Stephen Cannell - At First Sight

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Dear Mrs. Ellis:

I have tried desperatey to reach you. l've left message after message at your hotel and on your cell voice-mail, but for some reason I have not been able to get through, so I am putting this in a fax in the hope that it might reach you. I think I have finally solved your husbands hit-and-run. As I wrote earlier, Top Hat Auto in New Jersey is where the Taurus was repaired. The owner remembered the guy who was driving and I've enclosed a much better drawing. This morning I rechecked all the Hertz agencies in New York and eventualy found the car. It was rented by your friend Charles Best on April 12th and returned on the 13th. On my instructions, Hertz reexamined the car. It had severe right front feeder damage that had been Bondoed' up and repainted. I just found out from one of your friends yesterday that you went to Mr. Best's wife's funeral in LA. That really has me worried. You must yet in touch with me immediately, and Mrs. Ellis, please stay away from that man. I have notified the LA. police and am on my way out there. In the meantime, be extremely careful.

Chick Best is a cold-blooded killer.

Very sincerely yours

Detective Robert Butler

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Then I dug into the envelope and pulled out a folded fax picture and opened it up. The drawing depicted a dark-haired, middle-aged man.

It was Chick.

I sat on the toilet as my whole body went numb. Sweat started beading on my forehead and under my arms. I sat motionless trying to decide what to do next.

"Hey, Paige, what the hell're you doing in there?" Chick's voice came through the locked door again, shattering my thoughts and jangling my nerves. "Are you going to the bathroom or redecorating?"

"Be out in a minute," I sang out brightly. Then I took the wineglass, wrapped it in a towel, and held it over the sink. I tapped it lightly on the gold faucet fixture. It shattered, leaving me with the rounded pedestal base and a good shaft with a sharp, jagged point. I took this weapon, such as it was, and carefully fit it into my purse with the bottom up, so I could draw it quickly. I decided to keep humoring Chick. Stall. Delay. Find a way to make a phone call out. That was the gist of my feeble plan.

I knew Bob Butler was, if nothing else, a bulldog. His letter said he was on his way to L. A. and had already notified the LAPD. Maybe they could figure this out in time. He would probably start with the Lang-ham Hotel, where he knew I was staying. Since Peter Ellis had left a message for me there earlier, it would be on their computer. He would get to Chandler's parents. I'd told them I was coming up here. However, I'd only mentioned it in passing. I prayed they would remember.

Stall… Delay… Humor… Try and get a call out. That was my mantra.

I looked out the bathroom window. The snow was coming down even harder than before. We would soon be snowed in-maybe already were.

I had to assume, for the time being, that no help would be coming. This was going to be completely up to me. I was going to have to save myself. The Japanese meaning of karate suddenly flipped into my mind: Way of the empty hand… How appropriate.

I took a deep breath, opened the door, and stepped out of the guest bathroom to face my husband's killer. It was…

I STOOD IN THE KITCHEN WAITING FOR HER TO RETURN from the can. I felt my tool tingling-filling with blood, threatening to rise. On the other hand, it was more than a little off-putting that Paige kept wanting to load up the car and head down the mountain, as if I hadn't gone to a helluva lot of trouble to plan this romantic weekend. If I wasn't so in love with her I might have actually been a little pissed off about the way she was behaving.

To get my mind off my irritation with Paige, I started to rate my presale performance. I gave myself a 7 for account research, an 8 for account prep, and a blistering 9.5 for account management. I was now at the really important moment. The Client Close.

I'd made only one little mistake so far. The rant about JFK had definitely put a bone in her nose. It seemed to really tick her off. It obviously wasn't smart running down Chandler like that, trying to make myself look better by making him look small. Like one of those African birds that stands in a crocodile's mouth picking food from its teeth, I'd been taking a huge chance with that. If I wasn't careful, Paige would lose patience with me and all that would be left of my plan would be blood and feathers.

That aside, I was still trying to feel good. The red wine warmed me, and the old tube steak was threatening to become a full-fledged changeling for the first time in months. As I waited for her to reappear from her overnight camping trip to the can, a few things started to tug at my memory and make me wonder if, instead of being on the verge of victory, this whole thing might actually be going bad instead.

What the fuck was that look she gave me when I mentioned the Darvocet? Sometimes Paige could act damned weird. Now that I was closer to her, spending more time in her orbit, I could see there were things about her personality that I definitely had to work on. Things I needed to change if we were going to have a long-term relationship.

I poured the last of the French Bordeaux into my glass, held it up to the light, and swirled it. I'd taken a class at Wolfgang Puck's in Hollywood on how to evaluate great wines. Actually, if you want to know the truth, all this shit tastes like Ripple to me. I've never been good at sorting out the complex tastes and textures I'm supposed to experience. Some of these wine reviews can be pretty obscure, like saying a wine tastes like wood ash with a trace of pencil lead, for God's sake. Who the hell knows what pencil lead tastes like? There is also a complex protocol that goes with drinking this stuff. The entire cork-sniffing, glass-swirling, lip-smacking extravaganza. You learn the right words and always try to act faintly above it all, pretend to be constantly evaluating, add a skeptical frown, and you've got it.

I buy and drink this stuff mostly because it impresses the hell out of women. The idea that they're consuming something worth thousands of dollars, which overnight their body is going to process into bright yellow piss, really gets them off. It's such a totally unacceptable depreciation of value, they start fantasizing about all kinds of obscene bedroom calisthenics. Overpowering excess makes women want to fuck. Something I discovered in the eighth grade when I gave that fifty-dollar ring I couldn't afford to the thirteen-year-old girl I couldn't get a feel from and got laid.

These ruminations were interrupted as the bathroom door opened and Paige emerged, clutching her purse.

"Everything come out alright?" I grinned, trying not to project the irritation I was beginning to feel toward her. "How's your back?" "It takes a minute for these pills to work," she said.

"I think all that lifting may have thrown my neck out as well," I told her as I proceeded to go through an elaborate neck flex, back and forth, right and left, hoping I could get her back into massage mode again.

"Chick, I need to get home. We need to pack the car and leave now."

"Nonsense," I smiled. "Look, all that stuff I said about JFK Jr. and Chandler, I could see that bothered you, okay? I didn't mean that Chandler was anything like JFK Jr. Maybe you misunderstood me there. All I was saying is, I didn't quite understand him."

"It's okay. Shall we get this stuff out to the car?"

"I'm not gonna risk that road at night:" I said. "It's iced over-dangerous as hell:'

"It wasn't iced over an hour ago:' she countered defiantly.

Okay, let me say right here and now, that female defiance ranks right up there on the irritation scale with female credit-card excess, female menopause, and females who interrupt me when I'm telling a cool story. Maybe I'm overly sensitive because I spent sixteen loathsome years living with Evelyn and Melissa, but I've sort of had it with defiant women.