Shakespeare's Counselor

Page 17

Trying to keep hold of the image in my memory, I drove to Carrie's. Of course, her office was open and full of patients, and I explained to the receptionist that I wasn't there to see the doctor, that I was trying to find something I'd lost the last time I'd cleaned. Gennette Jenks, the nurse, gave me a suspicious look, but then Gennette was always suspicious of me. A hard-faced woman in her fifties, Gennette was chemically brunette and naturally efficient, which was the only reason Carrie kept her on. I looked around the small front office, which was crammed with a fax machine, a copier, a huge bank of files, and mounds of paper everywhere. No magazines.
And no magazines in Carrie's office besides a tattered old Reader's Digest left there on the little table by the chair in front of the desk. That was the bad-news chair; because most often when Carrie invited patients into her office and sat behind her desk, that meant she was about to deliver bad news. I twitched the chair to a more hospitable angle.
The magazine I'd been seeking was in the big pile on the table by the waiting area, a few chairs at the end of the hall where caregivers could wait while their charges were being examined. I shuffled through the stack and extracted the cover I'd been searching for. I stepped sideways into the little room where the part-time clerk, a milkmaidish blonde with a lust for Twinkies, worked on insurance claims. This was the same room where Cliff Eggers had been working the morning I'd cleaned, and this was where I'd picked up the magazine and returned it to the pile. That explained why I'd remembered the magazine. I'd stood in there for such a long time while he talked to me, I'd had time to memorize the cover.
After nodding to the clerk, who gave me an uncertain smile in return, I began paging through the magazine. Once, twice ... I was beginning to doubt myself when I noticed the jagged edge. Someone had removed a page from the magazine. Maybe it had had a great recipe for chicken salad on the other side - but on the whole, I doubted that. Someone besides me had found the picture interesting.
Now that I knew what issue of what magazine I needed, I returned to the library, dashing through the first blast of rain to push through the heavy glass doors. Lightning was making patterns in the sky and the wind had increased in pace, so the view through the high windows was ominous. Mary Lou Pettit, the librarian working the circulation desk, was clearly unhappy about the violence of the weather. As I crossed the large open area in front of the desk to reach the periodicals area, she caught my eye and gave an exaggerated wince, inviting me to share her anxiety. I raised my hand to acknowledge her, and shrugged.
To tell you the truth, I've always liked a good storm.
I'd checked the date on the magazine at Carrie's office. Now I found that the one I wanted had been put away. I filled out a slip, handed it in, and waited ten long minutes while an aide looked in the periodicals storage room. I passed the time by watching the rain lash the windows in irregular gusts.
Refusing to peek until I was by myself, I sought out a half-concealed table in a corner behind the stacks. I turned to the page that had been clipped from the copy I'd checked. "Author protects privacy" was the uninspired headline, and I checked the other side to see if there was anything more interesting there. But it turned out to be an ad for a diet supplement, one I'd seen in many, many other periodicals, so I flipped back.
The author in question was a man of medium height and build, swathed in a track suit and baseball cap, further shielded with sunglasses. He was holding leashes with two little dachshunds trotting at the ends.
Okay. So this wouldn't be an instant answer. I scooted my chair closer to the table and began to read. There was only one other person in sight, a bony and lashless young man who worked as a bagger at one of the grocery stores. He was reading a computer magazine. He seemed completely engrossed.
So I began scanning. Author of true-crime bestsellers Baby Doll Dead and Mother and Child, reclusive Gibson Banks ... blah, blah, blah ....eal name kept completely secret by his publisher....nly 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.
Chapter Ten
"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."