Highway 61 Page 2

  The next thing Truhler remembered, he was naked and lying facedown on a bed in a motel room.

  He woke up slowly, so slowly that at first he didn’t realize he was awake. He kept his eyes closed. There was a throbbing pain above his eyes, and he knew from experience that when he opened them, the pain would increase. He remembered the cocktails and he remembered the dope and then he remembered the girl and wondered if she was still there. Truhler swept his arms slowly across the mattress, pleased that his fingers did not find her—it would be so much easier if she was gone. He touched his own body and found that he was naked. It didn’t entirely surprise him. He was cold. He reached out for a sheet or bedspread to cover himself, but his hands came up empty. He opened his eyes. The dull pain in his forehead increased, as he knew it would, followed by a stabbing pain at the base of his skull. He closed his eyes, reached back, and rubbed his neck. His fingers found a bump that was sensitive to the touch. Where did that come from, he wondered.

  Truhler rolled onto his back and opened his eyes again. There were cracks in the ceiling. A bare lightbulb in a chipped fixture glared at him. That wasn’t right, he told himself. He raised himself up on his elbows and glanced around the room. Truhler didn’t know where he was, but it sure as hell wasn’t the pristine and elegant Prince Arthur Hotel.

  He thought about the girl. What was her name? Hell, did she even tell him her name? Truhler couldn’t remember. He called out. “Hey.” Maybe she was in the bathroom. “Hey.” There was no answer. He collapsed back on the bed.

  Truhler had never suffered a blackout in his life, he told me. Not once. He said that sometimes his memory had become a little fuzzy, especially when he was a kid and hitting the booze like he would live forever. Yet waking up in a strange room without knowing how he got there—that was a new experience, and he wondered if the dope had something to do with it.

  He called out again. “Hey.”

  He sat up and looked around. It was definitely a motel room, and not a very expensive one. Regulations and pricing information were attached to the back of the door. There was a battered credenza with a TV and cable box mounted on top. A table tent next to the TV advertised X-rated pay-per-view movies with the promise that the titles of the films wouldn’t appear on the bill. The drapes of the window were tightly closed. A small wooden table stood in front of the window. There was a wooden chair set on either side of the table. He could see that his clothing was piled neatly on top of one of the chairs and the girl’s clothes were just as carefully stacked on the other. Truhler wondered about that for a moment. If he had screwed what’s-her-name, the girl, he couldn’t imagine being tidy about it.

  He stepped off the bed. His foot touched something wet and sticky on the floor. His first thought, was that he had stepped into a spilled drink. He looked at the floor. It was a lake of blood. The girl floated below him in the lake. She was naked and curled into a fetal position with her hands clutching her throat. Her throat was deeply slashed; he could see a black hole beneath her fingers. Her lifeless eyes were open. They seemed to stare at him.

  Truhler screamed and fell back onto the bed. He frantically wiped the blood off of his foot with the bedsheet and screamed some more. The instinct for self-preservation kicked in, and he covered his mouth with both of his hands to keep from screaming again, praying that no one had heard him; that no one would come knocking on the door demanding to know what was wrong.

  Had he killed the girl?

  He couldn’t remember.

  Truhler began to tremble with a chill that had nothing to do with the cold and his own nakedness. They’d blame him, he knew they would. The cops would come and they would see the girl and they would see him and they would point their fingers and say, “You did it.”

  Except he could not have killed her. He could not have done a thing like that.

  He swept his body with both his eyes and his hands. There was no blood. Nor was there blood on the bed except where he had wiped his foot. Yet there seemed to be blood everywhere else. How could he have killed the girl like that without getting blood on himself, slashing her throat with, with what? He looked about for a knife without leaving the safety of his island bed and found none. He tried hard to avoid looking at the girl.

  What had happened? His last memory was of sitting in his canvas chair at Marina Park. John Németh, maybe the best white blues singer in the business, was holding forth beneath a blue-and-yellow-striped canopy. He had been joking with the girl about her film canister. Truhler could remember all that. Then it was as if he had blinked his eyes and magically appeared in the motel room.

  For a moment Truhler thought that maybe it was all just a bad dream, a hallucination brought on by the blunt. He hesitated, glanced over the edge of the bed, looked down at the girl. The nausea hit him like a sucker punch. Without warning, he doubled over and began to vomit. He tried to stop, only he couldn’t. He kept throwing up until there was nothing left in his stomach to throw up, and then he went through several minutes of dry heaves.

  He felt the icy fingers of panic gripping him, squeezing him. He had to do something—but what? Truhler covered his head with his hands. If the pain went away, maybe he could think of what to do. It didn’t. He needed a cigarette. He needed a drink. He needed—he needed to get out of there. He had to run. That was as far as his thinking could take him. Get out of the room. Get away from the girl. The dead girl.

  I asked him why he didn’t call the police, why he didn’t call for help.

  “I was going to,” he said, “but…”

  “But what?”

  “I was afraid.”

  Truhler slid off the far side of the bed and tiptoed as quickly as he could around the blood. He grabbed his clothes off of the chair and went to the bathroom. The bathroom was all white and clean and bright from the overhead light. He carefully examined his clothes and found that the blood had not splattered them. Truhler dressed quickly. He checked his pockets. He still had his wallet, his cell phone, his cigarettes, the card key to his room at the Prince Arthur, his money—he counted his money and found that it was all there.

  He tried to tell himself it was a dream. It had to be. Then he asked, Why him? Why was this happening to him? What did he do to deserve this? It wasn’t fair.

  Truhler stepped back into the room. He searched for his canvas chair. He couldn’t find it. He looked at the girl one more time. A sudden wave of anger crashed over him. Why was she doing this to him? He reached for the door handle and hesitated for fear of leaving fingerprints, then decided it couldn’t be helped.

  “I just had to get out of there,” Truhler told me.

  He stepped out onto a second-floor balcony, carefully closing the door behind him. Truhler noticed the room number for the first time. Thirty-four. It meant nothing to him. He stood outside the door and waited, he didn’t know for what. It was night. His cell told him it was two thirty in the morning. All he could hear was the low rumble of an air conditioner. That was why it was so cold in the room, the air conditioner. He shivered. It was warmer outside, but not by much. The parking lot below the balcony was quiet and still. A dim light seeped through the window of the motel office at the foot of the metal and concrete staircase. A much brighter pink light flashed the name CHALET MOTEL and NO VACANCY just above the front door. Cars moved along the well-lit street beyond the motel’s driveway, but they were few and far between.

  Truhler walked the length of the balcony as quietly as possible and carefully descended the stairs. When he reached the office, he glanced quickly through the window and pulled his head away. He looked again. The office was empty. He wondered briefly if he had used his own name when he registered. He wondered if he had registered at all. The girl must have, he decided. If it had been his choice, he would have taken her to his hotel.

  Without thinking any more about it, Truhler sprinted across the parking lot and began to run along the street, putting as much distance between him and the dead girl as possible. He did not know where h
e was. He did not know where he was going. Truhler ran for nearly a block before he realized he was making a fool of himself. People would think he’d done something wrong if they saw him running. He hadn’t done anything wrong. Stop running, he told himself.

  He slowed to a brisk walk. The street sign on the corner told him he was on North Cumberland. Truhler couldn’t believe his luck. It was one of the few streets in Thunder Bay that he recognized. The Prince Arthur was on Cumberland. Truhler didn’t know where he was, but he was now convinced that if he kept walking he would eventually find safety. He walked for several miles, passing shipyards, windowless concrete buildings he could not identify, and a variety of retail outlets, all of them closed. Cars and trucks passed him, including one patrol car from the Thunder Bay Police Service. None of them stopped. He smoked cigarette after cigarette until the package was empty. His head throbbed and his hands trembled and he began to wonder if he was walking in the right direction. Eventually he found himself approaching Marina Park and, in the distance, his hotel. His heart leapt in his chest, and it was all he could do to keep from running again. He entered the hotel through the rear entrance, the one facing the parking lot. The desk clerk, a young woman with narrow glasses, glanced up at him and then back at whatever work she was doing. Truhler went directly to the stairway. His room was on the fifth floor, only he didn’t want to wait for the elevator, didn’t want to meet anyone on the elevator.

  Truhler soon found his room. He went inside, making sure the door was locked behind him. He kept the lights off except for the bathroom. He stripped off his clothes and took the longest shower of his life, filling the room with a thick cloud of steam. Afterward, he took three aspirin tablets and two capsules of ibuprofen from the plastic containers in his suitcase. He swallowed them along with a tall glass of water before climbing naked between the cool sheets of his bed. He felt like crying but didn’t. He had done all of his weeping in the shower.

  The next morning, after a fitful sleep, Truhler dressed, packed, and drove home. During the long drive south he kept asking himself, “What happened?” By the time he reached the outlying suburbs of the Twin Cities, he decided nothing happened. This bit of self-deception lasted for about a week, lasted until a person or persons unknown sent a photograph to his cell phone. Truhler showed it to me after first making sure that Erica was still in the backyard; we downloaded it onto my computer so I could study it later. It was taken at a high angle and showed him on the bed and the girl on the floor. Their faces were clearly visible. The girl seemed very young. After waiting twenty-four hours to make sure Truhler was properly terrified, the blackmailer called and demanded money. Truhler paid it. Then he paid it again. And again. He paid the blackmail until he decided he couldn’t afford it anymore.

  * * *

  Truhler was upset that I wasn’t particularly impressed by his story.

  “I know you think I’m lying,” he said.

  I used to date a psychiatrist who told me one of the toughest parts of her job was getting past all the lies that patients told her; told themselves. When I asked how she could tell the difference, she said there were a number of things to look for. One was their emotional reaction to pointed questions. If they became angry or defensive, laughed nervously, or made accusations, she knew something was up. Another was their way of talking. If they spoke in a higher or lower pitch, or more quickly or slowly than usual, that could be a sign of lying. Still another clue was nonverbal body language. A shoulder shrug should never accompany a definitive statement. Wrapping legs or hands around chair legs or arms was a sign of restraint, of holding back, while leaning away might indicate lying because we lean away from things we want to avoid. She also had what she called the belly-button rule. She claimed that when we’re telling the truth we generally point our belly buttons toward our audience. When we’re lying, we turn away. If our belly buttons face the door or exit, it’s because subconsciously we want to escape. Yet my favorite clue was the simplest. She said patients were usually being honest when they said, “You may not believe me, but I’m telling the truth.” When they said, “I know you think I’m lying,” they nearly always were.

  Jason Truhler did all of these things, all of them with the most sincere expression on his face. Still, there was nothing to be gained by calling him a liar.

  “Tell me about the blackmailer,” I said. “Any idea of who he might be?”

  “No.”

  “How did he contact you?”

  “The first time he called my cell phone.”

  “Did you recognize the voice?”

  “No. He only called that one time. After that it was text messages and e-mail. But…”

  “But what?”

  “He sounded black.”

  “Don’t let the ACLU hear that. They’ll accuse you of profiling. Does your cell have caller ID?”

  “Yes, but it never gives me a name, just a number. I hit recall after the first time. A recording said to please leave my message and then repeated the number. When he texted me, the numbers were different every time.”

  “Probably using prepaid cell phones.”

  “He’s smart,” Truhler said.

  “Not necessarily. Cash is careless. It requires someone to pick it up, transport it, possibly launder it, deposit it—the FBI will be the first to tell you, always follow the money. The fact that the blackmailer isn’t using electronic transfers makes me question his sophistication. Let’s talk about the girl. Are you sure she was dead?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “Did you feel for a pulse?”

  “No. God, McKenzie. She was dead, okay? The blood—Jesus Christ, the blood.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t you think I would have known if she was—if she was still alive?”

  “I don’t know. Would you have?”

  His eyes bulged in anger, and then diminished as he thought it through.

  “What are you trying to say?” he asked.

  “Let me tell you a story. Guy walks into a bar. Maybe he’s on a business trip. Maybe he’s in Thunder Bay, Ontario, for the blues festival. Could be he’s leaning on the stick, minding his own business, and the sexiest woman he’s ever seen sits next to him, and he offers to buy her a drink. Or she’s sitting at a table all alone and crying, and the guy, being a gentleman, decides to comfort her. In any case, the guy and the girl meet, they talk. She asks questions, and he tells her things—such a pretty girl he can’t help himself. He tells her he’s alone. He tells her he’s a big shot in—exactly what do you do for a living, Jason?”

  “I work in agribusiness.”

  “Lucrative, is it?”

  He closed his eyes. “Yes,” he said softly.

  “Yeah, and he tells her that, too. After a while it’s his place or hers, usually hers. Pretty soon the guy and the girl are doing—doing what? They’re being polite to each other. Isn’t that what you said before, that you were being polite? Suddenly there’s a knock on the door, and an angry man, usually a husband, is standing there with his hand out.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That’s the original version of the badger game. It dates back to the nineteenth century. Hell, it probably dates back to the beginning of time. Nowadays, you don’t usually get an angry husband, though. Instead, the grifters more often confront the mark after the fact with photos or audiovisual. This works best with husbands or prominent businessmen afraid of scandal, and you’re neither of them, of course. For single guys like you there’s the threat of a rape charge; the woman claims the encounter wasn’t consensual, that it was rape, and she’s going to call the police. Or the girl is underage, which brings on a whole different set of problems. Are you sure the girl was old enough to drink, Jason?”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “This version—I have to admit that this version shows imagination.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I wish you’d stop saying that,” I said.

  “Goddammit!” r />
  “Yeah, that’s much better.”

  “You think it’s just one big, enormous fraud.”

  “A guy with a camera being in the right place at the right time suggests planning.”

  “What if—”

  “What if the girl is really dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know, Jason. What if?”

  “I didn’t kill her, McKenzie. You have to know that.”

  “The only thing I know for sure is that someone took a photograph and it wasn’t you.”

  Truhler went to the kitchen window. After a moment, he said, “Rickie’s coming back.”

  “She’s been very patient waiting all this time,” I said.

  “Look, I don’t care about the girl.”

  “What do you care about?”

  “I just want the blackmail to stop.”

  “Only two ways to do that. Get rid of the reason for the blackmail or get rid of the blackmailers.”

  “Kill them?”

  “No. Let’s be clear about that, Jason. If you’re looking for a hitter, you’ve come to the wrong place.”

  “What can we do?”

  I didn’t like the way he said “we” but let it pass.

  “When is your next payment due?” I said.

  “They’ll probably contact me Tuesday or Wednesday.”

  I chuckled at that.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Give me time to work, wouldja? It’s Sunday.”

  “I know.”

  “All right. First, we’ll find out if a crime has actually been committed.”

  “How?”

  “The newspaper.”

  “What newspaper?”

  I heard the door open behind me.