by John Dunning
In the old days, Littleton was a prime horse racing town. Centennial was never a big-time track, but it wasn’t the bush league either. Carol and I used to come down two or three times a summer to watch the horses run and lose a little of our hard-earned dough. Now when 1 come, all I feel is loneliness, and an aching sense of my own mortality. They’re tearing everything down, and someday soon they’ll come up behind me and tear me down too. Something as big as a racetrack ought to have a little bit of immortality attached to it But they tore old Centennial down and plowed her under. Right out there where the grandstand stood are high-rise offices and apartment buildings. Oh, sacrilege. All that’s left of the old days is the ever-flowing Platte: it snakes its way down from the mountains and winds past expensive subdivisions and subdivided farms and modern shopping centers built on the land of old ranches. In one of those houses, just south of the racetrack, Val Ballard lived.
I checked the address. The house sat back from the street in a grove of trees. It was very dark: the trees blotted out all light from the road. A wind had risen and the snow had blown in drifts over the driveway. I came in boldly, with my lights on, and sat for a moment with my lights playing across the front of the house. Nobody home, it looked to me. I turned off the lights, then the motor. The darkness was oppressive. I got out and followed my penlight up the walk to the front door. I rang the bell, then knocked. Nothing. I walked around the house, into the teeth of the gale, and fought my way across the yard to the garage. He had gone somewhere and he had gone in a hurry. He had left the door up and there were rubber marks on the cement. I could still see the ruts he had left in the yard, only half buried under the snow.
I went back to the car and got my tools. I knew I was a sitting duck for anyone who drove up—my car was there in the open yard, so there’d be no running away from it. When I decide to commit suicide, I don’t brood over it. I did think once of consequences. I could get three to five for this. Then I held the penlight in my teeth and picked open the front door lock.
The first thing to do was find an escape hatch. The back door. I crossed the main room and went through a dark corridor and found it. I checked it to make sure it could be opened easily. Fine. Well, not fine, but it wouldn’t get any finer. This was it. I had come looking for Ballard, I would tell my executioners. The house was dark but I had noticed the garage door up and had gone around to check. That’s how they happened to catch me walking around from the back yard. I would slip out the back way and walk nonchalantly around the house, and this was what I would tell them. I had stopped behind the house to take a leak, a nice touch, I thought, that gave some credibility to a shaggy-dog tale like that.
With that settled, I went through the house, looking for… what? I had a half-baked hunch I might even find Stan Ballard’s books. The place to start was in the basement. I found it with no trouble, a set of dark stairs that led down from the kitchen. If he came home now, I was sunk. Forget the back door, I’d never make it. I took a long breath and started down. The little light led me to a finished room. There were no books: just a water bed, a chest of drawers, a big-screen TV, a VCR, and a wall of pornographic tapes. I could see at a glance the kind of entertainment he liked, with titles like Love in Chains and Ginger’s Fantasy throbbing on the shelf. It didn’t mean anything. There was a room off the main room and I went there and opened the door. No books: not much of anything. The room was unfinished, and there were a few boxes inside, but a peek in them revealed nothing but junk.
I left it all as I had found it. The next likely place was an attic. Ballard didn’t have a walk-up attic, but I found a tiny trapdoor in the ceiling. I pushed it open with a broom, which I found in the kitchen. I gripped the rim and chinned myself up into the hole. With my little light in my teeth, I turned my head from one direction to another, dropped, chinned, and did it again from the other side. Nothing. It looked like he had never been up there: the place was two inches deep in dust and had never been disturbed.
I went through his living room. There wasn’t even a Reader’s Digest condensed book for the criminally brainless. In fact, Ballard didn’t have a single book in his entire house that I could see. I looked through the kitchen cupboards, remembering that twice before I had found in closets and cupboards small stacks of very good books. No luck this time. So…the hell with the books: maybe I could find a gun. A lot of cases are broken that way, through the almost unbelievable incompetence and stupidity of the killer. I went into the bedroom and looked in all the normal places where a man might keep a gun, and found nothing.
I came at last to his den. He didn’t even have a law book. I had never been in a lawyer’s house that had not even one book around, and it felt almost empty. He had a filing cabinet and a rolltop desk, neither of which was locked. I opened the cabinet and found his dead files, duplicates of old cases long disposed. I flipped through the folders double-time, looking for high spots. There weren’t any.
The bottom drawer was full of pornography. Another waste of time.
The desk had pigeonholes and compartments and many sliding drawers. The pigeonholes were empty, the compartments were full of dust, and the drawers were stuffed with pornography. I didn’t go through the whole boring inventory: it just didn’t look like the den of a guy who practiced much law.
I found what I found in the last possible place. On top of the desk, pushed far back where it lay in dark shadow, was a yellow pad. The top sheet was filled with doodles and notes. There was a name at the top—Rubicoff—and under it a figure, $1,235. There was a phone number. I recognized the exchange as east Denver, not far from my store. Rubicoff. It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t remember from where. At the bottom of the paper he had done some multiplying: the figure 8,500 multiplied by various numbers from 10 to 150. Each time the writing got darker, more slashing, angrier. I didn’t know what it meant but I had some guesses. The figure 8,500 might correspond roughly to the number of books in old Stan Bal-lard’s library. The figures were guesswork—somebody’s idea of what the library might be worth if the books averaged $10, $50, $75, and so on. He didn’t know books very well: it’s unheard of to get a high average on that big a library. On the other hand, I hadn’t seen a book yet that was worth less than $100.
And what about Rubicoff? I’d lay odds he was the turtle-faced man. I was getting close to cracking it, I thought.
I wrote the number in my notebook. I put everything back exactly as it was. Then I got the hell out of there.
43
I sat in the car and listened to the wind. A cold fear was blowing across the Platte.
At a gas station about half a mile from Val Ballard’s, I called Hennessey at home.
“Me, sweetheart,” I said when he answered.
“Oh, lucky day.”
“What’d you find out on that McKinley tape?”
“I don’t want to talk about this on the phone.”
“What’s Lester doing, running a tap on you now?”
“You’re puttin‘ my ass in one big crack, Cliffie.”
“Hey, one big crack deserves another. Come on, Neal, give.”
I let the line hiss for a moment.
“What do you expect me to say?” he said.
“I expect you to say yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. I imagine you’ll break into song, with the chorus of ‘Over the River and Through the Woods.’ I’m hoping somewhere along the line you’ll tell me something about the McKinley tape.”
He sighed. “Why don’t you come on over here?”
“ ‘Cause I’m two thousand miles away and heading in the opposite direction.”
“Then I guess I can’t help you. I can’t talk about it on the phone.”
“They separated the voices, didn’t they?”
“I don’t want to talk about this…”
“They separated the voices.”
“I told you before, they can do wonders with modern equipment. You want to talk about that, fine, I can talk all night. I’ve become a regul
ar scientist since I saw you at lunch, a real electronics wizard. Did you know they can take fifteen people and put ‘em to talking all at once, then take machines and separate every voice? Did you know that, Cliffie? Got something to do with timber and pitch. And all I always thought timber was was something loggers yell when they’re chopping trees down.”
“What did Peter say?”
“I think he yelled timber. Maybe he was an old logger up in Oregon.”
“You’re a pain in the ass, Hennessey,” I said, and meant it.
“Oh yeah? Fine. Someday I’ll sit down with you and compare notes and we’ll see who the real pain in the ass is.”
“It’s you, Neal. You’re becoming one of them.”
“I got news for you. I always was.”
“Hang up, then, if that’s how it is.”
We listened to each other’s silence for ten seconds. Then, with an anger in his voice that I’d never heard, he said, “Cliff, you’re abusing our friendship. It’s bad enough when you put your own neck in a noose, but you want me to stick mine in too and call it for old time’s sake. Dammit, you’re gonna cost me my badge before this is over.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” I said, but I hung in there, knowing that my silence was working on him.
“God damn it,” he said. “This isn’t right, Cliff.”
I didn’t say anything.
“The bastard said nothing, all right? Not one damn thing you or anybody else can use. You want his exact words? 1 ought to know ‘em, I been sitting here listening to the damn thing all afternoon. He said, ’Get away, get away.‘ He said that twice. Then he said, ’There’s nothing you can do to me, people already know.‘ ”
“What people?” I said—aloud, but to myself.
“I should’ve asked him that,” Hennessey said.
“What people?” I said again.
The line was quiet for a moment.
“What about Miss Pride? Did she say anything?”
“She said, ‘Oh, hi, everything’s fine.’ ”
I blinked. “She said what?”
“She said, ‘Everything’s fine, I’ll call you back.’ ”
The silence stretched.
“If you’re waiting for an encore, there isn’t any,” Hennessey said. “That was it, short and sweet: we busted our humps over nothing. I hope you’re satisfied.”
“Yeah, Neal, I’m satisfied.”
“I want you to be happy, old pal. If you’re not happy, I’m not happy. Is there anything else I can do for you, buddy?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Good. Don’t ever do that to me again.”
“Look, I’m sorry about—”
But he had already hung up.
44
I called rita McKinley, a futile gesture, I knew.
But, wonder of wonders, she answered the phone. Scooped it up on the first ring.
“Rita McKinley,” she said. I love women who answer the phone that way, crisp and cool and professional. “Go to hell you slob” might have been okay too, when the best I expected was a monotone from the damned answering machine.
“Not the real McKinley! Not the genuine article, in the flesh?”
“Janeway!”
“Was that sound I heard you falling off your chair with pleasure at hearing my voice?”
“Where the hell have you been?”
“So far today, everybody I’ve called has asked me that. I was hoping to get some variation on the main theme from you.”
“I’ve been trying to call you all day. What happened?”
“It’s all in the newspaper, Miss Sunshine. I know how you like the crime news, so I assume you’ve read all about it.”
“I want to see you.”
“Now this is a definite step in the right direction. After you banished me to the National Leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana, I thought the only way I’d get back up there was to practice pole-vaulting.”
“Can you come up? It’s snowing pretty hard.”
“Be just as hard for you to come down. You got anything to eat up there?”
“Two steaks in the fridge.”
“What happened to the diet?”
“Don’t ask.”
“I’ll be up in a while. Better give me at least an hour and a half.”
“I’ll leave the gate open.”
It came again, that chill. “Don’t do that,” I said. “Look, it’s nine-thirty now, I’ll meet you at the gate at eleven. Drive your car down. If I’m not there, come back at half past.”
“Why don’t you want me to leave it open? What’s the problem?”
“Tell you when I get there.”
I headed west, into the stormy mountains.
45
It was truly a miserable drive. I sloshed along the deserted freeway and slipped into the canyon. By eleven o’clock I still hadn’t reached Evergreen. I stopped at another gas station and called her, but she had the recording on. I left a cheery message and pressed on. The canyon too was deserted, leading to the inescapable conclusion that I was the only damnfool in the state on the highways tonight. The headlights threw up a glare that was blinding, and I couldn’t use my brights. Back and forth went the car, left and right in the twisted contour of the canyon road: it reminded me of a pendulum, or a hypnotist’s watch. Visions floated on the periphery of my sight. I saw Peter walking beside the car: nervous, furtive. He turned slightly and opened a door and there, yawning back into the dark, was my bookstore. It was empty, except for Miss Pride. Peter was upset. He was so upset that Miss Pride was trying to call me at Rita’s house. Then I lost the picture. I knew it was still playing out there but I couldn’t see anything. It was like a TV show with the picture turned off. I could hear voices but I couldn’t see them.
Miss Pride: Let me talk to him, Peter. Give me the phone.
Extrapolate, Janeway, figure it out. Figure it out and maybe the lights will come on again.
Someone had come to the front street window. Peter Bon-nema locked eyes with death through a quarter inch of clear plate glass.
Miss Pride: There’s nobody on the line.
Peter, his voice rising to a panic pitch: It’s a fucking tape recorder!
And death walked in.
Miss Pride: Someone’s come in, I’ll have to call you back.
That’s what I had heard. Hennessey had heard something else.
Peter knew. He knew exactly what was happening.
Get away! Get away! There’s nothing you can do to me! People already know!
What people?
There was the source of that cold fear I had felt.
If Peter had bartered names for a few final seconds, those people were in trouble. Whether they knew anything or not, he had signed their death warrants.
My lights picked out her road. It looked like a tunnel, slick and steep and dangerous.
I shoved the car into four-wheel drive and started up.
I wasn’t sure how far it was: a couple of miles, I thought, to the gate, maybe another hundred yards after that. I passed a car that had slipped off the road: clattered past it, kept going. You don’t stop on a drive like that: you keep the wheels turning, keep the traction, try to slug your way up the hill. I had reached the steepest part of the incline, a place that shot up suddenly and gained hundreds of feet in no time—simple enough in dry weather with the sun shining, not so simple now. I bumped over ruts and kept going. The canyon yawned mistily to my right. The wind was just vicious.
I passed the last of the side roads. There were no lights anywhere, or perhaps it was just that I couldn’t see them in the storm. The snow got deeper as I went higher. Not gonna make it, 1 thought: I could feel the car losing ground with every foot. The road had taken a hairpin curve and now the canyon lay off to my left. I couldn’t see anything but snow. I began to look for a place to park and found it a few minutes later: a simple widening of the road at a place where it curved again and began climbing. I pushed my front wheels i
nto a snowbank and stopped.
This was dangerous stuff. I had no coat—only the jacket I had worn to Levin’s office. It was adequate for a late-autumn Denver afternoon but wouldn’t do for a trek to the Pole. The only hat I had was a silly knitted thing in the trunk. This is how people die in Denver: they start out thinking they’re going for a walk; one thing leads to another and it turns into something else. I shimmied the gun around on my belt and zipped the jacket. I got the hat from the trunk and got some bullets for the gun; put the hat on my head and the bullets in my pockets and away I went. The snow was deep, but I was fit and I made good time. I slipped and fell a couple of times but did no harm. I wasn’t yet cold—that’s another deceptive thing about Rocky Mountain weather, how it sneaks up on you. On the coast, when it gets down to freezing, you freeze: here, I’ve gone out in short sleeves when the temperature was in the thirties and never felt the need for even a sweater. Then, half an hour later, you notice your fingers are turning blue. Oh, well, it couldn’t be much farther. The road was leveling off now: I remembered that from the other day. I’d be there in no time at all, a piece of cake. McKinley and I would spend Christmas together and live happily ever after. Trees were on both sides now: it was very dark. I kept my little light in my teeth and kept my head down, tried to keep my spirits up, and most of all I kept going.
At last I saw the gate, a silvery vision wavering like a mirage. I didn’t see her, though, and that bothered me. I looked at my watch: it was quarter to midnight. Could she be sitting up there in the trees with her lights off? My own light was so puny it barely reached to the gate, yet it must seem like a beacon from the 1939 New York World’s Fair in this dark. Suddenly the whole world lit up. Flash! She turned on her headlights and it was like a nuclear bomb going off: it froze me stiff and actually drove me back a step. She had her brights on. She flicked them down and I heard the car start. I could see it now, a gaunt outline behind the fence. I saw her pass in front of the headlights and heard the jingle of keys. A moment later the gate swung open.