‘You best be quick!’ she shouted. ‘I won’t leave the door unlocked, and I go to bed right after Johnny Carson.’
He sped south, past the houses, McDonalds, the Shell station, fragments of prairies and the almost empty parking lot that signaled the Wren House was still taking a beating on unserved Wallbangers. He slowed at the top of the overpass. The milky light of the moon chalked Poor Farm Road into a flat white alley between two endless black fields. He drove down and turned left.
A car was parked where Pauly Pribilski’s body was found. Courageous neckers, or perhaps thrill-seekers, come to park under the same full moon that had lit the bullets fired into Pauly Pribilski.
He cut his headlights and coasted to a stop a short distance back. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw that some of the beaten-down stalks of corn had begun wrenching slowly back up, contorting to clutch at life again, but the field would never be the same. Too much was dead.
A woman moved in the trampled corn. She wore a long dress or coat, despite the heat of the night. Beneath a soft, shapeless hat, her face was indistinct, and shifting. She might have been wearing a veil.
She moved slowly in a tight little circle. Her head was tilted downward and she seemed oblivious to Ridl, parked not fifty yards away. Several times she stopped and stretched out her arms in front of her, as though seeking something from the ground.
He watched her for fifteen minutes, then his curiosity could wait no more. He started his engine, turned on his headlamps and eased forward. The woman looked up. She was indeed wearing a long black dress and a long veil. She walked to her car, in no apparent haste, got in and drove away.
Sometimes nuts came out to play after a killing. This one had come costumed, right down to a long black veil. He drove back to the rooming house and took his small duffel bag to the front door.
As the landlady led him upstairs, she reminded him that it was a good thing he’d snapped up a room, as they were going fast. He asked how many others she’d rented. None yet, she said, but it was bound to happen.
The room he’d snapped up belonged to her son, now apparently grown and gone. He’d decorated it with hanging model airplanes. Ridl stripped to his shorts and lay on an itchy wool blanket that felt even hotter than the air trapped in the closed-up room. Opening the window by the bed set some sort of monstrous bug, unseen, banging on the window screen – trying to get in instead of out, he hoped. He turned out the light and the bug gave up.
As he lay in the heat in the dark, he let himself wonder if he were mountain-building. It was still most likely that the girl had been attacked by her date. She’d fought back and ended up killing him. Unhinged, she’d gone into hiding. Even at the end of the day, it reeked of ordinary.
Except that too many bullets had rained into Pauly Pribilski’s groin. That wasn’t ordinary, and the growing belief that he’d tumbled onto a good story began to calm him.
So, too, did the softer image of a tall and slender girl, tan and beautiful, who was not too many years younger than him.
Soon, he found sleep.
TWELVE
The sound of a small airplane, flying low, woke him at seven-thirty the next morning. He swung too quickly out of bed and got hit by another airplane, this one much smaller and dangling from the ceiling. Keeping his head low to avoid the rest of the mismatched squadron, he slipped on a fresh golf shirt and his khakis, went into the hall and found the bathroom. It was a place of Ivory soap and furry pink bath mats. He showered quickly and was downstairs before eight. By then, he’d heard the airplane – the real one – four more times.
‘Coffee’s on the counter, Mr Ridl,’ the landlady said. No doubt braced for the onslaught of reporters needing rooms, she’d donned a pink blouse that matched her bath mats.
Another woman sat with her at the chrome-trimmed, white Formica table. Ridl took a cup from the counter, filled it with coffee from the percolator – no new-fangled Mr Coffee, not for this landlady – and joined them.
‘Mr Ridl, this here is Blanche.’
Blanche nodded.
‘Mr Ridl is an important reporter for a Hollywood newspaper,’ the landlady said.
Blanche looked at Ridl with narrow-eyed interest. ‘You know movie stars?’
‘Too many to count,’ he said.
‘That your yellow convertible on the street?’ Blanche asked. ‘Doesn’t look like a Hollywood car.’
‘It’s a rental.’
‘It’s got an awful lot of rust on it,’ Blanche said.
‘Keeps me from appearing too Hollywood.’
‘It’s got a ticket on it. I looked: no parking is the offense,’ Blanche said.
Ridl caught the profanity before it got loose from his tongue, and said instead, ‘How much?’
‘Forty-five, because it says it’s a third offense,’ Blanche said. ‘More than usual.’
‘What’s usual?’
She made a noise of disgust in the back of her throat. ‘Zero. Delbert Milner is an elected man. Foolishness like parking tickets will get him thrown out as sheriff.’
‘I heard an airplane,’ Ridl said.
‘Searching for Betty Jo Dean,’ Blanche said. ‘Besides the airplane, and me and others going door-to-door, there are teams crisscrossing fields all the way west to Big Pine State Park.’
Ridl gulped the last of his coffee and got up.
‘Want me to hold your room?’ the landlady asked. ‘’Course, you’ll have to pay in advance.’
‘I hope I’ll be leaving after I do some interviews in town,’ his mouth said, but his head already doubted this. The fresh ticket on his windshield went beyond a sheriff hassling a reporter. He’d been tracked, found on a side street. They wanted him gone, fast.
He got in his car and headed south, toward Poor Farm Road.
The intersection of Route 4 and Big Pine Road was clogged in every direction by cars and trucks. He had to drive a quarter mile west before he could park.
He shot pictures of the long, ragged lines of people moving west through the fields of tall grass. Though it was still early, the temperature was already in the upper eighties. He didn’t want to think about what shape the girl was sure to be in if she’d been lying in such high heat for over a day.
He moved into the field to join the closest line of searchers. ‘You a professional photographer?’ the woman closest to him asked.
‘Reporter, Chicago Sun-Times.’
‘She’s not going to be found here,’ the woman said, waving vaguely at the prairie grass surrounding them. ‘All this was searched yesterday.’
‘How about the state park?’
‘Big Pine? That’s four miles ahead. Park rangers are doing that because some of the paths are dangerous. It’ll be hard, slow work. Years of leaves, mounded up. You could hide a body good…’ Her voice trailed away.
‘You’re thinking she’ll never be found?’
‘Not there, not in the Royal, either.’ She pushed at the grass in front of her. ‘That river is just a few hundred yards east of where Mr Pribilski was found, and it’s deep and runs fast. Wouldn’t you rather weight a body to disappear instead of leaving it in these weeds to be found?’
‘Assuming she wasn’t the killer, why abduct Betty Jo Dean?’
She gave him a weary look. ‘The killers might have had additional need of her.’
‘Rape?’
‘I heard she excited plenty of men.’
They came to an access road.
‘Then we have this,’ the woman said, stopping to wipe her forehead. ‘Care to guess the name of this particular road?’
‘I wouldn’t have a clue.’
‘It’s called the Devil’s Backbone because of the way it’s twisted. Up there is the Materials Corporation. Sand and gravel pits, some of which have been flooded for years. They’ve got divers checking them out, but I imagine there are a hundred little crags and nooks in every one. If Betty Jo’s in there, she’s likely never coming out.’