Joe Lansdale - Leather Maiden

“I think it used to be something different, but my dad changed his last name, officially, to Mercury. Old hippie guy. I think he liked the band Queen. The lead singer was named Freddie Mercury. Now I’m a Mercury. Even though I’m not related to Freddie.”

“Just a wild guess, but I bet Freddie’s last name wasn’t Mercury either. Least not at birth.”

“Probably a good guess. What can I do for you? It’s Cason, isn’t it?”

I nodded, said, “Caroline Allison.”

His eyes narrowed. “Ah, yes.” But then he paused. “You’re originally from Camp Rapture, aren’t you?”

“Interesting everyone knows who I am.”

“That Pulitzer nod. Hometown boy. Everyone knows about that. You ran some football, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

“Never cared for football myself. What’s the point?”

“To get the ball to the other end of the field,” I said.

“Again, what’s the point?”

“I’m afraid that’s it. If you played well, you might get in a cheerleader’s pants later in the evening.”

“Now I’m starting to understand football,” Mercury said. “Come into my lair.”

He led me through a maze of file cabinets and tables adorned with newspapers, books and folders. We came to a table that held only a computer, a pen and a pad. The computer screen gave off more light than the overhead bulbs. There were two chairs. He took one, I took the other.

“So what’s up with you and the Allison case?” he asked.

“Francine was planning an article on it, and I came across her notes.”

“Francine, writing about murder? That would have been a departure. She once did a series on common insects in the garden. An article a week in the Sunday paper, for, let me see, about twenty years is how it felt.”

“So the insect world was not that mysterious to you?”

“Not the way Francine wrote about it,” he said. “Under her firm and generic hand…well, trust me, a bug a week wasn’t that interesting. And, of course, there was her famous article on cat hair and why it keeps cats warm. I couldn’t wait to get up on Sunday morning and unfurl the paper to get to that one.”

“About Caroline,” I said. “No one knows for sure what happened, do they? There was never any body.”

“True, but hell, what do you think?” Mercury said.

“That she’s dead and her body has been lying rotting in some ditch somewhere collecting ants and worms, and the simple thing is no one has come across it, and someone she knew did it.”

“When you put it that way, it isn’t a lot more mysterious than the bugs or the cat fur.”

“You believe so much in mystery and adventure, what are you doing down here?” I asked.

He looked a little wounded by that. “Again, I’m down here because I don’t play well with others and am considered a loon. I believe in flying saucers, lake monsters and the rare twenty-year-old virgin. I believe our government has listening devices everywhere, and in some cases buried under our skin.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I went right to business. “Francine left quite a bit of stuff on Caroline in her files, but I was wondering if there was more. Wondering if there had been a follow-up to the case. If there were any suspects, that sort of thing.”

“There’s always more to everything, but we don’t always know what the more is. That’s how it is with Allison. She went to a fast-food place and didn’t come back. They found her car on the other side of town, near the railroad tracks, by the old train station. Police searched all over. Bulletins were put up. Dogs were used. People from out of town came to help search. It was all the news for weeks.”

“Nothing else?” I asked.

“To do with Caroline?”

“That’s what I’m asking about.”

“I thought you might be interested in some other stuff for columns. Might as well get them lined up. This town, you wouldn’t believe it, but there’s all manner of things that goes on.”

“My dad said as much.”

“He’s right. Cat’s body run up the flagpole.”

“I saw that taped to one of your file cabinets.”

“And there’s more. Someone put a bomb under the ass of the Virgin Mary statue in the Catholic church and blew the holy cunt right out from under her. There’s all this garbage going on with the blacks and the whites over a school some folks want to build.”

“I heard about that too,” I said.

“It’s all come down in the last six months,” Mercury said.

“It couldn’t just be coincidence?”

“Of course it could,” Mercury said. “You see cop shows all the time where someone says they don’t believe in coincidence, and let me tell you, those people are idiots. Coincidence is rife all over, my friend. But even though I believe in coincidence, I also believe in patterns and design. You have to pay attention and see the simple pattern under the chaos, beneath and between the coincidence.”

I stood silent for a moment, trying to sort out what Mercury had just said.

Mercury grinned at me. “Profound, don’t you think?”

“It’s something,” I said. “I don’t know I’m trying to link anything. I thought maybe with Caroline being gone so long, and no closure, that an article on her would be appropriate. To show she’s not forgotten. The other stuff, maybe I could get a grab-bag column out of it, mention in the last six months there’s been all of this weirdness in town. Like a bad moon is rising over Camp Rapture kind of thing.”

“To be frank,” Mercury said, “and possibly to get punched in the nose, I don’t think you are all that interested in remembering Caroline. I think you smell a good news story. Something you think the hicks in town have not followed up on. Am I right? And that you will be able to nose it out because you used to be a real reporter. No emphasis, mind you, on the used to be.”

“Guilty,” I said.

“Of course you are,” he said.

Mercury turned to his computer, tapped the keyboard, brought up some information about Caroline Allison. There was a lot of it. It was much more than I had. I said, “Can you print this out for me?”

“Sure.”

He scanned through some of it, came to her photograph. A head shot. Her hair was as yellow as sunlight, her eyes so blue they broke your heart, her skin looked soft and warm as a spring day. And her mouth. Men would have ideas about that mouth, and so would a lot of women.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Looks like a movie star or a model, doesn’t she?”

“She is stunning.”

“Can you believe she was a history major?”

“Saw that in Francine’s note,” I said.

“Girl like that doesn’t strike me as someone that would spend her time in the library behind the stacks. A face like that, there had to be some party girl inside. There’s some devil in those eyes, don’t you think?”

“I suppose.”

Of course, from the moment I realized she was a history major, I had thought of my brother, Jimmy. She had been in his department, and most likely he had taught her, or knew her. And, of course, he would have known about her coming up missing, about her never being found. It was another lead-in, another angle. I filed that in the back of my mind.

Mercury reached in his shirt pocket, pulled out some greasy glasses, put them on, tapped at the keyboard some more, scanned through more files.

“Girl like that, in high school, you’d think she’d be more popular than a free back rub, but guess what, there’s hardly anything about her in her high school annual.”

“You have it?”

“I have it scanned in. I’ve looked through it. I think she was a member of the history club, and that’s it. No Most Beautiful. No Most Likely to Succeed. No Most Popular. And except for the history club, where there’s just the one picture of her and some other students, there’s little to nothing. She wasn’t too popular. Way she looked, that’s peculiar.”