot ten, maybe one fifty-five or one sixty. I moved the magnifying glass over his hand, the one extended holding the leashes.

I looked at his hand real close. And then I looked again.

And then I got mad.

 

He wasn't at the police station. It was his day off, the dispatcher told me. I was lucky not to encounter Claude on my way out.

How'd I know where his house was? I'd seen him coming out of it as I took one of my night walks. At the time, I hadn't realized who he was, or at least what his cover identity was. At the right modest house on Mimosa Street, I pulled up front, not caring that I was halfway onto his lawn. I was across the sodden grass and onto his front porch before you could say, “Traitor.” I was too angry to raise my hand to knock. I turned sideways, raised my leg, and kicked.

Officer McClanahan looked up from his computer in understandable surprise.

Miss Bard,” he said, getting up very, very slowly. “Are you all right?”

“I think not,” I said, softly. The rainwater was trickling down my face. I shivered in the air conditioning because my clothes were soaking wet.

“I have no intention of attacking you,” he pointed out, and I realized I had dropped into fighting stance, my body aligned sideways to him, my knees bent, my hands fisted; the left one in chamber, the right one poised in front of me.

“I might attack you, though,” I said. I circled to the right a little. He was stuck behind his computer desk, and it was hard to see what he could do about it. I was interested to find out. “I know who you are,” I told him.

“Damn. I ripped the picture out of the magazine at the doctor's office when I was there for my allergy shot. I knew there were lots more copies around town, but so many people could see that one.”

I sensed movement and glanced toward the door that led into the back of the house. Two little dogs stood there, the dachshunds from the picture. They didn't bark, but stared at me with round brown eyes and wagged their tails in a slow and tentative way.

I looked back quickly to “Officer McClanahan.” He hadn't budged.

“Was it them that gave me away?” he asked. His voice was calm, or he was working mighty hard to make it seem so.

“The ring.”

He looked down at his finger. “I never even thought of it,” he said, his voice heavy with chagrin. “The dogs, yes. But I never thought of the damn ring.” It was heavy and gold, with a crest of some kind with one dark blue part and one white, as background; I hadn't been able to tell the colors from the picture, of course, but I could tell dark and light. “My college ring,” he told me.

“The dogs weren't just props,” I said.

“No, and I laughed like hell when I read that story,” Gibson Banks said. He pointed at the dogs. “This is Sadie, and this is Sam.” His face relaxed into a smile, but mine didn't. If he thought cute names for his dogs would charm me, he had the wrong woman. “I can tell you're very angry with me,” he continued, the smile fading.

“No shit,” I said. I moved a little closer and the dogs came in to sniff me. I didn't react to their cold noses pressing my ankles, and I didn't take my eyes off him.

“Well, what are you going to do? Are you going to hit me, or what?”

“I haven't made up my mind,” I said. I was at ease with standing and thinking about what to do, but he was getting jumpy. My breathing was even and good, the discomfort in my pelvis now only a slight ache, and I was fine with kicking him. I wondered if Jack would come back to Shakespeare to bail me out of jail, and I wondered if the trial would take very long.

“You betrayed me, and my friend Claude,” I said.

“I misled you.”

“You came to write about my life, without telling me.”

“No, not your life.” He actually looked indignant.

I found myself feeling strangely embarrassed, guilty of some form of hubris. “Jack's?”

“Not even Jack's, as fascinating as it is to any aficionado of true crime that you two are a couple.”

“Who, then?”

“Tamsin Lynd,” Gibson Banks said.

“Does Claude know who you are?” All the fire left me, abruptly and without warning. I eased into a chair close to the desk.

“He knows I'm Gerry McClanahan, a police officer who wanted to live in a small town.”

“That's who you really are? Your real name?”

“Yes. I spent fifteen years on the St. Louis force before I found out I liked writing just as much as I liked being a cop. Since then, I've lived all over America, moving from case to case. Europe, too.”

I held up my hand to stop his digression. “But Claude doesn't know you're also Gibson Banks.”

Gerry glanced down, and I hoped he really was feeling a little ashamed. “No. I've never taken a real job to be closer to a story before. I figured it was the only way to stay hidden in a town this small.”

I ran a hand over my face. Claude had one cop who was a writer in disguise, another who was obsessed with proving her own version of a current case. “I'm going to tell him,” I said.

“I wish I could persuade you not to, but I hear Chief Friedrich and his wife are your friends.”

“Yes.” Gerry McClanahan, aka Gibson Banks, didn't sound upset enough to suit me.

“What about Tamsin Lynd?”

“She's my counselor.”

“What do you think about what's happening to her?”

“I'm not giving you a quote. If you think you're going to put me in your book, you deserve anything you get.” I felt like someone was boring through me with a giant awl. My poor life, so painfully reconstructed, and it was all about to be destroyed. “Don't write about me,” I said, trying not to sound as though I were begging. “Don't write about Jack. Don't do it.” If he could not hear the despair, he was a stupid man.

If he had smiled I might have killed him.

But—almost as bad—he looked cool and detached. “I'm just here in Shakespeare following the Tamsin Lynd story,” he said after a long pause, during which the sound of the rain dripping from the roof became preternaturally loud. “A middle-class woman of her level of education, in her line of work, being stalked by a madman as she moves around America? That's a great story. You know Tamsin and Cliff have moved twice to escape this guy? But somehow he always finds out where she is and begins leaving her tokens of his—what? His hatred of her? His love of her? And she's this perfectly ordinary woman. Bad haircut, needs to loose some pounds. It's amazing. It could happen to anyone.” Gerry McClanahan was speaking with such gusto that I could tell he was delighted to have someone to talk to.

“But it's happening to her. She's living this. You're not watching a movie,” I said, slowly and emphatically. Talking to this man was like talking to glass. Everything I said bounced off without penetrating.

“This case has even more twists than even you can imagine. Look at finding you, such a name in true crime books already, and Jack Leeds, whose television clip is a true piece of Americana.”

He was referring to that awful footage of Karen's brains flying all over Jack's chest when her husband shot her. I had a moment of dizziness. But McClanahan hadn't finished yet.

“And you're just sidebars! I mean, think. One of the counselees getting killed in the counselor's office? That's amazing. This case has turned upside down. When it's over, and I wrap up my book, think of how much women in America will know about being stalked! Think of all the resources they'll have, if it ever happens to them.”

“You don't give a tinker's damn about the resources available to the women of America,” I said. “You care about making money off of someone else's misery.”

“No,” he said, and for the first time I could tell he was getting angry. “That's not it. This is a great story. Tamsin is an ordinary woman in an extraordinary situation. The truth about this needs to be told.”

“You don't know the truth. You don't know what is really happening.”

He put his hands on the yellow legal pad on his desk and leaned on it as if he were guarding its contents. He focused on me. “But I'm very close. I'm right here; working on the investigation into the murder that took place in Tamsin's office! The death of a woman who was killed just to make some weird point to Tamsin! How much closer can you get?” He was flushed with excitement, the bottle-green eyes alight with elation.

I thought of many things to say, but not one of them, or even all of them, would have made any impression on this man. He was going to ruin my life. I once again thought of killing him.

“I'll bet that's how you looked before you pulled the trigger,” he said, his eyes eating me up. For an interminable moment I felt exposed before this man.

“Listen,” he said. “Keep quiet, let me see this through, and I'll leave you out.”

I stared at him. Bargaining?

“I'm doing as good a job as any other policeman on this force. I'm really working, not just playing at it. If you let me follow this story to the end…you're home free.”

“And since you're so honest, I should believe you?”

He pretended to wince. “Ouch. The truth is, I've done more watching out for Tamsin than any cop could ever do. In case you hadn't realized it, I bought this house because it backs catty-cornered to Tamsin and Cliff's. I watch. Every moment she's home and I'm not at work, I watch.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said slowly. “You're stalking her, too?”

His face flushed deeply. He'd never put it that way to himself, I was willing to bet. “I'm observing her,” he said.

“No, you're waiting for someone to get her.”

I got up and left his house.

“Remember!” he called after me. “If I get to keep my job, you get to keep out of the book!”

I went right to Claude. I was in that period of grace, the time between the moment the bullet hits and the moment you begin to feel the pain; in that period of grace, you actually felt numb, but you knew something dreadful was coming. (At least, that was what some gunshot victims had told me.) If I waited, I would consider Gerry McClanahan's offer. I couldn't let myself hesitate.

The old house, temporary home of the chief of police's office, looked especially forlorn in the renewed rain. I was so wet that getting out again hadn't posed a hardship, and I walked into the station with my hair dripping in streams to the floor, much to the amusement of the desk clerk. She went into Claude's office after I asked for him and ushered me in after a brief consultation. She also handed me a towel.

It was hard to know what to dry first, but after I rubbed my face and hair, I began to work my way down. Then I folded the towel, put it in the uncomfortable chair that faced Claude's desk, and sat on it.

Claude was wearing his work face, serious and hard, and I was wearing mine, blank and equally hard. We were just two tough people, there in that little office, and I was about to tell my friend Claude some tough things. Before I opened my mouth to speak, I found myself wishing I were rich enough to hire someone else to come in here and tell Claude all this unpleasant news. And I was still undecided about whether or not to talk about Alicia Stokes.

In the end, I only broke the news about Gerry McClanahan. If Claude had researched a little more he would've found out about Stokes's obsession. Or maybe he did know. Maybe he needed her more than he cared about her quirks.

At least I told myself that was my reasoning; but actually, I suspect I just didn't want to give Claude so much bad news at one time.

“So,” Claude rumbled, when I'd finished, “My newest officer is a famous writer?”

I nodded.

“He's a qualified police officer, right? I mean, his references checked out.” These words were mild, giving no hint that Claude was truly and massively angry.

“Yes, he is a qualified police officer.”

“He told me he had taken a few years off to travel on some money he'd inherited.” Claude swiveled his chair to look out at a dripping world. “He didn't have a record.” Claude kept staring out the damn window for a good while. “And he intends to write about the murder of Saralynn Kleinhoff?”

“He's writing a book about the stalking of Tamsin Lynd.”

Another shock for Claude, who ran a hand over his seamed face. “So, though she never told us squat and I wouldn't know about it to this day if Detective Stokes hadn't remembered it from her former job, Tamsin Lynd has been stalked for a while. Persistently enough to make it a notable case.”

“According to McClanahan, yes. He says she's moved twice.”

“And whoever this is, just keeps following her.”

“Alicia Stokes has a theory about that.”

“Yeah, Alicia said she thinks Lynd is doing all these things herself. She played me a tape about a similar case that occurred a few years ago, the woman was doing it all herself. Smearing manure on her own door, setting off smoke bombs on her porch, sending herself threatening hate mail.”

I couldn't help but realize that Tamsin's stay in the conference room while Saralynn was killed and Janet attacked was much more explainable if it had been Tamsin doing the attacking. I tried to imagine Tamsin pinning the body of Saralynn up on the bulletin board, and I just couldn't. But I knew better than anyone did what could be inside someone, unsuspected. However…I shook my head. I just couldn't see it. I didn't want to see it.

“Lily, what did he threaten you with?”

“What?”

“You told McClanahan you were coming over here?”

“Yes.”

“He didn't try to stop you?”

I didn't answer.

“I know he did, Lily. Don't you lie to me. There's been enough of that.”

The numbness had worn off by then, and Claude's question drew my attention to the wound. The pain hit me broadside. I realized, fully, that my new life was gone. Possibly Jack's, as well. We would go through the whole thing again, both of us, and I didn't know if we were strong enough to withstand it.

“Lily?”

Looking down at my hands folded in my lap, I told him.

After a moment of silence, Claude said, “Damn him to hell.”

“Amen to that,” I said.

We sat in silence for a moment.

“What about telling Tamsin?” I asked.

Claude rubbed a finger over the surface of his badge. “Lily, you go home and rest up,” he said finally. “That isn't your responsibility. I'm sorry it's mine, but I guess it is. It's someone I employed who's watching her.”

“But not illegally,” I said, having thought it over. “He stays on his property. He doesn't trespass. He's just…observing Tamsin's life. From a safe distance.”

“He doesn't communicate with her or try to scare her?” Claude asked, thinking it through.