‘If he’d flown in here, he’d be in the stir now,’ one of the Bayshore controllers had told Dees over the phone, but Dees wondered. Yes. He wondered very much.
The Night Flier had landed in Duffrey at 11:27 P.M., and ‘Dwight Renfield’ had not only signed the Sarches’ logbook but also had accepted Ray Sarch’s invitation to come into the trailer, have a beer, and watch a rerun of Gunsmoke on TNT. Ellen Sarch had told all of this to the proprietor of the Duffrey Beauty Bar the following day. This woman, Selida McCam-mon, had identified herself to Dees as one of the late Ellen Sarch’s closest friends.
When Dees asked how Ellen had seemed, Selida had paused and then said, ‘Dreamy, somehow. Like a high-school girl with a crush, almost seventy years old or not. Her color was so high I thought it was make-up, until I started in on her perm. Then I saw that she was just . . . you know . . . ‘ Selida McCammon shrugged. She knew what she meant but not how to say it.
‘Het up,’ Dees suggested, and that made Selida McCammon laugh and clap her hands.
‘Het up! That’s it! You’re a writer, all right!’
‘Oh, I write like a boid,’ Dees said, and offered a smile he hoped looked good-humored and warm. This was an expression he had once practiced almost constantly and continued to practice with fair regularity in the bedroom mirror of the New York apartment he called his home, and in the mirrors of the hotels and motels that were really his home. It seemed to work — Selida McCammon answered it readily enough — but the truth was that Dees had never felt good-humored and warm in his life. As a kid he had believed these emotions didn’t really exist at all; they were just a masquerade, a social convention. Later on he decided he had been wrong about that; most of what he thought of as ‘Reader’s Digest emotions’ were real, at least for most people.
Perhaps even love, the fabled Big Enchilada, was real. That he himself could not feel these emotions was undoubtedly a shame, but hardly the end of the world. There were, after all, people out there with cancer, and AIDS, and the memory-spans of brain-damaged parakeets. When you looked at it that way, you quickly realized that being deprived of a few huggy-kissy emotions was fairly small beans. The important thing was that if you could manage to stretch the muscles of your face in the right directions every now and then, you were fine. It didn’t hurt and it was easy; if you could remember to zip up your fly after you took a leak, you could remember to smile and look warm when it was expected of you. And an understanding smile, he had discovered over the years, was the world’s best interview tool. Once in awhile a voice inside asked him what his own inside view was, but Dees didn’t want an inside view. He only wanted to write and to take photographs. He was better at the writing, always had been and always would be, and he knew it, but he liked the photographs better just the same. He liked to touch them. To see how they froze people either with their real faces hung out for the whole world to see or with their masks so clearly apparent that they were beyond denial. He liked how, in the best of them, people always looked surprised and horrified. How they looked caught.
If pressed, he would have said the photographs provided all the inside view he needed, and the subject had no relevance here, anyway. What did was the Night Flier, his little batty buddy, and how he had waltzed into the lives of Ray and Ellen Sarch a week or so earlier.
The Flier had stepped out of his plane and walked into an office with a red-bordered FAA notice on the wall, a notice which suggested there was a dangerous guy out there driving a Cessna Skymaster 337, tail-number N101BL, who might have murdered two men. This guy, the notice went on, might or might not be calling himself Dwight Renfield. The Skymaster had landed, Dwight Renfield had signed in and had almost surely spent the following day in the belly-hold of his plane. And what about the Sarches, those two sharp-eyed old folks?