The Hook

by Donald E. Westlake

  He couldn’t do it, whatever he was trying to do he wasn’t doing it, break her neck or twist off her head or whatever it was, it wasn’t working, and he abandoned that and reached out to his left and found the table with the dynasty horse and his wineglass on it, and pulled it to him, horse and glass both flying somewhere.

  Rectangular, thin-legged table, but thick solid wooden top. He raised it over his head with both hands and brought the edge of it down hard on the back of her head. And then again onto her neck. And then again on her head.

  She wasn’t moving. Her arms were half bent, up beside her head, fingers curled. He reached out to move her right arm, and it waggled. He put the table on the floor, leaned down close to her, to the bloody mess of the right side of her face, and very faintly he could hear the ragged breathing.

  Until this instant, there had been nothing sexual in it. The whole thing had been so unexpected, so unplanned, so much the result of the tension he was feeling, the fear, the doubt. She had not been a woman, she had merely been something that moved and made sound and it was his job to stop the movement and stop the sounds.

  Now, the smell of her, the warmth of the body under his, that faint sound of her breath in and out of her broken nose, and he became aware of her as a sexual being. Oh, don’t, he told himself, straightening, still kneeling on her back. Don’t be aroused by this, for God’s sake.

  He climbed off her, shaky, tottering. He went down that interior hall and found the antiseptic bare kitchen. Her plastic-bag collection was in a plastic bag inside the doored space under the sink. He chose two large bags from the supermarket and brought them back to the living room.

  Her bowels had released. No fear any more of being turned on. He knelt beside her, fitted first one bag and then the other over her head, twisted them at the back of her neck to improve the seal. Then he closed his eyes and knelt there, holding the twisted bags.

  He stayed there like that for a long time. He didn’t want to think about what he’d just done, he wanted to think about what he had yet to do. Fingerprints. The wineglass, on the floor unbroken. The end table. The doorknob. The door handle under the sink in the kitchen.

  Somewhere, she would have a datebook, probably by the phone in her bedroom. His name would be in it, for tonight. Take the entire datebook. Look around for anything else that might have his name on it, or anything about him.

  Robbery. This should be a robbery, not a boyfriend, not a crime of passion. Find jewelry, something obvious, anything, something of value, take it away, get rid of it. Rings, necklaces, cascading into the sewer. Not in this neighborhood, he’d walk close to Times Square, Ninth Avenue, where it’s darker, drop the stuff into the sewer, take the subway home from the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

  Planning. Planning, eyes squeezed shut. Slowly, the thoughts calmed down, and when at last he opened his eyes, he felt so drained he could barely move. All his limbs were stiff. The fingers holding the twisted plastic bags were stiff. He moved himself, this way and that, freed his fingers from the bag, then looked down at her, touched her, inspected her.

  She was dead.

  * * *

  As he slid into bed, Susan rolled over in the darkness and said, “Wayne? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s over,” he said.

  “You aren’t going to do it?”

  “It’s done.”

  He turned toward her, and she put her arms around him, and he nestled his face in against the warm side of her throat, felt the beating of the pulse there. Her breath was regular in his ear, strong and regular, not weak and ragged.

  After a while, she said, “Was it bad?”

  “Worse than you can know,” he said.

  Nine

  Friday afternoon, Bryce got back to the Bel Air a little after three. He’d had lunch with an actor, a star of tough-cop roles, who wanted to make a series of films based on the characters in Bryce’s Twice Tolled. Bryce had thought he’d used up those characters by the end of that book, that there was nothing more to say about them, but the actor had a vision.

  He kept using the word “franchise,” which out here apparently didn’t mean Burger King but meant a continuing roll in a series of films that the actor could be identified with, so that the audience would want to see him play the part again and again. The actor said the general belief out here was that audiences liked that sense of the familiar, given how much a movie ticket costs these days, but Bryce suspected it was the moviemakers themselves who needed that sense of the familiar—remakes, sequels, series, franchises—given how much a movie costs these days.

  He didn’t know if the actor had any kind of studio support behind him for this idea, but saw no reason to throw cold water on it. He wished the actor well, honestly enjoyed the anecdotes, had a very nice lunch, and when he reached the hotel he didn’t go at first to the bungalow but inside to the desk, to say, “Has Ms. de Fuentes arrived yet?” Isabelle was supposed to have been on the morning flight out of Kennedy, which should have arrived at eleven-thirty.

  “Yes, I believe she’s in the bungalow,” the clerk told him, and gestured away to Bryce’s left, saying, “And these two gentlemen are waiting for you.”

  Gentlemen? He turned, and saw two men rising from lobby sofas, moving toward him, and his first thought was that they were both the actor he’d just had lunch with. A second later, he realized, no, these were the real thing. And a second after that, he knew what it meant.

  Poker face, he told himself, though inside he was flabbergasted. Wayne had done it! He’d actually done it! Somehow, even though he’d come all the way out here to get out of the way, Bryce had never truly believed it, that Wayne would actually go through with it, that this story they were making up together would burst into real life.

  Wayne’s done it, he thought, and something icy touched his spine.

  “Mr. Proctorr?”

  “Yes?”

  “Detective Grasso,” showing a gold badge in a soft black leather case, “and Detective Maurice, LAPD. We’d like to speak with you for a few minutes.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  He stood waiting, with a half smile, but Detective Grasso said, “It should be in private, sir.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Detective Maurice said, “We’d like to go to your room, sir, if we could.”

  “Oh.” Bryce frowned, reacting to the complications. “The problem is,” he said, “my fiancée just arrived from New York, I haven’t even seen her yet, I don’t know if she’s showering or what she might be doing.” Gesturing at the sofas where the two men had been seated, he said, “Couldn’t we talk here?”

  “We’d prefer not to be in public, sir,” Detective Grasso said. Both men were polite, but cold, and insistent.

  Bryce said, “Let me call the room, okay?”

  “Good idea,” Detective Grasso told him.

  They waited near the desk, both watching him, not talking together, as he went over to the house phones. Isabelle answered on the second ring, and he said, “Sweetheart, hi, it’s me, I’m in the lobby.”

  “Why?”

  “There are two detectives here, police detectives, I don’t know what it’s about, but they want to talk to me in the bungalow.”

  “Detectives?”

  “Could you—I don’t know, could you go to the coffee shop for a few minutes? I’m sorry to do this to you, sweet—”

  “Of course, Bryce, not a problem. I’ll leave now.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll be in the coffee shop, burning with curiosity, when you’re finished.”

  He went back to the detectives: “She’s leaving there now.”

  “Sorry to disrupt things, sir,” Detective Grasso said, but he didn’t sound sorry and he didn’t look sorry.

  Bryce led the way along the outside path through the lush green plantings to the bungalow and unlocked them in, then said, “Can I get you anything? Seltzer? Juice?”

  “No, thank you,” Detective Grasso said.
“Could we sit here, sir?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  The living room area had two short sofas placed in an L-shape with a large square glass coffee table. Bryce sat on the sofa to the right, Detective Grasso on the sofa to the left, while Detective Maurice brought a chair over from the dining table.

  Detective Grasso had a small notebook and pen out now, and he said, “You say that was your fiancée, sir?”

  “Yes, that’s right, she just came out from New York.”

  “And what’s her name, sir?”

  “Isabelle de Fuentes.”

  “Is she an Angeleno, sir?”

  “No, from New York. Spanish, really, her father was at the United Nations, but she’s an American citizen. Excuse me, but, could you tell me what this is about?”

  “I’m afraid it’s bad news, sir,” Detective Maurice told him.

  “Bad news?”

  Detective Grasso said, “About your wife, sir.”

  “My—Oh, Lucie! We’re getting a di—What do you mean? What about her?”

  “She’s dead,” Detective Grasso said.

  Those four cold eyes looking at him, weighing him. An innocent man would feel guilty! I’m innocent, I didn’t do it! “Dead? But why would she—How?”

  “She was beaten to death in her apartment,” Detective Maurice told him.

  That was surprising, and horrible, too. He hadn’t known, or wanted to know, how Wayne would do it, but he would have guessed a gun, or maybe poison, something like that. “Beaten? Lucie?”

  “Wednesday night, sir,” Detective Grasso said. “That would be the day after you checked in here.”

  “Tuesday, yes, but—Wait, please, I’m trying to understand this. Beaten?”

  And now he was thinking, it wasn’t Wayne, that couldn’t have been Wayne, it’s an absolutely insane coincidence, never get away with that in a novel, there wasn’t time for Wayne to have done it already, somebody broke in, some drug addict, rapist . . .

  “Somebody,” he said, and found his throat dry, and swallowed noisily. “Somebody,” he said, “broke in?”

  “There was no indication of forced entry,” Detective Grasso said.

  “She knew her attacker,” Detective Maurice said.

  “But—why? Was it—was it, you know, rape?”

  “No, sir,” Detective Grasso said, and Bryce astounded and horrified himself by laughing. They didn’t react, just both kept watching him.

  “She’s dead,” he told them, in explanation, still helplessly grinning, “beaten to death, and I’m worried about rape.”

  Detective Maurice said, “Sir, I think you could use a glass of water.”

  “I want to hear this,” Bryce told him. “Wednesday. Why didn’t anybody tell me?”

  Detective Maurice got up and went over to the kitchen area, as Detective Grasso said, “She was found this morning. She was supposed to see friends last night, go to a movie, I believe, and never showed up. They tried phoning her, and this morning when she still wasn’t around one of them phoned the local precinct there.”

  Detective Maurice came back with a tall glass of clear water and extended it to Bryce, saying, “You ought to drink this, sir. A bit at a time.”

  “Thank you,” Bryce said, but when he took the glass he almost dropped it, and then had to hold it with both hands. He drank some, and the edge of the glass chattered painfully against his teeth. He put it on the coffee table with a clatter, then held his hands out, palms down, and stared at them. “I’m shaking,” he said.

  “Take it easy, Mr. Proctorr,” Detective Grasso said.

  Bryce stared at Detective Grasso. He felt he was laughing again, or smiling maniacally, but he didn’t seem to have any control. “We’re getting divorced,” he explained, “we don’t love each other any more, we don’t care about each other, why would I—Why am I shaking?”

  “It’s a shock,” Detective Grasso told him.

  “If you feel faint, Mr. Proctorr,” Detective Maurice said, “put your head down, or lie down on the sofa there. You don’t want to hit your head on the coffee table.”

  “No, I’ll be all right,” Bryce said. “I’ll be all right.”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Detective Grasso said, “but there are a few questions.”

  “Of course, sure.”

  Detective Maurice said, “Would it help you if your fiancée was here, sir?”

  “Maybe so,” Bryce said. “Yes. Maybe so. She’s in the coffee shop.”

  “I’ll call,” Detective Maurice offered, and Detective Grasso gave him his notebook, in which he’d apparently written down Isabelle’s name.

  “I’m just bewildered,” Bryce told Detective Grasso, while Detective Maurice was on the phone over by the kitchen area. “Why would anybody do that?”

  “That’s what the NYPD is working on,” Detective Grasso said. “And they asked us to help.”

  “Anything,” Bryce said. “Anything I can do.”

  Detective Maurice came back and sat on his chair again, saying, “She’ll be right along. She sounds very pleasant, Mr. Proctorr. No accent at all.”

  “No, she’s really American,” Bryce said. “She works for an ad agency in New York, she writes copy for clothing catalogues, her ex-husband was Spanish, the divorce was in Spain and he got the children, three children, it’s been very tough on Isabelle, her father’s doing what he can, he’s retired now, back in Spain, he lives in Madrid.”

  I’m babbling, he thought, they don’t care about all this, but he couldn’t control the babbling either, any more than the expressions on his face. He picked up the water glass, again with both hands, and this time he managed to drink without hitting the glass against his teeth.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, as he put the glass down. “Usually, I’m better than this.”

  “It’s been a shock,” Detective Grasso said. Hadn’t he said that before?

  They heard Isabelle at the door, and all looked that way as she came in. She had changed into a summer blouse and skirt, from whatever she’d worn on the plane, and looked very beautiful.

  The detectives stood, but when Bryce started to stand he lost his balance and almost fell sideways onto the coffee table. Both detectives reached quick hands in his direction, but he found his balance, stood upright, and smiled shakily at Isabelle as she hurried to him, frowning with concern.

  “Bryce, what is it?”

  “Isabelle de Fuentes,” he said, feeling formal introductions were absurd but necessary, “these are Detectives Grasso and Maurice from the Los Angeles police. They’re here because somebody killed Lucie.”

  “Lucie!” Isabelle stared from him to the detectives, and back to him. “They don’t think you did it!”

  “No no, I was here already, it was when, Wednesday.” To the detectives: “Wednesday?”

  They both nodded, watchful. Isabelle said, “What happened?”

  “She was beaten to death—”

  “Oh, my God!”

  “—in her apartment.”

  “Mr. Proctorr,” Detective Maurice said, “I think you should sit.”

  “Yes, thank you, yes.”

  They all sat, Isabelle now at Bryce’s right, holding his upper arm with both hands. Bryce said to Detective Grasso, “Her apartment. I’ve never seen that apartment. I can’t, I can’t picture it.”

  “Just as well,” Detective Grasso said.

  Detective Maurice said, “She didn’t live there during the marriage?”

  “No, we have an apartment on Central Park West, and a house in Connecticut. She moved out, it was her idea to get her own place, temporary, a furnished apartment, and at the end of the divorce we’d see who’d get what place, what, what we wanted.” Frowning, he said, “It’s a furnished apartment, who knows how many keys there are.”

  “The detectives in New York have established,” Detective Grasso told him, “that the management changes the lock code with each new tenant.”

  “There’ll be a funeral,” Bryce said,
and looked helplessly at Isabelle. “I have to go to the funeral, don’t I? I suppose I have to go to the funeral.”

  “Mr. Proctorr,” Detective Grasso said.

  Bryce faced him. “Yes?”

  “Could you tell me the reason for this trip, sir? Vacation, is it?”

  “Well, a working vacation, I guess,” Bryce told him, thinking, they want to know if I did what I did, got out of the way so someone else could do it for me. He said, “I’m a novelist, and—”

  “Yes, sir,” Detective Grasso said, “we know who you are.”

  “Oh, okay. Well, three of my books have been made into movies, and there’s interest in more, so I’m here to talk to people about them. For instance, I had lunch today with George Jenkins, he has an idea to do a series of cop movies—sorry.”

  Detective Grasso seemed amused. “That’s okay, Mr. Proctorr, we’re cops.”

  “Okay, fine. Well, anyway, he thinks he’d like to do this series from a book of mine called Twice Tolled. What I do, I come out every once in a while, remind everybody I exist, meet with people, and usually something comes of it.”

  “And had this trip been planned for some time?”

  “Well, talking about it for some time,” Bryce said, “but didn’t finalize it until the last minute. I ran into a snag in the book I’m working on—Isabelle, you remember, I was working on it last weekend.”

  “Yes, sure,” she said. “You seemed very happy with it.”

  “I was, until Monday. Then I saw I’d really written myself into a corner, I’m going to have to think about it for a while, so I called Jeff—he’s my agent out here—and he said he could set up meetings this week, so I came out Tuesday.”

  Detective Grasso said, “And when do you go back?”

  “Well, I planned to be here for another week or so, I’ve got appointments most of next week, but now, I suppose I really do have to go to the funeral.”

  Isabelle said, “Oh, Bryce.”

  “It’s very hard to believe Lucie’s dead,” Bryce told the detectives. “We didn’t get along at all, the last couple of years, it hasn’t been an easy divorce, but to have her suddenly gone, I can’t fathom it. She’s one of the liveliest people I know. Right now, I can hear her voice.” And he could.