Private Eye Four-Pack, page 36
“You’re sure you didn’t tell this to Jack?”
“I couldn’t have. I told you; it came back to me slowly. I intended to call Mr. West, but it was too late.” She shivered and pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders. “The whole thing is very queer. I’m afraid it’s not much help, is it?”
I was cold, too, but the chill started from inside, down deep in the soft lining of my bones.
“I’m not sure what it means. Not yet, anyway.” I stood up abruptly.
“Do you have to go so soon?”
“I’m afraid so. Thanks for talking to me, Mrs. Irving.”
My words killed the spark in her eyes. She seemed to shrink into a puddle of old, yellowing fat.
“I want to go inside,” she said fretfully. “I’m tired and cold, and Barbara always forgets me.”
The sun was setting as I walked back through the garden. Fog drifted on the horizon like silver smoke, and the sharp edges of the wind had been honed in the Arctic. I paused briefly by the rose bed. The color had faded in the twilight but the scent was stronger, sickly sweet in the damp air.
I took the key from beneath flowerpot number five and let myself into the kitchen. My feet moved through the silent house, carrying me into the glass-bound living room. I went directly to the bar and poured something from a decanter into a glass. I had no idea what it was, only that it was strong and burned my throat when I swallowed.
I refilled it a second time and took it to the sofa. From the soft cushions I watched the sun slip into the sea. I didn’t think at all. In reality the brain is only a computer. Overload its circuits and, quite simply, it shuts down. Eventually I closed my eyes.
When I opened them, the darkened room vibrated with a low throbbing. It took me a moment to remember where I was and to identify the sound as waves slamming against the bottom of the cliff. I had no idea how long I had slept. My mouth tasted bitter and foul, and I was fiercely thirsty.
I felt my way to the bathroom without turning on the lights. I didn’t want to look at myself or my surroundings. Darkness kept things at a blind, impersonal level. It was better that way. I used the toilet, washed my hands, and then let water run into my mouth from the sink faucet.
My eyes were fully dilated as I padded back through the living room and into the kitchen. I let myself out and crossed the breezeway to the garage. Garden tools hung conveniently just inside the door. I found a shovel and took it outside.
TWENTY-ONE
No lights were visible from the Irving house. Southward, Laguna glowed in a wide twinkling arc where the ocean curved against the hills. The principal mass of fog was still out over the water, but high, gauzy streamers floated inland. The moon must have been just below the hills. There was a lot of soft pearly light—too much for starlight, plenty to illuminate the rough texture of flagstone, smooth grass, and the crumbly earth beneath the rose bushes.
I pushed the top of the spade into the ground and put my foot on the thin upper edge. It sank easily, biting deep, but the wet earth was heavy to lift and clung to the metal surface.
After three or four spadefuls, my lungs labored to draw enough air, and sharp twinges of pain traveled down the muscles in my shoulders and upper arms. I ignored the pain and plunged the shovel, over and over, stopping only occasionally to clean off the sticky mud.
Only a quirk in an old woman’s memory had kept Jack from knowing the whole truth, but he had guessed enough to make him dangerous. I threw down the shovel and tore the plants out by hand, grunting as a thorn slashed the soft flesh at the base of my thumb, not stopping until I had ripped them all from the ground.
With the bushes out of the way, I dug frantically, ignoring the burning across my shoulders. My breath came in shallow gasps. Sweat poured down my face and, sealed in by the nonporous polyester, lay clammy and cold on my back and legs.
It was a very big hole. By the time I dug deeply enough, the muddy earth I piled on the side almost buried the rose bushes. The moon had risen. Its custardy light picked out a few petals, broken and colorless, on the dark mound, their bruised scent faintly sweet over the heavy odor of the soil.
The shovel met solid resistance and I could finally stop. I had found Frank Terrell.
He was four feet deep in the soft clay, wrapped in a plastic bag. Mercifully, the darkness hid the full reality of my discovery. Natural forces of decay would have been at work, and underground all organic material is the same to the worms.
I didn’t need positive identification to know whose body lay in the grave. Poor Frank. Chance provided what seemed like a carte blanche pass to the kind of life he dreamed of having, but it was actually a one-way ticket to death.
Now I understood the agony Jack had lived through the last few days before he died. It burned in my own guts, searing all the soft, visceral places inside my body, bubbling like lava through my bloodstream with every pump of my heart.
Savagely I hurled the shovel away from me, backed up and collapsed on the flagstone. The chaise would be too comfortable. I needed contact with sharp, stony surfaces. I drew up my knees, wrapped my arms around them, and held on tightly while the pain jumped along my neural paths like a flame.
I don’t know how long I waited. Time was only another dimension of the bitter anguish that threatened to suffocate me. It may have been a minute, an hour, forever, before a car whined softly up the inclined street, and an electronic motor sent the garage door rattling up. A light came on automatically, leaking through the cracks around the breezeway door. The car eased inside, the engine stopped, and the garage door clattered down. A car door opened, slammed shut; then the breezeway door opened, spilling light across the terrace.
He froze with his hand on the knob. “What the hell—”
“Turn off the light and join me, Ted.”
“Delilah?” The light went off and his shoes scraped against the flagstone. “What are you doing—” He stopped and sucked in his breath in a ragged gasp as his eyes adjusted to the darkness and he saw the hole. “Oh, my God!”
“Sit down and join the wake, Ted.”
“Delilah—”
“Poor Frank, dead and buried all these months and nobody to mourn him.”
He stumbled to the gaping hole and dropped down on his knees. “How did you know?”
“Coincidence. Luck.” The words tasted of gall and vinegar. “I guess you were right to try and pull the plug on me, Ted. I’m a shitty detective, but anybody can stumble on the truth by blind luck. One thing I can’t figure out. Why the elaborate setup with Paul Rinker? A bullet in my head would have been much quicker and a hell of a lot kinder.”
“I wouldn’t hurt you, Delilah.”
“Oh, Christ, yes, I forgot. People like Frank and Cathy Cranston and George Mertin, I’ll bet they got it from you firsthand, but friends…” I had to stop. Breathing was becoming as painful as talking.
“I didn’t want any of this to happen. You’ve got to believe that.”
“It started with Cathy, didn’t it? No, I guess it began long before that. How many girls did Mertin send you? And, for Chrissake, with all the free sex that’s available, why did you get mixed up in a slimy mess like that?”
“You don’t understand,” he said in an agonized whisper.
“No, you’re right. I don’t understand. I will never understand. Anyway, there was Cathy. Something went wrong, didn’t it? Did you get rough with her? I have to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume her death was accidental.”
“She took something…pills…thought she was dead.”
“So instead of calling the paramedics, instead of trying to save her, you panicked and threw her off the deck.”
He hunched over, rocking back on his heels, and drew his head inward as if to hide. “There’s a strong riptide off the point. The…the body could have been carried out to sea.”
“But it washed up on the beach on Friday morning, and Frank saw it. He had been here the day she came, a Wednesday afternoon. Frank worked for you and the Irvings on Wednesday. She was a distinctive girl, and she wasn’t in the water that long. The fish worked on her, but not enough. Frank recognized her and came to you.”
“No, he called and threatened…but then on Monday…” He shuddered visibly. The fog thinned for a second, and the moonlight shone on his face. Shadowy eye sockets and bleached skin turned it into a skull. “Frank was working in the yard, I suppose. I bought the roses and left them here on the terrace for him to plant.”
“He demanded money, didn’t he? You panicked again and killed him. What was it this time? A gun? The one you used on George Mertin?”
“Mertin? I don’t know what—no, it was a glass sculpture—the whale. It’s there in the bottom of the hole. I should have called the police. My God, I knew I should when I saw him lying there, but I couldn’t do it. I drove his truck away, and later, when it was dark, I buried him here and planted the roses over the grave. I prayed to God it was over, but it wasn’t. Amy Terrell became hysterical. She wouldn’t accept the fact that Frank had simply left her. When the police couldn’t help, she planned to hire a detective on her own.”
“And you were so solicitous, so kind. You recommended Jack. Jack, for God’s sake. Your friend.”
“Delilah, I was desperate. The idea of a stranger prying—but Jack—I thought somehow I could control the situation.”
“Then you didn’t know Jack at all. Nothing could stop him. Why the hell do you think he was so good at his job? He guessed, didn’t he? About Cathy and about Frank’s blackmail attempt? He didn’t even have the whole story, but he guessed that you had killed Frank. You were terrified that he would find Frank’s body. An unknown girl already classified as a suicide was one thing, but a body in your own backyard…So you went to Mertin for help. He set up the hit, and you used your friendship with Jack to lure him to the meeting place. You had him killed!” The word keened wildly.
He stumbled awkwardly to his feet and held out his hands in supplication.
“No, not that, Delilah, never. I swear to you.”
I waited for his onslaught, but he stopped, pinned to the blurry sky by the rumble of a car in the driveway.
“Edward.” Ted moaned the name softly.
Footsteps thudded on pavement, and the breezeway’s sliding screen squealed in its track.
“Edward,” Ted repeated on a rising note of despair.
“Father? What are you doing out there?”
“Go away,” Ted pleaded.
“No,” I said. “Come and join us.”
“Mrs. West?” He took a few steps out on the terrace and stopped. “I warned you, father.”
“Edward, please. It’s over. Let it be over.”
Edward spoke in calm conversational tones. “You told her, didn’t you?” He detoured to where I had thrown the shovel, picked it up, and walked to the grave, raising the shovel so that the mud-streaked metal glittered in the moonlight. “You really shouldn’t have told her, father.”
The shovel whistled briefly, ending its arc with a thump of metal against human flesh and bone. Ted’s body did a slow sideways flop and fell into the open grave.
TWENTY-TWO
Edward. Not Ted at all but Edward.
Shock froze my body, but my hearing was fine-tuned to painful acuity. I could hear the whisper of Edward’s fingers as they adjusted their hold on the smooth wooden handle of the shovel. I could hear the faint sliding hiss of his shoes on the grass. And I could hear him breathing through his mouth like some monstrous fish gliding toward me through the silvery light.
“You brought this on yourself, Mrs. West. I warned you last night,” he said as he raised the shovel.
My instinct for self-preservation sent me into a bruising roll. The shovel slammed into the flagstone inches from my face. He grunted at the shock of hitting stone instead of flesh and hesitated for a precious second before raising the shovel for another blow.
“There’s no way to get around me,” he pointed out reasonably.
He was right. The terrace with its beautiful, deadly thorned, dense plantings was a trap. I scrambled to my feet and ran through the open screen door into the breezeway. If I could get to the driveway on the other side of the screened wall, there would be room to maneuver, to avoid the madman, room to run…
My fingers flew wildly over the closed screens, seeking the edge of the door, but the second—my precious second—was gone, and Edward was in the breezeway, swinging the shovel like a scythe.
As it whistled through the air, I threw myself to the right. That movement, combined with the fact that he didn’t have enough room for a full swing, saved me from taking the entire brunt of the blow. It hit my left arm just above the elbow and knocked me, reeling, against the garage wall. I screamed as bouts of white-hot pain spurted along my arm.
“I didn’t want this to happen, Mrs. West.” A petulant whine edged his voice. “None of it was my fault. That stupid girl and her pills—I had to protect myself, that’s all. From your husband, from you. You can see that, can’t you?”
I clutched my arm with my right hand. Broken—no, not broken, but numb and wet—sticky wet from blood, a lot of blood running freely down the tips of my fingers. Next time, next time he hit me…I inched sideways, pressing against the rough brick wall for support. Next time I would be dead, unless I could think of something…
“Stand still,” he said.
I kept my eyes on the shadowy bulk of his body. If he raised the shovel…Oh, God, there had to be a way. My shoulder touched the molding of the garage door frame.
“Stand still and it will all be over,” he ordered querulously.
“Like hell,” I said thickly and grabbed for the doorknob.
The shovel chopped splinters from the frame, but I was already through, into the blackness of the garage. I slammed up against the hood of Ted’s car with a sickening jolt that sent spasms of pain up my arm. The car was still warm to the touch. Warm and ready. Three hundred horses ready to leap into action. If the key was in the ignition. If I could find the radio controller to open the garage door. If I could even get into the goddamned thing. The passenger side of the car was locked both front and rear.
“Mrs. West?” Edward breathed in wet, gasping gulps, the sound abnormally loud in the confines of the garage.
I felt my way around the car, squeezing between the bumper and the door.
“Mrs. West?”
He lost control of his voice. Shrillness crept in, cracking the words like shattering glass. At least it didn’t sound as though he were following me across the room.
I found the door handle on the driver’s side of the car just as Edward flipped a switch. The overhead lights went on with a brilliance that was physically painful. Well, if I was momentarily blinded, so was he. I opened the car door, and there was a blessed mechanical whine that warns of keys being left in an ignition. I slid inside, but I couldn’t close the door with my left arm. I had to reach over with my right to slam it shut and push down the pin to lock it. The resulting pressure against my left arm brought a scream clawing its way up through my throat.
My fingers brushed the keys, verifying their position in the ignition. Where in God’s name was the radio transmitter to control the overhead door? My sight was filled with splinters of light and whirling colors. I felt frantically along the sun visors, hoping the controller was clipped there. Dammit, it had to be someplace handy for the driver—unless Ted had taken it with him: Oh, God…God…From the corner of my eye I could see Edward moving from the doorway. He grabbed the car door handle, shook it furiously. The whole car swayed. I braced myself by putting my good hand on the seat beside me and my fingers touched the smooth plastic case of the controller.
I pushed the switch, and the motor grumbled to life overhead, raising the door in slow motion. My fingers poised over the ignition, ready to start the car, but the garage door made a thumping sound and, to my horror, it began to close.
I grabbed the controller and punched the switch. The door opened a few feet and closed again. The damned thing must have been programmed to reverse itself if it touched something—Edward’s car, of course. Edward’s car was parked just outside the door.
My eyes had been on the rearview mirror. It was the blurred motion of a swinging object that snapped my attention back to Edward. He was screaming. The metal and glass cocoon of the automobile muffled his words but not the whump of the object striking the windshield.
A thousand streaks radiated from the point of impact, but through the crazed glass I could see he had exchanged the shovel for a long-handled ax.
He swung again, and splintery dust blew on my face. There was no time for the awkward reach to unlock the door; the ax was falling again. I scrambled up and rolled over into the back seat just as an enormous shower of glass exploded into the front.
I could hear Edward screaming now, a string of gibberish punctuated by the slam of the ax against the side windows. There was glass all over the seat, all over me. I tasted blood, and when I tried to move, a razor-sharp fragment sliced through my jeans and into my knee. I had to ignore it and reach for the pin to unlock the door. It was then I realized that I was still clutching the radio controller.
A very still space formed in the middle of the pain and terror. If I were quick enough, there was a chance—a very slim chance—to get out of this death trap. Another blast of glass exploded like shrapnel inside the car. I turned my face away, but I could feel a dozen stinging points of contact on my back and arms. Carefully I pulled the metal handle to release the door catch, picked up the controller with my good hand, and hit the activating switch.
