by James Swain
The window disintegrated before their eyes. Jan ran through the space and jumped as well. The drop was longer than she’d expected, the ground coming up much too hard.
She pushed herself off the ground. The lepjack lay on its side a few feet away, out cold.
Osbourne was gone.
She ran up and down the beach looking for him, wishing she had less compassion for animals, and had taken a clean shot when she’d the chance.
Chapter 36
The Belly of the Beast
Returning to Malibu, Hardare had nearly suffered a heart attack. Bodies in the hall, glass everywhere, his daughter in the care of several uniformed police.
“Where’s your mother?” he asked.
“Outside,” his daughter replied.
He found Jan running up and down the beach. He’d tackled her, fearful that a cop might see she was armed, and start shooting.
Rolling around in the sand, his gentleness had been overwhelmed by her fury. He had never seen such blind anger; never known such a side existed in her. Using all his strength, he managed to pin her arms down while hugging her slender body.
Unexpectedly, her anger ebbed, and in its place a terrible hurt began to surface. Crying, she whispered to him.
“I let the bastard get away, Vince. I had him on the floor, begging, and I didn’t kill him. I did the wrong thing.”
He tried to respond, the words dying in his throat. She looked into his face and knew exactly what he was thinking.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered tearfully.
Arm in arm, they trudged across the dunes back to the beach house.
By nightfall, the lepjack was in the care of a pricey Malibu veterinarian, and Hardare had moved his family to the stuffy St. James Club on Sunset Boulevard. No less than half of L.A.’s finest had escorted them to the hotel, while the other half scoured the city looking for the Lamborghini belonging to a famous singer whose weekend house Osbourne had broken into.
For dinner, they ate take-out fried chicken in front of the TV in their suite while avoiding the local news programs.
“How are tickets selling,” Jan asked, heaping seconds of cole slaw and mashed potatoes onto her paper plate. Her mood had shifted like the wind in the past few hours, finally metastasizing into something she could deal with: raw hunger.
“Slow,” Hardare said, his eyes leaving the grainy Gunga Din Crystal had found flicking channels. “The first four nights are almost at break even, but after that it’s soft.”
“Do you think what happened today will help?” Jan said. “It isn’t the kind of publicity we were looking for, but it still gets our name out there.”
“Not really,” he said, hating to burst her bubble. “I spoke to the theatre manager earlier. He said he was getting dozens of calls from people wondering why we had stayed in L.A. after all that had happened. I guess they didn’t see the valor in it.”
Putting her plate aside, Jan said, “You sound like you might not anymore, Vince.”
“I don’t see any valor in this if it means losing you or Crys,” he said. “There are times when the phrase `The show must go on.’ impresses me as the dumbest thing anyone has ever said.”
Crystal zapped the TV’s power and sat on the couch beside her father. “Are you thinking about cancelling, Dad?”
“It crossed my mind,” he said. “What do you think?”
Crystal shook her head. “Not me.”
Without hesitation Jan said, “Not me either.”
He said, “Okay. I’m glad we’re still in this together.”
“Baldie won’t be back,” Crystal said. “Trust me.”
Hardare laughed, hearing some of his own bravado in his daughter’s claim. “How can you be so sure?” he asked her.
“Easy,” Crystal said. “I saw what Jan did to him.”
By 11:30 Hardare was ready to call it a night when the phone rang in their suite. He put the receiver to his ear. “Yes?”
“This is the front desk,” a man’s voice said. “Detectives Wondero and Rittenbaugh here to see you.”
They had found Osbourne. Hardare said, “Send them right up.”
“Not yet,” was Wondero’s answer as he and Rittenbaugh entered the suite. “But we’re getting close.”
It had been a long day for them as well, their faces showing the many miles they’d traveled.
“You found the Lamborghini,” Hardare said.
“We sure did,” Rittenbaugh replied, “Parked in an alley near Paramount studios. The interior is stained with blood. We think Osbourne might use it to leave the city. One of our guys spotted a wallet lying on the seat. We want to look at it, but we’re afraid of impounding the car. Osbourne might see us, and run.”
“Why not lock pick the car door,” Hardare said.
“The locks are specially fixed,” Rittenbaugh said. “Our guy couldn’t open them, and he’s a pro.”
“But he isn’t as good as you are,” Wondero said. “We were hoping you might take a whack at it.”
Hardare was tired enough to already be feeling the bed beneath him. A cup of black coffee would fix that, he thought.
In the darkened bedroom he gently shook Jan awake and explained where he was going, promising to be back soon.
“Haven’t we helped the police enough?” she asked sleepily.
“I can’t say no,” he told her.
“Be careful,” she whispered.
The locks on the Lamborghini had been specially fitted with tamper-resistant devices. Kneeling on a newspaper, Hardare held a penlight in his mouth and began to explore the lock on the driver’s door with two universals, their special construction letting him “see” the lock’s peculiar design.
He heard a man’s cough and glanced up. A pair of uniformed cops guarded each end of the block, as well as two on a rooftop, watching with infra-red binoculars. Wondero and Rittenbaugh stood behind him, waiting anxiously.
“Think you can open it?” Wondero asked.
“We’ll see,” he said.
Hardare’s head was buzzing from the swill that 7-Eleven called coffee. He shut his eyes, and let his fingers go to work.
Houdini, whose techniques he considered nonpareil, had picked locks with a blank mind. With twenty years practice, Hardare had reached this level, and even gone one step further, able to dream of faraway locals and the pleasures such places afforded.
He was imagining the city of Stuttgart — the first proposed stop for The Hardare Circus — when the driver’s door clicked open. Standing, he brushed himself off.
“All yours,” he said.
“Nice work,” Wondero said.
The detective retrieved the wallet lying on the seat, flipped it open, and pulled out a California Driver’s License. It contained a photo of Osbourne wearing a wig and glasses. The name on the license was Gene Murray the address 4501 Rosewood.
“That’s walking distance from here,” Rittenbaugh said.
The shaky two-story at 4501 Rosewood reminded Wondero of so many houses featured on Hollywood celebrity tours: a non-descript place, with a sloping porch and old casement windows, the same kind of nothing house Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe and Carole Lombard had lived in, until fame and fortune had called them to the hills.
Wondero waited for their back-ups to position themselves. Two policemen in the alley, four standing on the curb, a chopper circling overhead, testing its spotlight on rooftops. He rapped three times on the screened front door.
Rittenbaugh edged sideways across the porch, attempting to see inside. “I hear something.”
Wondero knocked again, harder.
The front porch light flickered on, the moths asleep within the glass casement coming to life. Wondero clutched his 12 gauge, double pump shotgun to his chest. He had discounted this exact scenario years ago, convinced Death would be caught by chance, or worse, never caught at all. For him to make the collar, it was enough to make him start going back to church.
“LAPD, open up.” He paus
ed. “Okay, we’re going in.”
Wondero kicked the door three inches above the knob. The door went down, and he rushed inside. Sitting on a chair in the hall was a package of dynamite that was wired to the door. The light on the porch had been voice-activated. It was a trap.
“Get out — get out!”
Wondero and Rittenbaugh were on the lawn when the bomb went off, and the house became engulfed in bright orange flames.
Hardare was sitting in the detectives’ car across the street when the house caught fire. He jumped out, and met the detectives in the middle of the street. They were both white as ghosts.
“What happened?”
“Osbourne booby-trapped his own house,” Wondero said. “Son-of-a-bitch just destroyed all the evidence.”
The house continued to burn. Neighbors filled the sidewalks to watch. In the window of a house next door, Hardare saw a stocky, elderly woman with an ecru net in her hair, who appeared to be tied up with ropes.
“What’s with her?” he asked.
The detectives saw the tied-up woman as well.
“Let’s find out,” Wondero said.
The old woman next door did not answer her door, which was locked. Wondero took it down, and the three men rushed in and found themselves standing in someone’s living room.
“LAPD,” Wondero shouted.
The interior was musty and dark, the light from the TV outlining the ancient credenzas and wing-backed chairs. An orangery portrait of John F. Kennedy hung next to a portrait of Jesus. A woman bound in ropes with a gag in her mouth staggered in. It was the same woman they’d seen in the window. Wondero pulled the gag out of her mouth and stared to untie her.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“My name’s Myrtle Jones. I suppose you’re looking for Eugene. I wish I knew where he was, only I don’t.”
“Was Eugene holding you prisoner?” Wondero asked.
“Yes, since yesterday. I was inside his house, and saw his ghoulish collection. He’s the serial killer who’s been stalking Los Angeles, isn’t he.”
“Someone’s in the back of the house,” Rittenbaugh said.
The detectives drew their guns and hurried down a narrow hallway to the kitchen in the rear of the house. The shrunken remains of a man sat in a wheelchair. Prolonged sickness had eaten him away from within, his chest a sunken cavity.
“Mr. Kozlowski, we’ve been saved,” Myrtle Jones said, coming in behind them. “Mr. Kozlowski has a degenerative bone disease. When he was younger; he was a long distance runner, but those days are behind him. He’s been confined to a wheelchair for years.”
Wondero and Rittenbaugh gave Mr. Kozlowski a passing nod. They looked around the kitchen, found nothing, and headed back toward the front of the house.
Mr. Kozlowski acted annoyed, and bumped his wheelchair into the table.
“Is something wrong?” Hardare asked.
“He’s trying to say something,” Myrtle Jones explained.
A small computer was taped to the arm of his wheelchair. The infirmed man’s fingertips ran across the keyboard, and a message appeared on the screen.
HE’S HERE
“Who’s here, Mr. Kozlowski?”
EUGENE
“But he left. We both saw him.”
NO HE DIDN’T
“Well, I certainly saw him. He walked out the front door, and banged it shut.”
TRYING TO TRICK US
Kneeling, Hardare looked Mr. Kozlowski in the eye, and saw the sparkle of a mind that had refused to stop living long after his body had given up.
“Please tell me what you saw,” Hardare said.
EUGENE SNUCK AROUND THE HOUSE I HEARD HIM
“You’re saying he’s hiding behind the house?”
YES IN THE GARAGE
“Is there a car in there?”
VAN
“Does it run?”
LIKE A CHAMP
Everywhere Osbourne went, he’d used a stolen car, and it made sense that he might have another vehicle ready for his escape.
“Are you sure, Mr. Kozlowski?” Myrtle said, sounding doubtful.
HE TOOK THE KEYS
Hardare went to the back door and peered at the garage behind the house. The garage door was up, and inside the shadows he spied an old Volkwsagen bus.
“He wants to tell you something else,” Myrtle Jones said.
Hardare came back into the room.
TAKE MY GUN
“Where is it?” Hardare asked.
DRAWER BENEATH SINK
“Is it loaded?”
ALWAYS
Hardare opened the drawer under the sink and found a small caliber gun waiting for him. Grabbing it, he hurried outside.
Chapter 37
Primal Scream
Hardare came out the back door just as the VW’s headlights came on, followed by the sound of its engine turning over. The vehicle came screeching out of the garage and flew past him.
Hardare fired the gun into the vehicle’s side door. It raced past him and down the driveway to the street. A fire truck was parked in front of the burning house, the police helping the firemen deal with the blaze. The VW shot past them and sped away.
“Goddamnit —NO!”
In a heartbeat Hardare found himself standing in the middle of the street. The VW was already two blocks away. Osbourne was going to escape unless he stopped him.
Jan had taken him to a firing range a few times, and he knew how to handle a gun. Going into a crouch, he shut one eye, aimed, and started pulling the trigger.
The gun barked five times in rapid succession. The VW swerved, and smashed into a car parked by the curb. He’d hit the tank, and gasoline poured onto the street.
Hardare felt the rage of all the women Osbourne had killed boil up within him. He gave a bloodcurdling yell that came out sounding like a primal scream.
Wondero joined him as he ran down the street.
“Are you crazy — what are you doing?”
“Osbourne’s in the van,” Hardare said.
“What? Are you sure?”
“Yes — the old man in the wheelchair told me.”
Wondero sprinted past him, determined to get there first.
Hardare beat him anyway.
The VW was stopped. Bright orange flames had filled the interior, as if the gates of purgatory had prematurely opened up to make room. Flames shot up twenty feet into the air.
The driver’s door swung open. Covered in flames, his head and hands already dark cinders, Osbourne toppled out of the inferno, and did a series of fading pirouettes in the street. It was beautiful and horrible at the same time, and he finally crumpled in a heap before them, his charred corpse shriveling into a ball as the fire danced in mad jubilation across his remains.
“Christ Almighty,” Wondero said. “I didn’t think I’d ever see this day.”
The detective touched the corpse with his toe, just to be sure.
Chapter 38
Kindred Spirits
The discovery of a partially melted gas can with a bullet hole in it on the floor of the van Osbourne had been driving provided a logical explanation of his demise for the local TV stations, and Hardare’s name was hardly mentioned in any of the stories which ran that night.
Hardare didn’t care. Upon returning to the hotel, his wife and daughter had treated him like a hero, and he opened up his eyes the next morning to find the celebration still underway. Jan had ordered eggs Benedict and Dom Perignon from room service, which was delivered on a metal cart. As he sat up in bed, he’d been startled by the presence of several dozen brightly colored helium balloons clinging to the ceiling. Crystal handed him a pea shooter, and a box filled with metal BBs.
“Where the heck did you get these?” he said, laughing.
“Let’s see if you’ve lost your touch!” his daughter said.
And so he had spent the next half-hour lying in bed, leaving no doubt in either of their minds that he was still the world champion at shooti
ng balloons off the ceiling.
Their jubilation soon passed. At noon, the theatre manager at the Wilshire Ebell called the hotel. Ticket sales had slowed to a trickle. If demand did not pick up, he did not anticipate them breaking even for the two week run. Did Hardare wish to consider cancelling the engagement?