Summer traffic heading to and from the beach was heavy on San Vicente Boulevard. Convertibles full of sunburned kids. Volkswagen buses loaded with surfboards. To be young, Casey thought. He felt a million years old, a pariah who spent his life breaking people’s hearts. At the Academy they’d said it didn’t bother you after a while, detachment came with experience. But how long did it really take, Casey wondered, twenty years behind the badge before you no longer worried about being hated for wearing it?
He turned south on Lincoln and headed for Pico.
In a neighboring apartment—across the hall, Adrian guessed—a stereo set blared I am Woman I am free! like a trumpet blast. Then the volume was turned down. The nervous pulse still fluttered in her ears, but she had stopped yawning. With all her heart, she wished she could stop thinking. But her mind would not leave off recollecting. The sorcerer in action…
The day after her arrival, observing Stephen Myrick at work, she had found herself even more convinced of his sincerity, the authenticity of his magnetic gift. The first case she sat in on was an obesity problem, a woman with a lifelong history of overeating. Like most fat people, the patient had lost weight dieting periodically, but every time had regained the loss, and more.
“The same pattern holds true of most fat people,” Myrick explained. “They’re fat because they eat, and they eat because they’re fat. But she’s on a physician’s diet now. My first job is to hold her to it this time. No, that’s wrong. To help her hold herself to it.”
Embarrassed at intruding on what she pictured as something like a private ceremony, Adrian seated herself in the corner of his office. Mrs. Banner, the patient, plumped down in the Eames chair in front of Myrick’s desk, ignoring Adrian after their casual introduction. Perching on the corner of his desk nearest her, Myrick began to chat in an easy fashion: How was it going for Mrs. Banner this week? Fine, Doctor, she had lost three pounds. Let’s see, that was a total of twenty now? Twenty-one, the woman corrected him proudly, Dr. Stein could hardly believe what the scale showed.
“He hasn’t seen anything yet,” Myrick said. Then his deep voice altered, becoming bland and soothing. “Now lean back, Mrs. Banner. That’s it. No, don’t close your eyes yet. First let me see you roll your eyes up and back. That’s it. Up and back. Now close them, and take a deep breath. Deep, Mrs. Banner. That’s it. Hold it as long as possible and start concentrating. When you can’t hold any longer, you’re going to exhale very slowly. And while you’re exhaling, you’re going to concentrate on feeling that your body is sinking downward. Slowly sinking. But your left arm will float upward.”
Holding her own breath in the silence, Adrian listened to the faint, wheezing exhalation. Surely hypnosis isn’t this simple, she thought. No flashing lights. No spinning discs. She wished she could see the woman’s face. But the arm was enough. That fat, heavy, bare arm rising off the arm of the chair as if it really floated weightless.
“Your hand floating is your signal to yourself,” Myrick was saying. “You’re in the state of concentration called hypnosis, Mrs. Banner. And it’s your concentration that put you there. So you see, if you can make your hand float as it’s doing right now, you can induce control other ways, too. You can make yourself feel that you only want to eat what is good for your body. And not by depriving yourself, but by rewarding yourself. And this way, you’re working toward the goal you want.”
Myrick repeated himself several times, then Mrs. Banner came out of her trance by counting backward from three to one, opening her eyes and making a fist of the hand that was floating.
With a thump, her hand hit the arm of the chair. Then she swung around, beaming at Adrian. “I can do it by myself, too,” she said proudly. “At home or any place.”
Appalled, Adrian blurted, “But aren’t you frightened?”
“Of what?”
“Why—being in a trance somewhere. Being helpless.”
“Oh, that.” The fat woman giggled. “It’s not like they show in the movies. Like sleepwalking or something. It’s really just concentrating hard.”
With another compulsive eater, also a woman, Myrick displayed a technique of deeper hypnosis. This time he set up a series of posthypnotic suggestions while his patient slumbered—one, that the woman would again “float” her arm after she had awakened; two, that she would hum a bar of a popular song; and three, that she would fall asleep again immediately afterward.
The woman awakened and began to discuss her bill. Suddenly her arm began to drift upward, and seeming unconscious of it, she said, “I’ll write you a check next time, if you don’t mind. I’m a little—” Breaking off, she began to hum softly.
As the woman’s head sank and she began to snore softly, Adrian’s scalp prickled. Superstition, she thought. But if he can do this so easily, why not miracle cures? Addiction to food must be like any other…
More fool you for not knowing his limitations.
The telephone rang, but only once, a wrong number. Shocked out of her reverie, Adrian stared at the depression in the Naugahyde where William Myrick had sat. In over his head, his voice echoed cruelly. No more capable of dealing with addicts…
True? False? Adrian realized now that she did not know; she had been blinded by the radiance of Stephen Myrick’s personality, her own commitment to their work. Sorcerer, she thought. But if, instead, he was like the apprentice in the musical fable…
Marmalade meowed and curled around her legs as she pushed herself out of the chair, settling her forearms into the crutch canes. She knew it was superstition and despised herself for it, but all the same a queer belief was gathering in her that the source of his power must have turned on the hypnotist. He had manipulated forces beyond his understanding, summoned something he could not control. Like a demon, she kept thinking as she levered herself into the kitchen to make coffee. Like a demon roused from hypnotic sleep.
TWELVE
There was no answer at Judith Flesher’s address, a shabby six-unit stucco built in the one-story sheep-shed style of a cheap motel. But from a next-door neighbor, Krug and Casey found out that the girl worked at a hot-dog stand on Pico and Lincoln, so they headed west again. “Ramirez is on the way,” Krug said. “Let’s swing by, maybe we can catch him, too.”
The district was a hodgepodge of small houses and modest apartment buildings with for rent signs advertising children welcome. Hector Ramirez’s address just south of Pico turned out to be a single-family frame house, neatly painted, with a picket fence and a lush fig tree growing in the front yard.
“Looks respectable, anyway,” Krug commented as they climbed out of the Mustang. “Some of these Chicanos are okay, I guess.”
Admiring the hanging baskets trailing ferns which screened the porch from the street, Casey opened the gate. The front door stood half ajar behind a new aluminum screen door. From inside they could hear what was obviously the soundtrack of a Western movie—the television, of course.
Krug punched the doorbell, then banged on the screen door. After a time a little girl with ribbons in her braids peered out at them. “Hi, kid,” he said. “Your mama or daddy home?” But she only stared at him solemnly. “Look, girlie,” he tried again patiently, “go get your mama, okay? We want to talk to her.” But it didn’t work. “Christ,” Krug muttered, “no spikka, I suppose. What the hell do they teach these kids in school?”
“Let me try.” Casey squatted so that he could look in at the little girl on her own level. “Chiquita,” he asked softly, “dónde está tu madre?”
She pointed back into the interior of the house.
“Tell her to go get the old lady,” Krug instructed. “And pronto.”
“If I could only remember how to say—”
A brown hand yanked the little girl backward. And as she whined behind the door, a fat black-mustached youth in skin-tight jeans and a sleeveless leather jerkin confronted them. “You the fuzz, hey? I
been waiting for you.” He unlocked the screen door. “Parsons, he phones you gonna roust me, too. ‘So, big deal,’ I tell him, ‘let ’em, man. I got nothing I’m ascared of. Clean all the way, that’s me.’ ”
The house was as neat inside as out, Casey noticed, pleasantly cool and dim, nicely furnished, quiet when Hector shut off the television.
Striking a dude pose in the middle of the room, he grinned, stroking his Pancho Villa mustache. “Go ahead, ask me something,” he urged sassily. “I got answers, hey. Mr. Clean, that’s me. I’m strictly straight.”
“That’s just fine,” Krug came back, “because if you’re not, you get busted like in the next five minutes.”
“Oh, heavy, man, heavy.”
“Better believe it, sonny. And save the hard guy stuff for your buddies.”
His story was much the same as Eddie Parsons’s. Not surprisingly, Casey thought, since there had been ample time for them to compare notes. He had picked up Eddie on his Honda at seven, Hector declared, and they had gone to the meeting at Myrick’s, arriving ten minutes late. “Don’t matter, anyhow,” he went on, seeming to forget that it was all in the past tense now. “Doc, he don’t care. It’s like a rap session, see. We just sit around rapping when we feel like it. He gets us going about our hangups and all that. Man, it’s a real freakout sometimes!”
“Yeah, I bet it is,” Krug said sourly. “Who was there last night, Hector?” He checked the names against their list. “That’s the whole group, then. Six people, plus Dr. Myrick?”
“You keeping score, man, not me.”
Catching some fleeting difference in the boy’s tone, Casey suggested that they count again. “Just to make sure,” he said mildly. “I have a feeling Hector isn’t quite satisfied with the total.”
“What you talking about, man?” Looking from one to the other, the boy shifted restlessly. They watched him until at last he muttered, “Puta. What you want me to say? Listen, she was only there like ten minutes.”
“Who’s that, Hector?”
“The Flesh, man, who you think?”
“That’s Judith Flesher, you mean?”
Hector nodded sullenly. They were really grooving, he told them, till she showed up last night. Like bad vibes, man. The doc made her split, but it was a bummer from then on.
“Did you actually see her leave the house?” Casey asked.
No, Hector said, but he’d heard the door slam. He couldn’t answer definitely as to time, either. Maybe half an hour before the meeting broke up.
“We have Judith Flesher down here as having elected to drop out.” Casey indicated the list in Krug’s hand. “Sounds like maybe Myrick dropped her.”
“How about it, Hector?” Krug pushed him, but the boy either could not or would not answer—an intriguing beginning, they both agreed later, for a whole new line of thought.
Even more intriguing was their discovery fifteen minutes later that the Flesher girl had not showed up for work at the hot-dog stand. Not for two days. Not since Sunday the twenty-seventh.
“Pull her sheet from Juvenile,” Timms instructed when they reported back. “See who she runs with, everything you can find out.” He pulled his lower lip. “A fat girl he gave the boot to. Yeah, I think you might just have something there.”
“Might be worthwhile trying Miss Crewes, too,” Casey suggested. “She could probably give us some dope about her.”
“Yeah, her usual load of bullshit,” Krug said irritably. “Me, I’ll take what the record says.”
Judith Flesher was the sort of delinquent that was becoming classic, her record showed—not a petty offender in the old sense of thieving, truancy or bad morals, but a user and suspected pusher of addictives, a sixteen-year-old school dropout who had already spent over a year of her life in corrective institutions. The case reports of the juvenile specialists who had worked with her at the Sybil Brand Facility were unanimous in the opinion that the girl’s personality bordered on the psychotic, deeply hostile and violently antisocial.
“Sounds like one of those creeps that hung around Charlie Manson,” Krug commented when they had scanned the report. “From dropout to butcher in six easy lessons. You see anything there about parents?”
Casey searched the file until he found the information. “Father disappeared, mother a cocktail waitress. Last known address is a different one, Al.”
“For Chrissake, you suppose the kid’s living there by herself?”
“Too bad we didn’t find out.”
“We will, sport, we will. On overtime.” Krug grinned. “Tough titty if you got a hot date.”
“No such luck. But I’d better call home.”
“Yeah, me too.” Krug looked at his watch. “Never liked meat loaf, anyhow.”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess,” his mother said. “You’re going to be late.” Behind her voice Casey could hear the dogs barking. “Honestly, Case, why can’t you keep decent hours like other young men—”
“Oh, they’re decent enough.” He sighed. “That’s the problem.”
“Well, you would be a policeman.”
“There are those who consider it a fairly honorable profession.”
“Name me one,” she came back like a shot.
Deafened by her laughter, he said hastily, “Got to go, Ma. See you when I see you,” and hung up.
Krug was watching him—their desks sat back to back, so that they faced each other. “All set,” he asked with heavy sarcasm, “for a couple, three more hours of that honorable profession?”
“It’s a family joke, Al.”
“Yeah, I know. Nobody wants a dirty old cop in the family, right? You ‘new breed’ boys with your college degrees got a lot of problems.” Grunting, he heaved himself out of his swivel chair. “Okay, let’s check out Flesher’s landlord first. Save us a lot of hassle if he’ll take a quick look, see if her stuff’s still in her apartment.”
Judith Flesher’s landlord lived out of town, they discovered. However, in the front apartment of the six-unit building, they found a pensioner who claimed to be the manager.
“Got keys and I collect rents every month,” she declared stoutly when Krug looked disbelieving. “If that ain’t a manager, I don’t know what is!” Gnomic, irascible, her face clenched tight as a fist under a mop of wild white hair, she peered at Casey. “You don’t look old enough to me to be carrying a gun. Never did hold with it, anyhow. A man’s only a man, badge or no, and the best of ’em hasn’t got the sense God give a dickey bird. Lord, I ought to know! Had four husbands before I was through. Four, can y’imagine? I look back now, can’t for the life of me figure what I was thinking of. All that grief and foolishness. And for what, I ask you? Four fools that up and died on me, every one. Six children I never see hide nor hair of. And not a penny to my name. Wasn’t for the social security—”
“Ma’am, if you don’t mind,” Krug interrupted, “we’re short on time. All we want to know is if the Flesher girl still lives here.”
“ ’Course she does. Didn’t I just now say—”
“Yes, ma’am, you said. But she could’ve cleared out without letting you know. So maybe you’ll take your key and have a look?”
“Indeed I will not!” She glared up at him. “The very idea, asking me to snoop for you. Why, it’s getting so a person ain’t safe in his own home, all the snooping—”
“All right, all right. If you don’t want to cooperate, that’s your business. I just hope,” Krug added, “you won’t be sorry when the rent’s due.”
“That’s my worry.”
“We’d appreciate it if you could answer a few questions,” Casey said. “Only take a minute.”
“What kind of questions?”
“Well, for one—if you’ve seen Judy at all in the past couple of days.”
“Maybe, maybe not, I can’t recollect.”
&
nbsp; “How about her mother?” Krug asked. “She been around?”
“If she has, I never saw her. Some young ones run in and out, but nobody looks to me like a mother.”
“All right, ma’am.” Krug was heavily polite now. “If we could have the owner’s name and phone number, we won’t bother you anymore.”
“Well, that’ll be a relief, I must say!” Fumbling only a little, she spelled out the name and gave them a Riverside phone number. “Now, that’s all I’m going to tell you,” she warned while Casey took down the information. “I got my TV programs coming on directly, so I got no more time for talking. You want to see that girl, you’ll just have to wait like anybody else till she comes home.”
As they were leaving they handed her a card and asked her to give it to the girl if she showed up again. “Old bat,” Krug growled when they were out of earshot. “Lay you ten to one the kid’s skipped.”
“If she has, it’ll take a warrant now to prove it.”
Both silent, they got into the Mustang. And both smoking—Krug one of his small smelly cigars, Casey a Carlton—they sat there unspeaking for a time. “I’m getting a funny feeling about this case,” Krug said finally. He blew a smoke ring and they watched it float out the open window to dissipate in the mild, humid early-evening air. “What I feel like right now is somebody or something’s phonying this thing. Know what I mean? Take this Flesher girl,” he went on without waiting for Casey’s comments. “One kid very carefully don’t mention she was there, but she’s a weirdo, he tells us. Then the other one says she was on the scene. See what I mean? The good old finger. So what we want to know next is why, right? Why should those creeps need a scapegoat?”
Rouse the Demon: A Krug & Kellog Thriller (The Krug & Kellog Thriller Series Book 3) Page 6