Benediction

By Robert Sims Reid

Alexandra Roeg was an artist, and one night she wanted to create a masterpiece by cutting the heart out of the man who raped her. Proving the case should be easy, she told Detective Leo Banks. Find the video recording made by a second man, and he would have all the proof anyone would need.

For Banks, the attack brought to mind Donna S

• Language: English
• Publisher: West 26th street Press
• Release date: Jan 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9780786754304

Book preview

Chapter 1

IT was when a drug deal went sour that I was almost murdered. I was working undercover and a man who is now dead cut my throat and stabbed me in the kidney. Now I have a long, fine scar along the left side of my throat. This scar is not as bad as those on Boris Karloff when he played Frankenstein’s monster, but it’s not the sort of scar you’d ever mistake for the remnant of a face­lift.

My name is Banks. Leo Banks. I was a young cop, green as money that day I got cut up. That was three divorces ago. It was after the last divorce that I moved into the tiny apartment on the third floor of the old Hollingshead mansion, a dark, Victorian affair built by Ronald Hollingshead, a founding father of the city of Rozette. Leona, his daughter, was still alive when I moved in. From the time I first knew her, Leona was tethered to this earth by a green plastic oxygen line. Not long ago, that line couldn’t hold her back any longer and she died, alone and intestate. A few weeks before her dilapidated mansion was sold at auction for back taxes, I had a long talk with my pal, Pastor Roscoe Beckett, a talk about mortgage rates, bids, and ready cash. The Pastor, a blues musician and saloon-keeper, was more than ready to move out of his crib over a greasy spoon down on Rankin Street. Between us, we bought up Leona Hollingshead’s big old house and became men of property.

Property is one of the things we think about a lot here in Montana. Perhaps because there is such a wealth of it, a huge account of wind and grass and forest and mountain and river. A great, sustaining breath of country, which the few of us who live out here all want to inhale at the same time. If I sound a bit sarcastic, that’s because I’m from out of state, which is the next worst thing in these parts, I guess, to being a Communist.

I’ve come to enjoy having a separate room for cooking, eating, sleeping, and general hanging around. I even have a separate room for my books and papers on paleontology, a youthful pursuit that I took up again during convalescence, and stayed with after I went back to work at the Rozette Police Department. Before I became a home-owner, paleontology had been my sole interest in property. Rather than own some microscopic section of the earth, I’d been content to rummage around for skeletons in its closet. Back in the days when I was between one divorce and another and my life was populated by Old Bushmills corpses, I used to doze off while reading about shansiella shells or ginkgo leaves or beryl crystals. I had a recurring dream that the scar on my neck was really the bedding plane between two sections of limestone. Someday I would be cleaved open and there would be a completely new and expository fossil laying sharp and clear on the surface of my dead, stony neck. This is outrageous, of course, but since when has outrageousness ever proved to be a sufficient warning?

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to Johnny Perbix. I never wanted anything as badly as I wanted to take down Johnny Perbix.

When Perbix first showed up in Rozette five or six years ago, the town was on the skids. Lumber mills were closing right and left as Corso, the area’s major employer, moved on to greener pastures. There was still money to be made in the timber industry, but not enough money, it seemed, to hold the interest of a major conglomerate like Corso. So our central business district, which radiates around Defoe Street not far across the Holt River from my mansion on Eau Claire, was starting to look like the back lot of an abandoned film studio. Unemployment checks were a prime source of income, and selling a house was about as easy as getting a seat on the space shuttle.

Cash. That was the answer. Fresh, unencumbered cash, and people said Johnny Perbix had lots of it. Enough cash that people didn’t even call it that anymore. They called it an economic base.

For the first several years, Perbix commuted back and forth between here and Los Angeles, where, people said, he was a real hotshot in the recording industry. He’d hit it big, and now he was in his early fifties and looking for a smaller, more intimate business haven away from the madness of California. Sometimes, I guess, when a duck can’t get any bigger, the same effect is achieved by moving to a smaller pond. There were plans for a huge shopping mall, people said, and he was even toying with financing some vague sort of high-tech production and distribution facility, the kind of business that was guaranteed to make many people rich, yet not cost them anything, and not leave behind any dirt.

People said a lot of things about Johnny Perbix. One day a couple of years ago, Pastor Roscoe Beckett came to me and chimed in with his bit.

One of the Pastor’s barmaids, Donna Sanger, had a daughter named Molly, who had fallen in with Perbix. After an all-night screaming match with her mother, Molly dropped the bombshell that Perbix had a fondness for cocaine, rough sex, and homemade pornographic videotapes. Now, Johnny Perbix had decided to make little Molly a genuine film star, and Molly had taken off with him for California. Donna was worried sick. Was there anything, the Pastor wondered, that I could do?

Molly Sanger was eighteen, an adult, so she could come and go as she pleased. Still, I didn’t like the smell of things, so I decided to pay Perbix a visit the next time he was in town.

In those days, Perbix operated out of a small suite in the Rozette National Bank building, an old, expensively remodeled pile of bricks on the corner of Townsend and McLean. When his secretary ushered me into his office, Perbix didn’t bother to get up from behind his sweeping oak-and-glass desk.

Perbix’s round face retained a boyish quality, accentuated by the crow’s feet around his eyes. He wore a Western-cut suit of dark blue silk. The turquoise-and-silver clasp on his bolo tie nested snugly at the throat of his white shirt. Small, faint furrows of acne scars lined the lower ridge of each jaw. His barber had spent a lot of time taking advantage of every bit of the dark brown hair that Perbix had left. All in all, he was duded up like a country and western singer on his way to pick up an award.

You got a problem? His voice sounded flinty. Something on your mind?

I told Perbix that all I wanted was some help in locating Molly Sanger. No strong-arm stuff. Just, did he know where she was? Was she okay? Some reassurance I could give the girl’s mother.

Perbix spent about three minutes telling me first not to worry, and second that it was none of my damned business to begin with. Before I even got back to my office, his lawyer had phoned the mayor. By the time I parked my car, the Chief of Police was waiting at the station door.

The Chief didn’t mince words. Did I know who Johnny Perbix was? What his goodwill meant to this community? Jesus Christ, who did I think I was? What did I think I was doing? A golden boy, the Chief called me, a goddamn flaming golden boy. Yip, yip, yip! By the time he finished, he was standing on tiptoe. I spent the next three months investigating small-time check forgeries and other junk cases. Any spare time I had, I was given the privilege of running errands for the Chief’s secretary. In no uncertain terms, crossing paths with Johnny Perbix had gotten me a cold stretch in the P.D.’s version of Siberia.

In the months that followed, Donna Sanger began to hear rumors from her daughter’s friends that things were not well in sunny California. She confided her fears to Roscoe, who passed them along to me. More drugs and more hot, sticky movies, until one day Molly was dead of an overdose. I asked if her death was accidental, and Roscoe said it seemed pretty clear that she’d done it on purpose.

I took the news of Molly Sanger’s death to my captain, Vic Fanning. I told Fanning that I thought the least we should do was shine a little light on Perbix’s role in the girl’s death. If Perbix was going to use local kids for personal amusement and profit, then we cops should probably know a little more about him. The community, Fanning reminded me, was in sore need of what the financial types called a white knight, and Johnny Perbix fit that description better than anybody who had ridden into Rozette, Montana, in a long, long time. To hear Fanning tell it, this guy was a regular Lone Ranger of economic development. And we should risk his goodwill for the sake of a barmaid’s junkie daughter? Besides, the girl was an adult, which made her own bad choices her own lookout. If Perbix had broken any laws, he’d surely broken them in California, where people expected such things. I know that Fanning knew better, but those captain’s bars held him like a vice. If I didn’t like it, he’d see what kind of work he could find for me that was even more boring than misdemeanor forgeries. Case closed. Closed hard.

So we decided not to be constrained by a little corruption. Who doesn’t? The thing that I could never get out of my mind, the thing that caused Johnny Perbix to be such a black spot in my life, was his attitude that day I’d talked to him. He never denied anything, never said a word that I could pass on to the girl’s mother to ease her anxiety, didn’t even take the trouble to lie. And he never showed any concern for the girl herself. He was being entertained, first by Molly Sanger, and then by my visit and the thought of the leverage he knew was as close as the nearest telephone. Entertained. That was all that counted. I’m no saint, but even a barmaid’s daughter, I figured, deserved better than a big shot who didn’t give a rat’s ass for anything but a good time.

Funny, when you think about it. If everybody else could have been as honest about Perbix as Perbix himself was, we’d all have been better off.

Perbix eventually acquired a large tract of land in Bride’s Canyon, just east of town. There, with a lot of fanfare, he launched a silver-spoon residential development called Bride’s Canyon. The first house in Bride’s Canyon was the glass-and-cedar palace that Perbix built for himself. Not long after that, he moved out of his offices downtown, and began doing business from home.

Soon it grew harder and harder to come by any sign of Johnny Perbix’s activities. I kept my ear to the ground, thinking that a man like Perbix couldn’t operate down in the cold and damp forever. He was doing a good job of it, though. He did his business behind closed doors, and his business involved enough money to keep it that way. Who in the hell did he expect, in our struggling town, to buy all those newly platted lots and unbuilt houses? Something was wrong, everything in me screamed that something was wrong. But what was I going to do? Call the police?

Despite the fact that my discontent and anger over the Molly Sanger fiasco kept cooking along through the years, I wasn’t anywhere near boiling over until I met Alexandra Roeg.

For a long time now, I’ve tried to settle on the right way to tell what happened with Alex Roeg. I’ve sifted through the written reports and all the evidence from the case, as well as the memories of my conversations with her during that spring. These elements are clear enough about the facts. But, as my friend and former partner Sam Blieker says, what in God’s name do the facts mean once we know them?

Most of the time, working a case is not as complicated as putting together an uncharted voyage to the New World. The facts are both obvious and enough. Like chickens following a trail of corn one kernel at a time, we talk to people, collect and analyze evidence, file charges, go to court. We seldom contemplate where the corn might lead, or worse, that the kernels might be poisoned. The myth holds and we call it justice.

But forcing yourself into the shadowed interior of a case, the cavity behind the facts, that’s something else. You find yourself inhabiting people’s heads, their eyes and ears, their hearts. That’s where Alex Roeg took me.

Chapter 2

BOTH the city and the city’s police department were fairly quiet on the night I met Alex Roeg. Like the other fourteen detectives on the Department, I usually work a day shift. That’s because our job involves follow-up investigation, a methodical process that’s usually handled best during the day, when people are most available. We deal a lot with doctors and attorneys, and I can tell you right now you don’t find too many of those characters on graveyards.

That March night, though, I was at the station working over the file on the Thomlinson homicide. Last fall, a guy named Herb Thomlinson taped a bundle of dynamite to the firewall of his car, then parked the car in the driveway of the salesman who’d sold it to him. The salesman was uninjured by the blast, but died of a coronary three hours later. After Red Hanrahan and I finished taking Herb Thomlinson’s confession, I asked Thomlinson if he had any regrets about the whole thing.

Should’ve bought a Japanese car, Thomlinson said.

Thomlinson’s lawyer, naturally, filed a motion to suppress the confession Thomlinson gave me. We had the whole statement, all three hours of it, on videotape, which the judge watched at the suppression hearing. I’d started the interview by advising Thomlinson of his rights. Then Hanrahan went the extra mile and explained those rights. After all that, Thomlinson was sure he wanted to tell us what happened. He was sober, and seemed to be thinking clearly. According to Thomlinson’s lawyer, both Hanrahan and I were too cunning for our own good. We’d treated Thomlinson with courtesy and respect. Even kindness. This, Thomlinson’s lawyer reasoned, must have been coercive, since it led the unfortunate Mr. Thomlinson to believe that, despite the fact that he was under arrest for murder, he wasn’t really in trouble. Coercive niceness, the lawyer called it. The judge slam-dunked Thomlinson’s motion to suppress, but it made me nervous that he’d needed a month and a half and three sets of briefs to get it done.

We had Thomlinson charged with deliberate homicide, but he was holding fast that warranty problems with the car were mitigating factors that any reasonable man could understand. And besides, it wasn’t like Thomlinson intended to kill anybody. How was he to know the car salesman had a bum heart? The way Thomlinson saw it, the slug didn’t have a heart at all. So it looked like we were going to trial in a couple of weeks. Mike Sweeney, the prosecutor, had given me a list of eighteen or twenty jobs that needed doing before we sat down to pick a jury.

On top of the Thomlinson work I had my regular caseload, which at the time included three or four sexual child abuse reports, a couple of aggravated assaults and two more trials, an armed robbery, and a rape, getting ready to go. Then there were the half-dozen or so junk cases—forgeries, misdemeanor thefts, the kind of cases that need a hospice more than they need a detective. Add to that the countless morons who wander into the office or who phone every day, season with a generous amount of office politics, let simmer for twenty years, and you come up with a day in the life of Leo Banks.

So it was easy lately for me to come back to work at night, when the office is officially closed and nobody is around.

Working after hours was also simplified by the fact that my friend, Janice Bowie, had been in Peru for several months. Janice—Dr. Bowie—is an archaeologist. Last summer, she got connected up with an ongoing project and took an indefinite leave from her job at the local college. After wrestling with her emotions for about thirty seconds, she decided that rooting around in the dirt at Machu Picchu was a necessary alternative to romancing a police detective on the edge of burnout. Go figure.

I was on my way home at about midnight, when I stopped to tell Jimmy Aimes, the desk officer, that I was leaving. I found Aimes hunting frantically through a stack of papers as he hugged the telephone against his ear. The phone slipped and banged to the counter.

Sonofabitch, Aimes mumbled as he picked up the phone. What . . . no, not you, ma’am . . . yes, I’m sorry . . . wait, here it is. He read off the details of a traffic accident. Aimes is a blond man in his early twenties. I hear he comes from a big family of dairy farmers in the Flathead Valley up near Kalispell. He doesn’t look like a cop, doesn’t have the detached, unexpressive face most of us develop after listening and watching for so long that your face becomes a machine, a thing you let rest when you don’t need it. Aimes had been a cop for less than a year. Even so, he’d already learned to swear under his breath and to shout at people through the ported Plexiglas window between the desk and the world at large. Someday soon his face will lock up tighter than a cell door.

While Aimes was still reading from the report, another phone rang. The radio squawked nonstop in the background, like a bad piano player’s awkward left hand. Aimes shot me a desperate look. I picked up the phone.

Police department. Leo Banks.

The connection hung silent for a moment. I began to think I had a crank on the line. Then a woman stammered several unintelligible, yet clearly urgent syllables. My attention tightened down.

I’m sorry, ma’am, you’ll have to speak up. Please, it’s okay. Just tell me what you need.

There . . . there’s something I want to report.

Fine. I reached into my jacket for a pen and notebook. Just tell me—

There was a . . . a man . . . men here. Just awhile ago. Two men. Her words started crowding each other over the circuit. Men. They were in my house . . . he . . . I don’t know—

She didn’t speak again for several long seconds.

I need to know where you live, I said. Can you tell me where you live?

Twenty . . . Again, her voice dropped off, as if all breath had been squeezed from her.

I knew I’d lost her. I took a deep breath and waited for the line to go dead.

Twenty-three-oh-three Carson. Her voice was a whisper.

Hearing the address surprised me and I thought at first I’d have to ask her to repeat it. 2303 Carson, I wrote. A good neighborhood up the hill in Aztec Heights, above the smog.

I’ll get an officer up there as fast as I can. Are you hurt? Do you need an ambulance?

No.

Are the men still there?

No.

How long ago did this happen?

I’m not sure. An hour. I think it was about an hour.

Can you— The connection broke.

You got something, Leo? Aimes leaned his elbow on the battered green-and-white typewriter in front of him. He took a drag on a cigarette, then set it neatly in the ashtray next to the typewriter.

A haggard woman wearing two or three coats appeared on the other side of the Plexiglas. This woman wanders Rozette’s streets in all weather. She always smiles and waves at everyone. She’s crazy and she has wild gray hair. The cops all call her the Sea Witch.

The Sea Witch pecked at the Plexiglas with a grisly finger.

Aimes ignored the Sea Witch.

Sounds like an assault of some kind, I said.

Want me to send somebody?

The Sea Witch beckoned again.

In a minute! Aimes shouted through the port in the window.

I thought about my empty apartment and the possibility that I might draw the case tomorrow anyway. I told Aimes that I would go talk to the woman myself.

Suit yourself. Aimes lit a cigarette to match the one he already had burning. He looked down at the smoldering ashtray and scratched his head. You want one of these?

Gave them up.

I should do that. How’d you do it?

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