Head To Head

by Linda Ladd

  Black was outside in the yard when I came down the steps, just standing there, hands on his narrow hips, staring out over the dark water. I’d always heard he loved the lake, and now I believed it. It had a calming influence on me, too, especially at night. I looked out over the quiet cove and watched a boat near the opposite shore. A lantern glowed faintly at the stern, and it made me want to be out on that smooth black water, too, just floating and stargazing, not thinking about gruesome murders and missing body parts.

  I said, “We’re calling it a night. Harve’s tired and wants to get some sleep.”

  “Let’s walk back to your place.”

  Already a few feet down the path toward the dock, I stopped in my tracks. “What about the boat?”

  “Harve can have it.”

  “Harve can have it?” I repeated.

  “Sure. It’s handicapped equipped; all our Cobalts are. Then he can go fishing with his nurse if he wants.”

  “You’re giving him your boat, just like that?”

  “I’ve got a dozen of them docked at the marina. If I need more, I’ll order them. Harve’s helping me find Sylvie’s murderer. Think of it as a token of my appreciation.”

  “He’s a proud man; he might not take it.”

  “Then it’ll be up to you to convince him. Tell him it’s for Dottie to use.”

  I stared at him, but I thought about how often Harve longed to go out on the lake with Dottie, how many times he’d said he missed going fishing. It was just too dangerous in a wheelchair in the bass boat. But Black was right; he’d be comfortable in the big cruiser, and he’d be perfectly safe.

  Black said, “It’s a beautiful night. Let’s walk. I think better when I walk.”

  The night was dark, still, and peaceful, and little was left to be said. He took long strides, a sign of inner agitation. But hey, I was five-nine; I could match him, almost. I didn’t interrupt his thoughts. I knew what he was thinking about, and I wanted him to think about it. I was running into dead ends left and right. I welcomed his input.

  When we reached my house, we walked down to the dock, and he took out his cell phone and politely requested that Tyler pick him up at my dock. While he gave directions, I righted the picnic table he’d overturned and sent tumbling down the hill earlier. I sat down on top of it with my feet braced on the attached bench. Black came over and stood in front of me.

  “Thanks for giving the boat to Harve,” I said, realizing I was more choked up at the gesture than I realized.

  “I like him. He’s a good guy. Was he your partner in L.A.? Is that how the two of you became friends?”

  I did not fall for that. “He’s been a good friend to me, he and Dottie both.”

  “What happened to you in L.A., Claire? Why can’t you talk about it?”

  The probing shocked me. Most people took the hint when I shut the door on a subject.

  Frowning, I stood up and decided it was time to head for the hills. That’s right, flee when things become dangerously personal. Chicken, well, yes, exactly. Apparently, Black decided me exiting stage right wasn’t going to happen. He grabbed my wrist and spun me back around.

  I jerked against his hold on me, pissed off, but he pulled me close enough that our noses nearly touched. My heart began to pound. Black was breathing hard and his voice dropped to that husky, I-need-to-throw-you-down-right-here-right-now-and-ravish-you timber. “I want to kiss you.”

  Right to the point, no hedging here. I swallowed hard. Time for the womanly bravado I’d practiced for so long. “Sorry, pal, that ain’t gonna happen.”

  “Like hell it isn’t.”

  He brought his mouth up against mine, no soft little nibble but hard and edgy and determined, but his grip loosened almost immediately as if, uh-oh, he realized he’d made the wrong move, and I was going to be ticked off, but he was nowhere near to forcing me. This was a good time to knee him in the groin with good results. I could pull away any time I wanted, could stalk off, even slap his face or slap him in cuffs again if I wanted to. Unfortunately, I didn’t want to; I wanted this kiss as much as he did. He didn’t need more encouragement, and when I didn’t resist, he put one arm around my waist and pulled me up tight against his chest, his other hand caught in my hair and holding my head steady. It had been so long since I’d kissed a man, even longer since a man had sent a sexual fire ripping down my spine to explode where it counted. It felt good, wonderful, like seeing the sun rise over the promised land you vowed never to visit again.

  My lips opened to him, and he took full advantage, ravishing my mouth and cheeks, then moving to the base of my throat, where my pulse hammered in a staccato that was downright embarrassing. I felt my resolve go limp. I didn’t know how long the embrace lasted, but I finally fought my way back to reality enough to realize I was engaged in something incredibly stupid and unprofessional. The truth hit me like a cold shower, and I pushed him back. He didn’t resist my rejection, so we stood a couple of feet apart, both of us breathing hard and audibly, as if we’d run a full marathon. Sexual chemistry, there it was again, but now I really knew what it meant.

  Then, I’m sorry to say, I was the one that went for him, grabbing the front of his shirt and jerking him back to me. Our mouths ravaged each other some more, and the embrace got crazy with lots of groping under clothes and tongues and groans and moans. Then I came to my senses again and jerked back away from him, how I do not know. Maybe it was the Cobalt roaring into sight at the far end of the cove.

  “This can’t happen,” I got out somehow, but who was I kidding? It takes two to tango, and I’d been skipping around that dance floor pretty damn fast.

  “It already happened.” His voice wasn’t quite normal, either, which made me feel better, but he was calmer than I was and not trying to touch me. “And it’s not going to stop.”

  I was letting him lead me down the garden path that he’d chosen, and I stomped on my carnal brakes while I still could. “Look, Black. I like you. I didn’t at first, I admit it, but you’re not the kind of man I thought you were. I don’t think you had anything to do with this crime, but I have to prove that. The kissing was great, I have to say; I enjoyed it, too. But that’s all it can be. The end, over, done with.”

  Black gave a low laugh. Totally not amused. “I can wait until this case is over, if that’s the problem. Just hurry up and solve it.” He let me think about that for about two seconds; then he kissed me on the forehead and said, “Take care, Detective. I have to go to L.A. tomorrow, so don’t get yourself killed while I’m gone. Remember, duck and weave. I’ll call you when I get back from the coast.”

  Then he was striding down my dock to flag down his ride under my dusk-to-dawn lamp. I sat down on the picnic table, furious at myself for getting drawn into a personal relationship with a man like Nicholas Black. It was a stupid thing to do. If I couldn’t keep my hormones from raging when I was around him, and it was pretty damn obvious I couldn’t, then I’d have to keep my distance. Charlie would have my hide if he found out I’d been playing kissy face with a murder suspect. I cringed just to think how Charlie would ream me out if he ever heard about this.

  LIFE AFTER FATHER

  Brat didn’t kill again for almost two years. The brown metal strongbox was so full of cash that it would last Brat and the mother a lifetime; Brat had stopped counting after two hundred thousand dollars, all in neat bundles of hundred-dollar bills held together with rubber bands. Three days after Brat had killed the embalmer and burned the old house, he saw an old silver travel trailer sitting in the front yard of a farmhouse on a rural highway. It had a white sign on the hitch that said FOR SALE in red letters. Brat knew it would be a perfect place for his mother to live in peace and quiet. It had a living room for a TV and computer, a kitchen where they could eat together, and a little bathroom with a shower stall, a tiny sink, and a toilet. The big bedroom at the back would be perfect for Brat, and the small one would give the mother privacy to entertain her friends when Brat brought them home. The eld
erly farmer said, “Yes, sir, it would be a nice surprise for your mother and a bargain for just four hundred dollars,” and then helped Brat hitch it to the green Dodge station wagon free of charge.

  After that, they drove and drove, mostly on county roads where nobody noticed them. Brat discovered KOA campgrounds and other camper parks, where nobody ever bothered them or came around, and they could hook up water and electricity and have a nice, peaceful life. They never stayed long, because Brat was searching, searching, constantly searching. Finally, after many months and many miles, Brat found the woman they’d been searching for. They followed her for over a week, to make sure she was the right one, until the mother said, “Yes, dear, she is the one. She’s the perfect one.” They smiled at each other, and Brat was very happy they were still together.

  Brat thought about how to kill the woman for a long time. The cleaver and razor strop were in the mother’s bedroom, where she could keep an eye on them, hidden under the money in the locked brown strongbox. The perfect woman to kill lived in a small house that had two apartments, one upstairs and one downstairs. She lived upstairs and had to climb long wooden steps built on the side of the house to get to her front door. Every day for ten days, Brat watched her leave for work at a soup kitchen on the corner, then come back home and climb the steps. Every time she came into sight, hatred filled Brat, and the hot river boiled up over its banks and made Brat’s skin hot to the touch. When that happened, the mother refused to give good-night kisses. That’s how Brat knew it was time for the woman to die. The mother was getting impatient and angry and was refusing to talk anymore.

  One night when Brat and the mother were watching from the station wagon, hidden in the shadows along the woman’s street, the woman came outside to smoke a cigarette on the long flight of steps. The mother said, “Go on, go on, Brat. Don’t be afraid; she’s the one,” and so Brat sneaked silently up behind the woman, and when she stood up to go back upstairs, Brat hit her as hard as he could with the tire iron the embalmer had kept in the station wagon next to the spare tire. Heart thundering, the hot liquid boiling higher and higher, hotter and hotter, Brat watched the woman. She lay still at the bottom of the steps, and nobody came; nobody heard Brat dragging her by her long blond hair across the grass, then along the side of the road to the station wagon. The mother was pleased and said now they’d have a new friend to talk to.

  Except that, uh-oh, the woman wasn’t dead. She woke up and started groaning, and Brat had to tape her hands and legs and mouth shut with silver duct tape until they got home. Brat put her on the mother’s bed, and soon the mother said what had to be done, that their new friend wouldn’t like them, wouldn’t talk and be friendly until she was dead, so Brat got on the bed with her and put both hands around her throat and pressed down until something went crunch in her neck and her eyes closed and she quit struggling. Brat jumped off her, and the hot liquid fell to a simmering heat in Brat’s belly, until she moved again and her eyelids fluttered, and then the flames inside leapt out of control, and Brat dragged her to the tiny shower stall in the travel trailer and held her down on the floor. “The cleaver, use the cleaver,” the mother said from her place on her bed, and Brat did it, and then finally, finally, the woman lay still.

  Shaking all over, Brat got into the station wagon and drove all night, while the woman’s blood ran down into the shower drain. When they came to a wide river, Brat turned down a road and severed the woman’s head and put it on the pillow beside the mother’s, then wrapped the woman’s body in the shower curtain and dragged her up rocks to a ledge over the rushing water. Weighting her down with big rocks, Brat pushed her off the ledge and listened for the big splash, and when he returned to the trailer, the mother and the woman were having a good time, gossiping like old friends.

  “You two sure are chatterboxes,” Brat told them with a big smile. “How’m I gonna get any sleep tonight with all this yakkin’ and laughin’ goin’ on, huh?” But now his mother had somebody to talk to during their long drives, and when the mother was happy, Brat was happy.

  Brat was fifteen years old.

  22

  Sylvie’s head turned up three days later. Attached to a new body. In Los Angeles. On the soundstage where Gil Serna was filming interiors for Trojan, no less. Even more interesting, Gil Serna had up and disappeared. I arrived at LAX late that same afternoon. I begged Bud to take the assignment, but he had his hands full handling the infestation of press people. Maybe this latest development would send them hightailing it back to L.A., where they belonged.

  So I got hold of Jim Tate, a guy I went to the academy with, and he agreed to pick me up at the airport. I was glad to see him again, especially since I knew I could trust him. He hadn’t changed much, still short and square with enough muscles to lift a small Brahma bull over his head. He had a receding hairline shaped like a W over his eyebrows, but he had taken emphasis off it with a blond buzz cut that made him look like retired military. He was honest and smart, and lived for the weekends with his three sons, who raced pickup trucks on dirt tracks out in the desert somewhere. Married and divorced twice, he had made his work the center of his life.

  Tate already had permission from his superior officer to admit me to the soundstage, which was a few blocks off Sunset Boulevard, near Paramount Studios, the way paved by Charlie Ramsay’s call to a friend of his, who also happened to be the L.A. Chief of Police. I requested Tate as my liaison and got him. The news of the grisly discovery had not hit the airwaves yet, but the clock was ticking.

  “We need to get you in and out of here before the networks get hold of this and the media goes nuts.”

  “My feelings exactly.” Jim knew better than most about what had happened to me and Harve. He had been on the scene that night. He glanced at me. “Except for those bruises, you’re looking pretty good. You doing all right, kid?”

  “It was nice and quiet down on the lake. Until this happened.”

  “Harve doin’ okay, I guess?”

  “I see him almost every day. Then this case popped up, and all hell broke loose.”

  He said, “Somebody in the media’s bound to recognize you sooner or later.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been waiting for it.”

  “It’s been three years. People forget. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

  “I’ve never been a lucky person.”

  He didn’t try to convince me otherwise. Point made.

  “What can you tell me about this one?” I said.

  We took a ramp onto the 405 North fast enough to stand Tate’s tan Ford truck on two wheels. Racing trucks around a track did that to a fella. I held on but didn’t complain. Los Angeles was not the place for fainthearted drivers or scaredy-cat passengers. “Cast and crew all left the set on Friday around four o’clock. Security locked up the place for the weekend, but that doesn’t mean jack. Anybody can scale the walls: they’re low stucco with bougainvillea vines all over them for footholds. And a gap was found in a fence on the back lot.”

  When we reached Santa Monica Boulevard, Tate swerved onto it like a bat out of hell and flew west. The car in the merge lane was forced into the middle and almost hit a new bright blue Chevy Malibu, but Tate didn’t miss a beat with his story. “When everybody showed up Monday around noon, they found the vic on a bed on one of the sets. They recognized Sylvie Border right off, freaked out, one and all, real mass hysteria, and put in a garbled call to 911. It sounds pretty much like the same MO your perp used.”

  “Silver duct tape around the neck?”

  “Yeah. Hands and ankles, too. Pretty grisly stuff, even for out here. Blood everywhere, like that goddamn Interview with the Vampire movie.”

  “The victim nude?”

  “Yes, and blood’s congealed all over her; it looks like she’s wearing a shiny red wet suit. Looks like he made an effort to smear it all over her face.”

  “Pleasant. Anybody spotted on the set over the weekend?”

  “One guard said that that psychiatrist, you know tha
t guy, Nicholas Black, came by late Saturday night, asked him if Gil Serna was around.”

  My stomach sank at the mention of Black’s name. “Nicholas Black was at the soundstage where they found her? You sure it was him?”

  “Sounds familiar, right? The guard said he stopped Black at the gate and wouldn’t let him inside. Black told the night guy that he couldn’t find Serna anywhere and was worried about him.”

  Great move, Black. Show up at the second murder scene asking questions. “Has Serna resurfaced yet?”

  “Nope. He seems to have disappeared into thin air after he left work on Friday, which doesn’t look particularly good for him. His coworkers are saying he hasn’t been the same person since he found out Sylvie was dead. Said he went kind of crazy with grief and couldn’t concentrate on his lines, couldn’t function much at all.”

  “Who saw him last?”

  “The night watchman said he left on Friday afternoon about four-thirty but then came back later, around seven in the evening. Said he forgot something. Guard said he didn’t see him leave, or anyone else come or go, but he went on rounds in the back lot several times, during which Serna could’ve left without him noticing.”

  It took us about forty-five minutes to get to the Paramount soundstage where the second murder had taken place. The entire block was cordoned off, but media people were lined up like crows on a telephone line. Tate reached in the backseat and tossed an L.A. Lakers cap into my lap.

  “Put on your shades and wear this, and they aren’t gonna recognize you.”

  Gratefully, I shoved the cap down low over my face and climbed out of the truck. Years had passed, true enough, but Hollywood reporters remember scandals like Hollywood actors remember Oscars. Tate flashed his badge to the uniforms keeping the milling throng of reporters at bay, and we wound our way through a series of movie sets, stepping over cables and dodging lights and boom microphones and cameras, until we reached a scene lit up by three floodlights. Detectives were standing around in small groups, talking the case, and uniformed criminalists were still sweeping the scene. They were thorough, and they were very good. A couple of guys that I’d worked with before caught sight of me and smiled, and I nodded back without stopping. I knew what they were thinking. That was one reason I’d left L.A. to lick my wounds in the middle of the Ozark hinterland.