“He committed suicide?”
“I don’t like to call it by that name. He didn’t shoot himself, or take poison. It wasn’t necessary, in his condition. Abel got up out of bed and destroyed the furniture in his room. He broke it up, piece by piece, with his hands. I tried to stop him, but it was no use. He threatened to kill me if I set foot in there. He died of the effort, and the anger with himself. When things were quiet, and I dared to go in, I found him in the wreckage.”
“Why don’t you try for some rest now, Helen? You’ve had a terrible day.”
“I can’t. I’ve had an incredible day, but I can’t even think about sleep.”
“I have some Nembutals at home.”
“No,” she answered brusquely. “I have pills, too. I prefer not to sleep. I know it’s irrational but I have the feeling that if I keep thinking I’ll be able to think where Jamie is.”
“You love him, don’t you?”
“Everybody does. I love him most. He’s my son.”
“The chances are Miner is holding him somewhere in the desert.” I told her about Lemp’s “timetable,” which I had given to Forest. “Do you know of any place in the desert where Miner would be likely to take him?”
“No. Fred always hated the desert.” She added thoughtfully: “We have a cabin in the desert. He wouldn’t dare to take Jamie to our own house.”
“It’s worth considering. It might have struck them as good tactics, on the least-likely principle. Is there anybody in your desert house?”
“Not now. We closed it last month for the season. It’s too hot in the summer.”
“Where are the keys?”
“Abel kept them in his desk. I’ll get them.”
She left the room, and returned quickly, looking distraught. “They’re gone.”
“Where is this place? Does it have a telephone?”
“Of course.”
She brought me a telephone and gave me a Palmdale number. At three o’clock in the morning, the call went through immediately. Among husky rumors of transcontinental conversations, I heard the rural telephone ring four times, then four more times. The receiver at the other end was lifted.
“Pacific Point calling,” the operator said.
There was a long pause.
“Is anyone there?” the operator said. “Pacific Point is calling.”
The receiver was replaced. There was a colloquy of operators; then: “I’m sorry, sir, your party does not answer.”
“But there was someone there?”
“I think so, sir. Shall I have them ring again?”
Close to my ear, Helen cried: “Yes! Please! I know he’s there. It couldn’t be anyone else.”
“No, thank you,” I said to the operator, and hung up.
Helen grasped my shoulder with both hands, and shook me: “He’s there! Talk to him. I have to know.”
“No, we might frighten him off. It’s possible we’ve done that already.”
Her emotions were swaying in great surges. She cried with equal passion: “Yes! You’re right. We’ve got to go there, now, immediately.”
“We?”
“I wouldn’t trust anyone else.”
I reached for the telephone. “I’ll notify Forest.”
Her hand closed over mine, slender and strong. “You’ll tell no one. I’m taking no chances, understand. Fred Miner can go Scot free if he gives me Jamie back. He can keep the money—”
“How far is it?”
“About a two-hour drive. We can do it faster if we take the Lincoln.”
“The F.B.I. can do it still faster by plane.”
“I don’t care. I want my boy to be alive when we reach him.” She was obdurate, her mind completely fixed on one final hope. I made no further attempt to argue with her. She was perfectly ready to go alone if she had to.
“Where’s Seifel?” I said. “He might be some use if we run into trouble.”
“He went into the pantry to make himself a drink. He never did come out. Hurry and find him.”
The lights were on in the butler’s pantry, and Seifel had left spoor: a silver pail half-full of melting ice, an icepick floating half-submerged in it, a bottle of Bushmill’s Irish Whiskey standing open, a wet ring whitening on the black oak sideboard. Animal noises reached me from another part of the house.
I found him in a bathroom, dousing his head in a basin of cold water. The fluorescent light thrust a white shaft through an open door across the master bedroom, making a cross-section of the chaos Helen had described. In his last hour Abel Johnson had gone berserk. The bed had been dismantled, its coverings torn, the drapes dragged down from the windows, the windows and mirrors smashed. The angry man had fought himself to a finish, bringing his life down in ruins around his own head.
Seifel raised his dripping face and reached for a towel. “Don’t mind me, I’ve been sick. Feeling much better now. I should never mix my drinks.” He shuddered behind the towel.
Above the square blue bathtub in one corner of the room, an Aubrey Beardsley drawing was recessed in the wall behind glass. It depicted a young woman with a swan neck, serpent eyes, hair like a tropical forest. She was perfectly drawn, debonair and evil.
“On your horse,” I said to Seifel, who was retying his tie. “We’re going for a ride.”
“A ride? Where to?”
“I’ll tell you on the way. Come on. You don’t have to look pretty.”
“One moment. There’s something I wanted to say to you, in private.”
I was prepared for a fist-fight on the spot, under the eyes of Beardsley’s dark-haired lady. But Seifel was truly unpredictable. He said:
“I want to apologize. I’d had too much to drink, and Helen had been rather rough on me. What’s more, you were right. I remember Kerry Snow—the name at least; I never saw the man. I turned him in for desertion in ’46.”
“Without ever seeing him?”
“Right. I told the F.B.I. where to find him.”
“Where did you get the information?”
He hesitated, swallowing shame. “I have to tell someone, I guess. It might as well be you. Helen gave me the man’s address. She asked me to have him apprehended. Just don’t tell her I told you.” He smiled dismally.
His mechanism seemed obvious. Helen had turned him down, and he was retaliating. An urge to hit him rushed up into my head and almost blinded me. It ebbed like a wave, leaving me chilly. Yet I didn’t doubt the truth of what he had said.
I thrust it out of the foreground of my thoughts and went outside, with Seifel at my heels. The wind had risen higher. Above the sighing trees the whole sky seemed to be swaying, threatening to topple.
The black Lincoln that had killed Kerry Snow was purring in the drive. Helen was at the wheel. She moved over to let me take it, and explained to Larry Seifel where we were going.
CHAPTER 22: The big car was clumsy on the hillside. I drove it angrily, punishing the brakes and tires on the hairpin curves. The wind died down as we descended. The road uncoiled in a long curve that joined with a two-lane black-top. This ran ruler-straight to the middle of the inland valley, where it met the north-south highway. I pushed the car to ninety and held it there.
Seifel was in the back seat, hunched forward close to my shoulder, watching the road dart backward through the narrow gantlet of the orange groves. Helen held her shotgun in her lap. No one spoke.
Before we reached Pasadena and the foothills of the mountains, dawn had begun to outline their crags and peaks with an etching-tool. We ascended through fading night into gray day. In the summit of the pass, I switched off the headlights. The sky was a dull green, like stagnant water. Every wrinkle of the cliffs was distinct. Great patches of dirty snow lay at their bases, and along the sides of the road. Their chill edged the wind.
Helen shivered, and drew her leopard-skin coat closer around her shoulders. The gun rolled off her knees and rattled on the floor.
“Be careful with that,” I said sharply.
“I am being car
eful.” She retrieved it from the floor.
“Keep it out of sight when we get there. I have a gun in my pocket, but I’m not planning to use it if I can help it. This is a situation where violence might backfire.”
She didn’t answer. I glanced at her face, and saw how pale she was. Her eyes, dull and heavy like a reflection of the sky, were gazing far ahead and down across the desert. Its whitish earth, scrawled with winding dirt roads and drifts of brush, stippled with Joshua trees, lay perfectly distinct a mile below. Twenty miles of mountain driving brought us down to it, and into its dust.
I slowed for a crossroads ahead.
“We turn left here,” she said. “It’s only another five miles.… God, how I despise this place, this unholy, empty place. It was never meant for human beings at all. It’s the abomination of desolation.”
“I understood you came here for winter vacations.”
“We did. Abel always had. I couldn’t deny him his pleasure. He loved it here, it took him back to his deer-hunting days.”
“Fred Miner couldn’t take it, is that right?”
“That’s true, the dry air bothered him. It’s strange he should have chosen this place, under our very noses in a sense, and yet it’s the back of beyond. What was it you said at the house, that he was operating on the least-likely principle?”
“We all should have thought of it before. You’ve read Poe’s ‘Purloined Letter.’ ”
“A long time ago, when I was in school.”
“Was that so terribly long ago?”
“Æons and æons.” She murmured softly and ruefully, to herself: “The purloined boy.” Her hands were gripping the stock and barrel of the shotgun.
Marked by a row of country mailboxes, a side road meandered off to the right. One of the mailboxes was stenciled with the name ABEL JOHNSON. Helen touched my arm: “Turn here.”
I turned. At the top of a rise, she cried: “Look, you can see the cabin.”
I caught a glimpse of the building, a low-roofed stone structure hugging the flat top of a knoll, perhaps a mile away. Straight up from its squat stone chimney, a narrow blue ribbon of smoke was being unreeled onto a transparent green-glass sky. The air was so clear that I could see the light-gray mortar between the moss-dark chimneystones.
We went down into a shallow arroyo, losing sight of the cabin like a ship in the trough of the waves. The road followed the arroyo bed for half a mile, then climbed the other side. At the top of this second rise, the incredible happened.
“I see him,” Helen said. “I see my boy. He’s safe.”
Seifel leaned forward between us across the back of the seat. “Where is he?”
“See him? He’s playing ball. He’s all right, Larry. Look.”
The boy was on a concrete terrace at the front of the cabin, tossing a rubber ball against the door and trying unsuccessfully to catch it. His red head flared like a tiny beacon.
“Hurry,” his mother said beside me. She flung her body forward urgently, as if her movement could increase the speed of the car.
The gun fell across my right foot on the accelerator. I snatched it up and handed it back to Seifel. Helen was oblivious, fixed on the figure of the boy, which appeared and disappeared and appeared again.
At last he saw the Lincoln and recognized it. With a joyful yelp, he dropped his ball and came running out to the road. I braked, but not quickly enough. His mother staggered out of the moving car and fell on her knees in the dust. Then the boy was in her arms.
The door of the cabin opened outward suddenly. Fred Miner came out in his shirtsleeves, an automatic in his hand.
“Mrs. Johnson!” he called on a loud note of surprise. “Is everything okay?”
Almost simultaneously, the shotgun roared from the back seat. One of Miner’s arms moved as if it had been pushed backward by an invisible hand. The automatic clanked on the terrace. Miner ran inside.
I turned on Seifel: “Don’t be a fool. You’ll draw his fire.”
“I winged him,” he said excitedly.
The boy disengaged himself from the leopard-skin arms. “Why are they shooting at Fred, Mummy? Did he do something wrong?”
“It’s only a game, Jamie.”
I swung the door wide. “Get into the car, both of you. We’re all getting out of here.”
But Miner had anticipated us. There was a rapid burst of explosions. The bronze Jaguar shot out of the carport beside the cabin. The top was down, and I could see Miner’s face intent over the wheel. The sports car crossed the road in front of us in a flurry of dust, skidded into a turn at the foot of the slope, and turned back to the road a hundred yards behind us. Before I could get the Lincoln turned and straightened out, the Jaguar was a mile or more away, an invisible comet with a winding tail of dust.
I turned to the boy. “Is anybody else out here?”
“No, sir. Just me and Fred.”
“Did he treat you all right?”
He looked puzzled.
“He didn’t hurt you, Jamie?” his mother said.
“Fred wouldn’t hurt me. Fred and me are shipmates.”
I said to Seifel: “You stay here with Helen and the boy. Call the police, et cetera.”
“Let me go after him.” His face was shining with a kind of buck fever.
“No.”
Helen climbed out of the car with the boy in her arms, struggling, and Seifel followed them. I followed Miner’s dust.
It was still very early, and there were no other cars. The trail of dust hung in the still air over the road like a curling white worm. It led south across the arid valley, back towards the wall of mountains. Their snow-capped peaks were dazzling now in the full sun.
Twice I caught sight of the Jaguar bouncing over the top of a rise like a low-slung brown rabbit. It was far ahead, and increasing its lead. Since the Lincoln did better than ninety in the straightaways, Miner’s car must have been doing well over a hundred. It struck me wryly that he was breaking the conditions of his probation.
I caught sight of it for the third time when it reached the southern rim of the valley, by now a tiny bronze beetle blowing a small derisive spume of dust. It raced below the leaning basalt slabs that buttressed the base of the mountain. Then it was lost in the trees on the shaggy mountainside.
Four minutes and five miles later I was at the foot of the basalt cliffs. Beyond them the road turned sharply and steeply upward. For a screeching, sliding instant the big car threatened to roll. I stamped the gas pedal to the floorboard, braking with my left foot. The rear wheels churned the gravel of the shoulder and pushed back onto the road. Miner’s dust was there ahead, obscuring the road and talcuming my windshield.
The desert flora gave way to scrub oaks and these in turn to larger trees, great pines and spruce. The road grew narrower and more treacherous, doubling and redoubling on itself. Far up ahead a patch of snow glittered like a medal on the mountain’s shoulder. The road curved round the end of an oval lake that mirrored trees and sky. The higher it went the narrower it grew. I began to hope that Miner, with all his speed, was in a dead end.
Then I saw a gleam of chrome through the trees, and heard him coming. There were no side roads above the lake. The single road we were on was just wide enough for two cars to pass each other. On my left the bank sloped up at an angle of forty-five or fifty degrees. On the other side the shoulder fell off sharply into a ravine where a mountain brook rushed downward from the snowbeds.
The Jaguar appeared around a curve, headed directly for me. Miner had come to the end of the road and turned back. I braked and jerked the steering-wheel to the right, skidding to a stop broadside across the road. He didn’t slacken speed. If anything, he accelerated. I flung myself backward across the width of the car and fumbled for the door button. But there was no impact.
The Jaguar swerved sharply to my left and climbed the bank. For a moment it looked as if the maneuver might work. Miner was poised above me, forty feet off the road, like a pilot in an open cockpit.
Then one of his tires went out with a gunshot report. The Jaguar left the slope, turned turtle in the air, hung there for a long instant with Miner suspended head-down from the steering-wheel, and fell back to earth. Over and over it rolled, down into the road behind me.
Miner was flung out halfway down the slope. He was sitting up when I reached him, coughing bright blood and holding his chest together with one arm. His other arm hung loose, its sleeve soaked with blood. His brow was deeply ridged as if by a giant nutcracker.
His eyes saw me. “Mess. I could of held it with two good arms. Teach me to break the speed laws.”
“Why did you do it, Fred?”
“She told me to.” His voice was guttural, his breath beginning to bubble. “I know I broke my conditions. But it’s pretty rough when you fire on a guy for that.”
“It wasn’t for that.”
“What then? I was only protecting the boy. I brought him out here for his own protection.”
“Who told you to do that?”
“Mrs. Johnson. She’s the boss.”
Then his eyes lost their light, and he toppled. I caught him under the arms. His body was heavier than lead.
CHAPTER 23: I took him back to the desert house, driving slowly because I distrusted my nerves. The wrecked sports-car had blocked the road until I had it removed. I finally found a telephone at the ski lift where the road ended, and got in touch with a tow service in Palmdale, forty miles away. It took over two hours altogether. It was midmorning when I reached the Johnson place.
A black custom-built Ford was nosed under the carport I parked behind it. When I stepped out of the car, the weight of the sun was palpable on my head. The landscape shimmered slightly like a painted curtain concealing a still more desolate reality.
Forest was standing in the doorway with a tall glass of something in his left hand and a revolver in his right hand. He returned the gun to its shoulder holster. “Catch him?”
“He’s in the trunk of the car, wrapped in a blanket.”
His broad face was impassive. “You had to shoot him, eh?”
“No. He cracked up, trying to get away. Where’s Mrs. Johnson?”
Meet Me at the Morgue Page 15