“Settle down,” he said jokingly as he poured his brandy. “Don’t rush yourself or me. As you said, let’s talk.”
Julie stammered a few unintelligible words, her mind cruising in useless circles, desperate to pick up a thought that was relevant. She loved—still loved—Peyton. He was back and needing help in a hurry. When he had asked her if she had found someone else in his absence, she had mentioned Louis as a personal friend, feeling strangely that she was lying. For Louis her desires stopped at the friendship stage. But for Louis Strack himself, well . . . he had been making his desires more and more obvious. Yes, Louis, was a man on the move.
Sure, the evening a few days ago had been a catastrophe, that evening he tried to kiss her. The next evening had been far better, and under the pressure of his hands and fingers she reluctantly had given in. But as her mother would have secretly asked when Julie was a teenager, “For God’s sake, did you go all the way?”
To be honest, no. After the incident on the balcony Louis had become the wounded lover, bereft of pride, ego-battered, love-tested to the extreme. And when he did rub her thigh a night or two ago, she had not protested. When his fingers crawled up her skirt on a mission very important for him, she had not thumped him with an ashtray. Expecting the night to end as it should have, she had been startled when he stood up and announced that he must go home and to bed.
Strange character, Louis. In forty-eight hours he had turned Julie’s unintentional victory on the balcony into a success for himself. The lady was primed, the night was soft and full of promise, the liquor flowed by the bucket. Somewhere in that process she forgot her place and caved in to his mastery, fully expecting a night full of secrets and dark passion.
None of that happened. When he announced his departure and walked out, she felt betrayed and was almost angry. Call her nutty. The man who meant nothing to her had made her mad by not demanding a tumble in the sack.
But she still loved Peyton, didn’t she?
There was a black curtain hanging between her and her own past—the shadows behind the curtain a memory of Peyton, the light before a more recent memory of Louis, the fellow griever and comforter. But Peyton was back. Damaged and different now, he was back. Peyton’s first appearance in the cemetery was now a vague memory of something that never had happened, something that had transpired in her fevered mind and nowhere else. Thus she could pass it off as wishful thinking. But yesterday afternoon, when she chased him into the deserted ghetto and cornered him in a soap factory—that was not easy to pass off as hallucination. Peyton was alive, and he needed her.
Louis was staring at her as she took this trip down memory lane, puzzled, his head cocked and his eyes bright. She came to herself with a jerk.
“Need sleep?” he asked when her eyes were clear. “I could rustle up a cot somewhere.”
She touched her temples, driving the daydreams and memories away. “Sorry,” she whispered.
His smile became very fatherly. “You said something about never seeing me again. What’s up?”
She ground her knuckles into her eyes. Just what was up? She felt like a jittery woman at a job interview. How silly. She made her face stern and went on. “Louis, you know that I was engaged to Peyton Westlake before he . . . vanished.”
He nodded, then leaned forward and placed his elbows on the desk, idly shoving the briefcase aside. A brass latch popped apart, and the briefcase split open awkwardly, crammed full of industrial secrets. “Engaged? You never told me that.”
She dropped her head, ashamed. “He asked me before he died. I mean, he asked me before the . . . fire.”
“And?”
“And I finally told him yes.”
Louis laughed without much humor. “Julie, is that what brought us down here on a Sunday? Is this what you wanted to talk about?”
“Partly,” she said.
“Fine, then. It does not disturb me that you were engaged to the late Peyton Westfrazzle, or whatever his name was. Ooops, sorry. I don’t mean to belittle the man.”
“Forgiven,” she said mechanically, needing to say more but not wanting to.
He flashed that big smile again. “Darling, don’t worry yourself about the niceties of a new relationship like ours. You and I are lost, both of us, trudging around on a parched desert of pain and grief. No one I’ve ever met before has given me the space to acknowledge my feelings without seeming moody. All I offer you is equal treatment for your malady.” He paused, drawing a breath. “Pals now?”
She wished she had checked her purse before coming, for inside, nestled among makeup and nameless useful odds and ends, might be a small pack of tissues. The tears were coming on fast, a floodgate waiting to be opened. She rummaged through her purse and found nothing but hard junk.
“Louis,” she squeaked, fighting those tears, “Peyton is still alive. He was burned in the fire, horribly burned. I don’t quite understand what happened, but I know he needs me. I know it.”
Louis stared at her for a moment, expressionless, then looked down at his desktop. He set the snifter of brandy aside and wormed his fingers together. “Oh, Julie,” he said softly. “Your news has a bittersweet flavor. Of course I am very happy for you and wish the best for Peyton. If there’s anything I can do—medical care, money for him to live on, even a job when he’s ready, it’s his. I, uh, I just wonder . . . how badly was he . . . injured?”
Julie mashed her purse to her face, a purse smelling of leather and time and the day Peyton had given it to her for no reason at all; just like the necklace, which had been his queer way of asking for her hand in marriage. Her sobs were enormous, sobs for Peyton and his peculiar suffering, sobs for Louis and the love affair that had been star-crossed from the start.
Louis’s telephone began ringing like an unwelcome stranger to this party of grief, and Louis snatched it up, covering the receiver as he walked to a far corner. Julie’s breakdown was nothing that a business client should have to hear about. He said hello, then talked into the telephone, his voice low and impossible to understand. Not that she really cared. The tragedies that life was intent on heaping on her shoulders were becoming too much to bear.
She looked up, her face wet with tears smeared into crazy shapes by the angles of the purse, and looked the desk over, wishing to God Louis had some Kleenex someplace.
Something caught her eye, and she forgot about tears and Kleenex for a long time.
The briefcase had one latch undone. Packed paperwork spilled out of the narrow gap in the brown leather while the other latch held on for dear life. Two or three sheets of paper were now visible. The only thing that was extraordinary here was the topmost paper, the one with the ring of spilled coffee on its face, the one Peyton had set a cup of coffee on so long ago.
The Bellasarious memorandum.
Her throat clenched up, trying to strangle her. The office seemed incredibly hot all of a sudden. The form of Louis in the corner was abruptly menacing, skulking through secrets, plotting crimes. Even the smell of his after-shave was repulsive.
He hung up the phone and carted it back to his desk. “Ten thousand more Krugerrands, Julie. The sky’s the limit, huh? God, how I love . . .” He glanced down to the desk and the paper she was staring at.
There was a long silence then.
“You,” she said at last, a word spat out with the acid of anger, the steam of raw hate. “You did it all.”
He put on a lopsided grin. “Yes, the Bellasarious memo. Too bad you had to see it, and all my fault. This may be a serious strain on our relationship.”
“You burned Peyton’s lab,” she hissed.
“Not me personally,” he said, looking wounded. “I have an employee who does certain things for me. Things I would rather . . . not do myself.”
She stared at his face, trying to find a motive there for having turned her life and Peyton’s upside down, a reason for his goodness and his badness. His face was a blank stone.
“Now I guess you have to kill me,” she sa
id coldly, full of ice and dread inside.
He smiled ingratiatingly, as if tutoring a small child about the ways of the world. “Hardly, Julie. You have nothing solid on me, and I believe you would find a very unsympathetic police department should you report this. Much of Strack Industries money goes to beneficial causes, including the bribery of police officials, the best charity of all. So before you get into your head an idea of conquering the nasty capitalist and its uniformed henchmen, please consider this.” His face went soft. “I love you,” he whispered. “I really, really do.”
He walked to the velvet curtain before Julie could get her thoughts together, and slung it apart, revealing a large square table. He snapped on a light and waved to her.
“This will be the riverfront in two years, Julie. Office buildings, shopping malls, clean sidewalks, and safe condominiums. No crime, no filth, no poverty. A new city within this dying city, a new start.”
She went reluctantly to the large scale model on the table. Someone had put a great deal of time into constructing it, with its buildings and its exotic landscape and its miniature cars parked in tiny lots. There were even tiny trees with leaves made of green foil and miniature pedestrians strolling about, frozen in time. All in all, Julie was impressed, but only by the architect who had designed this and nothing else.
“You and I,” Louis said, and Julie glanced at him. “You and I, together, building a new city. We cannot let anything get in the way of that goal.”
She glared at him, hoping her eyes were boring twin holes through his expensive suit and expensive hide.
He winked at her, mocking. “Despite the way things might appear, you can’t pretend that moments haven’t passed between us, Julie. We shared something, and we can still have it.”
Her eyes became narrow. “If you’re not going to kill me, I have better things to do.”
He waved a hand. “I’ll be in touch.”
She went to the door, filled with rage and betrayal and the righteous desire to snap something obscene in his face. Instead she went out and never came back.
But she would see him again, on different turf, in a different way, a way that would be very deadly.
Louis snatched the phone up the second Julie was through the door and out of sight. He dialed a number he knew very well, the number of a man who did not mind working on Sundays.
It rang once. “Yes?” Robert G. Durant said.
“Do you want the bad news or the good news?”
“I like bad the best, Mr. Strack. Hit me with it.”
Louis sat down. “Do you recall the little difficulty I had with my father, and how you resolved it? I must say, even I was surprised.”
Durant chuckled. “Call me lightning, Mr. Strack. I strike when you least expect it.”
“That’s what I pay you for, Robert. Now I have a similar problem with a certain Julie Hastings. Know her?”
“Yep. She was that dingleberry Westlake’s main squeeze. So?”
“She is our key to Mr. Westlake.”
Durant drew a quick breath. “Boss, he blew up with his chink pal! I swear it!”
Louis propped his feet on his desk beside the briefcase. “It seems that when you retrieved the Bellasarious memorandum, you failed to expunge the good professor.”
Durant sounded weak. “Please say you’re kidding.”
“No joke, Robert, and I don’t put up with shoddy tactics. I want him dead.”
Durant gulped into the phone, sounding much like Elmer Fudd. “But—but—but—”
“Do not have a nervous collapse like your friend Rick did, or I will have you eaten by crocodiles. Got it?”
There was a pause. Then, timidly, “You mean real crocodiles, Mr. Strack?”
“I never lie. I want Westlake eliminated forever.”
Durant sounded very childlike now. “How can I find him, boss?”
Louis smiled. “I believe we have a little girl who will guide us there.”
They talked for a while and then hung up. Louis went home and swam in gold the entire afternoon, then called his favorite prostitute to join him on his mattress of money.
He tipped her ten Krugerrands beyond the normal fee. No one would ever call Louis a skinflint, just like no one would ever call Louis a crook.
It was a grand life, after all.
30
Durant
ROBERT G. DURANT hung up the phone after Mr. Strack had clicked off, his face creased with confusion, his lips pursed in a mystified frown. Westlake not dead? Preposterous. That egghead scientist had been blown to bits, along with his chink buddy. Plus, he had been electrocuted and gotten his face fried off. But why, oh why, Durant wondered, hadn’t he told Martinez or even that jitterbug Rick to invest a few bullets toward the good doctor’s future? Who could have foreseen that he would survive that kind of treatment?
Durant stood in the den of his expensive house in Briar Wood Estates, surrounded by potted plants and a regal bookcase that took up two walls. There were Thoreau and Twain and Joyce, massively thick volumes of every kind of book. To top it off, Durant even owned a rare collector’s edition of a Jack London novel.
Of course he had not read any of these rare editions. His head was too full of thoughts about crime and money ever to let him concentrate on the written word. But when business acquaintances dropped by, this luxurious combination of den, greenhouse, and library was most impressive. If there was one truth about him that should never be exposed, it was the fact that he was borderline stupid and a social cripple. Most of his talents lay in the area of being a cutthroat and a bully. Those were roles he played quite well. Let others think of him as a self-made rich man, a gentleman and a scholar. Very few would think of him as the coldhearted sleaze he really was.
Standing amid this luxury, staring blankly at the telephone, he tried to dredge up some decent reason for Westlake to be alive. At the same time he wondered how to extricate himself from this monstrous blunder. Mr. Strack had not sounded very angry on the phone, but he hadn’t sounded all that overjoyed, either.
Durant slumped into his expensive leather desk chair, eyebrows drawn together, frown deepening. He picked up a pencil and began to tap it on the desk. In another room a stereo was playing some unpronouncable German opera, for Durant had quite a collection of classical works. He tried to spend at least twenty minutes every day listening to the crap, figuring that eventually someone might mention opera at a stuffy party and he didn’t want to sound dumb. If there was one thing he hated more than almost everything else he hated, it was looking like a dope and feeling like the brainless crook he was.
The pencil tapped. The stereo blared Wagner. The frown hung on. He was feeling like a dope. One little shit named Westlake had managed to put his position with Strack in jeopardy, and that position was the only thing keeping him from poverty and bread lines. Strack was considered Mr. Nice Guy to the bone. His charitable donations kept the police away from Durant, freeing him to perform every dirty trick in the book.
Durant gave his padded shoulders a little shrug. Today he was wearing a black pin-striped suit and an Indiana Jones hat. On his feet were patent-leather shoes with tips as pointy as spears. In about two hours Dana was supposed to come over and screw his brains out, and he had hoped to surprise her today by actually dressing up before they got down to business. Even better, since the old whip was worn out, he had bought a new one. God, but did that Dana scream loud. He couldn’t ask for a better partner in S and M, his favorite sport next to killing people.
Yeah, that again. While musing, he had almost forgotten about Westlake and the sorry mess he had landed him in. Bad enough that this Sunday’s weekly screw was, well, screwed. Strack wanted Westlake dead in a hurry. Sure, no problem, boss. We’ll follow his girlfriend and find out where Mr. Genius scientist lives. Then we shall plug him and watch him die.
Really think so?
Well, yeah. So he survived electrocution. Who wouldn’t? That boiling pink shit in the tank had toasted him, made
him bald, burned off his face. Big deal.
What about the explosion?
Ahem. Yes. Ahem.
He’s one tough sumbitch. Maybe wears bulletproof long johns. Why bother, though, when your whole head is one burned marshmallow? Jeez . . . no hair, no scalp, no face, no . . .
No face.
No face!
Durant felt himself suddenly trembling as various mental tornadoes churned up new thoughts from the depths of his limited brain. That disgusting thing in the alley beside Chin Fong’s joint, that was a melting mask. The smoking gloves, fake hands? Why? To avoid leaving fingerprints? No. Because Westlake’s hands were black and burned clear down to the bone.
He was a master of disguises, obviously. A genius, a survivor, a terrifying menace. What if he did wear bulletproof long johns, like those metal suits skin divers do when they’re in shark territory? How do you get around that?
He sat there and thought, still frowning, his forehead beginning to ache from it. If Westlake was smart enough to look like anybody he wanted to, maybe Pauly hadn’t been lying. Westlake made the pickup, not Pauly. Rick would drop dead on the spot if he saw Westlake, and maybe he had. And just maybe Westlake was Mr. Strack now. Maybe.
Durant realized he was on the brink of panic. Why would Westlake pretend to be Strack? Why would he tell Durant to kill Westlake if Westlake was really Strack, and could he be Strack and then Westlake at the same . . . ?
He dropped his head into his hands, wallowing in confusion and misery. New Wave crime, techno crime, seemed to be the rage now. What had happened to the Capones and Dillingers? God, but it had been easier in those days. Not that Durant had been alive back then—he was only thirty-seven now—but the old black-and-white movies he had watched made those years seem fun.
He decided to give this matter a lot of thought, even though his head was aching already from the mental gymnastics. The murder of Westlake would not be an ordinary hit, you could bet your buns on that. This particular job demanded courage, intelligence, and a better weapon than the standard Ruger .22 pistol at close range, the choice of both the CIA and R.G. Durant. A silenced .22 made less noise than a door being slammed, but it wouldn’t be any good if Westlake was wearing body armor or some kind of bulletproof mask.
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