Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

But he hadn’t. Instead he’d gone to Chicago, where he’d worked at a variety of low-paid jobs from pumping gas to delivering pizzas. If his parents were worried by his lack of ambition, they didn’t make a big deal of it. Joseph and Olive Watson were plain folks-he ran a garage, she took care of the house-and made a clear distinction between “doing well for yourself” and “getting above yourself.” Going to college wasn’t needful for the former, the way they saw it, and could all too easily lead to the latter, if not to worse things. As long as Dale continued to fear the Lord, it wouldn’t do him any harm to have a taste of big city life, get it out of his system. Then he could come home to Decatur, find some nice girl and settle down to a steady job.

The first sign that this modest scenario might not work out was when the Watsons received a letter postmarked Omaha, Nebraska:

Dear Mom and Dad,

Well, as you see I’ve moved out West for a while, I guess I just got the travel bug. I got work at a garage, nothing fancy, but I can do lube jobs and replace shocks like you showed me, Dad. Once I get a few bucks together I might head on a little farther, try and see something of this great country of ours. Hope you’re well. Say hi to Trish and Howie. Did Ronda have her baby yet? I guess she must.

Love, Dale

For the next eighteen months, similar letters arrived irregularly from towns and cities all over the western states. On special occasions-Christmas, his parents’ birthdays-Dale would telephone, but his calls were as brief and vague as his letters. He never left a forwarding address or phone number where his parents could contact him, explaining that he would soon be moving on.

One of the letters had been sent from Portland, Oregon, and for a moment Eileen McCann thought she might be on to something. But it was dated six months before the burglary at Willard Sumner’s house, by which time Dale Watson had once again “moved on,” and she reluctantly conceded that this was a mere coincidence.

Mr. and Mrs. Watson had not been too happy about Dale’s continuing and indefinite absence, and still less with his nomadic way of life, but they had other problems to contend with, notably Olive’s health-a kidney infection-and the marriage of Dale’s sister Patricia, which was well on its way to becoming Topic A in the community.

Just over a year earlier, they had received yet another of Dale’s letters, this one from Los Angeles. It mentioned that he intended to “head south for a while, maybe go to Mexico.” There was nothing else remarkable about it, certainly nothing to suggest that this was the last contact they would ever have with their son. But there the series ended. When two months went by without any more letters or phone calls, the Watsons-alarmed more than anything else by that word “Mexico”-notified the police.

About a million Americans are reported missing each year, and the numerous city, county, state and federal agencies whose job it is to locate them are understaffed and underfunded. As the months went by without any news, the Watsons reluctantly decided to employ a private investigator. Lou Gelen did not find their son, but he discovered a tragic and possibly significant secret which Dale Watson had been keeping from his parents.

As one of his routine search procedures, Gelen contacted the Illinois Drivers Services Section in Springfield, hoping that Dale might have registered a change of address which would give him a starting point to work from. He drew a blank there, but Dale’s accident history showed that he had been involved in a traffic-related fatality in Idaho the previous year. Gelen applied to the Motor Vehicle Division of the Idaho Department of Law Enforcement, enclosing the search fee of five dollars, and ten days later received a copy of the accident report.

One summer night, just before two in the morning, Dale Watson had been driving a car which was struck by an eighteen-wheeler tractor-trailer rig which had crossed the median on Interstate 84 near Nampa. Watson was taken to the hospital suffering from shock and minor injuries. His passenger-Starr Costello, seventeen, of Boise, whose parents were the registered owners of the car-was killed. The trucker was charged with reckless driving. No charges were brought against Dale Watson.

Using the Haines Tele-A-Key locator service, Lou Gelen obtained the phone number corresponding to the street address in Boise where Dale Watson had told police he was living at the time. The person who answered his call said he’d only been there a couple of months and had never heard of any Dale Watson. The Watsons weren’t prepared to pay Gelen’s expenses to go out there in person, so there the matter rested until the police got involved.

After a flurry of faxes and phone calls from Eileen McCann and the Idaho State Patrol, the Boise Police dug out their files on the accident. According to Dale Watson’s statement, he had been at a party given by some people he’d met in a bar. He’d got a ride to the party, which was in a town called Caldwell, but the people he’d come with had left early and he’d had no way of getting back to Boise. Then a girl called Starr Costello offered him and another couple a ride in her parents’ car, which she’d borrowed. At the last moment the couple had got a ride with someone else, and Dale and Starr had set off together. She’d asked him to drive because she was feeling “unwell.” Watson had agreed to take a breath test, which showed a level of alcohol slightly over the legal limit, but since the accident was clearly not his fault, and he was “severely traumatized” by what had happened, the police decided not to press charges.

At Eileen McCann’s request, the Boise Police interviewed a number of people who had attended the party in Caldwell, and eventually traced three who had known Dale Watson. One of them had since moved out of the area, but she was able to contact the other two by phone.

The first, Kathy Lawson, twenty-two, sounded like a female equivalent of Dale himself, a rootless migrant moving from state to state according to whim or weather. She was from South Dakota originally, but had moved around quite a lot since then, and had a record of convictions for drug possession. Despite this, she was perfectly prepared to talk to Detective McCann all day-or even longer, Eileen suspected, given half a chance.

“Dale was like a nice guy, you know? Someone you could trust? Like I know he kinda had a thing for me, but he never hit on me or anything. You get guys hitting on you the whole time, but Dale was different. He was like gentle. I mean you could talk to him. He was real intelligent too, read books and everything. But like he never came on like heavy. It was like he was really interested in you, what you were thinking, your personality.

“That thing that happened, with the truck? It just… I don’t know what to tell you. It was like it destroyed him. I was there that night, and we kinda had a little thing going for a while there. He like started to come on to me, you know, and then this other guy, a real asshole name of Arnold, he came over and got me to dance and Dale kinda drifted away. He wasn’t like real flexible, you know?

“It’s like with the accident. I mean it wasn’t his fault, the other guy was going too fast and just lost control. And the girl who died wasn’t even a friend. It was just some mall rat who offered him a ride home, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t like it was someone he really knew and cared about. But he took it really hard. I went to see him in the hospital, they thought he had maybe a cracked rib or something? And he was going on about how it was all like just a total chance, what happened. And I thought, right, so what’s your problem? But Dale, well, you know he had a kinda strict religious upbringing, that Bible Belt stuff, and I guess that makes it tougher to go with the flow. Like if you grow up thinking there’s like a reason for everything, and then something like that happens, and there’s no reason …

“Last I heard of, he was talking about moving to Seattle. He said he wanted to go all the way to the edge and then fall off. That’s what he told me, or it might have been someone else he said that to. I was kind of out of circulation just then, with this … Well, I won’t bore you with the details. A medical thing. And when I felt like seeing people again, Dale wasn’t around anymore. It’s too bad. If the kid had been his, I would’ve maybe thought about having it. I kinda wish I’d told him that. Maybe it would have like made him feel better, you know?”

The other witness, Eugene Vandestraat, twenty-eight, worked as a bouncer at a club described by police as “frequented mainly by younger individuals.” Eileen McCann asked him if he’d ever had any professional encounters with Dale Watson.

“You mean like trouble? Hell, no. Dale … Listen, I called him the Philosopher. That was something I got called at school, on account of I was so dumb. Some jerk in the honors program started it off and the thing stuck. But Dale, well, he wasn’t no philosopher, I guess, but he was a guy who lived in his mind, you know? Like you’d look at him, and you could almost hear his brain working, kinda like a dishwasher.

“Dale never gave anyone any trouble, far as I know. Just the opposite. You were in trouble, he’d come and fix it. Not the way I would, but there’s kinds of trouble you can’t just walk in and say ‘OK folks, you’re outta here,’ right? Like I recall one time there was this guy, his woman’d left him, he was a big drunk, we all kinda felt she’d done the right thing there, but he just couldn’t take it. Used to come in and sink a few, next thing you know he’d be going up to the other tables, people he’d never even met before, and telling them how this bitch’d dumped him after all he’d done for her.

“What you going to do? You can’t throw the guy out, he ain’t getting violent or abusive, plus he’s one of our best customers. But folks didn’t want to know. Maybe they had problems too. They’d gone out to forget that shit, and here was Clark-that was his name-wouldn’t shut up about it. But Dale, Dale was a genius. He went over to the guy and sat down at his table, said ‘Tell me about it.’ Clark didn’t know what the fuck to do. He’d made a career outta breaking people’s balls about his problems and here was some guy asking him to talk about it.

“So anyway he starts into the whole story, same as usual. After a minute or two Dale looks at him-I heard all about this from a guy at the next table-Dale looks at him and says, ‘You supporting this woman?’ Clark kinda frowns, what the hell’s this? ‘Hell, no,’ he says, ‘we weren’t even married.’ ‘Yes, you are,’ says Dale, real quick. ‘You’re carrying her around on your shoulders like a monkey.’ And you know? After that, we didn’t hear one goddamn word from Clark about it ever again.”

Vandestraat hadn’t seen Dale Watson after the accident on the highway, but he said he’d been talking about going home. “Said he was tired of drifting around from place to place, wanted somewhere to lay down his head.”

Eileen McCann reviewed the progress she had made with mixed feelings. On the one hand, the breakthrough she had initially hoped for had not happened. She had learned nothing which would enable her to close the file on the Evanston killings. On the other hand, she now had a clear image of who Dale Watson had been, a small-town “philosopher” who had never had a chance to test his ideas against a coherent system of thought. He probably wouldn’t have got very far if he had, but at least some formal education might have helped him deal better with the demons that menaced him, with his sense of being different from everyone and everything around him, and his need to grapple firsthand with the big questions which his parents had conveniently packed up and shelved away in a box marked Religion.

Those demons had always been there, she guessed, nagging away at his peace of mind, continually pushing him to “move on.” When the truck had smashed through the traffic barrier and killed Starr Costello, they had emerged in force, precipitating the crisis which he had managed to stave off for so long. As soon as he got out of the hospital, he had no doubt headed out to the coast, as Kathy Lawson had said, all the way to the edge of the continent, hoping to “fall off.”

She contacted the Seattle Police, but they had no record of a Dale Watson. But somewhere out there, Eileen McCann was sure, he had crossed paths with Willard Sumner’s stolen revolver. After that, the other idea in Dale’s shocked, guilt-ridden mind had taken over, the one he had mentioned to Eugene Vandestraat about going home. “He was tired of drifting around from place to place, wanted somewhere to lay down his head.”

But where was home? Not Decatur, where parents and relatives and friends who had never understood the way he saw things, even in the good times, would expect explanations and a “normal,” easygoing, brain-dead mentality which Dale knew he couldn’t fake any more. No, he would go to Chicago, where he had first tasted the joys of independence, a city he knew and where he no doubt still had friends (but who were they, and why hadn’t they come forward when he died?).

That much McCann was fairly sure of. The rest, which was everything she needed to close the case, remained obscure. She could understand that Dale Watson might have come to believe that the only place he could finally “lay down his head” was in death. But if suicide was his aim, why kill two total strangers too? And why choose a deserted house in Evanston to do it?

Maybe the question was the answer. Maybe Watson had deliberately set out to create an insoluble mystery which would enlighten others as he had been enlightened, an action as random and meaningless as the passion he had suffered, and which had made his life unlivable.

Maybe. Maybe not. As Eileen McCann tidied her papers away and prepared to turn her attention to other matters, the one thing she felt reasonably certain of was that no one would ever know.

The chance discovery of Sam’s phone number sparked an idea which firmed up into a project over the course of the next few weeks. The more I thought about it, the more excited I became. I had always wanted to visit the Pacific coast, but had never been farther west than St. Cloud. Now was the ideal opportunity to indulge in a prolonged bout of white-line fever. I had plenty of leisure and no other plans or commitments. And if I needed further justification, I could always claim that it marked another essential stage in my quest for full citizenship, a kind of personal manifest destiny. What have Americans always done, given half a chance, but head west?

I bought maps and guide books, then a car. This was also a Chevy, but a very different animal from the Nova, one of those elephantine gas-guzzlers which Greg had been driving that night we were pulled over by the traffic cop on the way back from the Commercial. I found it both comforting and exciting, but couldn’t be bothered to figure out why. That was another sign of the way I had changed. Analysis once again seemed as irrelevant and misguided as it had back in the seventies, a futile attempt to understand what can only be seized and lived. Understanding hadn’t saved my wife or my son. Why should it save me?