‘He was an arm-wrestler?’
‘I’m talking about his mother.’
Sergeant Houk drew up underneath the overhanging eucalyptus trees on Paseo Delicias and switched off his engine. ‘That’s the house,’ he told Detective Gable. ‘Look at all those goddamned Mercedes. It looks like Hitler’s garage.’
The deputy’s car drew up behind them, and the deputy came up and leaned on the roof of Sergeant’s Houk’s Buick, next to the open window, and flipped his notebook. ‘The sheriff just came through on the radio. The property is owned by Matt Orwell, the movie producer, and rented through Rand and Stewart, of Rancho Santa Fe. The present renter is the Salamander Corporation, registered in Butte, Montana. The rental documents were signed on behalf of the corporation by Mr J. Ortal.’
‘Bingo!’ breathed Sergeant Houk. ‘And what’s the betting that Mr J. Ortal turns out to be Mr L. Denman?’
‘You seriously think that Denman burned that bus?’ asked Detective Gable, taking off his sunglasses and hooking them into his shirt. ‘He don’t seem like the type to me.’
‘Type, will you listen to him?’ mocked Sergeant Houk. ‘Did you ever see a single perpetrator who ever ran true to type? Type is for the movies. This guy Denman is a pyromaniac. You know? He loves to see things burn.’
‘That still doesn’t mean that he burned the bus,’ Detective Gable insisted.
Sergeant Houk sighed. ‘Let me suggest a scenario, right? Denman meets Mrs Kerwin at his restaurant one evening, very romantic, they flirt, etcetera, ectetera, they date, eventually they fall in love. Come on, he’s a reasonable-looking guy and she’s a pretty reasonable-looking woman, and one thing we know about Mr Michael Kerwin is that he was away most of the week on business. Between the two of them Denman and Mrs Kerwin work out this plan to kill off his fiancée and her husband. Denman used to work in insurance, remember, he must know all the wrinkles. It’s Double Indemnity all over again.’
‘But why did they fry a whole busload of people, just to nail this one guy?’ Detective Gable asked him, looking more like Jackie Gleason than ever. His hair was frizzy and wild, and there were clear beads of perspiration on his upper lip.
‘It’s been heard of before,’ the young deputy remarked, trying to sound experienced and professional. ‘You remember that case when a guy bombed an entire airplane, just to collect his mother’s insurance? A hundred innocent passengers blown out of the sky, and for what? Just to get rid of one person. Hard case to solve, too: you’ve got scores of suspects, and as many motives as there are passengers.’
‘Yes,’ said Sergeant Houk, caustically, ‘I saw that movie too.’
Detective Gable wiped his forehead with his sleeve. ‘So what are we going to do? Are we going to go in there, or what?’
‘Of course we’re going to go in there,’ Sergeant Houk told him, with exaggerated patience. ‘You know what my motto is, “No Stone Unturned”. Maybe Denman didn’t do it. But maybe he did. Maybe he’s Ortal and maybe he isn’t. But we’re not going to find out by sitting on our rear ends.’
He climbed out of the car, and combed his hair. Then he said, ‘Let’s go,’ and they went.
They negotiated the interlocked maze of closely-parked Mercedes, and Sergeant Houk admired each one in turn. ‘Beautiful, beautiful. Clean them up, and they’d be worth a fortune. You see that one, that tourer? One point five, easy.’
‘Pretty small engine for a car that size,’ Detective Gable remarked.
‘Engine? Who’s talking about engines? One point five million, at auction. They sold one at Christie’s just like it.’
They climbed the broken steps to the verandah. ‘Don’t know how much Orwell charges for this dump, but it’s got to be too much,’ Sergeant Houk remarked. ‘Have you seen the prices around here? Three quarters of a million for a three-bedroom home, and a view of what?’
They reached the door. The lizard doorknocker hung in front of them heavy and fat and black, more like a flaccid overripe fruit than a doorknocker cast out of brass. Sergeant Houk took a look along the verandah, at the broken boards, at the grimy windows. ‘Place looks deserted to me. Deputy—why’nt you scout round the back—see what you can see? But be careful what you do. Don’t touch anything, even if it looks like evidence. Especially if it looks like evidence. We don’t have a warrant.’
He took hold of the knocker and clapped it forcefully against the door. It startled a brace of California quail on the roof-ridge, and sent them fluttering into the bright morning sky.
‘Nobody here, Sergeant,’ the deputy called back, as he reached the end of the verandah.
Detective Gable looked this way and that, as if he were trying to cross the street. ‘You know something, Sergeant, this case is totally weird. This is the weirdest damned case I ever handled.’
Sergeant Houk shook his head. ‘This case isn’t weird. There’s nothing weird about it at all. The perpetrator wants us to believe it’s weird, that’s all, to throw us off. A woman burns herself to death in a parking lot. A bus-load of people burn themselves to death in the desert. A woman gets burned in her apartment, a McDonald’s chef gets burned in his car. It’s not weird, Gable, it’s just death, and death is death no matter how it happens. You wouldn’t think it was weird if they were shot, or stabbed, or strangled.’
‘Well, I know. But I still think it’s weird.’
Sergeant Houk knocked again, but the front door remained adamantly closed. The deputy came back along the verandah, his boot-heels making a hollow rocking noise, his thumbs wedged into his belt.
‘Okay, Matt Dillon. Go check the back,’ Sergeant Houk instructed him.
‘The name’s Roger,’ the deputy replied, somewhat put out.
‘Okay, Roger, sorry Roger, go check the back, Roger.’
The deputy skirted the garage and timidly fought his way through the overgrown weeds, using his gun-barrel to push aside the thistles. Sergeant Houk watched him go with the expression of a man who had to learn patience the hard way.
‘All right,’ he said, at last. ‘Let’s give this doorknocker one last workout.’ He banged it seven times, grotesquely loudly, and Detective Gable winced every time.
‘If they don’t answer that, they’re either out, or dead,’ said Sergeant Houk.
They waited and waited. ‘Nobody in, said Detective Gable. But as he did so, the front door suddenly unlatched itself and swung open, and there stood Helmwige, tightly swaddled in a bronze silk bathrobe, with a towel tied around her head.
‘Yes?’ she said, as if she hadn’t heard Sergeant Houk beating at the door as if it were the Gates of Hell.
Caught off-balance, Sergeant Houk dropped his badge. As he bent down to retrieve it, he saw that Helmwige was wearing heavy silver anklets. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. We’re investigating a series of homicides in the San Diego area. I was wondering if I could ask you some questions.’
Helmwige blinked at him with spiky wet eyelashes. ‘What could I possibly know about homicides?’
Sergeant Houk coughed. ‘I’m not suggesting that you know anything about them directly, ma’am. It’s just that you may be able to assist the investigation by clearing up a couple of peripheral queries.’
Helmwige said nothing. Sergeant Houk wasn’t at all sure that she had understood him.
‘For instance,’ he ventured, ‘do you happen to be acquainted with a man called Lloyd Denman? He owns a fancy fish restaurant at La Jolla. Tall guy, thin, kind of aquiline nose.’
‘Beaky,’ added Detective Gable, when Helmwige still failed to respond.
Helmwige, without taking her eyes off them, called, ‘Otto! Kommen Sie hier, bitte!’
After another lengthy pause, during which Helmwige stared back at Sergeant Houk and Detective Gable without volunteering a single word, Otto appeared from what was obviously the kitchen door at the back. He was wearing a white T-shirt and
voluminous grey cotton shorts, which made him look even thinner and paler and more dried-out than ever. He was wiping his hands on a small threadbare towel, over and over and over.
Helmwige said, ‘These gentlemen are detectives. They want to know if we have heard of anybody named—what was it, Detective?’
‘Sergeant,’ Sergeant Houk correct her. ‘And the name of the man I was asking you about is Lloyd Denman.’
Otto inspected Sergeant Houk and Detective Gable with cold yellowish-grey eyes. He continued to rub his hands as if he were obsessive about having them completely dry. ‘Why should you ask us this?’ he wanted to know.
‘Well, sir,’ said Sergeant Houk. ‘We’re investigating a number of homicides . . . you may have heard about them, a whole lot of people in the San Diego area have been burned to death . . . and Mr Denman happens to be a suspect in this case.’
‘A suspect?’ asked Otto, and then nodded.
‘Do you know him?’ repeated Detective Gable.
Otto pursed his lips dismissively, and shook his head. ‘Nein. Ich kenne ihn nicht.’
Sergeant Houk opened his notebook. ‘He was supposed to have visited these premises yesterday morning, round about eleven o’clock.’
‘Das ist ganz unmöglich,’ Otto replied.
‘What’d he say?’ Sergeant Houk asked Helmwige.
‘He said, it is not possible.’
‘He was seen entering these premises, sir.’ Then, to Helmwige, ‘Tell him that Lloyd Denman was seen entering these premises.’
‘Have you seen this man Denman?’ Otto asked him, unexpectedly, in English.
‘Sure I’ve seen him,’ said Sergeant Houk guardedly. ‘I saw him about a half-hour since. And if you can speak English, why the hell have we been . . .’
He was interrupted by a splintering of glass from the back of the house, which sounded distinctly like a young deputy sheriff putting his boot-heel through a cucumber-frame. Otto’s eyes instantly flared wide open, and he hissed at Sergeant Houk, ‘You have sent somebody around to the back of the house?’
‘Well, yes, I’m sorry, but we didn’t think there was anybody here and we were just checking to make sure that . . .’
‘You have a warrant?’
‘Not specifically as such, but . . .’
‘Who knows you are here? Which of your superiors? Which of your colleagues?’
‘Sir—we weren’t sent by anybody—this happens to be part of an ongoing investigation, that’s all . . . and if that deputy has damaged anything . . .’
But Otto turned away from him, opened the kitchen door, and disappeared. Sergeant Houk said to Helmwige, ‘Listen—I didn’t intend to cause any problems here, but . . .’
Without a word, her face grim, Helmwige slammed the door. Sergeant Houk and Detective Gable were left standing on the verandah.
Didn’t I tell you this case was weird?’ said Detective Gable, hitching up his trousers.
‘If I had a goddamned warrant I’d bust in there like fifteen tons of hot shit,’ Sergeant Houk snarled. ‘Goddamned Krauts. Just because we beat the shit out of them during the war, they seem to think we owe them some kind of apology.’
‘Well, how can they expect that?’ said Detective Gable. ‘We weren’t even born during the war.’
‘Oh God give me strength,’ Sergeant Houk retaliated.
At that moment, they heard an appalling high-pitched scream. It sounded like a bird at first, or a coyote caught in a gin-trap. But it was quickly followed by another, more like a bellow of pain than a scream, and then a shout of ‘Help me! Help me! Aaaahhh! Help me!’
Sergeant Houk slapped Detective Gable on the shoulder and snapped, ‘Round the back! Quick! You go that way, I’ll go this!’
They both drew their guns. Detective Gable jumped heavily off the verandah and ran around the garage block, battling with the weeds as he went. Sergeant Houk sprinted along the verandah, round the other side of the house, and with a fierce kick broke the latch of the whitewashed wooden gate at the side. He forced the gate wider, pushed himself through, and galloped up a flight of six or seven shallow brick steps to the back corner of the house. He caught his foot in a loosely-coiled garden hose; tripped, took three flying, loping, off-balance steps forward, and grazed his hand against the path.
The screaming went on, almost inhuman. As he came around the corner to the small back yard, Sergeant Houk saw the deputy engulfed in roaring flames, flapping at himself in a convulsive attempt to put them out. His arms jerked up and down like a clockwork toy, but all he was doing was fanning the flames even more. His eyes were squeezed shut. Both his ears were alight, shrivelling like radicchio leaves on a kitchen burner. Fire poured from the top of his head, sending up a column of black smoke that rose higher than the house.
Detective Gable appeared on the other side of the house, fighting aside the last of the weeds. He stopped and stared at the deputy in open-mouthed horror.
‘Your coat, Gable, for Christ’s sake!’ yelled Sergeant Houk. ‘Use your coat!’
He looked desperately around. How the hell do you extinguish a burning man? There was a swimming-pool in the yard, but it had obviously long been empty, and was peeling and cracked and silted up with dry eucalyptus leaves. The rest of the yard was mainly concrete, with a few sorry yuccas, a tangled flower border, and a glass vegetable frame hidden amongst the overgrown crabgrass.
The garden hose!
The deputy was still flapping, still dancing. Detective Gable had twisted himself out of his coat and was waving it at him like a matador, trying to get near enough the blazing deputy to smother the flames. Sergeant Houk ran back to the garden hose. The tap was stiff, but he hit it twice with the butt of his revolver, and it loosened.
Hurry, Christ, hurry, the man’s on fire!
But all the time he knew that he was far too late, that it was no goddamned use, and that it would probably be kinder to let the deputy die. But he had been trained not to respond to thoughts like that. It was his duty to do what he could to save the deputy’s life, human sympathy notwithstanding.
The hose was faded and inflexible from years of lying in the sun, and hideously knotted, but he managed to yank enough of it across the yard to reach the burning man. Water clattered on the dry ground all around him.
The deputy had fallen on to his side now, amongst the grass and the broken glass, and was shuddering and quaking in agony. Detective Gable was on his knees beside him, trying desperately to cover him up with his coat, but every time he moved the coat to suppress the flames that danced around his face, more flames would spring up around his thighs and his groin.
‘Oh God!’ whimpered Detective Gable, his own hands reddened and blistered. ‘He’s like one of those fucking candles you can’t blow out!’
‘Roger!’ Sergeant Houk shouted. ‘Roger, you hear me? It’s okay! Get ready for a shock! This water’s real cold!’
He couldn’t tell whether the deputy had understood him or not. The boy’s face was blackened like burned beef, his eyes had been poached into blindness, his hair was nothing but crisp black tufts. But somehow he was still alive, still hurting, still burning, still trembling in the very last moments of his life.
Sergeant Houk swung the hose around and drenched him.
Detective Gable heaved himself up, offering his own burned hands to the hosepipe jet, and saying, ‘Here, Sergeant, for Christ’s sake, just one splash.’
The second he said that, however, Sergeant Houk saw with horror that the hose hadn’t extinguished the deputy at all. In fact, the flames were roaring up even more furiously, as if the water itself were flammable. He was about to say, ‘Gable, no . . .!’ when the arc of water pouring out of the hose-nozzle burst into flame, and Detective Gable was drenched in fire.
Detective Gable screeched, and tried to wave away the fire with his arms, but his arms instantly caught a
light. The hose almost immediately became too hot for Sergeant Houk to hold, and he dropped it. It snaked backwards and forwards under the wild pressure of the fluid, spraying Detective Gable again and again with liquid fire.
He fell to the ground, rolled over, thrashed, but he was burning even more fiercely than the deputy.
‘Daddy!’ he screamed. ‘Daddy! For Christ’s sake, Daddy!’
This time Sergeant Houk knew that the time for the rulebook had passed. He dodged the cascade of fire from the hose, and stepped up to Detective Gable quick and intent, his muscles tense as springs. He was holding his service revolver in both hands.
‘God forgive me,’ he said, and shot Detective Gable once in the head. Blood and brains sprayed outwards, and sizzled sharply in the heat.
Then Sergeant Houk turned around, his gun raised, and saw Otto standing at the kitchen window, his face white white white, his dry hands raised over his eyes as if he were staring at something very far in the distance. Helmwige stood a little further back in the shadows, but she wasn’t even looking at the burning men in her back yard, she was admiring her fingernails.
Sergeant Houk pointed his gun stiffly at Otto and screamed, ‘Freeze! Freeze, you bastard! You’re under arrest!’
But instantly he felt a wave of heat roar over him, as if a huge furnace door had been opened right in front of his face. His hands blistered, his sleeve caught fire, his gun fired on its own, smashing the kitchen window. Instinctively, he threw the gun away, a split-second before the rest of its rounds exploded in the chamber, blasting fragments of shrapnel in all directions. One of them caught Sergeant Houk deep in his left-calf muscle.
You bastard! he thought. You won’t burn me!
With his clothes alight, with his hair smoking, he ran back around the house, leaping over the hose, thundering along the verandah, vaulting the porch, and hurdling the long guano-spattered hood of Otto’s Mercedes tourer.
He didn’t notice the pain at first, but when his hair suddenly flared up, he felt a searing sensation on the top of his head that made him yell out. He had to get away! He had to get away!
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