I pushed the seat back in place, located and freed the trunk release before shutting the door. Around to the rear, then, to lift the trunk lid.
There was one item on the carpeted floor inside: a large, bulky laundry sack closed at the top by a drawstring. I loosened the string, widened the opening to see what was inside the bag.
Antanas Vok was inside the bag.
Shabby, ripped, dirt-caked black suit that stank of rotting meat. Stained white shirt. Old, dirty black shoes. Wide-brimmed black slouch hat. Realistic theatrical mask with dark bushy eyebrows and Vandyke beard glued on, the malleable latex material coated with some sort of luminous paint to give it an eerie glow in the dark. A pair of black gloves, fingers and thumbs on each painted to resemble skeletal hands.
There was a handgun, too, a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson five-shot revolver. I picked it up by the trigger guard, using the back of my index finger, and sniffed the barrel. Fired recently. With a couple of knuckles I broke the weapon to peer at the chambers. Three empty shells, two loaded ones. And all of them would be blanks. I shot him three times, but he wouldn’t fall down; he just kept coming at me. Yeah, blanks.
No surprises in any of this. Vinson had to have been the one impersonating Vok; Erskine was too smart to bring a third party into the scheme. She was the right height, the same approximate size. With that outfit and the mask on, and the hat pulled down low over her forehead, she’d have passed easily for a middle-aged man. Plus she’d had acting experience, enough to pull off the menacing act with Erskine’s help and guidance.
I stuffed everything back into the sack, retightened the drawstring, then lifted the bag out. I couldn’t risk leaving it here without constant surveillance on the BMW; she might decide, or Erskine might tell her, to make it all disappear. I closed the trunk, relocked the driver’s door, and pocketed the key in case it became necessary to return the sack at some point. Then I swung it up over my shoulder and quick-stepped down the empty driveway.
Two cars passed on my way to where I’d parked mine, but so far as I could tell none of the occupants paid any attention to me. Tenants hauling their laundry to a nearby Laundromat were common sights in almost any neighborhood. Just the same, I felt an easing of tension once the bag was locked away in the trunk.
* * *
What had taken place at the Erskine home last night was clear now. It must have gone something like this:
In costume Vinson slips onto the property same as the other times, catches Marian Erskine unaware inside the house or already sitting out on the terrace, advances on her in a threatening manner. Victim has the gun in hand or close to hand, fires three of what she believes are live rounds. Vinson keeps coming, the way a genuine revenant would. And in horror and sudden savage pain down goes Marian Erskine.
Then Vinson makes her first mistake. She’s supposed to be certain the victim is dead before calling 911, but haste and nervousness cause her to misdiagnose; she doesn’t realize until the firefighters arrive that Mrs. Erskine is still alive. Bad moment for her, but she manages to hang on to her nerve. By then she’s retrieved the gun, gone to wherever she stashed her regular clothing, changed, loaded the costume and weapon into the laundry bag, and hid the bag in the trunk of her car.
Her second mistake was leaving the bag there. Maybe she was supposed to get rid of the contents somewhere, or at least hide the revolver inside her apartment until she could return it to Erskine. Or maybe she just didn’t think there was any hurry. From her perspective, no one had any reason to search her car.
I had a case now against the two of them: my testimony, Marian Erskine’s dying words, the array of sure to be fingerprint-laden evidence in the sack. But it was by no means conclusive, not where a wealthy Atherton citizen and allegedly bereaved widower was concerned. Enough, maybe, to convince the local authorities to mount an investigation, but just as likely not. I needed more solid proof.
So?
Couple of options. Pack it in for the day, go home to my family, and take steps tomorrow to see Melanie Vinson alone and try to crack her as I’d originally intended. Or stay put for a while in the hope that she’d return at a reasonable hour and I could brace her tonight. If she was with Erskine and he went into her town house with her, all the better. I liked the prospect of bracing the two of them together in a place he had no good reason for being the day after his wife’s death, catching them off guard, making an effort to provoke her if not him into an incriminating slip with the tape recorder running. I’d settle for Vinson alone, but it was Erskine I most wanted to confront.
The second option, then. I dislike stakeouts after sitting through scores of them over the years, but I was angry and determined enough to tolerate one more of short duration. And I had a good vantage point from here, a clear look at the front entrance to the complex. Seven-thirty now. Give it a couple of hours at least.
I called Kerry to tell her I’d be home late, then tried to make myself comfortable. Good luck with that, in Tamara’s vernacular. My aging body tends to cramp up if I sit more than a few minutes in any one position, and shifting around only increases the pressure on my tailbone. I had to get out twice and take short walks in the cold wind to stretch the kinks out of my lower back.
Eight-thirty, nine o’clock. A few cars arrived and parked on the street or pulled into the nearside driveway, and half a dozen people went in through the front entrance. None of them was Vinson or Erskine.
Hunger pangs increased my discomfort. I hadn’t eaten since a light lunch. In the old days I kept a bunch of light snacks—potato chips, peanut butter crackers, cookies—in the car for unplanned-for downtime such as this, but now that I did little fieldwork and had pretty much given up junk food for health reasons, I no longer bothered to stock up. All I found when I rummaged around in the glove box was one of the dinky little energy bars Emily is fond of. Apricot, except it didn’t taste much like apricot; it tasted like chewy cardboard and only made me hungrier.
Nine-thirty.
Quarter of ten.
The hell with it. It had been a long day, I was tired and stiff and cold as well as hungry, and it was a forty-some-mile drive back to the city. No sense in pushing myself past a sensible limit. Start fresh tomorrow.
I got the engine going and headed for home.
16
But home was not where I went. I took an impulsive and ill-advised detour instead.
I was on Page Mill Road, nearing the intersection with Highway 280, when the thought began to nag at me that Erskine might have taken Vinson home with him. Would the son of a bitch be that bold, that callous? Sure he would. Dinner first, maybe, someplace where they weren’t known, then a return to the scene of the crime to finish up their celebration. No risk to him; he’d committed the perfect murder, hadn’t he? It wasn’t likely any of the neighbors would notice them arriving, but if they were spotted and the fact was later mentioned to him, why, he’d just say she was helping put his wife’s affairs in order, or comforting him in his time of need. He wouldn’t give much of a damn what the neighbors thought anyway.
Couldn’t hurt to swing by his house, could it? It was more or less on the way, a round-trip detour off 280 of only a few miles. If the place was dark I needn’t stop; if it showed lights I could ring the bell, late as it was, and see if I could get him to let me in—feed him a story about being on my way back from San Jose, where I’d uncovered some information about the Leno brothers. Might just work. Then what I could do was make it plain, without actually accusing him, that I had the entire scheme figured. Escalate the war of nerves—the Javert treatment. If Vinson was there and stashed someplace where she could listen to the conversation, it might scare her enough so she’d be easier to crack when I tackled her alone.
It was not much of an idea, a product of weariness, frustration, and a compulsive need to confront Erskine, but I could not talk myself out of it. When the Atherton exit came up, I turned off and let the disembodied voice guide me through a series of curves and turns to the Erski
ne property.
No lights showed at the front of the house, but the gates at the foot of the drive were wide open. Funny. Whether he was home or not, why hadn’t he bothered to close them?
I turned in between them for a better view. Amber-colored ground lanterns illuminated the driveway; more of the same glowed like stationary fireflies all across the grounds. I couldn’t tell from here whether or not there were any lit windows at the sides or rear of the house. Except for the night-lights, the darkness was thick with restless shadows. Overhead, fast-moving clouds driven by high-altitude winds hid the stars and the sickle moon except for brief breaks in the leaden canopy.
Well?
Well, I’d come this far. Go on up and ring the bell and let’s see what happens.
I drove through the gates and up the drive. Halfway along, where the shrubbery thinned out, I could see part of the lantern-lit path that led to the summerhouse, a darkened hulk against the screen of evergreens. A faint yellowish sheen lay over a portion of the side terrace: drapes open in the sunroom, one or more lights burning inside.
A light-colored Corvette drawn up on the white-pebble parking area confirmed that at least Erskine was here. I rolled up next to it, doused the headlamps. When I got out, I stepped over to the Corvette and laid a hand on its hood. Warm. Wherever he’d been tonight, he hadn’t been home long.
I crossed slowly to the porch. The night’s silence was broken only by wind-rattle in trees and shrubbery; there were no sounds that I could make out inside the house. If Vinson was here with him, they were somewhere at the rear—in bed together, like as not.
I put my finger on the bell, but I didn’t push it. There was tension in me all of a sudden; the skin across my neck and shoulders had begun to pull and prickle. Another of those sixth-sense feelings of wrongness, sudden this time, setting off the silent danger alarm inside my head.
For some seconds I stood still, listening, looking around. Still quiet inside the house, nothing visibly or aurally changed out here. But the feeling remained strong just the same. Strong enough to prod me off the porch, over onto a lit path that led around on the terraced side.
I hadn’t gone more than a few steps when the woman screamed.
The cry came from outside the house, toward the rear—a high-pitched shriek that shattered the stillness and brought me up short, raised the hairs on the back of my neck.
Confusion of sounds then: garbled yells, scrapings and scufflings, a sharp metallic clatter as of a wrought-iron table or chair knocked over onto the terrace bricks. The woman screeched again, terrified words this time that carried distinctly on the wind.
“Peter, who … oh, God, this can’t be happening!”
Another scraping noise, the pop of shattering glass.
The woman: “What’re you doing? Why are you—? No! No, don’t—!”
Running footfalls. And then the sudden crack of a gun, a large-caliber weapon that sent echoes hammering through the darkness.
I had taken a couple of steps toward the corner; the report twisted me around, sent me running back to the car. Only a damn fool rushes unarmed into an unknown, firearms-deadly situation. I dragged the car door open, leaned in to release the hidden compartment under the dash, yanked out the snub-nosed Colt Bodyguard I keep in there for emergencies, and ran back toward the far side of the house.
More sounds battered the night, a male voice now, yelling something I couldn’t understand.
Near the corner I slowed, holding the .38 up next to my ear, drawing in close to the sweet-smelling shrubbery that grew there; charge out into the open and you’re a target even on a dark night. Before I could get my head around for a clear look, the yelling morphed into a kind of panicked wail. Other cries followed it, diminishing. Man on the run, howling like a banshee.
I stepped out away from the shrubbery with the revolver leveled. A rent in the cloud cover opened just then, letting enough starlight and moonshine leak through to bathe the yard in faint luminescence. In the two or three beats before the tear closed, I had a glimpse of what seemed to be two figures stumbling up the steps into the summerhouse, one clinging to the other from behind. False impression, my old eyes playing tricks. Only one figure had fused into the black-dark inside—Erskine, still emitting that half-crazed wail.
The night was shadow haunted again as I ran in a crouch toward the side terrace. I did not see the woman until I was only a few feet from where she lay in a dip in the lawn beyond the bricks, facedown with both arms outflung.
I veered that way, dropped to one knee beside her—and my stomach churned even though I was braced for the worst. The slug from the shot I’d heard had opened up the back of her head just above the neck; spatters of blood and bone and brain matter matted her black hair. Melanie Vinson. I did not need to touch her to verify it.
Over in the summerhouse, the wailing stopped and Erskine’s voice bellowed, “You can’t force me this time, I won’t let you! Go back where you came from, go to hell!” Then the gun banged loud again.
I ducked instinctively, but the round hadn’t been directed my way. Almost immediately, there was another outburst from Erskine in the summerhouse darkness, rising above the noises made by the wind. “Not me, goddamn you, not me, not me!”
The cries were soaked in such visceral terror they drove me up onto my feet, sideways to the path that led over there. Erskine spewed something else, but the wind gusted just then and tore away the sense of it. The wildly flailing tree branches and running clouds created a gyrating dance of shadows, surreal, like images in a madman’s dream.
The gun went off a third time.
I was looking straight at the summerhouse and I saw the muzzle flash, saw the shape of him as he went down. An instant later, I saw something else, or thought I did—a different kind of flare, so brief it was like a subliminal image of a comet’s tail streaking across the night sky. Gone in an eyeblink, if it had ever been there in the first place.
I stepped farther away from the path, to keep out of the amber glow from the lanterns. But nothing else happened. Silence, now, inside the summerhouse. The only sounds anywhere were the whistles and moans of the wind and the rattling tree branches.
I kept on going, slow, getting the pencil flash out of my pocket with my left hand as I went. At the summerhouse steps I paused again to listen—still nothing to hear—and then climbed them carefully with the .38 extended.
Needless precaution. What was left of Peter Erskine lay on the floor next to one of the chaise lounges, his head as much a bloody mess as Melanie Vinson’s, the weapon he’d used, a .357 Magnum, clutched in one hand. The pencil light showed something else, too: scratches on his neck and back, rips in his shirt in half a dozen places.
And no one else was there.
17
The official police verdict, based on what I’d witnessed that night and on the evidence corroborating my suspicions about Marian Erskine’s fatal coronary, was murder-suicide. Of course.
That was my verdict, too. Of course.
Peter Erskine had had a psychotic break, brought on by factors that could only be guessed at: fear of punishment for the murder of his wife, uncontrollable rage against his co-conspirator, an unstable psychological makeup. He’d killed Melanie Vinson because she wanted more money, or had threatened him in some way, or for no rational reason at all—love and lust flaring into sudden hatred, sudden violence. Then he’d cracked up completely, run screaming to the summerhouse, and blown himself away on the second try.
He’d been the only one in there, all three bullets fired had come from his Magnum, and the only fingerprints found on the weapon were his. It was inconceivable that another person could have been on the property, chased him after he shot the woman, dodged the first bullet, taken the weapon away and used it on Erskine, then escaped without my seeing any sign of him. The figure that had seemed to be clinging to Erskine was simply a distortion of shadows created by the scudding clouds and the wind-tossed evergreens. The torn shirt and the scratches o
n his back and neck had been done by Melanie Vinson during the struggle I’d heard on the terrace. The first shot from inside the summerhouse had been aimed at himself, only he’d been in such a state he’d missed completely; that slug had been found lodged in one of the support posts. And the words I’d heard him shouting were nothing more than deranged babblings.
The other explanation that crawled into my head, the supernatural one, I dismissed immediately as absurd. And did not mention to anybody, not even Tamara and Jake Runyon. Antanas Vok’s spirit had returned after all to exact vengeance by means of assault and demonic possession? Erskine’s blatant, contemptuous mockery of the powers of darkness had provoked sufficient wrath to permit it to happen? No. Hell, no. The only demons at work that night were the ones that existed inside Peter Erskine’s psyche.
Never mind that a ruthless control freak who had put together a murder plan requiring cold, steel-nerved calculation is about as unlikely a candidate for mental breakdown and willful self-destruction as there is. Never mind that he believed he’d gotten away with it, and therefore had fifteen million reasons to maintain his emotional balance and to go on living. Never mind that the bullet in the support post had been at belt level, opposite where he’d been standing, as if he had fired not at himself but at someone or something in front of him. Never mind that neither skin nor blood had been found under Melanie Vinson’s fingernails. And never mind the subliminal flare I thought I’d seen just after the second shot in the summerhouse; it was either my imagination or a retinal anomaly, an afterimage of the gun flash. There are always inconsistencies, unanswerable questions in cases like this. People go off the deep end all the time, for no clear-cut reasons. I’d seen it happen before, on more than one occasion.
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