“I can’t stop feeling odd about this,” he said. “I mean, we ought to go out someplace.”
“You mean shack up in a motel? That’s what he’s doing.”
“Some night he’s gonna walk in on us.”
“How many times do I have to tell you?” she asked impatiently. “When he drives up to the gate, he uses his radio controller to open it. That activates the gate-open signal and switches on the driveway camera. We can look up at the screen and see the Mercedes coming. At that point you have three minutes to scram if that’s what you want to do, or three minutes to grab a drink and sit down in the living room. It’s plenty of time for either.”
“I don’t like the idea of scramming, like some naughty kid. I don’t like the idea of sitting in his living room, drinking his Scotch, and pretending to be his friend, when I’m balling his wife and… Well, you know what I mean.”
“And stealing him blind,” said Arlene.
“I can’t believe he doesn’t know it,” said Steve, shaking his head.
“If he knew it, we’d know he knew it. Joe never could hide his feelings.” _
“He’s got a temper, too,” Steve said.
“Not really,” said Arlene. “He’s more the cool, calm plotter type. Phlegmatic is the word.”
“Even so, I wouldn’t want him walking in on us some night.”
Three
1
Khoury always made it a point with parking-lot attendants that they should handle the gull-wing Mercedes carefully, park it in front where they could see it, and watch out for someone who might want to make off with an eminently stealable antique automobile. Jorge Mendez did more. As he had time during the evening, he would wipe it down, making sure no trace of dust sullied its waxed surfaces. He knew that Mr. Khoury and his lady friend would not stay overnight but would leave the motel an hour or so after midnight, and to assure his ten-dollar tip he would be sure the car was ready and gleaming. If he had been still in New York, where he had worked at the same kind of job before he came to California, he would have started the car and warmed it up on a cold night.
“Good evening, Mr. Khoury. Welcome,” Mendez said, as Khoury pulled into the valet area of the Piscina Linda motel.
“Good evening, Jorge,” said Khoury to the attendant. “You’ll take care of it as usual?”
“Absolutely, Mr. Khoury. Your car is never out of my sight. I keep it right out here in the light, where I can see it all the time.”
As Khoury handed over his keys, Kimberly Dana entered the hotel. The lobby was decorated in a style that might have been called Southern California gothic: a nod, not quite a bow, in the direction of Mexico, with more of a concession to what Americans might suppose they would find in Mexico than anything they would ever find there. Red lights. Dark wood. Dark-red carpet. Cantinas did not look like Piscina Linda, but many Americans thought they did. Ten years ago this motel had been a chic place, visited by chic people. Today it was more often visited by people doing what Joe and Kimberly were doing—and wanted to do it in some style.
“Good evening, Mr. Khoury,” said the desk clerk. “Welcome to Piscina Linda.”
“Good evening, Frank. Pleasant evening, huh?”
“Yes, sir. Your suite is waiting as usual. Will there be anything?”
“Well, just the coffeje service as always,” said Khoury. “At midnight.”
“Oh, yes, sir. We’ll take care of that.”
The desk clerk did not ask Khoury for an imprint from his credit card. He did not ask him to sign the register. He simply handed him a key, which he knew Khoury would drop at the desk sometime after midnight. The motel would send a bill to Khoury’s. A check would come in a few days.
Frank did not know the name of the beautiful young woman who came to Piscina Linda with Mr. Khoury. He only knew that she was like everything else about Mr. Yussef Khoury—choice, exquisite, and no doubt very expensive. As always, she carried a capacious Louis Vuitton leather-trimmed drawstring bag, and Frank wondered what Khoury Collection lingerie she had inside. He admired what she was wearing, too—though he had no idea what to call it.
She was in fact wearing an ivory-colored long- sleeved, high-necked blouse, trimmed on the pockets and cuffs with black stripes and gold buttons. She was also wearing a black carwash skirt: calf- length skirt with multiple slits thigh high, the fabric slipping away from her legs as she walked, the way the felt strips in a carwash slide over a car. Very stylish, Frank thought.
Yussef and Kimberly went to their suite, which he had reserved by a telephone call that morning. There were only two suites in Piscina Linda, both on the top floor, identical. Each consisted of a sitting room furnished with couch, coffee table, chairs, a television set, and a small round table that could serve as a desk or dining table. The bedrooms were furnished with a king-size bed, another desk, chairs, and another television set.
Once inside, they kissed ardently. But they did not stay in the suite. He visited the bathroom for a moment, and then they went downstairs for dinner.
They asked for and always got the same table, overlooking the swimming pool from which the motel took its name. It was an immense pool, set partly in living rock. Other rock had been hauled in and built into grottoes and coves. The water circulated through pumps that lifted it some six feet and released it into a pond that overflowed, making a waterfall. Palms and tropical shrubbery grew in pots all around the pool. The bar and dining room opened onto the pool, though air curtains— streams of air blown upward from a line of nozzles in the floor and drawn into vacuum holes in the ceiling—kept out all but stormy weather.
Piscina Linda employed models to swim in the pool and sit around in bikinis in gaudy flower patterns: absurd simulacra of Polynesian maidens. Otherwise, the pool was the province of children, sent there to amuse themselves while their parents were in the bar or dining room, from where they could see the children clearly through the air curtains.
Yussef drank Glenfiddich Scotch, Kimberly a Bombay gin martini.
“Nervous?” she asked him.
He tossed back the last of his drink and signaled for another. “Yes. Aren’t you?”
“Sure. I wish we could get on with it. I wish we didn’t have to wait. But everything depends on waiting. We can’t go before it’s dark. Besides, it’s essential that we keep to our routine here. We’ve been careful enough to establish it, so let’s not attract attention by breaking it now.”
“We’ll have to keep to the routine for a while,” said Yussef. “God! To dine in a motel!”
“They do their steaks alright,” she said. “It’s not what you’d call a sacrifice to eat here.”
“I suppose so. The wine list is… undistinguished.”
“Let’s change the subject,” said Kimberly. “Have you given any more thought to a property?”
“I’ve been thinking more about what we’re going to do to get the money for a property.”
“I want you to read a novel. Altarpiece, by Daniel Lake. See if you don’t think it’s just perfect. What’s more, he’s been writing a long time and has never sold a book to a producer. You won’t have to bid at an auction to get Altarpiece."
“I might, if somebody sees in it what you see.”
“That’s why we should move quickly. I think it’s perfect. It’ll need acting ability, but we can expose the bod, too. I know you’ll like it.”
He reached across the table and put his hand on hers. “We don’t have to expose the bod, Kim. You’ve got star quality without showing skin.” Kimberly grinned. “Insurance,” she said.
They ate steaks and drank a bottle of Glen Ellen red. About nine they went up to their suite. With two hours, almost, remaining before they could leave, they went to bed.
In bed too, Kimberly was like everything else in Yussef Khoury’s life, to the extent he could control it; she was superb. He was conscious that he was not, not in the sense that she was. She was superb even in maintaining the pretense that he was all she could ever
want from a man. He was glad, anyway, that he kept himself in good shape, working out at the gym, taking treatments to keep his face taut and smooth. If he was not in the prime of life, he was not far beyond it. He had good muscle tone. Beyond that he had not lost his courage or his optimism, which was crucial if he were going to do what she had urged him to do tonight.
Not long after eleven they got up. Kimberly opened her bag and took out clothes. She put on a pair of tight blue jeans and a gray T-shirt, lettered ucla athletic department. She pulled on blue Adidas running shoes. Yussef changed into khaki slacks and a dark-blue golf shirt. He had not brought shoes and kept on his Gucci loafers and black socks.
Kimberly left the motel first, going down the back stairs and through the rear parking lot. Being lithe and strong, she nimbly threw herself over the five-foot chain-link fence and dropped into a field of weeds. Yussef followed her a minute later. He needed two tries to clear the fence, but two were enough. They hurried through the weeds and onto the street behind the motel.
Waiting on the street was the green Oldsmobile Cutlass she had rented the day before.
2
2
Casa Khoury stood on Mulholland Drive, at the crest of a ridge in the Santa Monica Mountains. Wearing white cotton gloves—they had never touched her rented car with their bare hands— Yussef drove slowly along the drive. A hundred yards from his home, he pulled off into the driveway of a house belonging to a neighbor who was in Europe. Leaving the Oldsmobile out of sight from the road, Kimberly and Yussef armed themselves with the Bali-Songs and with two nine-millimeter pistols.
They walked along Mulholland Drive toward Casa Khoury and within minutes were at the gate. Yussef led Kimberly to the right, up a little mound and down the back side, then to a clump of brush where the day before he had hidden a short steplad- der. He set it up, climbed it, and jumped down inside the fence. Kimberly did the same, and they pulled the ladder over the fence and laid it down .flat.
Inside the fence they paused and listened for a moment. The alarm system in the house was never turned on until the people inside retired for the night. It was not on now, and it was safe to walk directly, up the driveway.
The rooms at the front of the house were dimly lighted, only by light shining from the rear rooms.
The kitchen lights burned bright, glowing through the windows and lighting much of the west lawn. Lamps in the master-bedroom suite cast a warmer light.
Yussef used his key to unlock the front door, then turned the knob with his gloved hand. He and Kimberly walked into the marble-floored entry hall.
Kimberly had never been in the house before and stood staring, wide-eyed, at the opulence of Casa Khoury: at paintings on the walls, at tall vases on brass stands, at a palm growing in a huge stone pot. She was struck, too, by the parallel between the house and the store. It was as though Joe had furnished the place from the store—which of course he had.
Yussef beckoned her to follow him. He opened the door and glanced into the living room, which was quiet and almost dark. Then they moved along a hall toward the rear of the house. The hall branched, and they turned right into another hall, this one lushly carpeted.
Yussef stopped before a pair of double doors. He pointed at her handbag, and Kimberly pulled out the two Bali-Songs. They unfolded them, exposing the blades. He turned the knob slowly and opened the doors.
They walked into the master-bedroom suite. The outer room was a small sitting room, cozily furnished in English-country style. The door to the bedroom was ajar.
Yussef and Kimberly paused for a moment, as if they shared a thought: that they could still back off and not do what they had come here to do. She shifted her knife to her left hand and extended her right hand toward him. For a moment they stood, squeezing each other’s hands. Then they released each other, and moved toward the bedroom door.
As Yussef reached for the door, they heard an ecstatic moan.
Four
1
They caught Arlene Khoury and Steve Heck in flagrante delicto. They were naked, and he was on top of her. Grotesquely, his foot was in a boxed pizza, which in his passion he did not seem to realize.
Arlene screamed.
Steve rolled off of her and turned to face Yussef, who was on him like a pouncing cat, the handles of the Bali-Song extended at right angles to the blade and gripped in his two hands. Steve raised his arms to deflect the deadly blow he saw coming, but the two-handed thrust of the Bali-Song drove past his arms, and the blade plunged into his chest. Yussef twisted the knife, then withdrew it and shoved it in again. Then again.
Arlene screamed—until she choked on the blood coming up in her throat. Kimberly’s first thrust had driven the blade under her lowest left rib and upward into her lung and heart. The second stab glanced off a rib, and the blade cut through her heart a second time. Her scream diminished to a groan.
Arlene and Steve lay quiet, still alive. They stared at Yussef and Kimberly, uncomprehending and unbelieving, as they coughed up their life blood, as it streamed from the wounds in their chests. They couldn’t move. They could do nothing but know death, feel its unstoppable advance.
Yussef opened Arlene’s handbag and dropped a wadded handkerchief inside.
For a moment Yussef and Kimberly stood paralyzed by the enormity and horror of what they had done. Then—
“¡Asesinato!, ¡Sangre!, ¡Socorro
Kimberly and Yussef swung around. Sergio, the houseboy, was at the door, staring at them and at Arlene and Steve. Damn! He wasn’t supposed to be there.
Kimberly leaped toward him as he spun around to run. Gripping her Bali-Song by one handle, she swung the other as a bludgeon. It hit him on the back of his head, and he stumbled and fell. In an instant she was over him, driving the blade into his back.
“¡Policia!” he muttered as blood choked off his breath. “¡Socorro!”
Sergio lay in front of the small green-and-white vine-pattern sofa in the sitting room of the master-bedroom suite. He choked and moaned. Kimberly stabbed him twice more.
“I thought you said he wouldn’t be here,” she said to Yussef.
“He should have been in the other wing. He wouldn’t have been able to hear us from there.”
“Maybe it’s just as well. Three are better than two, if you think about it.”
Yussef nodded. “We have work to do. Let’s get to it. I don’t want to leave the Oldsmobile parked any longer than necessary.”
Kimberly knelt beside Sergio and drove her knife into him a dozen more times.
Yussef did the same to Steve, punching the blade into his body a score of times, then more.
When Kimberly returned to the bedroom, Yussef was standing over Arlene, staring at her.
“I’ll do that one,” she said. “You start some of the other stuff.”
Yussef nodded. With a gloved finger, he touched one of the wounds on Steve’s body and soaked up blood. With the blood he printed on the wall above the bed—
HEALTER SKELTER
POLITICAL PIGGY
Kimberly stabbed and stabbed at Arlene’s silent body. Then she turned away from her and walked into the sitting room. Sergio’s blood was easiest to soak up, because he was on the floor. She soaked a gloved finger in it and printed on the sitting-room wall—
ALL PIGGIS DIE
DIE!
WHO NEXT?
Now they pulled off the blood-soaked gloves and stuffed them into a Baggie. They put on fresh gloves.
Yussef had other work to do. From Kimberly’s bag he took out a burglar tool: a foot-long bar with a flat blade at one end, a round knob on the other. He left the house by way of the hall and the kitchen door and came around to a window on the rear of the house. Lying in the shrubbery where he had left them yesterday were a piece of two-by-four and a heavy rag. He jammed the blade end of the bar into the crack between the window and its sill, wrapped the rag around the knob to muffle the sound, and began to pound.
This was touchy. If a neighbor hear
d… But he pounded steadily, and after half a dozen whacks the blade broke away wood and penetrated. Shoving down on the bar, he pried the window upward. The simple latch broke, and the window slid up, open.
He tossed the two-by-four across the lawn, into some shrubbery near the fence, dropped the rag, and carried the bar back into the house.
In the kitchen he saw why Sergio had been in the main house and had heard Arlene’s screams. He had been heating a can of tomato soup, a late-night snack. It was boiling vigorously. Yussef left it alone. It would bum and set off the smoke alarms.
Back in the bedroom suite, he discovered to his disgust that in his hurry to get outside and do his work, he had stepped in Sergio’s blood and left footprints on the white carpet of the sitting room of the bedroom suite. Also, dirt from beneath the shrubbery had become stuck to his loafer. He scrubbed his shoe on the carpet, then stared at the soles, to be sure no blood remained on them.
Kimberly sat on the green-and-white couch, looking glum. She shuddered. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.
2
They used the ladder they had left inside the fence and climbed over again. In minutes they were back at the Oldsmobile, where they hid the Bali-Songs and the burglar tool in the tire well.
Yussef drove the car to a telephone booth. Kimberly got out, went to the booth, and punched in 911. "
“Police emergency.”
She mimicked a Spanish accent. “I work a party, Mulholland Drive. Just leave. Go past Khoury house. Yussef Khoury house. Something wrong there. Strange peoples there. Running around house. Not kind peoples Khourys invite their house.”
Columbo: The Helter Skelter Murders Page 3