Spiral

Sundy Moran?”
    I described my being attacked the night before, including what Ford Walton had said to me then and what the police told me that morning.
    Christie swayed a little more in her chair. ”The Moran woman’s death received kind of short shrift, what with all the attention on the Held murder. But a week or so later, I persuaded my editor to let me do a piece on Moran’s mother, Donna. It turned out kind of kinky, because of the boyfriend aspect.”
    ”Walton being with both the women.”
    ”Right. So my story got cut down to family-size, you might say.”
    ”Family-size?”
    ”The right ‘graphs—paragraphs—for a family-type newspaper.”
    «T »
    I see.
    ”Maybe you’d rather see the original?”
    ”Of your story?”
    Christie swung her chair around and started clacking away on the computer’s keyboard. ”Won’t take long... there.”
    I read about half of the first column on the screen before closing my eyes. Christie’s slant featured mother more than daughter. Donna Moran had been born poor thirty-seven years before and gotten pregnant at sixteen, father never identified. Sundy arrived eight months later—four weeks premature—and took her mother’s last name. It was a struggle from the beginning, the unwed mother’s own parents disowning their daughter and her child. Donna worked as a waitress in a roadhouse and tried ”the best I could, but us living in a hole like this here trailer park, with not even a telephone, what kind of chance did my Sundy have? I’ll tell you: Same as me, meaning none.”
    I read the rest of the story. Sundy found her way out of the trailer park and into booze, drugs, and prostitution, mother trying to get daughter ”back on the right track afore it was too late.” Ford Walton ”declined to be interviewed,” but there was an allusion to his ”lengthy” criminal record. And a depressing passage on how Walton and Donna Moran spent the time during which Sundy was killed.
    Christie put her finger on the paragraph I was reading. ”That’s the one that got my story truncated.”
    Without believing in censorship, I could see why. ”Too bad you don’t work for one of the tabloids on the checkout line.”
    ”Wouldn’t have flown there, either. No star quality to the victims.” Christie looked up at me. ”Any help?”
    The second paragraph had contained the town and road for the trailer park where Donna Moran lived. ”Yes, Oline. Thanks.”
    Christie turned from her screen. ”John, you find a connection between these killings, you owe me the first call, right?”
    ”So long as my client agrees.”
    Oline Christie smiled, smart yielding to pretty. ”Mo Katzen said you were a little too trustworthy.”

FIFTEEN

    The drive west took longer than it looked on the rent-a-car map. I went through a run-down section of Fort Lauderdale, then different communities with the word ”Lauderdale” also in their names. The character of the land grew increasingly rural after about ten miles, the acreage more undeveloped than farmed, with hammocks of trees and meadows of tall grass. The land was flat and hot and desolate enough to pass for the African veldt, even a few vultures making slow circles overhead.
    Twenty minutes later, I hit the town where Donna Moran lived. After three or four intersections, I turned north onto a marked but unpaved road. There were shacks and sheds alongside it, chickens strutting and pecking in the gravel at the shoulders. The entrance to the trailer park came up on my left
    The driveway was pure dust a cloud of it kicking up so thick behind me that I couldn’t see anything through the rearview mirror. The windshield showed an old man wearing a farmer’s straw hat and blue overalls, sitting outside one of the closest trailers.
    I set the brake and got out of the Cavalier, leaving my suit coat in it ”Morning.”
    He looked up at me, took a pull on the pipe in his left hand. When I got closer to him, I could see he ranged closer to forty than sixty. His lawn chair was rusty, the cross-straps of the seat frayed at the frame. He also gave off an odor that came less from smoking and more from not bathing.
    The man still hadn’t said anything.
    I stopped three feet in front of him. ”I’m looking for Donna Moran.”
    Just a stare, the comers of his mouth turned up around the stem of his pipe. Then, ”Got yourself a hell of a bandage there.”
    ”Thanks.”
    ”You got a badge, too?”
    ”I’m not police.”
    ”Didn’t