"But the man they accused-he wasn't really responsible."
"He wasn't?"
There was a pause again. "I'd really like to see you in person."
"In person?"
"I couldn't make it till this evening. And even then I'm not absolutely sure about that."
"Ma'am?" Chris said.
"Yes."
"Is this all on the level?"
"Why, of course."
"You know something about the man they accused of these murders?"
"Yes," the woman said.
"Would you tell me who this man was?"
"Of course. He was my brother."
"I see."
"Do you know where the Starlight Room is?"
"In Shaffer's Mall?"
"Right."
"Sure."
"Could you meet me there at six-thirty?" the woman asked. "Of course."
"In the lounge. We could have a drink."
"That would be nice," Chris said. Then, "Oh, wait."
"Yes?"
"How come you called me?"
The woman laughed softly, sounding almost embarrassed. "I like Channel 3 news best and I… I guess I just like your face. You don't look like a Dallas cheerleader. And that's nice."
"Believe me, there are days when I wish I did look like a Dallas cheerleader."
Like when no dick no brain TV news consultants are conducting focus groups, she thought.
The woman was back to sounding sombre again. "Tonight then. About six-thirty."
"About six-thirty. Right."
After she hung up, Chris called over the top of her cubicle wall, "Hey, Ramsey."
"Yeah?" he shouted back. "What?"
"Thanks for telling me to answer my phone."
"Huh?"
"Never mind."
She sat there exultant. Several murders, she kept saying to herself over and over again, thoughts of herself as the On the Town girl fading fast.
Several murders.
Wasn't life grand sometimes?
2
Rob Lindstrom
May 10, 1978
Rob had always felt that he would have been more popular in his college days if he'd been a Democrat. Unfortunately, he had inherited his political outlook from his father, a large, blunt Swedish immigrant who had come to these shores with nothing, and who now owned two department stores. Rob's conservatism came naturally.
Rob entered college just as the student movement of the late sixties was beginning to take over campuses. His first night in the dorm, he watched the ROTC building on the east edge of campus go up in flames. With all the smoke and the screaming and the sirens, the university resembled a war zone. Rob watched all this from his window. He was afraid to venture out.
Rob's political opinions didn't change until senior year, which was when he met Lisa. She was a dazzling blonde from New York. She was everything Rob wasn't-Catholic, sophisticated, and unafraid to try new experiences. While hardly a heavy doper, she did introduce good ol' Lutheran Rob to the pleasures of marijuana (or 'Mary Jane' as she mockingly liked to call it), New Orleans blues, dawn as seen from the dewy crest of Stratterhom Park, oral sex (the notion of a clitoris had pretty much been an abstraction to him), and Democratic politics. Lisa's father was a congressman who had been a good friend of Adlai Stevenson's, a man who had always reminded Rob of a greatly respected child molester.
Lisa changed virtually everything about Rob. His hair got long, his grade average went from a 3.8 to a 2.1, he started wearing the same shirt two days in a row, he started seeing the humour in the Three Stooges, he began experiencing vastly shifting mood changes depending on how things were going with Lisa, and he became a Democrat.
He even went to one SDS meeting with Lisa, though when he met the leader afterward he was totally put off. The leader- a fierce, bearded, crazed looking kid who carried a Bowie knife in his belt-complained that "since I joined SDS, my old man has cut my monthly allowance in half." The kid saw no humour in this. Had Lenin or Trotsky got allowances while attempting to overthrow their government? While Rob's opinion of mainstream liberalism had changed, his feelings about campus radicals hadn't. They still seemed like self indulgent children to him.
Lisa had changed one other thing about Rob: his plans for the future. His father had just assumed that after college, Rob would come back to Minneapolis and start work at one of the department stores, learning the business from the lowliest position to the most exalted. Eventually, of course, Rob's father would pass the management of the stores over to Rob.
But as graduation approached, Rob began to share Lisa's fantasy of heading for Mexico after college, and "living near the water somewhere and having lots of dope and getting away from all the hypocritical bullshit in this country. You know?"
So those were their plans anyway. But then Lisa met Michael.
Michael Blumenthal was a federal civil rights lawyer who was at the university giving a lecture to pre-law students. At this time, Lisa's plans-after returning from her eyrie in Mexico- were to become a lawyer. So she was in Michael Blumenthal's audience.
As she later told it to Rob, she just couldn't help what happened. There seemed to be an inevitability about her reaction to his dark good looks, his curious mixing of anger and compassion, and his intense desire to make the world a better place. After the lecture, she went up and introduced herself, and they became so engrossed in their conversation about his civil rights work in the South that they continued it in the student union over coffee, and then in a little bar several blocks away over beers, and finally in her apartment where, after pizza and ungodly amounts of marijuana, they climbed into her rumpled bed and made love.
And three days later ran off to Missouri to elope.
She told Rob all this the day after she got back from Missouri. She had only two weeks to go till graduation and then she and Michael were moving back to New York, him working for the government and her going to Columbia.
She hoped Rob would understand, crazy as it all was. She was sure Rob would find the exact right woman for himself very soon now because there wasn't anybody sweeter or more deserving anywhere on the planet than Rob Lindstrom and she'd never forget him or all the wonderful times they'd had.
But right now she had to run. (A quick wet kiss on the cheek- the goddamn cheek-and then she was gone from his life forever.)
Just like that.
So Rob went home to his father's stores. He dealt with the 'Lisa problem' as his mother had taken to calling it by reverting to his former self (at least externally). He cut his hair, he began wearing ties and sports jackets again, he spent Sunday afternoons watching Firing Line with William Buckley and savouring the way Buckley thrust and parried and ultimately destroyed his liberal guests, and he dated any number of young women who were eminently right for him in most of the ways that mattered to his parents. He tried to convince himself that he had survived something that more resembled an illness than love.
His sister, Emily, was his only confidante. Only Emily knew what Rob was really going through. The killer depressions. The crying jags. The inability to eat (or at least hold anything down for long). The disinterest in sex.
He would lie for hours on his bed, going over and over his relationship with Lisa, trying to determine if he'd done anything wrong to cause her running off with Michael that way. He hated her and loved her, missed her and never wanted to see her again, lusted after her and wanted to beat her to death with his fists.
And then came the night when he took the Norpramin.
Dr. Steiner, the shrink whom Emily had secretly arranged for him to see (Rob's father seemed to believe that shrinks were part of the communist conspiracy he saw evidence of everywhere), had given Rob pills that worked as both antidepressants and sleeping pills. He was to take three of them at bedtime.