Hanks staggered back across the stage as though he’d been kicked by a horse, blood gouting from his side and one of his thighs. He collided with the wall behind the stage and started to crumple. He hadn’t even hit the floor before Henry pulled a gun from the boxy suit and emptied the chamber into Darryl Wilder, punching him back into the font, which collapsed around him with a tinkle of glass and a rush of water.
There was no miracle. Darryl Wilder died while my ears were still ringing.
26 ~ Good Friday
On Friday, two days after the wake and eleven days after Max Grover was murdered, Christy flew to Boulder to take part in the farewell service Max had designed in his will. It had been delayed twice: first for the police autopsy, and then to give Max’s sister a chance to regain her bearings. When she felt well enough, she called Christy personally and invited him to come.
Christy later told me that the sun had been shining when he landed in Boulder, although it was unseasonably cold. He hadn’t been dressed warmly enough. He’d taken a cab to a small white clapboard house on the city’s outskirts, huddling in the backseat and using the forty-minute ride to continue outlining his plans for Max’s institute. Helen, Max’s sister, had come to the curb to greet him. Already inside the house were four tiny women in their eighties and Max’s lawyer, the same Mr. Jenks I’d talked to on the phone. Mr. Jenks was the shortest person in the room.
There had been hot tea and home-baked seed cake and talk of Max. Tears were not encouraged. Max, in Helen’s view, had been exactly who he’d wanted to be, and the service was a way for them all to pay tribute to a good man who’d managed to live a good life. When they left the house, Helen asked Christy to carry the urn containing Max’s ashes. Outside, they saw that the sky had disappeared beneath a featureless ceiling of gray clouds.
With Mr. Jenks at the wheel of a van, the seven of them drove up the side of a mountain and over several miles of dirt track before stopping at a grove of trees-the property Max had left to Helen. A wind had kicked up, forcing Helen to raise her voice as she read Max’s farewell. Christy wouldn’t tell me what Max had written. When Helen was finished reading she took the urn from Christy and threw a handful of ashes into the air. Christy raised his eyes and saw them coming down, coming down everywhere, thick and fast and white, lost in a flurry of sudden snow.
The day that Christy was in Denver, Ferris Hanks went home from the hospital. At seven that evening I drove up Sunset Plaza Drive and through the open gate, parking Alice on the brick circular drive that arched in front of the house. I didn’t ring the bell; the front door was ajar. Cold air streamed through it into the night.
Two of Ferris’s Yorkies met me at the door, sniffing my ankles in a perfunctory, professional manner. The big living room was empty. I stood there for a moment, listening to nothing in particular and looking around. The people crowded into the teak carvings held their frozen dance steps. Heavy cobwebs, gray with dust, drooped above the thick open beams. I hadn’t noticed them on my first visit.
To the left were two steps leading up to a dark dining room, dominated by a massive carved table at least fifteen feet long. Chairs of wood and leather were pushed back from it all along its length, as though the party had risen only moments before. I counted twenty of them. Dust coated the leather seats.
The Yorkies trotted along in front of me, anticipating my destination, as I crossed the living room and climbed the spiral stair to the second story. The stairs curved upward, hugging the walls of a circular tower, sliced by long thin windows, some of them thirty feet high. The city blinked and glittered below like broken glass.
The hallway leading to the bedrooms was arched; its white plaster walls were lighted every four or five feet by black iron sconces left over from the Spanish Inquisition. The Yorkies scampered through a partially open door, and I followed them into an enormous vault-ceilinged, white-carpeted bedroom.
“What a nice surprise,” Ferris Hanks said with his back to me.
He lay on his side, dead center in the king-sized bed, facing a small black-and-white television set and surrounded by his little dogs. He looked very small. The blankets had been tented above his broken leg. The screen of the television set showed me the hall I had just come through.
“Japanese,” Hanks said, still looking at the screen. “They’re so clever, don’t you think? That’s what people say, anyway. Watch.” The picture changed: the front door. Then the living room. Then the gate outside. “You didn’t bring me flowers,” he said, still facing the screen.
“No,” I said. “I figured you might be allergic.”
“You’re going to have to come over here,” he said. “I can’t roll over without help, and Henry seems to have decided to take a turn in the evening air. Just when I wanted someone to read to me. Would you like to read to me?”
I picked up the two Yorkies and put them on the bed. The other dogs scooted aside to make room. “I don’t feel like reading,” I said, “but I’ll tell you a story.”
“Am I going to like it?” I still hadn’t come around to the side he was facing, but he made no effort to turn his head.
“You should,” I said. “You wrote it.”
“What’s the fun in that?” he asked plaintively. “I know how it comes out.”
“Well, you’re going to hear it anyway,” I said. “Let’s start with a secondary character. Darryl Wilder was an interesting guy. He was nuts, but he was interesting. I wonder who he would have killed if his uncle hadn’t put a move on him. Someone, that’s for sure. Bus drivers, maybe, or Girl Scout troop leaders, or left-handed horticulturists. Somebody specific, and he would have created an elaborate, self-serving story that justified killing them, and he would have killed them ritually, the same way every time.”
“I’ve never understood how anyone can do anything the same way every time,” Hanks said. “It’s so boring. So perhaps your thumbnail appraisal of what’s his name isn’t accurate. Perhaps he wasn’t an interesting guy.”
Hanks may have been bored, but the dogs were paying attention. Nine or ten pairs of black eyes followed my every movement. “He was careful, too. Wilder, I mean. Did his research, meticulous as a graduate student. Gay men of a certain age, successful, living in a big city but born in a small town. That was important to him-that they came from somewhere else, somewhere small, where lots of people knew them. It gave him the opportunity to take a revenge that went beyond killing them. It had to be important, because it was the most dangerous part of his act. He had to send the papers and the finger. Anything you mail has a postmark, or if it’s Federal Express it has a waybill number. He left a description of himself every time he sent off one of his little packages.”
“Compulsives,” Hanks said dismissively. “I don’t see how you can think he was interesting.”
“It was there the whole time,” I said. “From the moment Spurrier told me about Max’s finger arriving in Boulder. Max didn’t fit the profile. The other men were in the closet at home; that’s why the packages were so destructive. But Max went out of his way to let the entire world know he was gay. He walked away from a career to do it. He walked away from you to do it.”
“I wish I could see your face,” Hanks said.
“Max never answered that ad. There were enough troubled kids on the sidewalk to keep him in the guardian angel business for the rest of his life. Max didn’t even read Nite Line. Someone put a clipping from the paper into the pocket of one of Max’s pairs of pants. He even wrote a flight number on it.”