Perry, Thomas - Jane Whitefield 02 - Dance for the Dead

by Perry, Thomas

  Jane took her time and looked closely at the houses. Few of them showed any interior lights at this hour. The garages were all hidden far back behind the houses at the ends of long driveways, and nobody left his car parked on the street. When she approached Turner’s block she slowed to a walk, as though she were catching her breath.

  The house had lights on behind the drawn blinds. She watched the windows for a few seconds and glanced at her watch. It was five-thirty now. When she looked up, one of the lights had gone off. She began to jog again. If he was turning lights off, he must be coming out. She passed the house, keeping her head forward but moving her eyes to the left to scan the house and the yard. As she came abreast of the house, another light went off.

  She saw the newspaper lying on the front porch. As she trotted on down the street she wondered about it. By now there was no chance he didn’t know that his office had been raided. If he hadn’t been behind his desk at Hoffen-Bayne when the cops came in and started padlocking filing cabinets, then somebody certainly would have told him. Reporters would call him. Was it possible that he wouldn’t bother to read what the newspapers said about it the next morning?

  She stopped running again at the end of the block and looked back at the house as she crossed the street. Two lights were still on. She started moving again, this time down the street toward Wilshire, glancing back now and then to see if anything had changed. Maybe he had gone out in the night to buy the paper as soon as it had come off the presses. No, that didn’t make sense; the newsstands carried only the early edition that had been printed the previous afternoon, before the raid.

  She turned and ran toward her car. The sun would be up before long, and there would be people out even in this quiet neighborhood. Inside her car she quickly changed into a pair of jeans and a blouse.

  She drove back down onto Hillcrest. As she passed the house, the other two lights went off. She checked her watch. It was exactly six o’clock. She was positive now that the lights were on timers. The ones they sold in hardware stores had crude dials on them, so it was difficult to set them for any time but an hour or half hour. She had always used them in her house when she went on a trip, and had solved the problem by setting the present time on them not to correspond with what her watch said. Turner wasn’t as good at this as she was. He might be a thief, but he had not learned to think like one. He had not even timed them to be sure they didn’t click off before the sun was up.

  Still, it was conceivable that he had set them but hadn’t left yet. She stopped at a small convenience store with an iron grate across the door, walked to the pay telephone, and dialed his number. There was no answer and no machine to record a message. She hung up after ten rings and got back into the car. As she started it, she checked the rearview mirror and saw a car coming that had lights on the roof like a police cruiser. It had blue and yellow stripes, and the shield on the door said “Intercontinental Security.” She pulled out and followed it at a distance. The car swung up and down a couple of side streets above Sunset, and then came down to Hillcrest, gliding along, the driver glancing casually at all of the houses with blue-and-yellow security signs. He pulled up at the curb in front of Turner’s house and got out. He was young and broad-shouldered and wore a tight uniform like a cop’s with a gun belt that made him hold his arms out a little from his sides as though he were carrying two buckets. He opened the gate, ran a flashlight over a couple of side windows, and picked up the newspaper. Turner was gone.

  Jane drove on, turned left on Sunset Boulevard and continued west to the entrance for the 405 freeway near U.C.L.A. This was the way Turner would have come after he had heard the news. He could have turned south toward the airport, but she was sure he had not done so. He was a conservative, judicious man. He had taken the second ramp, the one that got him safely out of town but didn’t incur the risk of appearing to flee the country. He had gone north to his house in Monterey.

  14

  Jane came up over the hill that separated the city from the San Fernando Valley and edged to the right onto the Ventura Freeway, then stayed on it as far as Santa Barbara before she stopped for breakfast in the restaurant of a sprawling hotel complex along the beach. By the time the food was cooked she was too impatient to eat, so she had the waitress put it in a Styrofoam container and took it with her in the car. North of the city at the Santa Barbara airport, she turned in the rented car and took a commuter flight to San Francisco, then rented another car there to drive down the coast to Monterey. It was early evening when she checked into a small motel a mile inland from the ocean, showered, and wrapped herself in a towel.

  She sat on the bed and dialed Carey McKinnon’s number, then hung up before it rang. She had been waiting, listening to the static while the telephone company’s computers threw switches to move the call across the country to Carey’s house, and she sensed in herself a feeling that was not right. She had not been calling because she wanted to give him a message of love before he dropped off to sleep, or even to soothe herself with the sound of his voice. These were the only legitimate reasons for calling Carey tonight. If the eagerness she had been feeling was morbid curiosity or the grim satisfaction of confirming a suspicion, then the only decent thing to do was leave him alone.

  She opened her suitcase and looked at her clothes. She decided that evening in Monterey was an occasion for basic black. She put on a black turtleneck sweater, a matching jacket, and black pants, then tied her hair back. The accessories were what would make such an outfit. She laid out the few items of female paraphernalia she had brought and made her selections. She fastened her hair with a black ring and a thin five-inch-long peg that had a T-shaped handle at one end and was sharpened at the other. Before she put the perfume bottle into her purse she opened it and sniffed cautiously. It had a soft wildflower smell with a little touch of damp earth that tickled the nose a little. It was a mixture of mayapple and water hemlock roots that she had mashed and strained into a clear concentrate. Eating the roots was the customary Iroquois method of suicide.

  For her feet she chose a pair of twenty-dollar black leather Keds. They had gum soles like sneakers, but the soles had no distinctive lines or patterns. They were merely plain, flat, and rough, a texture that could make it hard to distinguish the prints they left as a human track, let alone identify them as the prints of a particular woman’s shoe.

  She left the lights on in her motel room in case she returned, but put her suitcase in the trunk of the car in case she didn’t. She made her preparations carefully because she could not have said what she was preparing for. As she started the car and pulled out of the lot, she began to feel uneasy. If she had seen another woman adorning her hair with a spike designed to be driven into a person’s chest, or popping a vial of hemlock extract into her purse, she would have said that the woman was on her way to kill someone. People who brought along weapons without knowing why had a tendency to find out why after they arrived.

  She ran a quick inventory of the thoughts she had about Turner. She suspected that he was a man who stole from children, but she had not discovered any evidence that he had ordered the deaths of Timmy and his parents, or told anybody to kill Mona and Dennis rather than let them into the courtroom. She wanted to watch him and study him. He didn’t seem to be a physical threat, and she was not suddenly feeling the urge to go and supply herself with a gun; that would have been a bad sign. The poison proved nothing. Over the years she had promised clients that she would die rather than reveal where she had taken them. To say this without keeping within reach the means to accomplish it would have made it a lie.

  Jane drove down Morales Prospect past the address and took a long, careful look. The house was set far back on the deep lot, partly concealed by a few tall pine trees that had been left standing when the house was built. The second floor was fake Tudor, with a high, steep mansard roof that didn’t go with it, and the ground floor had a brick facade about six feet high. There were dim lights on in the second-story windows, but the bo
ttom-floor windows were dark. Even the porch light was off. As she passed, she could see that the house was sheltered on three sides by the remnants of the pine grove. The trees ran right up to the edge of the driveway and nearly touched the garage.

  She drove up the road looking for a place to leave her car. A half mile farther she found a closed gas station with five or six cars lined up along the side waiting to be fixed. One of them had its hood off and in its place was a tarp of heavy-gauge plastic taped down to keep the sea air out of its engine. She pulled into the lot with her lights off, parked next to this car, and moved the tarp to her own hood.

  She walked back along the road, keeping in the shadows of hedges and trees inside the property lines of the big front yards so that any headlights unexpectedly shining on her would fall on her black hair and black clothes and not on her face and hands. But this part of Monterey was a winding seventeen-mile scenic route, so people probably drove it in the daytime when they could see it.

  In ten minutes Jane was standing among the trees in the side yard of the house. She felt the soft, cushioned layer of long needles on the ground and smelled the pine scent in the dark, still air. She made her way to the garage and looked in the window. She could see the gleaming finish of the black BMW inside. This was the place where Turner had come to wait out the scandal, leaving the questions and cameras to his lawyer. She walked slowly and quietly around the house, staying back among the trees.

  She studied the lower windows, then the upper ones. She scanned the eaves and gutters for spotlights that might automatically come on if she made a noise, but she saw nothing that worried her.

  She wanted to see Alan Turner. She returned to the spot where she felt most sheltered by the trees, at the back corner, and watched the lighted upper windows on two sides of the house. There was no glow of a television set, no shadows on the ceiling from anyone walking across any of the rooms. She felt a strong urge to see what he was doing and what he looked like tonight.

  Maybe she had come too late, and he had lain down to rest with the lights on and fallen asleep. He had driven much farther than she had, and had probably done a lot of it at night, so he would be tired.

  She felt drawn to the light. When she walked to the side of the house to peer into a window, she saw the little yellow-and-blue sticker of Intercontinental Security. It made her take a step backward while she tried to analyze the uneasiness this gave her. It had begun to seem that every building she had seen since she started looking into Timmy’s problems had one of these stickers on its window. Alarm systems didn’t surprise her – she had one herself – but California seemed to be blanketed with Intercontinental stickers. Had it been that way for years without her seeing it?

  But of course Turner’s houses would be protected by the same company that Hoffen-Bayne used. He probably hid the cost of the alarm systems for both houses in the monthly fee for Hoffen-Bayne. She decided that her uneasiness was only the result of having her attention focused on the signs. If somebody she knew got a disease she had never heard of, suddenly she would notice articles in the newspapers about it and overhear people talking about it until it seemed that the whole world had been infected.

  She pushed the security company out of her mind and forced herself to think about the sticker in a way that was of more immediate use. It warned her that Turner had an alarm system. Whatever interior traps and gadgets the system had, they would probably be turned off if he was still up and walking around, or he would risk setting them off himself. The perimeter circuits would certainly be turned on.

  She studied the building for its weakness. The alarm system would protect the windows and doors. The high, steep roof didn’t have skylights or big vents, and if he were in an upstairs room, he would hear her walking up there. She looked down. This house was like most in California. The ground never froze, so they had no basements. Houses were bolted to three-foot foundations with a crawl space under the floors for pipes and wires. Near the side door by the kitchen was a little wooden trap to cover a two-by-three-foot concrete access well. She lifted the cover off quietly. As she looked down she had a momentary foreboding of spiders and rats, but she pretended there were no such things. She crawled under the house and pulled the trap back over the opening.

  Beneath her was bare, powdery dirt. It was dark under the house, but she could see moonlight coming through little screened openings placed at intervals in the foundation. She found the gas pipe from the kitchen overhead and followed it slowly toward the center of the house, making out thick drain pipes and thinner water pipes here and there. Finally she reached the place where the gas pipe jointed and went upward. There was a square opening in the floor beside it about three feet wide.

  She reached up to touch the place where the opening ended. It was a big square fabric filter. She pushed up on it and tilted it, then brought it down under the house with her. She reached up again and felt the row of burners. There was only about a foot and a half of space between the business part of the gas furnace and the floor, but she estimated that she could probably fit. She felt carefully around the inside of the furnace until she found the panel that slipped off so the filter could be removed and cleaned. That must be the front.

  Jane placed her fingers on the lip and the top of the panel and slowly pushed upward. The panel slid up a quarter inch, when suddenly there was a flash and a click, and the pilot light came on. The burners just above her head began to hiss as the gas came out of them. She ducked down quickly and lay on her back as the gas ignited and the level blue flame spread across the top of the row of burners. Now she could see in the weird blue light. She could tell that she had estimated the shape and structure of the furnace only slightly wrong. She studied it, moving her head from side to side and lifting it as far as she dared.

  There had to be some kind of safety button to kill the furnace when the door was off so that it didn’t start up and burn the house down. As she searched, the blower motor went on and the fire grew hotter. She couldn’t let it run for long, or all the metal around it would get hot too. She kept her head low, slipped her fingers under the bottom of the panel, and pushed upward again. The panel lip was freed, and the furnace went off. Carefully she pushed the panel higher until it came off, then leaned it on its side to keep from making noise, and lay down again.

  A few minutes later she judged the air was cool enough to let her reach up through the space where the panel had been and feel around. There was a wooden door in front of the panel: the furnace must be in a space disguised as a closet. She ran her fingers up the side of it until she felt a hinge.

  She sat on the ground and waited until she could touch the burners with her fingers before she made her attempt. She squatted cautiously, rose to a crouch, straightened to raise the upper part of her body into the furnace, reached out the front to find the doorknob, and opened the door a crack. She pulled herself up, slithered under the burners and out the front of the furnace, crawled out of the closet, and closed the door behind her.

  She was in a dim hallway with a bleached oak floor and a long row of small framed drawings of sailing ships on the white walls. As she looked down the hall she could see the foyer. There was an alarm keypad on the wall near the front door. A small red light was glowing to indicate that the system was armed. At the other end of the hall was a staircase. If she herself had installed the security system, this was where she would have put an interior trap. Whatever a burglar stole down here, you didn’t want him getting up those stairs where the bedrooms were. She stepped slowly to the side of the staircase, grasped the railing, and sidestepped between the posts up along the outside of it. She was ten feet up, just below the center of the staircase, before she found the electric eye mechanism. It was a foot above a step, so a crawling intruder couldn’t slide under it, and even one who took three steps in a stride would break the beam. There were probably pressure pads under the carpet on some of the steps in case an intruder saw it in time.

  She kept outside the railing beyo
nd the top of the stairs and then climbed over the railing into the hallway. There might be other traps on the second floor, but if Turner was up here, this alarm zone was probably turned off.

  There were lighted rooms on both ends of the second-floor hallway. The house was absolutely quiet. She could hear no movement or snoring or the shifting of a person in a chair. She wondered for a moment if she had been lucky and entered while he was out, but then she remembered the car in the garage.

  She looked at the glowing doorway of each room and chose the one to her left. It was slightly closer to the stairway, and if she had to run she didn’t want to have Turner three steps closer to the only way out. Slowly she edged along the hallway with her shoulder almost touching the wall. When hardwood floorboards creaked, it was usually the ones in the center.

  At the doorway she leaned out just far enough to use the dark windows in the room as mirrors to search for Turner. When she found him she jerked backward. She had been looking for a human form, and when she found it lower and closer to her than she had expected, her reflex was to duck back quickly to evade the blow or the shot. But even as her body was protecting itself, the feeling had already turned into something else.

  His blond hair was wet with blood, and under the body, the thick beige rug had soaked up the first of it and saturated, then let a pool of it form and spread. She could see that the outer edge of the pool was already drying into a dark maroon ring, the carpet tufts hardening into twisted bristles. She craned her neck to look for the gun, and found it where it was supposed to be, beside the right hand. She knew enough about the way policemen treated the scenes of suicides to know it was a bad idea to enter the room. If she lost a strand of hair or a fiber from her clothes, she would be somebody they wanted to talk to.