According to Woodbody, it was Dooley who had started calling her Yoko.
Woodbody characterized their meetings at The Place as "occasional, bordering on regular." Lisey parsed this intellectual bullshit and decided it meant Woodbody-Dooley bitchfests about Yoko Landon four and sometimes five afternoons a week, and that when Woodbody said "a beer or two," he probably meant a pitcher or two. So there they were, this intellectual Oscar and Felix, getting soused just about every weekday afternoon, at first talking about how great Scott's books were and then progressing naturally to what a miserable withholding bitch his widow had turned out to be.
According to Woodbody, it was Dooley who had turned their conversations in this direction. Lisey, who knew how Woodbody sounded when he was denied what he wanted, doubted if it had taken much effort.
And at some point, Dooley had told Woodbody that he, Dooley, could persuade the widow to change her mind about those unpublished manuscripts. After all, how hard could it be to talk sense to her when the man's papers were almost certainly going to end up in the University of Pittsburgh Library with the rest of the Landon Collection anyway? He was good at changing people's minds, Dooley said. He had a knack for it. The King of the Incunks (looking at his new friend with a drunk's bleary shrewdness, Lisey had no doubt) asked Dooley how much he'd want for such a service. Dooley had said he wasn't looking to make a profit. They were talking about a service to mankind, weren't they? Prying a great treasure away from a woman who was too stupid to understand what it was she was sitting on, like a broody hen on a clutch of eggs. Well, yes, Woodbody had responded, but the workman was worthy of his hire. Dooley considered this and said he'd keep a record of his various expenses. Then, when they got together and he transferred the papers to Woodbody, they could discuss the matter of payment. And with that, Dooley had extended his hand over the bar to his new friend, just as if they had closed a deal which actually made sense. Woodbody had taken it, feeling both delighted and contemptuous. He had gone back and forth in his mind about Dooley during the five or seven weeks he'd known him, he told Lisey. There were days when he thought Dooley was a serious hardass, a self-made jailhouse scholar whose blood-chilling stories of stickups and fights and spoonhandle knifings were all true. Then there were days (the day of the handshake being one of them) when he was positive that Jim Dooley was nothing but talk, and the most dangerous crime he'd ever committed was stealing a gallon or two of paint thinner out of the Wal-Mart in Monroeville where he'd worked for six months or so in 2004. So for Woodbody it had been little more than a half-drunk joke, especially when Dooley more or less told him he was going to talk Lisey out of her dead husband's papers for the sake of Art. That, at least, was what the King of the Incunks told Lisey on that afternoon in June, but of course this was the same King of the Incunks who had sat half-drunk in a bar with a man he hardly knew, a self-confessed "hard-time con," the two of them calling her Yoko and agreeing that Scott must have kept her around for one thing and one thing only, because what else could he have wanted her for? Woodbody said that, as far as he was concerned, the whole thing had been little more than a joke, just two guys blue-skying in a bar. It was true that the two guys in question had exchanged e-mail addresses, but these days everybody had an e-mail address, didn't they? The King of the Incunks had met his loyal subject just one more time following the day of the handshake. That had been two afternoons later. Dooley had limited himself to just a single beer on that occasion, telling Woodbody that he was "in training." After that one beer he'd slid off his barstool, saying he had an appointment "to see a fella." He also told Woodbody he'd probably meet him the following day, next week for sure. But Woodbody had never seen Jim Dooley again. After a couple of weeks he'd stopped looking. And the Zack991 e-mail address stopped working. In a way, he thought, losing track of Jim Dooley was a good thing. He had been drinking too much, and there was something about Dooley that was just wrong. (Figured that out a little late, didn't you? Lisey thought sourly.) Woodbody's drinking dropped back to its previous level of one or two beers a week, and without even really thinking about it, he moved to a bar a couple of blocks away. It didn't occur to him until later (until my head cleared was how he put it) that he was unconsciously putting distance between himself and the last place he'd seen Dooley; that he had, in fact, repented of the whole thing. If, that was, it had ever been anything other than a fantasy, just one more Jim Dooley air-castle which Joe Woodbody had helped to furnish while drinking away the waning weeks of another miserable Pittsburgh winter. And that was what he had believed, he finished, summing up as earnestly as a lawyer whose client faces lethal injection if he screws up. He had come to the conclusion that most of Jim Dooley's stories of banditry and survival at Brushy Mountain had been complete fabrications, and his idea of getting Mrs. Landon to give up her late husband's manuscripts was just one more. Their deal had been nothing but a child's game of What-If.
"If that's true, tell me something," Lisey said. "If Dooley had shown up with a truckload of Scott's stories, would that have kept you from taking them?"
"I don't know."
That, she thought, was actually honest, and so she asked him something else. "Do you know what you've done? What you've set in motion?"
To this Professor Woodbody said nothing, and she thought that was also honest. As honest, maybe, as he was capable of being.
7
After a pause to think, Lisey said: "Did you give him the number where he called me? Do I have you to thank for that, too?"
"No! Absolutely not! I didn't give him any number, I promise you!"
Lisey believed him. "You're going to do something for me, Professor," she said. "If Dooley gets in touch with you again, maybe just to tell you he's hot on the trail and things are lookin good, you're going to tell him the deal's off. Totally off."
"I will." The man's eagerness was almost abject. "Believe me, I--" He was interrupted by a woman's voice--his wife's, Lisey had no doubt--asking something. There came a rustling sound as he covered the bottom part of the telephone with his hand.
Lisey didn't mind. She was adding up her situation here and not liking the total. Dooley had told her she could turn off the heat by giving Woodbody Scott's papers and unpublished manuscripts. The Professor would then call the madman, tell him everything was cool, and that would be that. Only the former King of the Incunks claimed he no longer had any way of getting in touch with Dooley, and Lisey believed him. Was it an oversight on Dooley's part? A glitch in his planning? She didn't think so. She thought that Dooley really might have some vague intention of showing up at Woodbody's office (or suburban castle) with Scott's papers . . . but before he did, he planned to first terrorize her and then hurt her in places she'd never let the boys touch at the junior high school dances. And why would he do that, after going to such great lengths to assure both the Professor and Lisey herself that there was a fail-safe system in place to keep bad things from happening if she cooperated?
Maybe because he needs to give himself permission.
That rang true. And later on--after she was dead, maybe, or so grotesquely maimed she wished she were dead--Jim Dooley's conscience would be able to assure itself that Lisey herself had been to blame. I gave her every chance, her friend "Zack" would think. It was nobody's fault but her own. She had to be Yoko to the bitter end.
Okay. Okay, then. If he showed up, she'd just give him the keys to the barn and the study and tell him to take whatever he wanted. I'll tell him to knock himself out, have a ball.
But at this thought Lisey's lips thinned into the humorless moon-smile perhaps only her sisters and her late husband, who called it Lisey's Tornado Look, would have recognized. "The smuck I will," she muttered, and looked around for the silver spade. It wasn't there. She'd left it in the car. If she wanted it, she'd better go out and get it before it got completely dar--
"Mrs. Landon?" It was the Professor, sounding more anxious than ever. She'd forgotten all about him. "Are you still there?"
"Yea
h," she said. "This is what it gets you, you know."
"I beg pardon?"
"You know what I'm talking about. All the stuff you wanted so bad, the stuff you thought you had to have? This is what it gets you. How you feel right now. Plus the questions you'll have to answer when I hang up, of course."
"Mrs. Landon, I don't--"
"If the police call you, I want you to tell them everything you've told me. Which means you better answer your wife's questions first, don't you think?"
"Mrs. Landon, please!" Woodbody sounded panicky now.
"You bought into this. You and your friend Dooley."
"Stop calling him my friend!"
Lisey's Tornado Look grew stronger, the lips thinning until they showed the tops of her teeth. At the same time, her eyes narrowed until they were no more than blue sparks. It was a feral look, and it was all Debusher.
"But he is!" she cried. "You're the one who drank with him, and told him your tale of woe, and laughed when he called me Yoko Landon. You were the one who set him on me, whether you said it in so many words or not, and now it turns out he's just as crazy as a shithouse rat and you can't pull him off. So yes, Professor, I'm going to call the County Sheriff, and yessirree, I'll be giving them your name, I'll be giving them anything that'll help them find your friend, because he's not done, you know it and so do I, because he doesn't want to be done, he's having a good smucking time, and this is what it gets you. You bought it, you own it! Okay? Okay?"
No answer. But she could hear the wet sound of breathing and knew the former King of the Incunks was trying not to cry. She hung up, snagged another ciggy off the floor, lit it. She went back to the telephone, then shook her head. She'd call the Sheriff's Office in a minute. First she wanted to get the silver spade out of the Beemer, and she wanted to do it right away, before all the light was gone and her part of the world swapped day for night.
8
The side yard--which she supposed she'd go to her grave thinking of as the dooryard--was already too dark for comfort, although Venus, the wishing-star, had yet to make her appearance in the sky. The shadows where the barn joined the toolshed were especially dark, and the BMW was parked less than twenty feet from there. Of course Dooley wasn't hiding in that well of shadows, and if he was on the place, he might be anywhere: leaning against the changing-hut by the pool, peering around the corner of the house where the kitchen was, crouched behind the cellar bulkhead . . .
Lisey whirled on her heels at that idea, but there was still enough light to see there was nothing on either side of the bulkhead. And the bulkhead doors themselves were locked, so she didn't have to worry about Dooley in the cellar. Unless, of course, he'd broken into the house somehow and hidden down there before she got home.
Stop it Lisey you're creeping yourself ou--
She paused with her fingers curled around the handle of the BMW's rear door. She stood that way for maybe five seconds, then let her cigarette drop from her free hand and stamped out the butt. There was someone standing in the deep angle where the barn and the toolshed met. Standing there very tall and still.
Lisey opened the Beemer's rear passenger door and snatched out the silver spade. The light inside the car stayed on when she closed the door again. She'd forgotten that, how the inside lights of cars now stayed on for a little while, the courtesy light they called it, but she found nothing courteous about the idea that Dooley could see her and she could no longer see him thanks to the way that smucking light was screwing up her vision. She stepped away from the car, holding the shaft of the spade diagonally across her breasts. The light inside the BMW finally went out. For a moment that made things worse. She could see only a world of indistinct purple shapes under the fading lavender sky, and she fully expected him to leap out at her, calling her Missus and asking why she hadn't listen as his hands closed around her throat and her breath rattled to an end.
It didn't happen and in another three seconds or so, her eyes re-adapted to the low light. Now she could see him again, tall and straight, grave and still, standing there in the angle of the big building and the small one. With something at his feet. Some kind of square package. It could have been a suitcase.
Good God, he doesn't think he can get all of Scott's papers in there, does he? she thought, and took another cautious step to her left, holding the silver spade so tightly that her fists throbbed. "Zack, is that you?" Another step. Two. Three.
She heard a car coming and understood that its headlights were going to sweep the yard, revealing him fully. When that happened, he would leap at her. She swung the silver spade back over her shoulder just as she had in August of 1988, finishing her windup as the approaching car breasted Sugar Top Hill, flooding her yard with momentary light and revealing the power-mower she herself had left in the angle of the barn and the shed. The shadow of its handle leaped upward on the side of the barn, then faded as the car's headlights faded. Once more the lawn-mower could have been a man with a suitcase at his feet, she supposed, although once you'd seen the truth . . .
In a horror movie, she thought, this is where the monster would leap out of the darkness and grab me. Just as I'm starting to relax.
Nothing leaped out to grab her, but Lisey didn't think it would hurt to take the silver spade inside with her, if only for good luck. Carrying it in one hand now, down by the collar where the shaft met the silver scoop, Lisey went to call Norris Ridgewick, the Castle County Sheriff.
VII. Lisey and The Law (Obsession and The Exhausted Mind)
1
The woman who took Lisey's call identified herself as Communications Officer Soames and said she couldn't put Lisey through to Sheriff Ridgewick, because Sheriff Ridgewick had been married the week before. He and his new bride were on the island of Maui, and would be for the next ten days.
"Who can I talk to?" Lisey asked. She didn't like the close-to-strident sound of her voice, but she understood it. Oh God, did she. This had been one long goddam day.
"Hold on, ma'am," CO Soames said. Then Lisey was in limbo with McGruff the Crime Dog, who was talking about Neighborhood Watch groups. Lisey thought this a considerable improvement on the Two Thousand Comatose Strings. After a minute or so of McGruff, a cop with a name Scott would have loved came on the line.
"This is Deputy Andy Clutterbuck, ma'am, how can I help you?"
For the third time that day--third time's the charm, Good Ma would have said, third time pays for all--Lisey introduced herself as Mrs. Scott Landon. Then she told Deputy Clutterbuck a slightly edited version of the Zack McCool story, beginning with the call she had received the previous evening and finishing with the one she'd made tonight, the one that had netted the Jim Dooley name. Clutterbuck contented himself with uh-huhs and variations thereof until she had finished, then asked her who had given her "Zack McCool"'s other, possibly real name.
With a twinge of conscience
(tattle-tale tit all the dogs in town come to have a little bit)
that caused her a moment of bitter amusement, Lisey gave up the King of the Incunks. She did not call him Woodsmucky.
"Are you going to talk to him, Deputy Clutterbuck?"
"I think that's indicated, don't you?"
"I guess so," Lisey said, wondering what, if anything, Castle County's acting Sheriff could get out of Woodbody that she hadn't been able to pry loose. She supposed there might be something--she'd been pretty mad. She also realized that wasn't what was bothering her. "Will he be arrested?"
"On the basis of what you've told me? Not even close. You might have grounds for a civil action--you'd have to ask your lawyer--but in court I'm sure he'd say that as far as he knew, all this guy Dooley meant to do was show up on your doorstep and try a little high-pressure sales routine. He'd claim not to know anything about dead cats in mailboxes and threats of personal injury . . . and he'd be telling the truth, based on what you've just said. Right?"
Lisey agreed, rather dispiritedly, that it was right.
"I'm going to want the letter th
is stalker left," Clutterbuck said, "and I'm going to want the cat. What did you do with the remains?"
"We have a wooden box-thingy attached to the house," Lisey said. She picked up a cigarette, considered it, put it back down again. "My husband had a word for it--my husband had a word for just about everything--but I can't remember for the life of me what it was. Anyway, it keeps the raccoons out of the swill. I put the cat's body in a garbage bag and put the bag in the orlop." Now that she wasn't struggling to find it, Scott's word came effortlessly to mind.
"Uh-huh, uh-huh, do you have a freezer?"
"Yes . . ." Already dreading what he was going to tell her to do next.
"I want you to put the cat in your freezer, Mrs. Landon. It's perfectly okay to leave it in the bag. Someone will pick it up tomorrow and take it over to Kendall and Jepperson. They're the vets we have our county account with. They'll try to determine a cause of death--"
"It shouldn't be hard," Lisey said. "The mailbox was full of blood."
"Uh-huh. Too bad you didn't take a few Polaroids before you wiped it all up."
"Well excuse me all to hell and gone!" Lisey cried, stung.
"Calm down," Clutterbuck said. Calmly. "I understand that you were upset. Anybody would have been."
Not you, Lisey thought resentfully. You would have been as cool as . . . as a dead cat in a freezer.
She said, "That takes care of Professor Woodbody and the dead cat; now what about me?"
Clutterbuck told her he would send a deputy at once--Deputy Boeckman or Deputy Alston, whichever was closer--to take charge of the letter. Now that he thought of it, he said, the deputy who visited her could take a few Polaroid snaps of the dead cat, too. All the deputies carried Polaroid cameras in their cars. Then the deputy (and, later on, his eleven PM relief) would take up station on Route 19 within view of her house. Unless, of course, there was an emergency call--an accident or something of that nature. If Dooley "checked by" (Clutterbuck's oddly delicate way of putting it), he'd see the County cruiser and move along.