16
Wednesday’s guest speaker was a policeman, introduced simply as Detective Thurman. Thurman stood at the podium and addressed the class with his hands trembling. Professor Williams took a seat with his class and scribbled notes along with his students, pondering Thurman’s points here and there, laughing at the man’s crude jokes. The detective had an impressive paunch and spoke in a smoker’s whisper. His face was just shaved and irritated, and only a mustache, stained from years of nicotine and stress, remained. He had big fat hands that were all nicked up, Mary assumed, from days spent tending his garden. He had brought Professor Williams a huge paper sack of vegetables. Tomatoes, he’d scrawled on the bag.
“It’s not how you think,” he told the class. “Solving crimes ain’t the easiest thing in the world. I know you all are smart. I mean, I know Winchester is like Yale and Harvard”-some of them had a laugh at that comment-“but still. It takes a deeper intelligence to solve crimes. They’re like locks. You pick the first tumbler, and you feel something slide into place. That’s one theory. But there’s more. The pin slides in deeper, past the first set of tumblers to the second, and you have to pick them, too. And then there’s a third set, way down in the back of the mechanism, almost impossible to get to. You’ve got a perp? Okay. Does he have an alibi? He does not. Okay. What’s his motive? He’s got a viable motive? Okay. Can you find the evidence to convict him in court? It’s a series of tumblers that you have to go through, and when the last one falls into place the lock slides apart and you can get inside the thing to look around. A lot of people think there’s some voilà moment where everything becomes clear. Well, it ain’t like that. It just isn’t.”
Thurman paused then and shuffled through his index cards. His hands were still trembling, those thick knuckles knocking against the podium. “Now,” he said, his voice quavering. “I understand you all have a crime to solve. Mr. Williams has asked me not to speak specifically about your assignment. I might, you know, give somebody some tips.” He laughed, a musical little snort that blared out of one nostril. “But I can talk about missing girls. Lord, I can go on all day about missing girls.”
The detective took a sip from the Dasani bottle he had brought with him. Cleared his throat. He was looking at the class now with a glaring intensity, his eyes slick and wet. “There was this one,” he said. “Deanna Ward. You all may have heard of her.”
Mary sucked in a breath. She’d heard that name before somewhere, but she couldn’t remember exactly when. She shut her eyes and tried to recall it.
On Professor Williams’s desk. The yellowed paper, the typewritten words:
Deanna would be the same age as Polly if not
Was this the same girl? Mary opened her eyes again and focused on the detective. She suddenly knew that she should pay close attention to what he said. There was going to be important information divulged today, she thought.
“This is when I was down in Cale, working the homicide beat,” the detective went on. “Deanna went missing-oh, ’bout ’eighty-six or so. Young girl. Teenager. Student at Cale Central there. Her momma told me she had eloped with her boyfriend. The whole family seemed unconcerned about it all. Had this ‘it’ll pass’ attitude, you know. Yet they had called the police in, so figure that. Anyway, we didn’t think too much of it. We sent one of our detectives out to snoop around, find out if they’d gone to Vegas or somewhere to get hitched. But the boy came back alone. He had just been visiting his dad in Cincinnati and when he came back he was shocked. He thought, you see, that the girl had left him for another boy.
“No, wait,” Thurman said then, gesturing in the air as if to say, Wipe that off, clean the slate. “Before then. Before the boyfriend returns, we’d brought the dad in to question him. This guy is a bum. Tattoos all over his body, profane things, Nazi propaganda and all that. He had a tattoo of the solar system on his back. Must have cost him a year’s earnings, at least. They called him Stardust. Star. Star had been up in Swani for beating a guy nearly to death a few years before. He was in a motorcycle gang we were surveilling called the Creeps. This was about six months prior to Deanna’s disappearance. One of the Creeps had been shot to death during a ride out to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and we were calling them in one by one, you know, interrogating them. We brought Star in and he said something strange, something we didn’t really put together until the boyfriend came back and it was clear that something terrible had happened to Deanna.
“Star was talking about their ornaments, the girls who sit on the backs of their bikes and smoke cigarettes and let their hair blow wild while the men look tough in the front. He’d said, ‘Johnny Tracer’-which was the guy who’d been shot-‘was looking for a girl to ride with, and I said, “I got one for ya. I’m trying to get her off my hands anyways.” ’”
Thurman’s eyes widened and he breathed in expansively, playing up the drama of it all. “So after the boyfriend returns we call Star back in. He comes in like he owns the place. You know how they do. These bikers and hoods and criminals. They’re above the law. They’re untouchable. So this guy comes in and we ask him again what he’d meant before, which ‘girl’ he was talking about for dead old Johnny Tracer. And of course he lied. He said it was some girl he’d met at a truck stop, some hook-” Thurman wasn’t sure if he should say the word. He looked at Williams anxiously, awaiting clearance. He finally decided on “some trash.”
“Tell them about how you caught Star,” Williams led the detective. “Tell them the part about Bell City.”
Thurman said, “Well, we kept Star on a short leash. Put a man outside the house to watch his every move. For two or three days after Deanna went missing-nothing. Not a peep. He was Honest Abe. I suppose that he knew we had our eye on him, so he was just play-pretending like he was Mr. Common Joe. The guy even went to church, if you can believe it, dressed in all black.”
“And then?” Williams pushed. It was clear that he was tiring of all the extraneous detail in the man’s story.
“And then it happened,” Thurman said. “Star got on his bike one morning, real early, just after dawn, and he rode out to Bell City. He stopped a few times on the way, trying to detect a tail, but our guy was good. They played cat and mouse all the way up Highway 72. Finally, Star pulled over to a little dusty trailer right outside of Bell City. The detective stayed back a good distance and watched him through binoculars. Star went in, stayed maybe a half hour, then came outside and drove back to Cale.
“Of course we descended on the place. But get this: there was a girl in there, but it wasn’t Deanna. It looked like her. In fact, we thought it was her. We arrested Star and returned the girl to her mother, but the mother told us, ‘This isn’t my daughter.’ And it was true. One of detectives had whispered to me as we drove her from the Bell City trailer that there was something funny about her. She was…hiding her face somehow. She was disguising herself. The mother was more distraught than before. What a thing! To think that your daughter was going to be returned to you, but you get this…counterfeit. So we took the girl in, questioned her. She would only say that she ‘knew’ Star Ward. She never told us what her relationship was with him. When we asked her about the missing girl, Deanna, she denied knowing a thing about her.”
“But she looked just like Deanna, right?” Williams said.
“Right! It was the damndest thing. It struck us alclass="underline" how similar she looked to Deanna. She was almost an identical copy, except she was…different somehow. She would do this thing with her face-I’ll always remember it-like tilt it to one side and blink at us innocently. It was all very bizarre and crooked, and it still gives me nightmares even now, almost twenty years later.”