She made no reply, gave no sign that she’d heard.
To encourage a response, rouse her, he said, “You’ve called Carley. And she and her boyfriend are on their way. Right?”
She nodded.
“When they get here, Paula and I will keep watch outside, in front. It’d take a tank to get into the rear of this building, and the building’s attached on both sides. So you’ll be safe.”
“Safe …” Bitterly, she nodded. “Sure. Safe for now.”
Bernhardt made no response. Sitting beside him now, Paula moved as if to say something. Surreptitiously, Bernhardt shook his head. The tactic was rewarded when Diane began speaking without prodding:
“I guess that maybe you believe me now. Daniels killed his girlfriend and then hired Kane to kill Jeff, to keep the secret. And now Kane’s come to kill me.” She spoke in a dull, dead monotone. Then she finished the glass of whiskey.
“It’s not that I didn’t believe you, Diane. But proving it, that’s something else.”
“I’m not interested in proving anything. I’m interested in staying alive.”
“You’re alive. And by now Kane’s fifty miles from here. Believe it.”
“Are you going to the police?” she asked. “Tell them what happened?”
“I’m going to talk to them tomorrow. I know a couple of lieutenants. I’ll talk to one of them. We do favors for each other. Are you prepared to say that it was Kane?”
“Definitely.”
“And you’re both sure”—he included Paula as he spoke—“you’re sure he was going to attack you?”
Silently, both women nodded.
“How close did he get to you?” Once more, he included both of them in the question.
“About ten feet,” Paula answered. “Maybe fifteen feet. Why?”
“There’s probably a legal difference between threatening an attack and actually making an attack.”
Contemptuously, Diane snorted. “Legal difference. Shit. How about—”
At the hallway door there was a click, metal-to-metal. Instantly Bernhardt was on his feet, instinctively flicking open the poplin jacket. With his hand on the butt of the revolver holstered at his belt, Bernhardt was in the short entry hallway as the door rattled against the security bolt.
“Diane?” A woman’s voice.
“That’s Carley,” Diane called.
Bernhardt drew the jacket together and opened the door.
1:45 A.M., PDT
WITH HIS ARM AROUND Paula, with her head resting on his shoulder, Bernhardt said, “You should go home. I’ve had some sleep. You haven’t. And you’ve had a shock.”
“How long’ve her lights been out?”
“A half hour. Maybe more.”
“I’ll give it another half hour.”
“Why?” he asked. “I’m just curious.”
“I guess I want to make sure she’s sleeping. It’ll help her, if she sleeps.”
“Okay …”
“I’m so goddamn mad at myself for not getting his license number.”
“Jesus, forget about it, Paula. You probably saved her life tonight.” He smiled down at her. “And without the police whistle, too.”
“It would’ve been interesting to see what the whistle would’ve done.”
“Next time.”
“So when do I get to carry a gun, like the boss?”
“No comment.”
A car turned into Noe from Twenty-sixth Street. Paula raised her head, looked. It was a small car, not the one Kane had used. Letting her head sink on his shoulder, a wonderfully secure sensation, she said, “Do you really think Kane’s fifty miles away?”
“I do.”
“Then what’re we doing here?”
“We’re cuddling.”
“Hmmm.
A companionable silence passed before Bernhardt asked, “Do you think Kane knows Diane recognized him?”
“I have no idea.”
“But what d’you think?”
“Alan—” Exasperated, she sharply shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“Okay …” Soothingly, he caressed her cheek, kissed the top of her head. “Relax.”
Another silence. Then, conciliatory, she asked, “What happens tomorrow, in the light of day?”
“First,” Bernhardt said, “I want to talk to my buddies at the police department. Then I want to talk to Diane’s father. Paul Cutler. If this thing—”
Across the street, lights suddenly blazed in Carley Hanks’s apartment. A figure stood at the big bay window. It was a woman’s figure. A terrified woman. Carley Hanks, desperate, shouting something unintelligible.
“Jesus—” Bernhardt threw his weight against the Honda’s driver-side door, swung it sharply open. At the other door, Paula was doing the same.
“No.” Bernhardt turned toward her, leveling a top-sergeant’s forefinger. “You stay here. On the phone.”
“But—”
“Do it, Paula.” Momentarily he locked eyes with her. Then he turned, sprinted across the street.
2:05 A.M., PDT
“DID YOU CALL NINE-ONE-ONE?” Bernhardt asked. It was an automatic question, a required question.
A useless question. Too late.
A lifetime too late.
She lay on the floor in front of the couch. Her open eyes were sightless; her mouth was agape. Already, her skin at the neck was cool to the touch. And, yes, the room reeked with the smell of her body’s wastes. As if it were a scene conceived by a director of B movies, her leather tote bag, open, spilling bottles of pills, lay on the couch beside her. One of the bottles was open; some of the pills from it had spilled out on the carpet beside Diane’s claw-crooked hand. Her fingernails, Bernhardt noticed, were bitten to the quick.
Poor little rich girl.
“Dale called, nine-one-one,” Carley Hanks’s voice was hardly more than a whisper.
“What happened?” As he asked the question, he focused his gaze on Carley: the living, not the dead. Across the room, pale and ill, Carley’s boyfriend—Dale—sat slumped on a straight-backed chair. His eyes were glazed. He looked like a badly beaten fighter, between rounds.
“As soon as you guys left,” Carley answered, “she got that goddamn tote bag from the closet, and started popping pills. Three, four pills, maybe more.” Numbed, she shook her head. “Then she started on the whiskey. A lot of whiskey.”
A lot of whiskey, before the couple arrived. And a lot of whiskey afterward. And pills. Quaaludes, probably. Or worse. Pills and alcohol, the killer combination.
“How’d you know—” Bernhardt broke off. But she understood the question:
“I don’t know what woke me up. Maybe nothing. I had a dream, I think that was it. And then—” Helplessly, her eyes returned to her dead friend, lying at her feet. At that moment, outside, the sound of a siren began.
2:30 A.M., PDT
THE AMBULANCE STEWARD LOOKED at Bernhardt’s license, looked at Bernhardt’s face. Then he shrugged. “The pills were Xanax. At least, that’s the bottle that was open. Mix a few of those with five or six ounces of whiskey, and everything stops working.” As he spoke, two police patrol cars turned into the block, one from either direction.
“Excuse me,” the steward said. “I’ve got to talk to these guys, then I’ll take her downtown. Any questions, ask at the coroner’s office.”
“Yes,” Bernhardt answered. “Yes, I know.”
SATURDAY,
August 4th
10:30 A.M., PDT
“MY GOD …” LIEUTENANT FRANK Hastings rose from his desk, turned away from Bernhardt, went to his office window. In his middle forties, Hastings was a big, muscular man. Born in San Francisco, Hastings had gone to Stanford on a football scholarship, then gone to Detroit to play second-string fullback for the Lions. He’d married an heiress whose father was part owner of the Lions. For a time their life was gilded with privilege and publicity. But an illegal block ended his playing days and Hastings took a make-work PR
job at his father-in-law’s factory. The job and the marriage had both been mistakes, and after three years a divorce was the only way out. The father-in-law used his checkbook and his clout to run Hastings out of Detroit. Drinking too much, lost without his two children, Hastings had come back to San Francisco and begun putting his life back together, a long, painful struggle. Hastings was a calm, deliberate man who thought before he acted and backed up what he said. His opposite number was Lieutenant Peter Friedman; together the two men cocommanded Homicide. Each man had been offered full command, and a captaincy. Both had declined. Hastings had seen enough interdepartmental politics working for his father-in-law. Friedman, who had a gift for playing the stock market, decided the extra money wasn’t worth the grief.
“My God,” Hastings repeated, “I wonder whether she had it right? I wonder whether Kane came to kill her?”
Bernhardt made no response. He’d been talking for almost an hour, and he’d only had two hours’ sleep.
“Have you tried to locate this guy?” Hastings asked.
“Not really. I called the airports, looking for the airplane. But that’s about it. I mean—” Resigned, he spread his hands, shook his head. “I mean, I’ve got other clients. And they’ve got bigger checkbooks, if you want the truth. Mostly, what I was doing with Diane Cutler was holding her hand.”
Hastings turned away from the window, returned to his desk, sat down. Outside the window the city’s chronic summer fog still clouded the sky, blotting out Hastings’s slivered view of the Bay Bridge and a wedge of the Berkeley hills beyond.
“Hand-holding can be important. Maybe very important in this case. She was obviously a very unhappy kid.”
Wordlessly, Bernhardt nodded, dropped his eyes. Hastings watched the other man for a moment, considering. Then: “Come on, Alan. Give yourself a break. You did what you could. My God, you got paid two hundred dollars. What more could you do?”
As if to protest, Bernhardt sharply shook his head. “They’re just kids, Frank. Eighteen years old. For Carley, two hundred has to be a lot of money.”
Studying Bernhardt, Hastings made no response. Then, quietly, he said, “Did you come for some help—or to bleed all over my office?”
It was the right remark, expertly timed. Result: Bernhardt’s expressive face began to clear, a smile began twitching at the corners of his mouth. He drew a long, resigned breath, then said, “Shit happens. Is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
Another deep breath. Finally: “I guess I came for advice, most of all.”
“Fine.”
“I figure,” Bernhardt said, “that I have a responsibility to find out what happened on Cape Cod.”
Hastings nodded. “I agree. But to do it, you’ll almost certainly have to go to Cape Cod. That’ll take time. And money, too. Are you ready to swallow that?”
“I’m sure as hell willing to go to her father, and ask for the money.”
“Good luck.”
“He’s rich. Her mother’s rich, too.”
“Her mother’s also married to Preston Daniels. The villain.”
Ruefully, Bernhardt smiled. Then, speculating: “My God, Frank—just imagine, if it’s all true. Preston Daniels kills his girlfriend. Preston Daniels hires his personal pilot to kill his stepdaughter’s boyfriend, because he saw Daniels burying his victim. Then Preston Daniels tells the villainous pilot to track down Daniels’s stepdaughter and kill her. Jesus—” Awed, Bernhardt shook his head. “This is a goddamn soap opera.”
Indulgently, Hastings smiled. “That’s one scenario. But how about if—” He glanced at the notes he’d taken while Bernhardt had told his story. “How about if it’s all a string of coincidences? It happens, you know. It happens all the time. Or what if Diane Cutler was conning you? What if she dreamed everything up—opium dreams? That happens, too. What if Kane came out here to persuade her to go back to her mom, no hard feelings? What if Daniels’s girlfriend just disappeared for reasons unknown? And the kid—Jeff Weston—he could’ve got killed the way a lot of people get killed, for the money in his pockets.”
Bernhardt nodded. “I’ve thought about all that.”
“Do you have the name of the missing girlfriend? Do you have an address?”
“No. Maybe Diane knew her name. But she didn’t tell me.”
“Pity. A name would help.”
“Could you …?” Bernhardt let it go unfinished.
“I can try. I’ll call this place”—another glance at his notes—“Carter’s Landing. I’ll see what I can find out. But that’s all I can do, Alan. You understand.”
“Sure …” Resigned, Bernhardt nodded.
“For God’s sake, don’t take it so hard.”
“She died while I was parked outside, on guard, Frank. I gave her one of the drinks that killed her. I owe somebody for that.”
“She died because she was a very unhappy kid. She was on drugs. She freaked out because she thought Kane came to kill her. But she could’ve been wrong. It’s as simple as that. Like I said, Kane could have—”
“He had a club. Both of them saw it. Diane and Paula, they both saw the club.”
“Listen, Alan.” Earnestly, Hastings leaned across his desk. “These things happen in seconds. And it was dark. Diane already had it fixed in her mind that someone, maybe Kane, was going to kill her. There’s a name for that. It’s called paranoia. And when she saw what she was afraid she’d see, she went over the edge, and OD’d. It happens, Alan. God knows, it happens. And this girl seems to fit the profile. Completely. If she hadn’t OD’d last night, then it’d just be another time, another place. And soon, probably. Very soon.”
“If I find that Kane was in San Francisco last night, though …”
“It might not prove a thing. If he denies that he was here, and if you can prove he was here, that’s something else. Otherwise, if he says he was here on an errand of mercy—trying to help Diane with her demons—who’s to contradict him? Now—” Hastings dropped his voice, deepening the emphasis. “Now, if you find the girlfriend’s body in that landfill, and if you find her blood type in Daniels’s car, or his house, that’s something else. A tire tread matching Kane’s car at the scene of the Jeff Weston killing, that wouldn’t hurt, either.”
Morosely, Bernhardt made no response.
“You knew I was going to say all this, Alan.”
“Sure I did. But, Jesus—” He shook his head. “But it was just a few hours ago that—”
Hastings rose, put his hands flat on the desk, sympathetically shook his head. “It’s no fun, seeing them dead. Some cops say they get used to it. I suppose some do. But I’d rather work with the ones who don’t.”
“Yeah …” Bernhardt, too, rose to his feet. “Well, thanks, Frank. Thanks a lot.”
Ruefully, Hastings smiled. “What you really mean is ‘thanks for nothing.’ But the truth is, there isn’t a damn thing I can do about this. Absolutely nothing, officially. There’s been no crime committed in my jurisdiction, not even a reasonable suspicion. I’ll make a phone call to Carter’s Landing, but it could do more harm than good. Rural cops, as you may discover, can get pretty territorial. And if they decide to stick it to a big-city cop—well—they can do it.”
“I’m not a cop, though.”
“Even worse.”
11:10 A.M., PDT
“THERE YOU ARE, MR. Foster.” The airline clerk handed over the ticket envelope with a practiced flourish and a mechanical smile. “That flight will be boarding in exactly an hour, gate thirty-three.”
“Thank you.” Kane pocketed the envelope, turned away from the sales counter, glanced up at the overhead display of gate numbers. Yes, gate thirty-three, concourse C. There would be a snack bar on the concourse. He would have doughnuts and coffee. On the airplane, they would certainly serve lunch.
At a souvenir shop he’d bought a flimsy nylon flight bag, for carry-on luggage. “Protective coloration” was the phrase. A man
traveling without luggage from San Francisco to New York would surely be remembered. Then he’d bought two newspapers and two paperback books, to give the flight bag bulk. Now he walked to the security scanner, put the flight bag on the conveyor belt and stepped through the scanner, no buzzers, no alarms.
No alarms …
“Kane,” the woman had shouted.
Over and over, the words had reverberated: “Kane,” followed by “Drop it, you bastard.”
And he’d run. He’d turned his back, run to the car, driven away. His hands on the steering wheel had been shaking. He’d hardly turned the corner before the images had begun to flash: the woman, standing in the middle of the street, watching him drive away. The woman, surely a policewoman, surely copying down the rental car’s license number. Then the green-on-black computer screen, displaying the name of the car-rental agency.
Followed by his name, his address, his New York driver’s license number.
Ahead, he saw the snack bar sign. There was no line. He placed the nylon flight bag beside a small table facing out across the airport. He bought a cup of overpriced coffee and an overpriced butterhorn. Carrying the coffee cup, almost full, his hands were steady. Seated at the table, biting into the butterhorn without tasting it, he turned his attention to the runway far beyond the snack bar’s window, where a DC-10 was about to touch down.
But the images persisted: Diane and the policewoman, at police headquarters. Constable Joe Farnsworth, his pig eyes studying a printout: Bruce Kane, current address. Occupation.
Current employer: Preston Daniels.
Preston Daniels, questioned by the police. Preston Daniels, consulting with his lawyers. Pompous, bloated lawyers, the rich protecting the rich. Making the deals. Paying off the politicians who paid off the police who took the money and smiled.
Take the money and smile.
Take the money and run.
Buy an airplane. A Beechcraft single, or a Mooney. Fly up to Canada, and disappear.
Except for the Bones Page 18