Stephen Cannell - At First Sight

Once more I grabbed. This time I managed to hold my tortured thoughts.

I locked onto something important. Tire treads.

I remembered a documentary I saw on A amp;E dealing with the new forensic science being employed by police departments. Investigators could trace a car using tire tracks. They could make random pattern matches. Isolate something called "unique identifiers." They could graph the imperfections in the tire tread and scan them into a computer. If they found the car, they could match the tire tread to the unique identifiers found at the crime scene.

There was also something called "paint fragment analysis." Tiny paint particles, so small you couldn't see them, could be left on skin or clothes. They could retrieve dust-sized samples from Chandler's body and tell what color and make of car the paint came from. I was starting to panic again.

I got out of the car and walked around to the front. It was a mess. A broken headlight and frame. A caved-in right front fender. Some of the blue paint was scratched and scuffed. There was blood. Chandler's blood. Not much, but some. It had seeped into the broken headlight. Shit. I had to do something about this.

I sat on the hard ground and leaned up against the car to think about it, trying to sort out my options. Without warning, I began to cry. Deep, soul-wrenching sobs choked my throat and constricted my breathing. It wasn't so much that I was feeling sorry for myself.

Although, truth be told, there was some of that. It was more as if I was saying goodbye to the last remnants of who I thought I was.

No longer could I accept myself as someone who had been put upon by life. No longer could I blame my emotional shortcomings on my dead father's fucked-up value system, or on my mother or grandma. In truth, they had all helped to form who I was, shallow and transparent as that man had become. But none of that mattered anymore. I now knew I was no longer struggling against the events of an unfair childhood. I was no longer a victim of my father's death, or my mother's low-income circumstances. I couldn't think of myself as someone put upon by the choices and actions of others. Chick Best, the victim, was gone.

This new Chick had just committed murder. He had killed another man. This new Chick was an aggressor. A perpetrator. This new Chick had taken a human life, parked on a man's chest and waited for him to die. I'm telling you, it was an impossible idea to come to grips with.

Being a victim is so much more satisfying. In failure, as a victim your excuse is built in. It's not my fault. I had no advantages growing up. My father was a cheap, slick asshole. When a victim succeeds, he has heroically overcome adversity, risen above cultural and sociological disadvantages to win bravely in the face of all odds.

However, there is no heroic rationale for murder. Murder is pure aggression. Murderers are unredeemable psychotics. So I sat and cried for the loss of the man I had been. I cried until my throat was dry and my eyes were swollen. When I was cried out, I sat in silence, my mind aching, but no longer spinning.

I knew that I had a lot of things to do, and I had to do them quickly. First I had to repair this fucking car. I couldn't destroy it or ditch it, because the Hertz Rent a Car in New York City would want to know where it was. If a blue Taurus went missing from Hertz and the police got blue Taurus paint off Chandler's body, a ten-minute computer run would find me and I would end up hosting a shower party in the North Carolina State Prison.

I had to repair the car so no one would notice. I knelt down and studied the right front fender. It was bent. No large paint chips seemed to have been knocked loose, but the rim was scratched and the paint underneath scraped, so that would need to be straightened and repainted. I had driven over Chandler's chest with the right-side tires. Can skin and clothes be used to match treads? Did I leave tread marks on Chandler or on the pavement? I wasn't sure, but to be safe, I needed new rubber.

How long before Chandler Ellis's death would become front-page news? With luck, it wouldn't make the papers until tomorrow evening. Of course, because he was related to the L. A. Times Chandlers, the electronic media would jump all over it, pending notification of kin. That meant it could make the TV news by sometime tomorrow, maybe sooner. So there wasn't much time, and I had a lot to do.

I looked at my watch. It was still only 1:35 A. M. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since I'd hit Chandler, but in reality it had only been a little over two hours. I opened my wallet and counted my cash. Eighteen hundred dollars. I always carry a lot of cash when I travel because I sometimes incur personal expenses that I don't want showing up on my Amex card. Don't ask, because I'm not going to explain that further.

I got back in the Taurus and drove all night, heading north. I stopped at a self-serve car wash in Richmond around 5:30 A. M. and scrubbed the front end of the car until I was pretty sure there was no blood left. I bought some dark glasses and a ball cap at a drugstore. The tire store I eventually picked was in Newport News, Virginia. It was in a grungy neighborhood full of low-end businesses where it looked to me like cash would talk. It was seven in the morning when I parked out front of Dale's Tire Town and shut off the engine. Dale hadn't worked too hard for his slogan. In red script it read: DALE'S Where the Rubber Meets the Road. Pu-leeze.

At nine-fifteen, a man who turned out to be Dale himself drove in and opened up. I waited until a few employees arrived, and then, wearing the sunglasses and ball cap, pulled up to one of the tire bays and got out. Dale was a speed-thin southerner with a skinny neck that looked like it was made up of gristle and rubber bands.

"Cha' need?" he slurred at me through tobacco-stained teeth the same color and texture as a grape-stake fence.

"New tires," I said, forcing a smile through my own too-dry pearlies.

Dale squatted down and looked at the rear tires on the Taurus, then he got up and checked the front pair. He rubbed his chin like he was preparing to shave. Of course there was still over a half-inch of good rubber all around, and that turned out to be what was bothering him.

"Zis a feckin' joke? You one a them TV consumer guys with a hidden camera, tryin' to see if I'll sell ya tires ya don't need?"

"No… no. I, uh… I don't like the way these tires are riding. I'm gonna throw 'em in the trunk and put 'em on my wife's car." Even to me, this sounded more like an excuse than an explanation. Or was it just my guilty conscience revving?

An hour later, I paid for four new Firestones. They were identical to the ones Dale had just taken off the car, minus the unique identifiers that could be used to match the tread marks on Chandler's chest and send me to prison. Dale threw the old set into the trunk. They didn't all fit, so the last one we rolled onto the floor behind the front seat. I muttered some nonsense about my wife's car, paid with cash, and left.

As I pulled out I glanced in the mirror and saw Dale watching, shaking his head slowly. This bubba's definitely gonna remember me, I thought.

"Yessir, Officer. Yankee in a suit. Guy came in here, swapped a perfectly good set of Stonies for a set of new ones. Didn't make no damn sense 'tall."

When you watch this stuff on TV or in the movies, it seems pretty simple. It's another thing altogether when you're actually trying to cover up a murder yourself. Everything you say or do has repercussions. Trying to wipe a trail clean is no simple task. A tiny mistake is like a pebble thrown into a still lake; the circles of ripples roll out, but it's still pretty easy to judge where the stone originally landed.

I parked by a body of water about ten miles away, went through the bushes, and found a good place to ditch the tires. I rolled them into a lake I didn't know the name of and watched while they sank.