The Puppet Master

by John Dalmas

  I shifted my attention to my present problems. "Keep it to myself for now."

  We sat there eating brownies and sipping coffee. Molly's blast had wakened Myers in the next room. He'd peeked in worriedly, saw us talking normally, and after a trip to the bathroom, joined us. Neither Myers nor I had much to say, and Molly wasn't being talkative either. I finished my coffee and stood up. "It's time for me to go," I said to her. "If you'll let Myers hide out here temporarily, the firm will pay. Fifty bucks per diem. How about it?"

  Molly scowled. "For a couple of days tops; I'm not into house guests. I don't even let my kids stay more than two or three days."

  "Is that okay with you, Robert?" I asked.

  He nodded.

  "Good. If I'm not back day after tomorrow . . ." I looked in my billfold; I didn't have a lot of cash, but enough to give Myers a hundred. "Catch a flight out of town, to Phoenix maybe, or San Francisco, and tell your story to the FBI."

  He nodded again.

  I got the jacket and Dodger cap that Molly had loaned me, and went out to her old Dodge. She'd been damned generous to someone she hardly knew. Then I got in and started it up, but before I could drive away, it seemed to me someone was there, watching me. So I looked in the back, and saw no one.

  Then I got out and looked in the enclosed luggage compartment. As I closed the hatchback, I suddenly realized.

  "Get your goddamn ass out of my space!" I didn't shout it, but it slashed out of me with snap and anger. Waves of chills washed over me then, as intense as orgasm, and after half a minute, when they'd settled out, I realized there was no one there but me.

  But there had been! I didn't doubt it. I hoped I'd blasted him out of his ectoplasmic socks.

  32

  PICTURE AT A PARTY

  I got back in the Dodge and drove down Hollycliffe to Bronson. In some respects, Los Feliz and the I-5 Freeway was the most logical route to take, but Los Feliz was continually patrolled because of speeders, so instead I took Franklin west, and then the Hollywood Freeway. The freeways were safer for me than surface streets. They were patrolled by the California Highway Patrol, and I was pretty sure the bad apples in the LAPD wouldn't invite the CHP in on their game. They could order their own officers without questions getting asked, at least out loud, at least for a while. But the CHP or the sheriff's department would want explanations.

  I crossed Cahuenga Pass and left the Hollywood for the Ventura Freeway westbound, then exited onto Coldwater Canyon and drove north. LAPD territory again. I hadn't gone far, hadn't crossed Tujunga Wash yet, when I heard a siren growl, the sort of little growl patrolmen use to get your attention. I looked in my rearview mirror, and sure as hell, there he was, coming up on me from behind, flasher spinning.

  I'd been careful not to speed or break any other traffic laws, and it was still daylight, so it couldn't be a taillight out or the telltale wrong glint from an out-of-date license sticker. The first thing they'd want was to see my driver's license, and even if they didn't remember the all-cars bulletin, they'd check the name on their computer. Standard practice. And there I'd be.

  I didn't think it all out like that, of course; that's simply the data I acted on. Instead of pulling over, I swerved through a short gap in the oncoming traffic. Horns blared; tires squealed. Someone sideswiped me and caromed into the police cruiser. Someone else broadsided me. I was pretty well shaken up. There were other crashes, half a dozen or more, then relative quiet. Molly's van was on its left side, and the right side was smashed in, so I unbuckled, crawled quickly to the rear and out the back door, which had sprung open. I needed to separate myself from the Dodge, hopefully before the patrolmen worked their way to where they could see me get out of it. The scene was turning into an ants' nest. People were running over, helping people out of smashed cars, and for half a minute I pretended to be part of them. The patrol car was on its side, too, and it looked as if the officers hadn't been able to get out yet. There were enough smashed cars there, and stopped cars, that it looked as if I'd get away with it. And I didn't even seem to be injured, just shaken up.

  I walked over to the sidewalk, where a crowd of people stood staring at the wreckage. There were too many of them to have gathered since the pileup; they'd been there before. Mostly they were young; we were right next to Valley College. A small group of them, about eight or nine that seemed to be together, started walking away then, and I joined them. I didn't want to be around when more police arrived.

  "Quite a pileup," I said to a couple of them, a guy and a girl.

  "You ain't just glibbin'," the guy answered. "I wonder what started it?"

  I shook my head. "No telling. Someone lost control, I suppose. Went to sleep, maybe. What's the crowd about?"

  "We just left the ball game. We beat Pierce."

  "Pierce? Are they good?"

  "They're the defending league champions."

  "Huh! That's pretty good! Now what? Parties?"

  "You got it."

  Of the group I'd attached myself to, one or two looked to be still in their teens, but most were in their twenties. We crossed Tujunga Wash on Victory Boulevard, and after a few more blocks turned north on a residential street, and went in a small house rented by several of them. Someone got a jug of wine out of the fridge and poured. Someone else went out for more. Three or four other people came in, one of them with a giant bag of tortilla chips, and opened it. A joint got passed around.

  I didn't drink or toke or add to the conversation, just threw in a ten when someone else went out to get a bushel of chicken wings from Colonel Sanders. The conversation soon left baseball and went to psychic stuff. Since the 2006 Stanford study of psychic phenomena, interest had surged on campuses.

  The place was getting crowded. A girl who came in about the time the chicken wings arrived was a psychic photographer with a different shtick. Instead of people pointing their cameras at her and getting strange results, she pointed her Polaroid at other people. And my being a total stranger, she asked if she could take my picture.

  "What does it do?" I asked. "Capture my soul?"

  She laughed. "Maybe, in a sense. Usually I get a picture of the person surrounded by their aura."

  "Kirlian photography?"

  "No," someone else said, "better than that. Manuela uses ordinary Polaroid color film and gets the auras on that!"

  "How does it work?"

  She shrugged. I was standing; she was sitting on a tall kitchen stool. "Stand still and I'll shoot you," she said, so I did. After a few seconds she pulled the picture and stared at it. "Huh!" she said, "I never got one like this before." Two or three people looking over her shoulders seemed impressed too.

  "Here." She handed it to me. It showed me, all right, but not in real time, and there wasn't any aura. It showed me standing behind Molly Cadigan's Town Van, peering in through the opened luggage doors. While from close behind me and a little to one side, an old man watched. Dimly you could see right through him! The farther down you got from his head, the more transparent, the less there he looked, but from what I could see of his feet, they were well above the pavement. His face was clear enough though, and from his expression, he did not wish me well.

  Others crowded around to see. "How'd you do that, Manuela?" one of them asked.

  "Darned if I know. I'm not sure it was me, this time. It felt as if someone, some spirit, was helping." She laughed then, pointing at the photo. "Not that one though. That is an evil spirit."

  I just kind of sat there a while. This "evil spirit" was the wild card, the joker in the deck. Somehow it seemed to me he was behind the whole thing—Kelly Masters jumping into the scene, the apartment building blown up . . . The police recognizing Molly's van this evening, for chrissake! Though how someone like that communicated with people . . . But hell! Who else or what else knew I was using it?

  Besides Molly. It could have been Molly. I couldn't have that though. I'd always been a good judge of character, and Molly wasn't someone who operated like that. She'd h
ave . . . Geez! They'd trace her van and know where it came from! They'd probably been there already, and picked up Myers! I should have called! Where in hell was my head?!

  "Can I use the phone?" I asked, loudly enough that whoever's place it was would hear. "Local call," I added.

  "Go ahead," a guy said.

  It was an old-fashioned voice-only phone. "Katey," I said, "is Molly there?"

  Molly's voice came in then, on an extension. "Martti? Where the hell are you?"

  "I'm not exactly sure, but I'm all right."

  "The police just called, said my car was in a wreck. Totalled. I told them I'd loaned it to a friend. They said the driver was trying to elude a police cruiser and caused a pileup. They couldn't find him afterward; thought he must be wandering around hurt. They wanted to know your name, so I told them. Then I took Robert to stay with a friend of mine. A guy named Casey Jones. You want his number?"

  I got it, memorized it, thanked her, and hung up. I didn't call Myers though. I just sat there awhile, not really thinking, just sort of mulling, turning over the same spadeful time after time and coming up with nothing. Finally I decided it was time to carry out my earlier plan, the one I had in mind when I'd left Molly's. I got up from my chair, Manuela, the psychic photographer, watching me. "You leaving too?" she asked.

  "Yeah. I've got things I need to do."

  She stood, and picked up her gadget bag. "So do I. You driving?"

  "No. My car's in the shop. I'm walking."

  "Maybe I can take you somewhere." She didn't wait for an answer, just went to the door with me and out into a lovely spring evening. It was nearly dark. "D'you know the spirit that helped me take the picture?" she asked.

  "I'm not sure what you mean."

  "It was a woman."

  "Small?"

  "Physically? Smaller than me." Manuela was a petite chicana, not a lot bigger than Tuuli, with small bones and fine features, about five-three and maybe a hundred pounds.

  "How do you know?"

  She shrugged. "You either know or you don't. Do you live around here?"

  "Not close. I— I lived in the building that got bombed this morning."

  Her eyes widened. "Jesus! Did you—lose anyone?"

  She was thinking about the spirit, the female spirit she thought had helped her get the picture. I shook my head. "Acquaintances. My wife's out of town. Have you heard of Tuuli Waanila?"

  "She's your wife? Tuuli Waanila's your wife?"

  "Right."

  "It must have been her then. Congratulations! . . . And to think I was going to make a pass at you!

  "So where can I take you?"

  Rather than tell her where I was headed, I had her drop me off at the Hollywood-Burbank Airport terminal. It wasn't that I didn't trust her. It just seemed wisest to keep things to myself. After she drove away, I turned and started walking. I had maybe a mile to go.

  33

  SETTING THINGS UP

  Where I went was our security headquarters in an industrial section of north Burbank. It's where security crews are dispatched to short-term jobs. Prudential gets a lot of those: the grand opening of a new mall, a big celebrity party—that sort of thing. Guys logged in there by phone or radio when they reached the job, and it's the place they called their reports to at the end of their shifts. There are always guys without assignments, and it's where some of them would hang around and wait, reading or watching the tube, playing cards or pumping iron. At intervals, guys got physical exams there from a staff paramedic. Who also checked them for overweight. Joe doesn't mind a little overweight, luckily for me, but he won't stand for his guys getting actually fat. I knew some of the guys, and all of them knew who I was—sort of a celebrity investigator. I knew the senior sergeant in charge: Wayne Castro. "Martti!" he said when I came in. "How the hell are you?" It was obvious he didn't know I was in trouble. "What are you doing here amongst us peasants?"

  "Is there a place we can talk, you and I? Privately? I'm on a case."

  "Sure." He got up from his desk. "This way." They have a little debriefing room, and he took me inside. "How can I help?"

  That's the attitude that made him senior sergeant in charge.

  I wondered how private we really were there. Was that old man floating unseen beside us? I'd felt him before when he was. Hopefully I'd feel him if he was again.

  "First I'm going to tell you what I've got in mind," I said. "If it sounds doable, I'll call Joe and check it out with him."

  To begin with, I gave him the picture in brief, then told him what I had in mind. He turned really sober, but didn't let it throw him. After asking a few questions on details, he said it sounded doable—scary but doable. With Joe's approval. He'd have to call in some guys listed as occasionals—mostly off-duty sheriff's deputies and police from outlying communities, who moonlight with us from time to time.

  I wasn't going to call Joe from there. If his house phone was monitored, they'd get my location. Instead I borrowed a company car and drove a few miles to North Hollywood, where I called from an outdoor booth at a shopping center. I caught him at home.

  "Joe, this is Martti."

  "Martti? Sinulla on musta rupinen perse!"

  I should mention that Joe grew up among Finns in Iron Mountain, Michigan, and learned to talk a little MichFinn as a kid—enough to play with—back when it was still spoken quite a bit. What he'd just said was crude bordering on obscene—totally out of character for him. It was also totally non sequitur. He was trying to tell me something was wrong, that he didn't trust his phone. Which meant I couldn't talk freely. Then he went on. "Do you know the police are looking for you?"

  I wished he spoke enough Finnish that we could talk about my plans in it. Unfortunately he couldn't say much more than thank you, give me a beer, shut up, and a dozen or two other phrases handy for teenagers. "Yeah," I said, "I heard it on the police band. Look, I'm at Meredith's, in the Valley—you know Meredith—and I have to make this fast. What I want to do is spend a bunch of company money. Minä valehtelen." (It means I'm lying; I figured he'd catch that one. He knew sinä valehtelet—you're lying.) "Maybe up to the max for my working account," I continued. "I need to leave town, do some stuff in Mexico. Fight fire with fire, so to speak. Make it all right, will you? Authorize it. I'm short on cash."

  "Now look!" he said, "I'm not financing you for setting any bombs in Ensenada! The smart thing to do is give yourself up. You know that, don't you?"

  "There's a time and place for everything, Joe. I'm going to do what I do with or without your help."

  "It's your ass, Martti. Minua on nälkä." Which means "I'm hungry," another total non sequitur. Hopefully he'd try to get in touch with me on a safe line.

  "Thanks for the help, Joe," I said sarcastically. "And the same to you." I disconnected, then hurried out, got in the car, and headed back to the security office. I wasn't sure what he'd do. But he and I didn't have any mutual friend named Meredith. Meredith was the street the security office was on, a connection I was betting he'd made. If he didn't—well, we'd see.

  While I drove back, another possibility occurred to me: What if it was Steinhorn monitoring the calls? If it was— He hadn't been with us very long, but maybe long enough to recognize the allusion to "Meredith's." The Burbank PD was independent, but the LAPD just might ask for their help, if they were worried enough.

  When I got there, there weren't any police cars or barricades. Joe had already called from a shopping center and said he'd call back. About ten minutes later he did. I gave him a rundown on what I'd learned—from Myers, and about seeing Masters and Steinhorn together . . . all of it with him recording. Including where Myers was hiding out. And told him what I wanted to do. He was spooked by it—so was I—but he approved. If we didn't get Masters soon, the guy might cut out and we'd never see him again. That or he'd do something even crazier than he already had.

  Then he talked to Wayne, among other things telling him to follow my orders. Before we disconnected, he told me "Martti
, for God's sake try to avoid bloodshed."

  Joe doesn't take the Lord's name in vain. He really meant it. "I promise," I told him. "No bloodshed if I can help it." That had been my dad's working principle, too. I'd try, but I wasn't sure how avoidable it would be.

  34

  AMBUSH!

  After our talk with Joe, Wayne phoned off-duty personnel and occasionals until we had a team of twelve men, including ourselves, that he thought were up to the job. All of them were police or ex-police, and several were ex-military as well. We even had an ex-Ranger and an ex-marine. He made it clear there might be shooting, and got only five refusals: four claiming other commitments, and one because of the 4 a.m. check-in.

  I'd have preferred more time to sleep myself, but operating considerations dictated starting early.

  Then Wayne and I worked out our plan. Normally you'd plan first and then decide on team size, but our team had needed to be nailed down before it got any later. Besides, the plan was simple. The main thing was to go over it on paper and try to foresee all the potential problems. Wayne called a couple guys back, and arranged to hire their personal vehicles as well. Meanwhile he sent two on-duty standbys to corporate headquarters in West Hollywood, to pick up an unmarked sedan with my access card. All the vehicles in Burbank had the company logo, so they wouldn't do for this job.

  We both stuck to drinking decaf while we talked. The security office has a bunk room for men on standby, and we wanted to get what sleep we could. But when I finally lay down at 11:30, my mind was full of the uncertainties. Our plan had some serious holes, but we couldn't see any feasible way around them. The last time I looked at the clock glowing on the wall, it was 1:10, and the guy on the desk woke me at 3:20. I took a quick shower, first with near-scalding water, then with water as cold as the L.A. Water Board provides in May. Then I dried myself with a rough towel and made the best of it. When the first of our team arrived, I was breakfasting on a Peanut Plank out of the snack machine, and a mug of sweet coffee fortified with instant to make it stronger. Actually I felt alert, even a little wired.