Death Trance

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Randolph. ‘They may be doing nothing more than trying to scare me. After all, they haven’t done very much to keep themselves hidden. On the flight out from Honolulu, they were positively glaring at me, right out in the open. I was frightened at first that they were sent out to kill me, but the more I think about it, the more likely it seems that they were sent just to keep tabs on whatever I was doing. Maybe to warn me off too. To remind me to behave myself and stop competing with some of my influential competitors back home.’

  Michael sniffed and took out a cigarette. ‘He may not have wanted to kill you at first, this Ecker, but if he has been talking to I.M. Wartawa and if I.M. Wartawa has been talking to him, he’s going to know that you’re attempting to meet your wife and children.’

  ‘And?’ Wanda asked.

  ‘And nothing,’ Michael replied, scratching a match on the side of Randolph’s closet door and lighting his cigarette. ‘Except that your wife and children were the only eyewitnesses to their own deaths, the only ones who saw who killed them. And so if /

  were this Ecker character, I’d do everything I could to make sure you never got to talk to them.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Memphis, Tennessee

  Waverley Graceworthy was sitting in the huge library of his mansion on Elvis Presley Boulevard playing backgammon with his niece, Gertrude, when the butler came in to announce that Mr Neil Sleaman was paying him an unexpected visit.

  ‘You’d better show Mr Sleaman into the study,’ Waverley told the butler. He reached over and patted Gertrude’s blonde, braided hair and smiled. ‘Go to the kitchen, why don’t you, Gertie, and ask Mrs Morris for some of her sand tarts. Tell her you can have a glass of hot, brandied milk to wash them down with.’

  He walked along the wide, carpeted corridor, his hands tucked into the pockets of his red quilted smoking jacket, until he reached the study. Usually Waverley referred to the study as his ‘den,’ although it was large enough to accommodate a fair-sized family bungalow, complete with carport. There were huge, dark oil paintings on the walls, mostly of Confederate victories: Bull Run and Fredericks-burg, and the armoured steamboat battle off Memphis in 1862. There was a cavernous fireplace but today the fire was not lit. The temperature at midday had been well up into the low nineties and the night promised to be sticky.

  Neil Sleaman was standing by the fireplace holding a thin black leather briefcase. He looked pale. Randolph, of course, had been calling him erratically day and night and expecting immediate answers to all his questions.

  ‘Glad you stopped by,’ Waverley said, offering Neil an armchair. ‘Is there anything I can get you to drink?’

  ‘A beer would be fine,’ Neil said.

  Waverley went to the fireplace and pushed the button beside the marble surround. ‘I usually prefer it, of course, if we make our meetings a little more discreet.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I didn’t want to tell you this on the telephone and I thought you would probably want to hear about it immediately. Randolph called me only fifteen minutes ago and said he was making arrangements to come back to Memphis.’

  ‘When?’ Waverley asked. ‘Not right away, surely.’

  ‘On the first available flight. That’s Garuda Airlines to Djakarta, then Thai International to London via Bangkok. He could be back here in Memphis by Saturday afternoon.’

  ‘Did he give you any idea of why he has decided to come back so soon?’

  Neil put down his briefcase as if it hadn’t really been worth carrying anyway. ‘He said that he’d been having some fresh thoughts about the Sun-Taste contract and that he’d probably found a way to solve our problems, that’s all.’

  ‘Sun-Taste expects him to make up the shortfall by tomorrow, doesn’t it?’

  That’s correct according to the contract. But Randolph must have spoken to Sun-Taste’s president direct from Bali. Randolph’s given them his personal guarantee that he can make up the shortfall by the end of next week, and he’s also promised that any tonnage that arrives later than originally contracted for will be free of charge.’

  ‘Now, let’s hold on here,’ Waverley said, raising his hand to his fine-boned chin.

  ‘You’ve been giving me your personal guarantee that Raleigh won’t be back on line until Friday at the very earliest.’

  ‘That’s correct,’ Neil insisted. ‘There is no way that even one barrel of processed cottonseed oil can be produced by that plant until three o’clock Friday afternoon. No way at all. They don’t even have the new valves assembled yet.’

  ‘So how can Randolph possibly suggest that he can make up the shortfall? And how in hell can he offer any tonnage for free? He’ll put himself straight out of business.’

  Neil took a sharp breath. ‘Waverley,’ he said, ‘I really don’t know, and that’s why I’m here. I mean, there’s always a possibility that grieving over his family has turned Randolph’s mind a little. Maybe he’s gone over the edge. But he sounded very calm when he called today. He sounded like he was in complete control of what he was doing.’

  Waverley frowned. ‘He can’t have found an alternative source of supply. Gamble’s is all committed, and the Association certainly isn’t going to let him have any. Even if he has managed to find some abroad, he can’t possibly ship it to Memphis by the end of next week. It isn’t technologically possible. Damn it all, it isn’t humanly possible.’

  The butler knocked at the door and Waverley called him in. The butler was English, smooth-faced, plump and exaggeratedly glib. Only another Englishman would have detected the lowliness of his accent and the endless sarcasm of his manner.

  Waverley thought he was almost aristocracy.

  ‘A beer for Mr Sleaman,’ Waverley ordered.

  ‘By all means, Mr Graceworthy,’ bowed the butler and withdrew.

  ‘Fine man,’ said Waverley. ‘Now listen, where were we?’

  Neil perched himself awkwardly on the arm of one of Waverley’s hide-covered armchairs. ‘You did suggest that we wouldn’t have any more problems with Randolph once he went off on vacation. I didn’t know how or why. I didn’t ask. But it obviously hasn’t worked, has it?

  Waverley pattered his delicate fingers against the surface of the burled-walnut table.

  It sounded like falling rain on a lonely night in one of Elvis Presley’s sad and romantic songs. ‘I have to make some calls. For some reason, not everything went according to plan. Well, it’s a war, isn’t it, of sorts? And in wars, mistakes sometimes crop up, misjudgments.’

  With sudden intuition, Neil said, ‘You didn’t arrange for anybody to beat him up, did you?’

  Waverley raised his head. His watery eyes were cold and uncompromising. ‘My dear young man,’ he remonstrated and then turned away so that Neil would find it awkward to engage his attention.

  But Neil persisted. ‘You didn’t arrange for anything worse than that? I mean, you didn’t send Reece after him, did you?’

  ‘Poof,’ Waverley said dismissively.

  Neil stood up. ‘You sent Reece. I should have known it.’

  Waverley turned back to him. ‘So what if I did send Reece? What do you have to be so righteous about? What do you think the Clares did to me and to my family? What do you think Randolph Clare is doing to me now? Would you suffer such injustices?

  Would you allow the son of the man who destroyed your personal life to complete the job his father left unfinished and destroy your business life too? Would you? The Clares are like jackals, father and son, feeding on the achievements of others, sucking them dry. They’re not creators; they’re not initiators. Everybody praises their business acumen; everybody praises their independence and their tenacity. But only I know what scavengers they are. Only I know what predators they are. It was only my pride and my dignity and my sense of humanity to my wife that allowed Randolph Clare’s father to remain independent. It was only my sense of justice that allowed Randolph Clare himself to develop his business as far as he has. Now he h
as gone too far. Now I withdraw my goodwill. Now he has to suffer the consequences of what his father did.’

  Neil Sleaman was silent for a moment and then he said with surprised respect, ‘That was quite a speech.’

  The butler came back with Neil’s beer in a tall, trumpet-shaped glass. While he drank it, Waverley impatiently walked around the study tapping the knuckle of his thumb against his front teeth. Neil, with white froth on his upper lip, asked, ‘Does Orbus know you sent Reece after Randolph?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what does Orbus think about it?’

  Waverley gave a shrug. ‘What Orbus thinks about it is not particularly relevant. For me, this is a personal matter as well as a business matter.’

  He walked across to his desk. There was a large silver inkstand, a bronze Tiffany lamp in the form of intertwined orchids and two silver-framed photographs, one of Waver-ley’s father, a fine moustachioed man with a stiff white collar, and the other of Waverley’s mother, an alluring woman with a feathered hat and dark, curly hair.

  ‘Personal,’ Waverley repeated and lifted his eyes to stare at Neil challengingly, daring him to criticize, daring him to doubt what he was doing just one more time.

  ‘I’d better go then,’ Neil told him. Til give you a call on your answering machine if I hear from Randolph again during the night.’

  He finished his beer with one last hurried swallow, wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, collected his briefcase and went to the door.

  ‘Neil,’ Waverley said sharply, and Neil hesitated, his hand on the doorknob. ‘Never question me again, Neil,’ Waverley told him.

  Neil looked as if he were about to say something but changed his mind. Waverley heard him walk down the hallway and then the unctuous voice of the butler bidding him good night.

  Waverley remained where he was, a diminutive figure in the vastness of his den. The light from the Tiffany lamp shone green on his glasses so that for one second he looked as if he had the eyes of a demon. He opened a drawer of his desk and looked inside. It was scrupulously neat: pens, pencils, rubber bands, paper clips, scissors, everything in its allotted slot. At the back of the drawer, however, there was another photograph in a frame matching those of Waverley’s mother’s and father’s. A serious, pretty girl standing outside a white-painted house, a girl whose eyes were strikingly violet and whose hair was the colour of touch-me-nots.

  Waverley looked down at her for a moment and then angrily closed the drawer. He returned to the library to find that Gertrude had tired of waiting for him to come back for their game of backgammon and had put the set away.

  It was a little over an hour later when the telephone rang in the library and the butler announced that Mr Robert Stroup was on the phone from Denpasar, Bali. Waverley said tersely, ‘Put him through.’

  There was a distant, ringing echo on the line but otherwise Waverley could hear Bob Stroup quite well. Bob Stroup was Recce’s mouthpiece. The two of them had an uncanny, silent rapport that had been developed through years of boyhood friendship, and climactically when the First US Cavalry Division penetrated the Fish Hook in Cambodia in 1970. Reece had been captured by Viet Cong and his tongue had been sliced out. Stroup had disobeyed orders and penetrated six miles into the jungle to find him. Ever since then, Stroup had expressed everything that Reece wanted to say: accurately, volubly and usually profanely.

  ‘Did you locate Randolph Clare yet?’ Waverley asked him.

  ‘We’re close, Mr Graceworthy, I gotta tell you. We’re so damn close we can smell him.’

  ‘But you haven’t actually located him?’

  ‘Not actually, if you want to use that word.’

  Waverley let out a tiny sigh of impatience. ‘How long do you think it’s going to take to find him?’

  That depends. We’ve been spreading some money around but the people here are kind of dumb, if you know what I mean. They want to poke into your business but they won’t tell you theirs. They’re different from Vietnamese, I gotta tell you.’

  ‘Do you yet have any idea of why Randolph Clare went to Southeast Asia? Has he been talking to any businessmen? Any food processors? Any fabric factories?’

  ‘Not so far as we can tell, Mr Graceworthy. I mean, as far as we can tell, he came here for nothing else but to find this guy Michael Hunter, this death-trance addict.’

  Waverley frowned. ‘What guy Michael Hunter? You haven’t told me about this.’

  ‘We haven’t?’ queried Bob Stroup. Then, ‘Hell, no, I guess we haven’t. As soon as we found out where Clare was headed, we lit out after him. Straightaway, Bali here we come. I gotta tell you how hot it is here. And the food, how can they eat this shit?

  I don’t care if I never see a grain of rice again in my whole damn life. They eat snakes too, would you believe? Stir-fried snakes. The first thing I’m gonna do when I get back to Memphis is go straight to The Butcher Shop and cook myself a twenty-four-ounce sirloin with two baked potatoes and half the fucking salad bar, I gotta tell you.’

  ‘Bob,’ Waverley interrupted him caustically, ‘I want to know about this Michael Hunter.’

  ‘Well, sure, he’s a death-trance addict. Well, the word isn’t addict but I forget the other word. It means when you’re good at something.’

  ‘Adept,’ put in Waverley.

  ‘You got it. Adept. And what he does is, he goes into this death trance and he can talk to people who are dead.’

  ‘He can talk to people who are dead?’ Waverley asked, pronouncing his words with exaggerated care as if speaking to a retarded child.

  ‘The guy we wasted in Djakarta told us all about it.’

  ‘Before or after he was dead?’ Waverley asked sarcastically.

  ‘Before, of course. But he had a full-sized thirty-five-dollar Bowie knife pressed up against his throat so I don’t think he was lying too much. He wasn’t one of your down-and-outs either. We opened his office up and he had more than twenty big ones in cash. The money had a note with it saying, “As per Mr G. Twyford’s instructions,” if that makes any sense.’

  The hair on the back of Waverley’s neck prickled. ‘It certainly does make sense.

  George Twyford is Randolph Clare’s accountant. So presumably those twenty thousand dollars were sent to this man you killed as a payment from Randolph Clare.’

  ‘Well, that’s kind of the way we figured it,’ Bob Stroup agreed. This guy we killed told Clare and his pals where to find this Michael Hunter, and Clare paid him for the information.’

  ‘But twenty thousand dollars?’

  Bob Stroup sounded a little embarrassed. ‘We laughed at him too, you know, when he first started talking about meeting dead people and stuff like that. But he said it wasn’t crazy at all. It really happens. Provided they can rake up the money to pay for it, almost everyone can go meet his dead Aunt Minnie. He said all kinds of people do it. Even big American corporations do it. It’s crazy, but it works.’

  ‘Well, Randolph Clare seems to think it works,’ Waverley remarked. ‘Otherwise he wouldn’t have paid your deceased friend as much as twenty thousand dollars.’

  ‘Well, there you go,’ said Bob Stroup. The only hitch is, we can’t locate this Michael Hunter. We’ll do it, believe me. We’ll find him. But he’s one of these ghost characters; everybody saw him yesterday but nobody’s seen him today.’

  Waverley asked, ‘What do you think Randolph Clare is trying to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe he wants to talk to his father. Or maybe to his family … you know, his wife and his kids. My sister went to a spiritualist right after her husband was killed. Danzarotti, his name was. Her husband, not the medium.’

  ‘Bob,’ Waverley said cuttingly, ‘supposing it works?’

  ‘Supposing it works?’ queried Bob Stroup, baffled. ‘Well, supposing it does?’

  ‘Bob, who saw you kill the Clare family?’

  ‘Only the woman and the kids themselves, and they’re dead, right? Dead men tell no tales. Nor women neither
. Nor …’ he stopped in mid-sentence. It had just occurred to him what it was that Waverley had been trying to suggest.

  ‘Eyewitnesses,’ he whispered.

  ‘Did you ever take your masks off?’ Waverley asked.

  ‘Right at the end we did, when the woman and the girl were hanging from the rafters.

  That was something we wanted to relish good, you know, and what can you see from the inside of a fucking ice-hockey mask?’

  He hesitated, and even over the international telephone link, his voice was beginning to sound haunted. ‘Besides - you know - they were dead, or almost. So what could they possibly do? Who could they tell? We strung ‘em up with barbed wire, and -‘

  ‘That’s enough!’ Waverley snapped. ‘The last thing I want is to hear you incriminating yourself over the telephone. There’s no bug at this end but God only knows what listening and recording devices they have on the satellite. Chief Moyne was telling me that they have electronic sensors that automatically start recorders going every time a key word gets mentioned, like “gun” or “dope” or something like that.’

  ‘Well, if that’s true, you just started them going full-belt,’ Bob Stroup retorted with an unexpected crow of pleasure.

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ Waverley rapped at him. ‘You’re not so stupid that you can’t see it for yourself. If this Michael Hunter really can arrange for Randolph Clare to talk to his wife and children, what’s the second thing he’s going to say to them after telling them how much he loves them?’

  Bob Stroup sniffed. ‘I guess he’s going to want to know who did it.’

  ‘Precisely. He’s going to want to know who did it. And if this Michael Hunter is genuine, the possibilities are that he’s going to find out.’

  ‘So we’d better waste him as soon as we find him.’

  ‘You bet you’d better. And you don’t have much time. Neil Sleaman called in earlier this evening and said that Randolph Clare was on the way home. This morning’s flight to Djakarta, or tomorrow morning’s flight as far as you’re concerned. Then straight back to Memphis by way of London.’