“The gun … I couldn’t, I couldn’t…”
“Cory’s gun?”
“She said I had to do it because of what happened to Mr. Vorhees.” The kid’s shaky voice changed, rose in the falsetto imitation of his sister’s. “‘He’s out of control, Kenny, we can’t let him hurt us, too.’”
Chaleen. Vorhees’ killer after all, for some reason as yet unclear. And Cory found out about it. And now, in her warped mind, it was payback time.
“But it’s not right,” Beckett said. “Even a bastard like him, even if he did what she said … it’s not right. I tried to do it like she told me to but I can’t.”
“Then don’t. Don’t! You understand me?”
A kind of moan and then silence.
“Ken? Where are you calling from?”
“His place. She let me have my cell, so I could call her when it’s over, but I…”
“You haven’t called her?”
“No, I couldn’t. Just you.”
“Chaleen’s place, you said. His home?”
“He’s in there. Cory put something in his drink when they were together before. He…” The falsetto again. “‘It’ll be easy, all you have to do is put the gun to his head and close your eyes and squeeze the trigger.…’”
“Ken, listen to me. Chaleen’s home, is that where you’re at?”
“… No. The factory.”
“And you’re where now, exactly? Inside? Outside?”
“In my van, out front.”
“All right. Stay there. Don’t leave the van, don’t call Cory, don’t do anything. I’ll be there as soon as I can. You understand?”
Runyon was talking to himself. The line hummed emptily.
* * *
It took him twenty-five minutes of fast driving to cover the distance from Belmont to Chaleen Manufacturing in the city. Nearing dusk by the time he reached Basin Street. The industrial area was quiet, Sunday deserted. When Runyon entered the last block, drove past the factory grounds, the ropy muscles in his shoulders and back drew even more taut.
The street was empty of vehicles of any kind, and the only one inside the chain-link fence, parked in the shadows next to the detached office building, was a newish black Cadillac. There was no sign of the blue Dodge van.
The kid hadn’t waited.
Drawn back to the flame again.
Runyon braked in front of the closed office gates. Before he got out he unlocked the glove compartment, removed the .357 Magnum from its chamois wrapping, holstered it, and clipped the holster to his belt.
A chill bay wind played with scraps of litter, swirling them along the uneven pavement, forming little heaps against the bottom of the fence; a fast-food bag slapped his leg as he stepped up to the gates. The two halves were drawn together, but not locked: a big Yale used to padlock them hung by its staple from one of the links. He pushed through, his steps echoing hollowly on the uneven pavement.
Somebody had torn the WE’RE ECO-FRIENDLY! poster off the office door; one corner of it was all that was left, the loose piece flapping in the wind. The doorknob turned freely under Runyon’s hand. He pushed the door inward, looked into the outer office without entering. Lighted, but empty.
He called Chaleen’s name. No answer.
Once more, shouting it this time. Still no answer.
He went in then, leaving the door standing open behind him, one hand on the Magnum. The two inner doors were closed. The one on the far left would lead to a bathroom or storage room. He cracked the one in the middle. The large room beyond was also lighted. He called out again, heard nothing but the faint after-echo of his own voice, then widened the crack so he had a clear look inside.
Chaleen’s private office, large enough to take up most of the back half of the building. Desk, chairs, wet bar, couch, a shaded lamp on the desk supplying the light.
And Frank Chaleen sitting in a sideways sprawl on the couch, head flung back, eyes shut, one arm dangling.
At first Runyon thought he was dead. But there was no blood or other signs of violence on Chaleen or the cushions under him, and as Runyon moved closer he could hear the faint rasp of the man’s breathing. Passed out drunk was the way it looked; you could detect the odor of liquor on his breath, and on a table next to the couch was a nearly empty glass of what smelled like expensive scotch.
But the way it looked wasn’t the way it was.
Runyon used a thumb to raise one closed eyelid. Drugged; the size of the pupil confirmed it. Beckett, on the phone: Cory put something in his drink when they were together before. Together here? No, she wouldn’t have run that risk. Probably arranged to meet Chaleen in a bar or restaurant not too far away, spiked his drink with something slow-acting like benzodiazepine, then sent him here on some pretext with a promise to meet him later. The drink he’d poured for himself from his wet bar would have helped deepen the drug’s effect when it finally took hold.
And once he was unconscious, Beckett was supposed to come in and finish the job. Shoot Chaleen point-blank in the head, make it look like suicide. Another reprise of Cory’s cold, evil MO: leave the dirty work, the wet work, to the men in her life, and her brother was the only one left. Except that she’d overestimated her power to manipulate Kenneth into an act he was incapable of committing. But he must have come close because he’d been in here with the gun and something else Cory had given him, the sheet of bond paper that now lay crumpled on the floor in front of the couch.
Runyon picked up the paper, smoothed it out. Chaleen Manufacturing letterhead stationery with six lines of computer typing on it and Chaleen’s scrawled signature at the bottom. But he hadn’t typed it and he hadn’t been the one to sign it.
I can’t go on living. Business on the edge of bankruptcy, my whole life in shambles. I killed Andrew Vorhees. We had a fight and I hit him with a paperweight and put the body in his car and made it look like a carjacking. The police are suspicious, they’ll find out, I can’t face prison. This is the best way for everybody.
The hell it was. Best for Cory. Only Cory.
Runyon shoved the phony suicide note into his pocket, then made a quick search under and around the couch and of the rest of the office. There was no sign of Cory’s small-caliber automatic; Beckett had taken it with him.
At the door Runyon cast one more look at Chaleen. Limbs starting to twitch a little now; pretty soon he’d wake up sick and bewildered. But not half as sick as he’d be when he took the fall for killing Vorhees.
Runyon was in the Ford and on his way down Basin Street before he rang Bill’s home number. Caught him in, gave him a terse report—what Beckett had told him, what he’d found in Chaleen’s office, what he was afraid might happen or have already happened.
Bill said, “The kid may not have gone back to the apartment. If he’s enough afraid of his sister…”
“Plenty afraid, but he won’t be able to stay away from her. He’s like a whipped dog with nowhere else to go.”
“She wouldn’t hurt him. It’s not her style.”
“Not normally, but she’s bound to be furious when he tells her he didn’t go through with it. I’m on my way there now.”
“Intervention? Cory could make a lot of trouble if he refuses to give her up.”
“I know it, but I don’t see any other choice now—I’ve got to try for his sake. I’ll take full responsibility—”
“No, you won’t,” Bill said. “I’ll meet you there and we’ll see this through together.”
24
I had a shorter distance to travel, so I got to the Nob Hill address ahead of Runyon. The blue Dodge van wasn’t anywhere in the immediate vicinity, but that didn’t mean anything. The neighborhood has a smattering of small parking garages where residents pay outlandish monthly fees to lodge their vehicles. I left my car in the nearest one, the hell with the expense.
While I waited I paced the sidewalk in front, looking up at the lighted windows of the Beckett apartment. No telling for sure if both of them were in there; th
e curtains were closed. I wondered if Runyon and I were going to have trouble getting in, first to the building and then to the apartment. We couldn’t go barreling through doors like a couple of commandos; admittance, at least to the building, had to be by permission.
If we did get into the apartment and Beckett was all right, I was not looking forward to the face-off with Cory. We had plenty of circumstantial ammunition against her, but none of it, including the fake suicide note, was much good from a legal standpoint unless we could convince the kid to open up to the authorities. If he sided with his sister, let her control him and the situation, we’d have no choice but to back off again.
I’d been there ten minutes when Runyon came hurrying up the block. We conferred in the foyer while he leaned on the bell. I expected it to be a while before we got a response, if we got one, and that the first thing we’d hear then was a voice on the intercom. But it was only a few seconds before the door buzzer went off, while the intercom stayed silent.
Neither Jake nor I said anything on the way inside. I could feel a sharpening tension. Nothing either of the Becketts did was completely predictable, it seemed.
The door to their apartment stood ajar. That ratchetted the tension up another notch. The sudden constricted feeling in my gut was one I’d had before, a sixth-sense warning sign: something wrong here. From the look on Runyon’s face, he felt it, too. He was armed as a precaution; he’d mentioned it in the foyer. I saw him put a hand on the holstered Magnum under his coat and keep it there as we moved ahead to the door.
We went in slow and cautious, Jake announcing us on the way. Almost immediately Kenneth Beckett answered in a flat, toneless voice, “In here, Mr. Runyon.”
So he was all right. One hurdle cleared.
Beckett was in the gaudily decorated living room, sitting stone-rigid on a chair in front of one of the gold-flecked mirrors, fingers splayed like hooks over his knees. Alone in there, his sister nowhere in sight. His unblinking gaze shifted from Runyon to me and then fastened on Jake. If Beckett saw me at all, he didn’t care who I was or why I was there. The look of his eyes—dark, opaque, like burned-out bulbs—confirmed my gut feeling of wrongness. So did a pair of long, fresh scratches below his left cheekbone, the blood from them still oozing a little.
Runyon said to him, “Why didn’t you wait for me at the factory, Ken?”
“Cory.”
“You called her after we talked? Or did she call you?”
“She did.”
“Did you tell her you’d talked to me, that I was on my way there?”
“No.”
“But you told her you couldn’t do what she wanted.”
“She said if I didn’t, she didn’t want anything more to do with me.… I wasn’t her brother anymore. But I couldn’t go back in there. I thought if I could just make her understand.…” He shook his head, a wobbly, broken movement. “Cory,” he said then. And again, twice, like a half-whispered lament, “Cory. Cory.”
“Where is she?”
“I’m sorry. Oh God, Cory, I’m sorry!”
“Where, Ken?”
Nothing for several seconds. Then Beckett lifted one hand in a vague gesture toward the rear of the apartment, let it fall back bonelessly onto his lap. Closed his eyes and sat there mute.
I moved first, with Runyon close on my heels. The kitchen and dining rooms were empty. So was the first bedroom, hers, that opened off a central hallway. The adjacent bathroom was where we found her—a luxury bathroom with gold-rimmed mirrors set into baby-blue tile, a sunken tub, and a glass-block shower stall. The air in there was moist, as if a bath or shower had been taken not long before, and thick with the odors of soap and lotions.
And bodily waste.
And blood.
I smelled the waste as soon as I entered the bedroom, in time to gird myself before Runyon and I crossed over far enough to see the body. She lay sprawled on her back on a fuzzy black rug in front of the shower stall, a bright yellow robe covering her from neck to ankles. Alive, she’d been beautiful; dead, she was a torn, soiled, ugly travesty. The bullet had gone in under her chin at an upward angle, ripped through the side of her face and opened up her head above the temple. The stall door and glass blocks were streaked and spattered with blood, bone splinters, brain matter, the blood still wet and glistening. Dead less than half an hour.
Runyon said between his teeth, “Goddamn it, why didn’t he stay at the factory?”
There was nothing to say to that. My stomach was kicking like crazy; I’d seen dead bodies before, the bloody, twisted aftermath of violence in too many forms, but I had never become inured to the sight. The reaction was always the same: sickness and disgust mingled with sadness and an impotent anger at the inhumanity of it.
The gun was on the floor next to the body, a short-barreled .25 with pearl grips. Neither Runyon nor I touched it. We backed out of there, returned to the living room.
Kenneth Beckett was still sitting in the same rigid posture, but his face was no longer impassive. Muscles rippled beneath the skin, making his features shift and change shape like images in a kaleidoscope. Tears leaked now from the burned-out eyes, mixing with the blood from the scratches to form a reddish serpent line on one cheek. Soundless weeping.
Runyon went to him, said his name twice to get his attention. “Did you call the police?”
“No. I couldn’t. I thought you’d come, so I just … waited.”
My cue to make the 911 call. But even as I spoke to the police dispatcher, I watched the two of them and I could hear what they were saying to each other, Beckett responding in that same hollow voice.
“What happened, Ken?”
“I killed her.”
“Not deliberately. You wouldn’t do that.”
“No. Never. Never.”
“Tell me what happened.”
It was a few seconds before Beckett answered. Then, in an agonized whisper, “So pissed at me because I didn’t shoot Chaleen. Madder than I ever saw her before. She wouldn’t listen, just kept screaming that I betrayed her. ‘Give me the gun,’ she said, ‘I’ll go do it myself.’ I … I didn’t want to. She hit me, scratched me. That damn gun. She yanked it out of my pocket. I tried to take it back and … I don’t know, it went off and she … she…”
His eyes squeezed shut, then popped wide open like eyes in a Keane painting. He made a low animal-like noise in his throat; swallowed to shut it off, and stumbled on. “I killed her. I loved her and I killed her. I wish I was dead, too. The gun … I put it under my chin and I tried … I tried, but I couldn’t make myself do that, either.”
Death wish already granted, I thought as I put down the phone and moved over to where they were. In a very real sense he’d died, too, the instant the bullet tore the life out of his sister.
“It was an accident, Ken,” Runyon said. “It’s not your fault, it’s hers.”
“No. Mine, and that stupid pig Chaleen’s. That’s what she called him. ‘Stupid pig deserves to die.’ Then why did she let him fuck her all that time? Mr. Vorhees, sure, but why him?”
Because she needed the kind of man he was, I thought. Read his character correctly, with that innate sense some corrupt individuals have for spotting one of their own, and knew he could be maneuvered into committing murder for her. But he would not have lasted long even if he hadn’t been responsible for Andrew Vorhees’ death; she’d have found a way to jettison him sooner or later. That could be the reason she’d bought the automatic.
“I tried to tell her I couldn’t do it,” Beckett was saying. “She wouldn’t take no for an answer. She never took no for an answer. I loved her so much, I always did what she wanted me to. In the light or in the dark. But not that. Why didn’t she understand, not something like that?”
Runyon said, “What do you mean, in the dark?”
“At night. In bed together.”
“So you were sleeping with her.”
No response for three or four beats. Then, “It wasn’t wrong. She
said so the first night she came into my room. It wasn’t wrong because we loved each other.”
“How old were you that first night?”
“Fifteen.”
The queasy feeling in my stomach was stronger now. Runyon’s expression said he’d had intimations of this just as I had. Held out hope that it wasn’t so, just as I had—the reason neither of us had brought up the possibility in open conversation. The kind of woman Cory Beckett had been, the screwed-up mess Kenneth was. Sex had been her primary weapon, always, and she’d wielded it mercilessly with all kinds of men. But sweet Jesus, her own brother!
“But I wasn’t enough for her,” Beckett said. “She had to have all those others. I didn’t mind so much until Hutchinson. It … it wasn’t the same with her after him. Because she wasn’t the same.”
Hutchinson. The biker felon she’d taken up with in Riverside, the one who’d been shot and killed by police.
“He talked her into it. She said it was her idea, but it couldn’t have been. He made her do it.”
“Do what?” Runyon asked him.
“I hated looking at her after that. But I couldn’t stop doing it to her, she wouldn’t let me stop.”
“Ken. What did Hutchinson make her do?”
“But only in the dark. Only in the dark. I couldn’t stand seeing her the way she was in the light. That’s why I covered her in the bathroom after I killed her. I … couldn’t … stand…”
Runyon asked the question again, but Beckett was no longer listening. His facial muscles quit jumping and twitching, his tear-stained features smoothed out so that he looked about the age he’d been when his sister seduced him—a battered, crippled, very old fifteen. He sat staring sightlessly, his mouth moving but no words coming out. Lost now somewhere deep inside himself. Lost, probably, for as long as there was breath left in his body.
But Jake and I could not just stand there and wait for the police. I wish we had. It would have been better for both of us if we hadn’t let Beckett’s last words send us back into that bloody bathroom.
We stood looking down at what was left of Cory Beckett. One fold of the yellow robe, I noticed then, had been draped over the other, the belt untied. I could not quite bring myself to reach down and open the robe. It was Runyon, after a few seconds, who did that.
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