“You’re right, it’s delicious,” he said, and she looked so pleased that he was tempted to ask if she’d baked it herself. She smiled her approval and hurried off to the next table.

  He was about halfway through the pie when he became aware that someone had stopped by his booth. He looked up and found an elderly woman staring at him with friendly intensity. She was little, and quite aged, with a round face, wrinkled like a hand too long in soapy water, and sparse white hair, short and choppy as if she’d cut it herself with garden shears. Her eyes, though, steel gray, were as bright as buttons and fully alert. She smiled down at him, the lipless, thin smile of the very old.

  “You’re the policeman, aren’t you?” she said. “The out of town one.”

  Stanley blinked in surprise, apple-crowded fork poised halfway to his mouth. This was a small town, sure, and he knew how fast gossip could travel around a community like this. Still, this had to be some kind of record. He put the fork in his mouth and said, through a mouthful of pie, “That’s me. But—”

  DEADLY WRONG 99

  “Now, about your boyfriend…” She looked him up and down, button eyes twinkling merrily.

  “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “Oh, not here. Not yet. But he’s coming. As fast as ever he can travel.”

  She bobbed her head for emphasis. Her grin was positively elfin. Stanley was struck dumb. A boyfriend? On his way here?

  Chris, maybe, deciding to share the mountain vacation? Or…

  but, no, that was surely beyond the realm of possibility. He didn’t know what to say.

  June said it for him, suddenly appearing beside her. “Mary, are you bothering the customers? You know Joe will have a fit.”

  “We were just chatting,” Mary said. She gave Stanley another smile and nodded her head again. “I’ve got to go. They think I’m a nuisance.”

  “Bye, now,” Stanley said. Part of him was sorry to see her shuffle down the aisle between the booths. She looked back once, just as she went out the door. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought she’d given him a quick wink.

  “Don’t pay any mind to Mary,” June said. “Folks around town call her Crazy Mary. If that tells you anything.”

  Which, surely it did, he had to agree. Still, what she’d said, about a boyfriend—he couldn’t help his thoughts turning to Tom. What if she really was one of those ESP types? She had known about his being a cop. An out of town cop.

  Of course probably half the people in Bear Mountain knew about that by now, small towns being what they were. And she had known he was gay. Well, gee, Stanley, duh.

  He finished his pie, stopped at the register to pay, thinking that eating in Bear Mountain was certainly cheaper than it was in San Francisco. Back at Libby’s car, he slid into the driver’s seat and put the key in the ignition, when a tap on the window caught his attention. He looked out to see Crazy Mary standing there, smiling that elfin smile down at him. He lowered the window and smiled back.

  “Hi, there,” he said. He was thinking he’d ask her about that boyfriend business, but before he could, she surprised him all over again.

  100 Victor Banis

  “That young man didn’t do it. Carl Hunter? He didn’t kill that McIntosh boy.”

  His mouth fell open. “How do you know that?” he asked.

  “Because I saw it. I saw the two of them, Carl and that other boy, they were, you know, they were being naughty. And then they had a quarrel over something, and Carl left, and someone came along…”

  “Someone else, you mean? After Carl had left?”

  “Yes. And he stooped down over that McIntosh boy, he was on the ground, you know, the boy, I mean, and this man hit him in the back of the head with a big stick, hit him hard, and he did it a second time. Then he put the stick aside, and knelt down, and turned the boy over, and banged his head down on this big rock. Ever so hard. I don’t know why he was so violent about that, after he’d already bashed his head in. People are funny, aren’t they?”

  Stanley’s gaped. “You saw all this?” She nodded emphatically, looking quite pleased with herself. “Where were you? Didn’t this man see you?”

  “Oh, no, I wasn’t where he could see me.”

  “Well, then, how did you manage to see him so clearly?

  Everything he did?”

  “The same way I saw your boyfriend.” She giggled and wagged a finger at him. “And he’s very, very angry with you, too, you can expect him to be in a pet, but never mind, it’s only because he loves you. You be good to him, you hear, he’s got lots on his mind.”

  With that, Crazy Mary turned and marched away across the parking lot without looking back. She turned onto the sidewalk in the direction of downtown Bear Mountain.

  Stanley felt like a tire that someone had let all the air out of.

  For a moment there, he’d thought he had actually found a witness. Wouldn’t that have been something? But, Crazy Mary, she’d only seen it in her head. Dreamed it, probably.

  He was back in the courtroom, in the witness chair. Your honor, Crazy Mary saw it all in her dream, it was Pencil Dick…

  § § § § §

  DEADLY WRONG 101

  He drove by The Handle Bar again. A couple more motorcycles in the lot. With the car window down, even from the highway, he could hear music blasting from inside. The volume must have been totally cranked up for it to carry this far outside.

  He pulled into the lot, sat with the motor running. A big, hairy man in leather drag came out, gave him a not very welcoming glance as he strolled to one of the bikes and straddled it. Stanley drove out of the lot again. He had just eaten an enormous lunch. Probably you should never tackle a leather bar on a full stomach. Not a straight leather bar, anyway.

  He remembered the therapist Carl had mentioned, the one Donnie had been seeing. Miller or Stiller, Carl had thought, with an office in the mall. He decided it would be easier to tackle a therapist on a full stomach. Probably, that was the best way of dealing with a therapist. A leather bar, a rough biker bar, he might end up having to run for his life, and you could give yourself cramps running too soon after eating. A therapist, the only danger was falling asleep, and as he saw it, there was nothing wrong with a nap after lunch.

  He’d seen the mall before, when they had first arrived in town. It wasn’t much of a mall, just a big Safeway at one end and, at a right angle to that, running along the far side of a big parking area, a block of small shops: a hardware store, a pet shop, greeting cards, travel agent—and, at the far end, M. H.

  Miller, Licensed Professional Counselor with, below that in smaller script: adult, adolescent, family, couples.

  He walked back to the Safeway, bought a big bottle of Stoli, a much smaller one of vermouth, a jar of olives—thank Heaven, the town wasn’t completely uncivilized—and stashed his purchases in the trunk of the car before he strolled back to the office of M. H. Miller.

  The glass door opened to a small reception room: a pair of ivory colored plastic chairs, and a table between them spread with ratty looking magazines, a desk, unmanned at the moment, a telephone with a red message light blinking.

  Behind the desk, a closed door presumably led to the therapist’s inner sanctum. Stanley was considering whether to 102 Victor Banis

  knock at the door when it opened, and a middle aged man in shirt and tie appeared, a half eaten sandwich in one hand.

  “Hi,” he said, and glanced at the empty desk. “Uh, my secretary’s out to lunch, but if you’d like to make an appointment, Mister…”

  “Korski,” Stanley said, stepping forward to offer his hand,

  “Stanley Korski. And you’re Doctor Miller?”

  “Mister Miller.” He switched the sandwich to his left hand, wiped his right hand on a trouser leg, and shook Stanley’s with it. “No doctorate, but I am board certified, fully qualified, I assure you. Did you wish to see me professionally?”

  “Yes, but not the way you mean. I’m a homicide inspector, Mister Miller, with the San Francisco Police Department, and I wonder if I could have a moment of your time, to ask you a few questions.”

  Mister Miller’s welcoming smile faded. “What about?”

  “Donnie McIntosh. He was a patient of yours, wasn’t he?”

  Without actually moving, the therapist seemed to withdraw into the room behind him. “I can’t talk about my patients.

  Confidentiality. If you’re a policeman, you must be aware of the law.”

  “Absolutely,” Stanley said, “and I wouldn’t dream of asking you to violate any confidentiality. I had in mind questions of a more general nature.”

  “This is relative to what?”

  “I’m here at the request of the Hunter family. Carl Hunter?

  He’s the one—”

  “I know who he is. But that’s all I know, and that he killed Donnie McIntosh. I’m afraid—”

  “Allegedly killed,” Stanley corrected him, “but it seems there is some question of what really happened.” Stanley glanced around, at the plate glass windows overlooking the mall parking lot. Beyond the glass, two women passed, laughing and chatting.

  One of them threw a casual glance inside.

  “I really think it would be more discreet if we went into your office.” Stanley said. He raised an eyebrow in question.

  DEADLY WRONG 103

  “Oh, okay,” Miller said with a notable lack of enthusiasm.

  “But I think this is going to be a waste of time. Yours and mine.

  It’ll have to be brief, too.”

  “If you’re expecting a client,” Stanley said. “I can wait.”

  Miller stepped aside and motioned for Stanley to come in.

  “No, come in,” he said reluctantly.

  Stanley went in, seated himself without being asked in one of the chairs this side of the big mahogany desk—the desk too big, too grand for this shabby office in a strip mall in a mountain village. Miller seated himself in the oversized cherry wood chair behind the desk, laid his unfinished sandwich aside and picked up some papers from the desktop as if he meant to read them. He gave them a quick shuffle, barely glancing at them and, putting them aside, looked across the desk at Stanley with a puzzled expression, as if surprised to see him still there.

  “Now, then…” he prompted.

  “Donnie McIntosh was your patient, that’s correct, isn’t it?”

  “Donnie—Donald McIntosh was a patient, yes, I can tell you that much.”

  “And it’s safe to say, he was a very disturbed young man.”

  “I’m not at liberty…”

  “To discuss your patient’s conditions,” Stanley finished for him. “But, that’s hardly confidential information, is it? To put it bluntly, I’m told Donnie was the town queer. Everybody I’ve talked to seems to know that. Didn’t you?”

  “Donald was,” the therapist paused, weighing his words.

  “He had a certain reputation, yes.”

  “He was a regular sexual outlet for a lot of locals, isn’t that right?”

  Miller picked up the papers from his desk again, looked at them as if he might read the answer there, and gave them another shuffle.

  “Mister…?”

  “Korski. Inspector Stanley Korski.”

  “Inspector Korski, yes, Donald McIntosh had a reputation in Bear Mountain. And he was, as you say, a very disturbed young man. He came to me initially in response to a court 104 Victor Banis

  order. He’d been arrested on a public nuisance charge—he was caught having sexual relations, oral relations, with another man, in a local park. He was given probation instead of jail time, with the condition that he receive counseling. All of this is a matter of public record, so I am not violating any confidentiality by telling you that. Nor by telling you that, even after the court stopped paying for my services, I continued to see Mister McIntosh, to counsel him. I felt that he was someone in dire need of professional help, and I thought that I could help him.”

  He smiled, a smile which Stanley thought was altogether smarmy. “Sometimes it isn’t just about money, not in my profession. Therapists, good therapists, really do care about helping people, you know. We do want to help.”

  Stanley was unimpressed by Mister Miller’s magnanimity.

  “And the sex,” he said in a voice dripping scorn. “I’ll bet that was great, wasn’t it? I hear Donnie was pretty good at what he did. Did you get the blow jobs, or the other end of the lollipop?

  I’m told he was very accommodating.”

  Miller’s mouth fell open, his eyes threatening to pop out of his head. For a moment, he looked as if he might explode. He jumped to his feet, shoving the cherry wood chair away from the desk so violently that it nearly toppled over.

  “I’m afraid I must ask you to leave,” he said, his voice high and tremulous, his face burning red.

  Stanley remained seated. “Sit down, Mister Miller,” he said calmly. “We’ve barely gotten started with our little chat.”

  Miller came around the desk and threw the door to the outer office violently open. It hit the wall with a crash. “Out, now,”

  he said, “Or I’ll phone the police.”

  “I don’t think so,” Stanley said, still not getting up. “Because I’d have to tell them about you and Donnie.”

  “There’s nothing…”

  “I can identify your chair, there,” Stanley said, pointing at the one behind the desk. “I’ve seen it in pictures. Donnie’s pictures, almost certainly taken right here in this office. I’d be willing to bet there surely isn’t a mate for that chair anywhere in Bear Mountain. And now that I see it, I recognize the pattern in the rug, too.”

  DEADLY WRONG 105

  Miller turned to stare at the chair behind his desk, like he’d never seen it before. He looked down at the rug.

  “And if you’re going to be flinging doors open dramatically, you really need to watch more Joan Crawford movies, that gesture was terrible.”

  Miller’s face seemed to crumple in on itself. He closed the office door quietly and came back to the desk, the look he gave his chair accusing, as if the chair had spoken against him.

  “That is your chair, isn’t it?” Stanley persisted. “The one in Donnie’s pictures?”

  Miller sank into the chair, seeming to grow smaller before Stanley’s eyes. “I insisted that he not show my face,” he said, his voice so low Stanley had to strain to hear it. “I never even thought about the chair. Who would ever imagine anyone would recognize that?”

  “I’ve got a good eye for chairs,” Stanley said. “For male genitalia, too, as a matter of fact. If you’d care to take off your clothes, I could probably identify yours from his photos as well.

  But we needn’t go that far, need we? It was you, in the pictures.” He made it a statement rather than a question.

  “I thought, what harm could it do?”

  “Maybe not to you. But Donnie?”

  “I didn’t… you know, I’d never done anything like that, with another male, I mean. I don’t know… he was so insistent.

  And, the thing is, he was such a sweet young man, really. I thought, if I became his friend, a confidant, maybe I could help him. The people he’d been doing these things with, some of them, they were the worst kind of low life, the scum of the earth. They knocked him around, many of them, treated him terribly. And I thought maybe by going along with him, by agreeing to what he wanted… it wasn’t… we didn’t actually have sexual relations. It was just a couple of photographs. He said… it was like a hobby with him. I’d been trying to get him to talk about himself, about his childhood, and he was just beginning to open up. And he said, if I’d let him take the pictures, he’d tell me anything I wanted to know.”

  He looked directly at Stanley, into Stanley’s eyes, for the first time since he had sat back down.

  106 Victor Banis

  “I was trying to help him,” he said in a breaking voice. “He had all these obstructions…”

  “And you just happened to get hard. Or, were you trying to get one of those obstructions out of his throat?”

  Miller sighed. “Yes, of course. I did let him… I let him perform fellatio on me. It was only the one time. He was so insistent.”

  Stanley shook his head and clicked his tongue. “The naughty boy. Forcing himself on you that way.”

  At least Miller had the good grace to blush and look away. “I didn’t…”

  “Did you kill him?” Stanley asked.

  Miller’s surprise certainly looked genuine. “Kill him? Of course not. I understood—didn’t Carl Hunter kill him? That’s what I heard. It was an accident, that’s what everyone said.”

  “Or not. If Carl Hunter is to be believed…”

  “But, is he? A boy like that, he has a reputation of his own locally, you can’t exactly believe everything he says, I should think.”

  “You can’t always believe everything anybody says, in my experience,” Stanley said. “Even therapists.”

  Another blush. “I deserve that, I’ll admit. What I did was wrong, I admit that too. I should never have—but, I swear to you, I had nothing to do with Donnie’s death.”

  “Maybe not directly, no. But I don’t imagine you did much for his self esteem.”

  He seemed to have no answer for that. He slanted a look across the desk at Stanley. “What are you going to do?”

  Already the man’s focus had shifted back to himself, to his own plight. It seemed Donnie McIntosh’s death did not, after all, mean much to him. Now that Donnie wasn’t around to give him head.

  “I don’t know,” Stanley said, getting up from his chair.

  “Yet.” He started from the room.

  “I was only trying to help him,” Miller said again.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Meat Loaf was blasting at deafening volume from wall-mounted speakers. Stanley paused inside the door to look around, giving his eyes time to adjust to the gloom, his ears to the din. His legs to cease melting and assume their usual rigidity.