Riders on the Storm Page 6

  “I know Karen appreciates that. In fact she appreciates everything you’ve both done for Will.”

  “The wives become stress victims themselves,” he said. “The man who went overseas is rarely the same man who comes back.”

  Car horns; a few shouts. Both sounded vulgar on the reticent air of the Victorian house.

  Randall Shepard walked over to the window and looked out. “They’ve been here twice with cameras already. I’m very much a liberal but I can see why people get annoyed with the press. The intrusiveness.” He turned back and gave me a smile he’d bought at a store. “People hear this story and they think we’re all snake-oil peddlers. It discourages people from coming here. People really do need to come here.”

  “Randall’s right. There are so many people we could potentially help. But bad publicity doesn’t help.”

  “Well, right now the only person I’m concerned about is Will,” I said.

  “Of course,” Randall said. “And we feel the same way.”

  Lindsey checked her watch. “I’m afraid I’ve got another session in ten minutes.” To Randall, “Honey, would you ask Myra to get me something edible from the fridge and get it up here fast?”

  “Sure will.”

  Another handshake.

  Then he did one of the damndest things I’ve ever seen. He gave me a thumbs-up. The beard, the suit, the slight air of stuffiness, the position in the community—I didn’t expect it from somebody like him. From Kenny maybe or from one of my clients or from Nick who worked on my car. But not this guy. I wanted him to stay the comfortable stereotype of the somber shrink. You don’t want your MD coming in with drinking straws sticking out of his ears.

  She was up and moving toward me now, too, as the door closed and Randall went to order her something edible from the fridge. She put her childlike hand in mine and said, “I’m sure this is going to work out all right. I hate all this pop psychology garbage about ‘keeping a positive attitude’ but I think this is a case where we need to do it. For Will’s sake as well as ours.”

  This was pure rote, nine out of ten of her patients getting it at least once. But ironically I needed to hear it. Sometimes cornball works.

  Then she got me to the door in seconds and said to tell Karen to call anytime she wanted or needed to talk.

  I left with a full understanding of why both Will and Karen preferred this place to the VA.

  9

  INTERNATIONAL ELECTRONICS WAS A HANDSOME WHITE TWO-story building located in a wooded area that had only started being developed a few years ago. This was the distribution and business center. The factories shipped everything here. By the time he’d been drafted Donovan had steered the company to becoming a major local employer. The company turned out a variety of products, but its mainstay was stereophonic speakers for the very high end—the real audiophiles.

  He and his longtime friend Al Carmichael had been music fanatics since grade school, always tampering with record players to get better sounds. As young men they got serious and created speakers that became the standard worldwide.

  I hadn’t paid much attention to the business over the years but did hear from time to time that their market share was thinning due to both domestic and foreign competition. I do remember that there were layoffs a few years ago. But then there was talk that the company had stabilized and the layoffs had ended. The figure I remembered was that the downturn had cut their work force by about twenty percent.

  Even with Donovan gone the business was running full force. The two parking lots were crowded and the loading docks were busy. I parked in Visitors and noticed two special parking spots. One was marked Donovan. One was marked Anders. The latter was filled with a brand-new silver Porsche. I went inside.

  Busy in here, too. People with papers hurrying left and right. A long desk where a prim but attractive middle-aged woman sat. She wore a pewter-colored blouse that she filled nicely. A pair of pince-nez rested enviably on her bosom. She was so programmed that she couldn’t help smiling even on the bereavement watch for her boss.

  There was only one way I could make this work. I needed to be brazen. It wasn’t my style and a dump truck was pouring vats of acid into my stomach. And the sweat wasn’t from the eighty-six-degree heat.

  “May I help you?”

  “I’d like to see Mr. Anders.”

  “You do realize what’s happened to our founder, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I’m very sorry. That’s why I’m here to speak to Mr. Anders.”

  “They were not only coworkers. They were best friends. I can’t imagine what Lon—Mr. Anders—is going though.”

  “But he is here. I just saw his car.”

  She’d admirably kept her irritation in check until now. “May I ask what your name is?”

  “Sam McCain.”

  “And what would your business be with Mr. Anders?”

  “Will Cullen is my client. That’s what I’d like to see Mr. Anders about.”

  She leaned most attractively back in her chair and said, “Is this some kind of joke? You represent the man who murdered Mr. Donovan and you want to see Mr. Anders?”

  “Afraid that’s the case.”

  She sat up straight again. “Well, I won’t let you.”

  “Of course you will. Your job description includes informing your employers who is here to see them. You don’t decide if they see me; that’s their decision. Now please inform Mr. Anders that I’m here.”

  “He’s a very good-sized man and he has a very bad temper.”

  “Then I’ve been warned and I appreciate it. Now please tell him I’m here.” I really liked her perfume. She was probably ten years older than me but that didn’t bother me at all.

  “You certainly have your gall,” she said as she leaned over to finger the proper button. “I’m so very sorry to disturb you, Mr. Anders, but there’s a man here who insists on seeing you.”

  “Who the hell would be bothering me on a day like this? What’s his name?”

  “He says it’s Sam McCain.”

  There was a considerable pause. “I can’t believe this.”

  “I can’t either. I was even considering calling the police and not even telling you.”

  “Send him in.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Would I say it if I wasn’t serious, Annette? I’m not really in a joking mood today, believe it or not.”

  “All right.” She obviously wanted to ask him if he’d lost his mind. “Thank you, Mr. Anders.”

  A very nice shape, too, tall and almost regal, her dark skirt loving its duty. I followed in the wake of her perfume.

  She opened the door and allowed me to enter what appeared to be a photographic library. Black-and-white as well as color photographs covered half the walls. Each contained dead animals of the kind found in Africa. Rhinos, lions, tigers, even an elephant. And standing with his booted foot on or near their heads was none other than my host, Lon Anders. He wore Hemingway khaki as well as a pith helmet. He’d even grown a wispy beard in some of them. And always at the ready was the rifle he held straight up in his grasp. He’d bravely let his guides find his prey and do everything but kill it for him. They would have made sure that there was no chance the animal would get loose and charge him. And then, heroically, he would blast the shit out of the poor beast.

  I thought what I always thought when I saw these great white hunter photographs. We have to start arming the animals. The kind of photo I wanted to see was of a giant elephant’s foot on the head of a douchebag white hunter.

  The other half of the walls were covered with framed photographs of him in three different types of flight suits during the days he was a pilot in Nam. I thought of Randall Shepard because in one of the pictures he was giving a thumbs-up.

  He said, “You’ve got a lot of balls coming here.”

  “Your secretary used the word ‘gall’ instead of ‘balls.’”

  “Hilarious. Now what the hell do you want?”

 
; “I thought maybe you could help me figure out who really killed Donovan.”

  “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “Your secretary used that line, too.”

  Lon Anders: running-back size, Scandinavian good looks, Marine Corps blond crew cut and the empty, angry blue eyes I’ve seen on a number of men convicted of murder. Tan shirt, brown knitted tie, brown pleated slacks. This was the swaggering country club Lothario who tried to get blow jobs from the college-girl waitresses after they were finished for the evening.

  “Your nut-job buddy Cullen killed Steve. Talk to Paul Foster, he’ll tell you. If Cullen hadn’t wigged out he’d probably be signing a confession right now.”

  “And you were doing what last night?”

  He was pretty good. He smiled. He must’ve had sixty teeth and had elves polish them when he slept at night. “You know, McCain, I’ve always heard that you were a dumb little jerk but I have to say—you just don’t have any common sense at all. If I was worried about being a suspect do you think I’d let you in here?” He pointed to his phone unit. Very sleek. “Why don’t you call Paul and tell him you think I killed Steve?”

  “You call him ‘Paul,’ too, huh?”

  “Yeah, I call him Paul. We’re on a number of committees together. He also likes to play handball. We’re friends the same way Steve and I were friends.”

  “I hear you and Steve weren’t good friends at all.”

  “I’m not even going to comment on that.”

  “So if you didn’t kill him, who do you think did?”

  The teeth again. They were spectacular. He went around the desk and sat down. I started to sit in one of the visitor chairs but he said, “Don’t even think about it. I don’t want your shit-kicker ass contaminating the furniture. This stuff is imported. And you’ve got three more minutes, by the way, and then I start breaking your bones.”

  “I hear Teddy Byrnes was playing bodyguard for Donovan.”

  “You have lousy sources if you heard that. Teddy’s a cousin of Steve’s. He got off to a bad start in life.”

  My laughter came out much louder than I would have expected. “‘Got off to a bad start in life’? He’s a psychopath. What was Donovan going to do, ‘rehabilitate’ him?”

  “As a matter of fact, in a way he was. One thing about Steve, he always believed in giving people second chances. You should see his office wall. He’s got so many plaques from places like Big Brothers you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “I doubt Al Carmichael would agree with that.”

  He was pretty damned good at scoffing. I wondered if he’d ever done any community theater. “Al Carmichael. He damned near destroyed this company. It took everything Steve and I could do to save it.”

  “I guess my lousy sources gave me some bad information on that one, too. The way I heard it, you and Donovan screwed him out of his part of the business.”

  I’d have to look into getting some teeth like that. “It’s a good thing you’re not a reporter. You’d get your ass sued out of business for slander.”

  “Libel.”

  “What the fuck ever. Al Carmichael insisted that we sink money we didn’t have into two projects we should never even have considered. But he was adamant. He even threatened to sell his stock to this group that wanted to buy us and then clean out our cash and dump half our employees and then sell us for a big profit. I guess your lousy sources didn’t tell you anything about that, did they?”

  I have the bad habit of wondering how people I meet would do as lawyers. He would work well either way, defense or prosecution. He could lie without his pants catching fire.

  “Seems to me if Donovan was really your friend, you’d want to help me find out who really killed him.”

  “Right. And Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t really kill President Kennedy.”

  “I wasn’t a big fan of Donovan’s,” I said quietly. “But he deserved better friends than you.”

  The teeth again. He started to say something, then shook his head.

  He said nothing more to me and neither did the sumptuous Annette as I walked out the front door.

  10

  JAMIE SAID, “I DON’T KNOW HOW THEY’RE GOING TO PUT A PARADE together on such short notice.”

  “O’Shay’s so desperate to get reelected I’m sure he’ll find a way.”

  “My mom always votes for him. I think it’s his hair. He reminds her of some old-time actor I’ve never heard of. I don’t like him because of what he said about Negroes one time. I had three Negro girls in my homeroom and there were a lot of people who were terrible to them. It used to make me so mad. So Senator O’Shay goes ahead and says that too many of them would rather live on the dole than work. Our pastor gave a sermon about people who talk that way. You could tell he was pretty mad. He even used Senator O’Shay’s name. But somebody in the church must have written him and told him what the pastor said because he wrote the pastor a letter and said he wanted it read to the whole congregation.”

  O’Shay was spending time addressing a church whose pastor he’d pissed off? Not exactly a good use of his time.

  “Did he read it?”

  “He did, yes, but then he attacked Senator O’Shay again for things that were in the letter.” A happy look. “Most of us were so proud of Pastor Jim.”

  I was waiting on a call to Al Carmichael at ChemLab in Pittsburgh. Who better to talk about Steve Donovan and Lon Anders than their former business partner? Good reporters always use disgruntled sources. Not all of them are reliable but the ones who are can give you explosive information and insights.

  Meanwhile I called the hospital and asked for the psych ward. The nurse I talked to sounded wary and weary. “All calls about Mr. Cullen go through our public relations office downstairs. If you’d told the receptionist what you were after she would’ve directed you there.”

  “All I want to know is if his condition has changed.”

  A put-upon sigh. “No, it hasn’t.”

  “Thank you.”

  By the time I got “Thank” out she’d hung up.

  “A man named Al Carmichael is on the phone for you,” Jamie said after the phone rang next.

  “Thanks for returning my call, Al.”

  “I’m assuming this has something to do with Steve Donovan’s death. I still have friends back in Black River Falls and three of them have called me about it. I think they half expected me to jump up and down and celebrate, but as much as I hated him at the end we’d been good friends for four or five years and so I have good memories of him, too. So if you want some kind of bad quote about him, I’m not going to give it.”

  “Would the same apply to Lon Anders?”

  A snort. “Exactly what are you looking for, Sam?”

  I told him. I also explained that I did not believe that my friend Will Cullen had killed the man. And that I was serving as both his lawyer and his investigator.

  “You think that’s smart? It’s pretty hard to be objective in a case like this.”

  “I’ve known Will all my life. I trust my instincts.”

  “Well, it’s your call, Sam.”

  “So how about Lon Anders?”

  “A total piece of shit. As soon as Steve hooked up with him things started to change at the place.”

  “How so?”

  “Somehow Anders was able to convince Steve that he knew something about our business. Anders is a quick study, I’ll give him that, but he’s basically a peddler. He liked to give pep talks to all the workers there. They thought he was an arrogant, stupid blowhard and they were right. After he got Steve’s ear, my staff and I could never get Steve to prototype anything we came up with. And we knew why. It was a turf battle. And what Steve never realized was that Anders would someday push him aside just as he’d pushed me aside. Three of my best staffers quit. They were so frustrated they couldn’t take it anymore. Anders took it on himself to find their replacements. They knew even less about our business than Anders did. But behind my back they reported ev
erything to him. What he was doing was building a case against me for Steve’s sake. I have a family history of depression. And that’s what landed on me. Anders was nice enough to spread the word that I had ‘mental problems’ so people started looking at me as if I’d bring a shotgun to work and kill two or three of them. So finally I just resigned and let Steve buy me out for pennies. But I just wanted out of there and didn’t really care what he paid me.”

  My mind fixed on him talking about Anders someday pushing Donovan aside.

  “What were profits like when you left?”

  “I admit to being petty when it comes to Anders and the clowns he’d hired. But the products they came up with made money. I couldn’t believe it but I saw it on the P&L sheets and there wasn’t much I could say about it.”

  “Have you had any contact with Donovan since then?”

  “No. I didn’t know what I’d say to him or what he’d say to me. But today … well I think maybe I should have called him once in a while.”

  “This has been very helpful, Al.”

  “I don’t really see how, but if you say so, I’m glad.”

  “Thanks,” I said. And I meant it.

  I was excited about it.

  One of the experiences I’ve never had as an investigator is being followed. The police do it all the time in unmarked cars and it is one of the staples for most private investigators. But it had never happened to me. And in comic strips, short stories, novels, TV shows, and movies, private investigators do it—and have it done to them—all the time.

  So I was sort of enjoying it.

  He’d followed me at about a half-block distance from my office. Drab four-year-old Dodge sedan.

  I had half a tank of gas so I was able to run him for half an hour, even up into the limestone cliffs above the river. He was good, very good. Easy peasy. Never panicked once. Just stayed behind me and never once came close to losing me.

  After a while it got boring. Plus I was hungry. My exhaustion needed to be fed.