As I drove north on the interstate, I kept my mind off Chandler Ellis-the sound his body made thumping under my wheels, the sound of his whispery voice.
"Chick, help me."
Instead of focusing on that I went over my new story… Driving at night… Hit an animal… Damn thing ran across the road. Deer. Are there deer in Virginia? Had to be, they're everywhere… Hit the deer, it veered and ran on. Never saw if it was hurt… Stopped, tried to find it. Walked around looking-following the trail of blood, so I could try to help it, but-
No. Too much. Don't overdo it. Make it boring, so they'll forget it. Just hit the deer. It kept going. I kept going… like that.
I picked an auto repair shop called Top Hat Auto Repair. A cartoon of a man wearing a tuxedo and top hat, holding a wrench and screwdriver, graced the chain-link fence out front. Underneath it advertised: Body Repair-Parts Center.
This time I bought a pair of drugstore reading glasses to go with my ball cap and went inside without my suit coat.
The estimator checked out the damage while I mumbled my deer story. He didn't seem to be listening or to care. His uniform identified him as Lou, but everybody called him "Wheezy." "Hey, Wheezy, we got the new parts sheets in from Holbrook Supply yet?" "Hey, Wheezy, you gotta phone call on six." Wheezy seemed to be the guy everyone asked questions of-a manager-type who still wasn't quite managerial enough to keep from wearing his name over his pocket.
After checking the damage, he rocked back on his heels and looked at me. "Cost you around a thousand dollars and 'cause we're busy, gonna take about two t' four days."
"Two to four days? See… the thing there is, I'm due in Montreal in ten hours, and I was wondering if there was any way you could get on it right now?"
He shook his head. "No way. If you can't wait, best thing is get it done once you get home:' he said.
"Except, it's my son's wedding," I replied. Desperation and panic seeped into my routine like flop sweat on a bad comedian. "We're using this car for the wedding," I continued implausibly. "I sort of don't want to have to pull up in front of the church with a bashed-in fender."
"Rent something else," he said.
I looked shocked. "What makes you think it's a rental?" I was going for indignation but only achieved petulance. He pointed to the windshield. There, pasted on the back of the rearview mirror, was a Hertz decal. Great… I might as well have left my confession pinned to the front seat.
"Look, Lou. Wheezy. I'm sticking with this car. There's gotta be a number that gets it done this morning."
I peeled two hundred dollars off a roll of fifties and put them into his hand, thinking, even as I did it, This is stupid, Chick. No way is this guy going to forget you now. But I was desperate. I couldn't be trying to fix this car once it was on the news.
"How long you got?" Lou asked, putting the cash in his pocket. "I really need to get moving. Why don't we start by you telling me how long it'll take?"
Lou looked at the front end again. "Well, providing we got all the parts and paint, we gotta hammer this out and Bondo it. I'll hafta use fast-dry body filler, then I gotta paint the fender, put it in the paint oven for at least an hour or two to dry-still gonna be a little tacky. Then I gotta reattach the new headlight rim and lens. Two o'clock at the earliest, maybe three."
I nodded my head. I didn't trust my voice to speak. I was starting to shake.
Of course, Chandler's death made the late morning news. I sat in the waiting room at Top Hat on a cracked leather sofa, trying to read tire literature as the 11:00 news, with Ken and Barbie, came on. This pair of vinyl cupcakes had too-sprayed hair and too-white teeth. Their padded shoulders were almost touching as they told the viewers that Chandler Ellis, nephew of the late Otis Chandler, of the Los Angeles Chandler publishing family, was found dead in a supermarket parking lot, the victim of a hit-and-run.
They put up a press picture of Chandler in his football uniform from Georgetown University, right arm cocked back, helmetless and handsome, ready to rifle a pass to a streaking wide out.
His copper ringlets and hero looks made his death all the more distressing to Barbie, although she didn't put it in quite those words. "Chandler Ellis, who was graced with looks, athletic skill, money, and social prominence, forsook a modeling career after college to work with learning disabled children. He also headed the Ellis Learning Foundation, which sponsors research into all forms of learning problems in children. He will be missed:' was the way she phrased it, but you could tell that, given the chance, she would've boned the handsome bastard in a heartbeat. I sat numbly, pretending to read an old Motor Trend magazine.
The repair work took until four o'clock, but Lou had rushed it, aspromised, and the paint and Bondo were both a little tacky when I got the car back.
"Hertz will never know you bent it," Lou grinned.
I paid the bill with cash and drove out, leaving Top Hat Auto Repair in my good-as-new Taurus with the traitorous, Hertz-stickered rearview mirror. Obviously, I was not born for a life of crime.
The rest was relatively easy. I returned the car to Hertz in Manhattan and put the charge on my credit card. The girl walked around the car looking for dings. Nobody touched the almost-dry paint. Nobody noticed the repair job.
I left New York on an eight o'clock flight to Los Angeles. All the way there, my stomach churned. Something told me I was never going to get away with this.
But throughout it all, one thought kept popping up. I'd knock it angrily back down, but unexpectedly it would bounce up again like one of those blow-up clowns with a weight on the bottom-grinning, red-nosed, and ridiculous. One positive thought in this ocean of negativity.
Want to hear it? Get ready, because it really sucks. What I kept thinking was:
At least Paige Ellis is a widow.
PART 2
Chapter 11
Of course Paige didn't know that right away.
After Chandler left for the drugstore, she sat in the front room of the wood-sided house on Lipton Road and tried to work on a seascape she was painting, but the pain from an extruded disc in her back, which sometimes kicked up after long runs, was killing her. She was getting ready for the Boston Marathon, pushing her distances out, and was experiencing more pain than usual. She wondered how she could have let her medication run out in the midst of her marathon training. Luckily, she reached Dr. Baker before he went to bed. When her back flared up, he normally prescribed Percocet, but that drug was a federally controlled medication, and because she had let it lapse, he said he couldn't prescribe it again without an office visit. As a temporary substitute he prescribed Darvocet. Not as potent, he'd told her, but it should do the job until he could see her. The doctor phoned in the prescription to Walgreens, and Chandler had rushed out to get it. But that was almost two hours ago. Now she was worried. It wasn't like Chandler to leave and not come back without calling.
The room was getting cold, so she went into the bedroom to put on a sweater, her lower back throbbing painfully with each step. Her MRI showed a slight extrusion at the S-7 vertebra. Dr. Baker had advised her against long-distance running, but when pressed, he admitted that the damage was already done, and said that in due time the disk extrusion would be absorbed. If she could withstand the pain, it probably wouldn't get worse. She decided to keep training and treat it with painkillers. She loved the feeling she got when she was pushing it. Five or six miles out, her endorphins kicked in, her spirit soared, and her body never felt more precious to her. So she kept early-morning runs in her schedule and endured the discomfort.