The Sweetman Curve

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Is Detective Morello there?’

  There was a pause. Then the voice said: ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, my name is John Cullen. It was my father William Cullen who was shot dead on the San Diego Freeway last week.’

  ‘Oh, sure. I remember. Cullen.’

  ‘Listen,’ said John, ‘it’s difficult to explain this, but I have good reason to think there’s going to be another shooting tonight. There’s a party at a house in Palm Springs for Anthony Seiden, the movie director, and somebody’s going to kill him.’

  There was another pause. Then the voice said, ‘What gives you that idea?’

  ‘I can’t go into it now, but, please get someone over to Palm Springs and check out the house. It’s urgent.’

  ‘I can call the Palm Springs police.’

  ‘Would you do that? Would you tell them it’s serious, and urgent? The party’s being held at Adele Corliss’s house.’

  ‘Adele Corliss, huh? The lady from Passionate Pretenders?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Do you have any idea what the killer might look like?’

  John put his hand over the receiver, and called to Professor Sweetman ‘Professor? Do you know what the killer looks like? Or anything about him at all?’

  Professor Sweetman shook his head. ‘They don’t tell me anything. I’m sorry.’

  John went back to the phone. ‘We have no idea, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Okay,’ said the voice. ‘Thanks for your information anyway. I’ll have it checked out.’

  John put down the phone. He said, ‘You know what a sceptic is?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Mel. ‘A guy who won’t believe he’s dead unless they let him check his own pulse.’

  ‘Well, that’s what the cop was. I think we’re going to have to go to Palm Springs ourselves.’

  ‘What do we do with Sweetman?’ asked Mel.

  John turned to the tall, elderly man in his white lab coat, and said, ‘Professor?’

  ‘I won’t run away,’ said Aaron Sweetman, in a husky voice. ‘I can’t leave Mima.’

  ‘And this one?’ asked Perri, indicating Dennis.

  Dennis shrugged. ‘I’ll probably run away,’ he said.

  ‘That’s a risk we’re going to have to take,’ John said. ‘We have your description, we have your car registration, and all I can say is, if you like Mexico, you’re welcome to it. The border’s only a taxi fare away.’

  Mel tucked the .38 back in his belt, under his fawn cotton windbreaker. Then, without another word, the three of them left the office, walked through the whirring humming computer room, and out into the late sunlight.

  ‘How long do you think it’s going to take us to make Palm Springs?’ asked Perri. ‘It’s a hell of a drive.’

  John checked his watch as they walked quickly across the grass to the parking lot.

  ‘If I take the road through Paloma Valley and Sun City, that’s getting on for two hundred miles. It’s almost six now – we should get there by eleven. Most of these Palm Springs parties don’t start until late, so we may be lucky.’

  ‘Oh God,’ said Perri, ‘I hope so.’

  It was 6:07 as they drove out of San Diego on the Murphy Canyon Road, with the sun sloping across the dusty blacktop, and the air suddenly thick with flying insects. At the wheel, John lifted his sunglasses to rub his eyes and hoped that he had the stamina to make it. Through the window of Professor Sweetman’s office, Dennis watched the long white Lincoln swerve out of the parking lot and head north. He crushed out his cigar at once, and went straight to the phone.

  A thin voice said, ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Dennis O’Fallon. I’m still in San Diego. We’ve had a hitch.’

  ‘What kind of hitch?’

  ‘Young guy named – what was his name, professor?’

  ‘Cullen,’ Professor Sweetman said sadly.

  ‘That’s it, a young guy named Cullen, a blonde girl, and a fat guy. They know it all. All about Sweetman, all about the print-outs, all about everything. The professor told them about Seiden, too, and they’re hauling ass to get to Palm Springs.’

  The thin voice didn’t falter, or register any surprise. ‘When did they leave?’

  ‘Just a moment ago.’

  ‘By what route?’

  ‘By the look of it, up Murphy Canyon Road to join the Cabrillo Freeway at Miramar. Then I guess they’ll take 15E to Riverside, and head east from there.’

  There was a silence, and then the thin voice said: ‘Okay, you did good to call. Stay there and keep your eyes on Sweetman till we call you back.’

  ‘My car’s busted,’ said Dennis. ‘They shot out my tyre.’

  ‘They’re armed?’

  ‘Only the fat guy. A .38 police special.’

  Again there was silence, and then the phone went dead. Dennis held the receiver for a moment longer, but nothing else happened, and he set it down.

  ‘Well, professor,’ he said, ‘it looks like you and me have got a long night ahead of us.’

  Twenty-One

  At 6:32, Henry Ullerstam kissed Hilary Nestor Hunter’s hand, and went down the steps to where his shiny black Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud III was waiting for him. His chauffeur closed the door behind him, and Hilary saw only his crisp white cuff and his glittering gold Cartier watch as he waved goodbye. As the car whispered away down the drive, she found herself longing insanely for 1980, for Angola, for oil wells, and for the riches that Henry was going to heap on her head.

  As she stood there in the fading light of the day, a bronze Buick came speeding up the road. It turned into her driveway and stopped outside, and a red-faced young man in white jeans jumped out with a large cardboard box.

  ‘I brought your outfit,’ he panted. ‘I’m real sorry it’s late.’

  Hilary smiled distantly. ‘That’s all right. Don’t worry about it.’

  The young man blinked. Hilary snapped her fingers to a dark-haired girl and said, ‘Give him five dollars for his trouble. Then come help me dress.’

  She stalked back into the house. The young man and the dark-haired girl looked at each other in a moment of shared bewilderment, and shrugged.

  *

  Anthony Seiden came out of the shower with a dark blue towel wrapped around his middle, and walked through the bedroom into the dressing-room. Dana, in a layered negligée the colour of wild peaches, was sitting in front of her make-up mirror. The bedroom and the dressing-room were both Bel-Air rococo, with a high gilded bed, and cream-painted furniture outlined with gold. On the walls were fussy paintings of Regency ladies on garden swings, amorously ogled by beaux with powdered wigs and quizzing-glasses. Anthony had inherited the decor from the previous owner, the costume epic director Abraham Spiro, and he adored its tastelessness so much that he had decided to keep it intact. Future generations, he used to say, would wander through these rooms and marvel.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to argue with Carl Chapman,’ Dana said.

  ‘Why should I argue?’ Anthony said. ‘He can’t help being a Fascist bigot, any more than I can help being a warm-hearted liberal.’

  ‘You’re going to tell him that?’

  Anthony laughed. ‘Oh, sure. Right to his face.’

  ‘You can laugh. You told Richard Nixon he was suffering from delusions of grandeur, right to his face.’

  ‘But that was true. Apart from that, I don’t think he heard me.’

  Dana began to line her eyes. ‘Everyone else did, and that was what mattered.’

  Anthony appeared from the open door of the dressing-room and looked at her face in the triple mirrors of her make-up table. Full-face, left profile, right profile. Three beautiful blonde Nordic women with six enchanting blue eyes, six long-fingered hands with pearlised nails, six firm breasts, six wide shoulders.

  He said, ‘Why should you care what I say to Carl Chapman? He’s a right-wing extremist of the worst kind, and he’s been tied in twice with the killing of Bobby Kennedy.’
<
br />   ‘I just think you should let your pictures speak for themselves, that’s all.’

  Anthony started at her reflection hard. ‘Are you trying to tell me something?’ he asked.

  ‘Tell you something? What do you mean? What should I want to tell you?’

  ‘Something about yourself, not me. Something about the way you feel. You’ve changed, Dana, more than I thought.’

  ‘Oh?’ she said, her eyes flicking up to meet his in the mirror.

  He looked at her hard, and thought for a while. ‘I don’t attract you any more,’ he said simply. ‘I sense you’re emotionally involved with me, but it isn’t sexually, and it may not even be romantically. You may even hate me.’

  She gave a quick, uncertain smile. ‘You’re talking nonsense,’ she said.

  ‘Am I?’ he asked her. ‘I’ve known you for a long time, Dana. We’ve been in love. All kinds of love. I know when I turn you on, and when I don’t, and I’m not turning you on now. I haven’t once excited you from the moment you walked back in through the door.’

  She said quietly, ‘You’re not giving it time.’

  ‘Time?’ he said, a little regretfully. ‘Why give time to something that isn’t even there? Why water a patch of ground that doesn’t have a seed in it? Look at me.’

  He turned her head towards him with his left hand. She looked up at him, then she turned away again, and there was a faint blush on her cheeks.

  ‘Can you honestly say that you love me?’ he wanted to know.

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Can you honestly say that you came back because you thought our marriage could work?’

  ‘No,’ she whispered.

  ‘Then why did you come back? If you don’t love me, and you’re not interested in saving our marriage, why did you bother?’

  She said, so quietly that he could scarcely hear her, ‘I guess everyone does strange things sometimes.’

  ‘I never knew you do anything strange. Not as strange as this, anyway. Everything you ever did was for your own kicks. You wouldn’t put yourself out for anyone. So why did you come back here? You’re not enjoying a moment of it. It’s completely out of character.’

  She stared at him, and her face was alight with resentment. ‘Out of character? What did you ever know about my character? Or bother to find out about my character? You just dismissed me as a walk-on actress in this wonderful controversial movie called the life of Anthony Seiden. You never gave me credit for any intelligence, any depth, or any taste. Look at this godawful bedroom. You only kept it because you thought I was a stupid starlet, and that this was just the kind of bedroom I’d adore.’

  Anthony dropped his gaze. ‘If that’s true, Dana, even the slightest bit true—’

  ‘Of course it’s true. Why do you think I walked out? I was tired of being treated like an idiot with nothing to contribute.’

  ‘Then why did you come back, if you hated it so much?’ Anthony snapped.

  She placed her hands flat on the dressing-table. She was obviously making an effort to control her temper.

  ‘Because I have something important to do,’ she told him. ‘For the first time in my whole life, someone’s given me something important to do.’

  He slowly stood up. He wasn’t going to ask her what this ‘something important’ was. She would make sure she told him in good time, in her own way. They had had this argument, in countless permutations, all through their married life.

  He said, ‘Okay, I’d better get dressed,’ and he went back to the dressing-room. The time on his Baume & Mercier watch was a quarter after seven.

  Twenty-Two

  At 7:58, T.F. got up from his chair by the window of Adele Corliss’s house, propped his M-14 against the sill, and paced up and down the room to stretch his legs. Mark was asleep, which T.F. considered was probably the best therapy the chauffeur could get, under the circumstances.

  The room was gloomy now. Outside, the desert sky was almost dark. The lanterns that had been strung in the trees were alight, and there was an appetising smell of hors d’oeuvres being cooked on the chef’s hibachi. T.F. lit a cigarette. He wasn’t hungry, and he knew that he wouldn’t feel like eating until he’d shot that bullet through those two inches of clear space and knocked out Anthony Seiden forever. A stylish job. Lots of class. And an extra notch in his reputation as a hit man.

  T.F. wondered why the world was ordered the way it was. Why you had to kill people to put over your own point of view. It seemed strange, and irrational, and yet he knew that was the way things were. He sometimes dreamed of an existence in which you could do anything you like – kill who you wanted in any way you wanted, and have hundred of girls around you, willing to do anything you told them.

  There was a rapid knock at the door. He said quietly, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s me, Ken.’

  T.F. went to the door and unlocked it.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘I thought you were downstairs keeping your eyes on the servants.’

  ‘I was. But I’ve just checked with Allen on the phone and he says that Cullen and the fat guy Walters have found out what’s going on here. They’ve alerted the cops and they’re driving up here themselves.’

  T.F. heard this news in silence. Then he said, ‘Cullen, huh?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Is Allen doing anything about it?’

  Ken shrugged. ‘He wouldn’t say. But I think he’s going to try to intercept them.’

  T.F. sucked on his cigarette sourly. ‘Shit. That meddling bastard Cullen. I should have blown his head off the first time I ever saw him.’

  It was 8:04.

  *

  Adele Corliss sat at her dressing-table, with her maid Dolores standing beside her with her towels and her lotions. The brass lamps in her bedroom were turned down to dim, so that her intensely-lit make-up mirror was like an altar, in front of which the high priestess of Palm Springs sat and made her devotions to youth and physical beauty. She was beginning to wonder if her eyes needed another wrinkle treatment. The sun, and the exertion of keeping an indefatigable young lover, were beginning to tell on her. Her superb body was really only meant to be looked at, not manhandled.

  Dolores said, ‘These bad guys, can’t you do nothing?’

  Adele gave her a twitchy smile. ‘You’re not forgetting that Mark’s up there, are you? They’ll kill Kim the moment they think we’re trying to play games. Did you see that man? The dark one? He’s like a rattlesnake.’ Dolores didn’t seem impressed. ‘Even rattlesnakes got their weak points.’

  ‘Maybe they have,’ said Adele, ‘but I’m not going to risk Mark’s life to prove it.’

  ‘Just somebody else’s, somebody more important, maybe.’

  ‘All right, Dolores, what would you do in my position?’

  ‘I tell you what I would do. That dark man sits by the window in Mr Ken’s room, looking out most of the time. I saw him when I crossed the front of the house. Now, if you got yourself the shotgun from the library, and you went to the small green bedroom, you could get yourself a shot at that man before he even knew what hit him.’

  Adele paused for a moment, and then began to wipe cream from around her eyes with pads of cotton. ‘Dolores,’ she said, ‘you’re so absurdly hot-blooded. That man has a rifle, and he’s a trained killer. Not one of us in this house can hit a barn from three feet away. What do you think he’s going to do if we shoot at him, and miss?’

  Dolores kept her muoth shut. Adele looked up at her, and then said, ‘You’re not thinking of trying it, are you? Because if you do, you’re fired. That’s if our rattlesnake doesn’t get you first.’

  Dolores grunted in disappointment. The time by the clock on Adele Corliss’s dressing-table was 8:43.

  *

  At 9:11, Carl X. Chapman arrived in a chartered Lear-Jet at Palm Springs airport, accompanied by Mrs Elspeth Chapman. An agency correspondent from UPI noted that Mrs Chapman was wearing dark glasses, despite the fact t
hat it was night.

  When Carl Chapman was asked what he thought of Anthony Seiden’s movies, he said, with a broad smile, ‘Every man in these United States is entitled to say his piece, and I’d say that Tony Seiden says his piece with great eloquence and impact. I’m going to this party because Adele Corliss is my friend, and because I respect Tony Seiden’s pictures, whether I agree with his politics or not.’

  The reporters were unaware as they noted down his words that they were helping to establish Carl X. Chapman’s alibi.

  *

  At 9:17, the first guests began to arrive at Adele’s house, and the music started. The sound of bongos and the amplified warbling of Spanish ballads could be heard for a mile in the stillness of the night. Upstairs, astride his chair, T.F. waited with the patience on which he had always prided himself – the patience of a professional killer whose mind is attuned to the perfect performance of one split-second act.

  Twenty-Three

  With a flackering roar, the Bell helicopter lifted off the concrete pad at Morrow Field, just outside of San Bernardino, and twisted away into the night sky, its spot-lamps sending shafts of white light down to the scrubby soil. In the cockpit, still tucking in the tails of his clean white shirt, sat Umberto. Against his leg rested a Schmeisser MP40 machine gun, black and greasy, and on the floor was a canvas tennis bag crammed with spare clips of ammunition.

  At the controls, Val was untidily dressed in jeans and a blue T-shirt with two cartoon turds emblazoned on the front of it. The turds were grinning and shaking hands, under a motto which read ‘Get Your Shit Together.’ Val wore night-glasses, and a shoulder holster, still unbuckled, with a Colt Python .357 magnum revolver hanging heavily under his arm.

  It was 9:44. Over his intercom, Umberto said, ‘Head for the Riverside Auto Racetrack. They should have just about reached there by now.’

  The world was dark beneath them, spattered with occasional bursts of light. They flew noisily southeast, until they located the Riverside Freeway at Grand Terrace, beaded with moving tail-lights, and then Val angled the Bell towards the Riverside cloverleaf.