Mind Tryst

  He was watching me. I had known he would be. His face was calm; he wasn’t leering or sneering, just watching me with a pleasant look on his face. He could look so normal, handsome. He was wearing jeans, and a plaid shirt rolled up at the sleeves. He wore laced work boots and a wide belt. He still had the beard, though spring was getting warm.

  “Here you go, Jackie,” the waitress said.

  I turned back toward the counter and began to dig for the right change in my purse. I shouldn’t have been caught staring at him; I was afraid he’d follow me back to the office. I slung my purse over my arm and couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  “Bodge was in here around eight,” the waitress said, stopping me. “He asked if you’d been in yet. I told him you come in around eight-thirty or so.”

  “Oh? Thanks, I’ll give him a call.”

  It was a perfect excuse to hurry out. I left without looking at anyone or saying good-bye. I kept my head down and my pace quick; I hoped I looked efficient rather than frightened. My hands were shaking as I unlocked the front door to the office. As I shouldered the door open, I felt the weight of the door ease and with a gasp I realized that Tom was behind me, closer than my own shadow, pushing the door open.

  I gasped and jumped so that I almost dropped my coffee.

  “Hey,” he said pleasantly, laughingly, “take it easy. I didn’t mean to scare you, Jackie.”

  My insides quaked. I was as furious as I was frightened. “You always mean to scare me!” I accused. “I told you to leave me alone, stop harassing me. Now get out of here!”

  “Aw, Jackie, come on. Come on. Relax.”

  I backed into the office, setting down my burden of coffee and Danish on the desk. I kept my purse strap on my shoulder but dropped the keys. He did not advance on me; arms akimbo, he gave a helpless snort of a laugh.

  “Jackie, Jesus...” he began. “What’s the matter with you? I just wanted to say hello, see what’s going on.”

  “I asked you to leave!” I ground out slowly. He shook his head with a light laugh as if he couldn’t understand my distress, my insistence. I lifted the receiver of the phone; then a noise behind me caused me to jump again.

  “Hey, folks,” Bodge Scully said, emerging from the little back room. He held a cup of steaming coffee in one hand. “Didn’t mean to give you a start, Jackie. I had this old set of keys Roberta gave me years ago... let myself in to wait for you. I put on the coffee.”

  “Bodge, I could have had a heart attack,” I said, feeling a lot better with him there. “It must be urgent.”

  “Ain’t anything around here that’s all that urgent. I just didn’t want to have to drive back into Coleman since I was out this way now.” He nodded to Tom.

  “How you doin’, Bodge?” Tom asked good-naturedly.

  “Tell the truth, I been working too damn hard. How you been?” Bodge asked, taking a couple of steps past me so that he stood between me and Tom. Through the glass of the front door I saw two highway patrol cars pull up to the front of the office. Tom was looking at me, at Bodge, his back to the closed door.

  “Been real good, Bodge,” Tom said. “Haven’t had much fun since I came back from Florida; no fishing or anything.”

  “I’m glad I ran into you,” Bodge said. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you. Ask you something.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Seems like you’ve been giving Jackie a hard time. Seems like you just won’t take no for an answer.”

  Tom chuckled. “Well... I don’t know...”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. I could feel my heart pounding in my temples. I backed farther into the office, parallel to the back-room door so I could dive in there if necessary. Four CHP officers approached the glass door.

  “Seems like being a handyman put you in touch with a lot of housewives,” he said to Tom.

  Tom, amazingly, remained cool, detached. “What’re you talking about, Bodge? What’s going on here? Jackie tell you I —”

  I have no idea what he was about to accuse me of. Bodge interrupted him. “Jason Devalian?” he asked. The front door opened and two officers entered behind Tom. He turned his head quickly from side to side, seeing them. The one on the left placed a firm hand on Tom’s left shoulder, grabbing his left hand; the officer on his right managed his right side in the same way. Bodge said, “You are under arrest for the murder of Katherine Sullivan Porter. You have the right —”

  He screamed. It was a wild, animal-like wail. “Noooooo!” My hair felt prickly against my neck and I braced myself against the rear wall of the office. Tom — Jason — tried to free his arms but he was slammed up against the wall by the two men, his arms pinned and cuffed. His struggle went on; he swore and growled and cursed. One cop hit him in the back of his knees and brought him to the floor, where they pinned him flat. When he started kicking, he was rewarded by having his head smashed into the floor. He thrashed around a little less, but he was by no means giving up. Though his hands were cuffed behind his back, the cops continued to hold him down.

  Both CHP officers were panting; he was a formidable prisoner. Bodge turned and looked at me.

  “Jason Devalian?” I mouthed, almost no sound coming out.

  He gave me a nod and looked back to the police and the prisoner. The front door opened a crack. A cop, with gun drawn and pointed skyward, peeked in. “How we doin’?” he asked.

  “We got him,” Bodge said. “You keepin’ back the nice folks of Coleman?”

  “You betcha; everyone’s inside. Let’s keep him in here till he’s shackled. Need a little help there, Sam?”

  “We got him,” Sam replied, breathless, his knee pressing against Devalian’s back, holding him firmly against the floor. “Let’s take it easy, dickhead,” the officer advised Devalian. “Easy does it now. We got all day. We can always go get the tranquilizer gun we use on loose elephants.” The assisting cop chuckled.

  When they began to shackle him, he started thrashing again. “Noooooo!” he wailed, though one cop had a fistful of his hair and was pushing his cheek into the floor. “Get your hands off me!” More grunting, snorting, growling. Bodge watched. Bodge was completely calm, one hand in a pocket, rocking on his heels now and then. He stood squarely in front of me so that I had to lean over to observe this violent arrest. I might have thought Bodge was being too sedate for this situation except that I noticed two things: The snap of his holster was popped and he didn’t smoke. He might not look all that ready, but he was.

  This went on for as long as ten minutes; I was so fascinated by Devalian’s fight, by his incoherent screaming, that the fear began to drain out of me. Of course the presence of several armed cops, and Devalian’s position facedown, cuffed and shackled, helped ease any sense of panic. It seemed an eternity before they were ready to drag him to his feet. When they pulled him upright and he began a renewed struggle, he got a brutal CHP elbow to the gut and doubled over with a groan. He straightened slowly.

  He looked at me.

  “You,” he said, his voice soft and raspy. “You wanted to make me suffer. All along.” The voice was calm enough to make me tremble.

  The police pulled him from the office and he began shouting again, cursing and struggling. They loaded him into the back of a squad car with an officer on each side of him. A short parade of police vehicles backed away from the curb and drove slowly down the street. I followed Bodge to the front of the office, onto the sidewalk, watching them drive away. In front of the coffee shop were a couple of men I didn’t know, in quilted jackets; they began walking toward Bodge and me; undercover police, surely. It was not until the cars were around the bend that Bodge spoke.

  “Don’t let that bother you, Jackie. He don’t seem to be in any shape to hold a grudge.”

  “He knows it was me; I picked him as a killer.”

  “With a fella like him, there’s only two ways it can go. You can get him or he can get you. At least you got him. I owe you an apology on one account. You knew all along; all you
were lacking were the facts. He was all wrong, but he had most of us good and fooled. If it hadn’t been for those prints and that conclusion about the handyman work, we wouldn’t have him now.”

  I wouldn’t be here now, I thought. “When did you find out?”

  “I got a call from Mike around seven a.m. with a make; I needed a warrant to go with that, so Krump gave me a coupla guys to sit on Devalian. Those guys from the coffee shop,” he said, pointing. “We were on him tight until CHP could wake up a judge, get us a warrant, and take him in. We were all just too damn busy to call you and explain before we could pick him up. I’d give my left nut for one deputy as good as you. Jackie, we got you to thank.”

  I sighed weakly. “Sure, Bodge. Any time.”

  The police had obtained arrest and search warrants based on a few shreds of circumstantial evidence. No one had seen his crimes; there was no physical evidence prior to the arrest. Seven of the eight women had had Tom Wahl do minor repairs or installations of decorator items for them. One woman, younger than the rest, had been hitchhiking. Bodge told me he was praying they’d find some evidence in Tom’s house to link him to the murders. His likeness — there was no current photo available — had been identified by store owners, shopkeepers, neighbors, and family members of victims.

  Bob Porter remembered that Kathy had hired Tom to fix the garage door and the fence, and that he painted the living room. She got his name and number off an index card that had been tacked to the bulletin board at the grocery store. She got her babysitter and her carpet cleaner the same way. His work for her had preceded her disappearance by five months. Bob hadn’t seen any connection at the time.

  In the hours following the arrest, hours I spent at home alone, the story began to fall into place for me. He’d had his nose and jaw broken in jail, altering his appearance. He wore colored contacts — and might have had plastic surgery; there were six years unaccounted for between his release from the penitentiary and his arrival in Colorado. He had had his chin squared off and his cheeks filled out; he looked more like the Tom Lawler of twelve years before than the Tom Lawler of today.

  It was Devalian who could play chess and attend group therapy, functional even though he was shot full of drugs; Devalian who could manipulate a transfer from a maximum-security hospital. I had studied that character and hadn’t made the connection. When I learned that Tom Wahl was not Tom Lawler, I never considered that Jason Devalian might imitate the very man he’d victimized.

  I went to see where they kept him. He was in the county jail in Pleasure, his captivity maintained with earnest caution. He was watched by an armed Colorado Highway Patrol officer outside his cell. The door to the cell area was locked. He was also wearing cuffs and leg irons. Sue had driven me there; she and Bodge and I were going for a drink later — a big one. She was with me when I saw him. He sat on a cot behind bars. He was looking at his feet, unresponsive, subdued. I peeked at him through a square glass window in a locked door. His guard said something to him and he didn’t move or reply. He continued to stare at his feet. The sight of him, the knowledge of how close I’d been and all he’d done, made me feel physically ill.

  In the office outside the cells I shook hands with Brad Krump. “How’s the fishing?” I asked weakly.

  “Sheriff Scully kept me informed on your significant contributions to this arrest, Jackie. You’ve got a good head. You must have been frightened.”

  “That doesn’t touch it,” I said. “How long are you keeping him here?”

  “Just long enough for an arraignment and a high-security vehicle for his transportation. The state is going to pursue his conviction; we’ll transfer him to Denver.”

  I had decided earlier that day that I couldn’t stay in Coleman. I was exhausted and disillusioned. I agreed to take a short leave of absence from the office before selling my house and moving away. I was going to spend that leave in L.A., where Chelsea and Mike would help me recover.

  Bodge and Sue and I sat at Wolf’s. We took a booth and drank and talked. “I called Mike,” I told them. “He’s coming out tomorrow; he wants to watch some debriefings and get from you, maybe from Brad, whatever information you can share. Bodge, do you have anything at all you can use for conviction?”

  “I can’t talk about anything that’s being held for discovery, you know that. I’m not worried about putting him away; if we can get him on one tenth of what he’s done, he’s a dead man.”

  “He’s behind bars, that’s all I care about. I hope the prosecution isn’t looking at using me as a witness; by the time this gets to trial, I’m going to be long gone. I hope Mike is ready to leave with me tomorrow. We’re going to drive back to L.A. in my car; I’m picking him up in Colorado Springs at noon.”

  ***

  I was home at midnight. I tossed my purse on the couch and put my cellular phone in the base I kept plugged in, in the kitchen. I went to my bedroom and got out suitcases and piled clothes on top of my dresser. Then it hit me hard. The hands that had touched my body had choked the life out of women, had murdered at least one child. I began to cry hysterically and could no longer hold back the sick feeling.

  I don’t know how long I was in the bathroom bent over the commode, sick. I kept thinking of that night he used my body; his voice in my ears kept coming back. I could keep you a prisoner and torture you with ecstasy. Come again... Come again. I cried and heaved. I couldn’t control my insides or my mind. When I got in the shower, I experienced another frenzy and began scrubbing myself; that he had touched me was suddenly unbearable. I shampooed four, five times.

  All this took over an hour; it might have taken two. I was weak from vomiting, crying, shaking, scrubbing. I dried my hair and pulled on a long nightie. I could hardly stay on my feet and believed, at that moment, that I might never recover from the dirty, tainted, violated feeling I had.

  When I opened the bathroom door the steam rolled out, but still it was the first thing I saw:

  There was an imprint on my bed. An impression on the new, thickly batted quilt ran from the pillow to the foot; it was smudged.

  I stood in the bathroom doorway, mesmerized by the horror. How could this be? I asked myself. Someone else. The phantom is back. He is the phantom. I am possessed.

  The phone rang. I walked toward it in a daze. I picked it up but did not speak.

  “I think you’ve been too hard on me, Jackie,” he said. Tom. Jason. His voice was as it had been on those other occasions when he was in control, when he was the man I was trying to rationalize into a boyfriend.

  I said nothing. I listened.

  “I’d like a chance to show you I’m not always like that. I think I overreacted. Give me another chance?”

  I placed the receiver gently on the hook. I thought, then, that he had been in my house. It was impossible. I’d seen him in cuffs and shackles, behind bars. Just hours ago. He was guarded; he was caught.

  They wouldn’t let him call me from jail. I knew that. I needed my gun. I ran for the stairs and flew down them, holding the rail with one hand and lifting my nightgown off my feet with the other. I knew he was after me and couldn’t think past protecting myself. I grabbed the newel post at the bottom of the rail and whirled around the stair toward the living room. He slammed me up against the wall before I even saw him. With his shoulder he rammed me against the wall again, knocking the wind out of me. After bouncing off the wall, I slid weakly to the floor, unable to take a breath.

  There he stood, grinning, holding my cellular phone in one hand. He’d called me from inside my own house. He’d come in while I was showering or drying my hair. He’d been there, right outside my bathroom door, while I was at my most vulnerable.

  I stared up at him from the floor, stunned and breathless. I remembered one thing I might use as a ploy to survive. I had no defense; the only thing that had kept me alive this long was that I had refused to play his game. I didn’t like him, I didn’t pity him, and his story got him nowhere. I reached up and turned on the light in
the front hall, causing him to wince.

  “All along,” I said. “It was you all along. In my house; in everyone’s house.”

  His contacts gone, I was faced with those wild blue eyes. His eyes sparkled, glistened. He gave a short nod, glaring down at me. He thought he had me now. “Till you locked the place up. I don’t know what you were so scared of. It wasn’t anything to be so scared of.”

  It only took me a second to assess his disheveled appearance and I knew his escape had been painful and daring, another real challenge of endurance. His wrists were smeared with blood, his pants legs still wrinkled at the ankles from the leg irons. He was glistening with sweat and breathing fast and hard.

  He stared at me and, very slowly, began to smile. He tossed the phone to the floor and reached behind him, withdrawing a razor knife. The blade popped out. “I hid this in your backyard months ago. Months.”

  He reached out and grabbed my wrist, yanking me to my feet. He dragged me toward the living room and kitchen; all the blinds and curtains were tightly drawn but there was glass on the floor underneath a dining-room window. He had broken in while I was in the bathroom, shower and hair dryer running. I could feel the blade against my throat. I thought, Dear God, don’t let him stumble. “Aren’t you going to tell me how you got out? You’re usually proud of your feats; how’d you get out?”

  He pushed me into my small kitchen. “They always think they can hold me down,” he said. “It’s like they know all about me and haven’t learned anything. It’s because they’re stupid pigs.”

  “But they had you this time,” I said, trying not to whimper.

  “I got sick,” he said. “Puked and puked and puked; I was choking and someone had to come in when I turned blue. I got real blue. Stupid shits. They act like they never had a prisoner before. It’s the oldest trick there is.”

  “And they let you get away?” I asked.