by Jan Burke
The front door was white and unadorned except for a fancy electronic lock — one that had both a key-card slot and number pad on it. We were searching for the doorbell when Justin Davis himself opened the door.
“Hidden video camera?” I asked.
“Yes, and a pressure-sensitive doormat,” he said. “Please come in.” He was a tall man, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted. He had that kind of lean, muscular sleekness that comes only to those who work at it, and that kind of grace in motion that belongs only to those who are born with it. He was dressed in a gray sweater and jeans, but made them look as if they would be acceptable attire at a coronation.
Except for a small scar on his cheek, his face was not remarkable, but neither was he plain nor unattractive. He had pale gray eyes and thick, straight black hair, which was cut in a conservative style. He either hadn’t acquired any gray hair yet or his hairdresser knew some neat tricks to make a dye job look natural.
He took our coats and hung them on a metal object that I assumed to be an advanced form of hall tree, but it could have been artwork pressed into doing double duty.
High ceilings, skylights, and tall windows gave the house an open and airy feeling. The inside was as white and bare as the outside. A painting here, a vase there, were all that would break up the starkness of white walls, ceilings and carpet. As a result, my eyes were immediately drawn to these few objects. I found myself anticipating the paintings as soon as I saw the edge of a frame, ready to savor any kind of respite from the blankness that governed the rest of the house.
But soon we rounded (not literally, since it seemed nothing was round in that house) a corner and came into a room that made me feel a certain appreciation for the spare decoration that had gone before. A wall of windows facing the Pacific gave Justin Davis an incomparable ocean view. The sun was just finishing its business day, and the rich sunset colors displayed beyond Davis’s windows and balcony were stunning. The Pacific and sky combined to make a natural mural.
We declined his offer of a drink. He seated us on a low white couch at one end of the room, near a fireplace. A fire was burning behind a glass screen, somehow as removed from us as the ocean, but warm and fragrant.
Davis poured himself a scotch on the rocks and took a seat across from us, in a chair that matched the couch. His voice, when he spoke, was soft and low. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you, Miss Kelly. If you hadn’t contacted the police about that letter today, I wouldn’t be here to welcome you.”
“I’m just glad you didn’t have a chance to fly that plane before the police found you,” I said.
“Perhaps you could give us some details about what happened this afternoon,” Mark suggested.
The corner of his mouth quirked up for about a nanosecond. “Wouldn’t the police tell you?”
“Yes, but it would be good to hear from you, as well.”
“Certainly. I understand that Miss Kelly and — Lieutenant Harriman, is it?”
“Detective Harriman,” Mark said easily. “I’ll let him know you wanted to give him a promotion, though.”
“Thanks. Perhaps I’ll contact his superiors. I really would like to see that the man’s efforts are appreciated.”
“I’m sure Miss Kelly will see that he’s rewarded,” Mark replied. “He’s definitely been more than cooperative with certain members of the press.” Mark managed not to laugh as he said this. Barely. He was avoiding eye contact with me at all cost.
“So what did happen at the airport today?” I asked.
“Detective Harriman said the police were already looking for me when you received the letter. He said that you had helped him prepare a list of people who might be…” His voice trailed off, and he took a swig of scotch, then got to his feet. He walked over to the windows, looking out at the darkened sea. “I wasn’t in my office today, so they hadn’t located me yet.” His voice caught, and he paused again. He looked back to us, embarrassed. “Sorry. I think all of this is just now hitting me.”
“Take your time,” Mark said.
He came back to the chair and then looked over at me, giving me another quick smile. Two or three nanoseconds this time. He didn’t strike me as someone who found it easy to smile, not even for that long. “Where was I?” he asked.
“You were saying that you weren’t in your office when the police looked for you,” I said. “What kind of work do you do?”
“I own a security systems company. Everything from industrial to home security.”
“And your office didn’t know how to locate you this morning?” Mark asked.
“I took the day off. My business has reached a point where I don’t have to spend every single day in the office. It’s a nice switch after years of never being home, always being in the office. In those first years, I was often there all day and night — except for a couple of hours at the gym. I’m a big believer in exercise — and even then I knew that if I wanted to be a good manager, I needed the stress-relief a workout brought me. Later, I’d catch a quick nap on my office sofa and be ready to roll.
“But now I have a team in there that I can trust, and I have time to pursue my real interests — especially flying and skydiving. I own my own plane. A Cessna182.”
He stood up, and again he offered us a drink. When we declined, he refilled his own and took a sip before continuing.
“Today, I didn’t even get close to my plane. Airport Security met me at my car and walked me into their office. A Detective Baird was there, and he asked me to wait for a moment. Then Detective Harriman came in, and explained that he had asked my mechanic, Joey Allen, to check my plane while Airport Security looked on. Poor Joey. It’s his first day back from a two-week vacation in Hawaii, and he gets hit with investigations and questioning — I probably caused his whole schedule to go hell.”
“It took a long time to find the problem?” Mark asked.
“No. Joey saw it within minutes. Someone had put the wrong fuel in my plane.”
“How could he tell?”
“Color. To explain it in simple terms, each type of fuel is color-coded; it’s a method of preventing mix-ups in fueling, a mistake which can be deadly. So by looking at the color, Joey knew that the wrong fuel had been mixed in with the one I would usually use. I probably would have been able to start the plane, even take off, but I would have had engine trouble in no time.”
“Is Joey the one who would normally fuel the aircraft?”
He shook his head. “I take care of that sort of thing myself. I know my own plane, and I pack my own chute. I use Joey’s help mainly for safety’s sake — to check my work and to take care of problems that are beyond my skill level.”
“When did you last fly the plane?” I asked.
“About a week ago.”
Well, I thought, that lets Joey off the hook. “And no one saw anyone near your plane since then?”
“No. But over the course of a week, any number of people could have been near it and not attracted any special attention. The airport is busy and there are a lot of Cessnas out there.”
We asked him a few more questions, none of which got us much of anywhere on the matter of the airport, but Mark did get some great quotes for his story. We started asking about the Olympus Child Care Center.
“Oh, yes, I remember it. Probably as much from hearing my mother talk about it as being there, to tell the truth. There were a lot of changes in our lives as a result. We moved to Las Piernas, for one thing. But as for the incident itself, I can’t tell you much. I remember a group of kids yelling at Mrs. Grant, remember the ambulance coming for the kid who got hurt — Robbie, I think it was. Not much else.”
He said he didn’t remember any of Thanatos’ victims. “No, I haven’t had contact with any of them. It’s been a long time. I don’t think I would have recognized any of them if I saw them on street. We were all just kids.”
“What about Jimmy Grant?” I asked.
He was quiet for a moment, swirling his drink. “W
hat kind of monster wouldn’t pity Jimmy Grant? He was sort of an outcast to begin with. Didn’t have many friends — he was the one I thought about when my mother used to tell the story. Funny.
“Maybe it was because I didn’t understand enough about death to feel sorry for Robbie. I thought, well, he’s gone. But Jimmy — I remember people talking about how Jimmy would never see his mother again. She killed kids, they said, so they wouldn’t ever let her near Jimmy again. I don’t think anyone ever heard what happened to him.” He sighed. “As I said, who couldn’t understand what that must have been like for an eight-year-old boy?”
“Is your mother still living?” Mark asked.
He was quiet again. When he spoke, his voice was flat. “Is my mother still living. Good question.”
“You don’t know?” I asked, surprised.
He gave me another one of those faint smiles.
“Sorry, that’s a philosophical question at this point. Peggy Davis, the body, is alive. Peggy Davis, the mind, is dead. She suffers from a severe memory-loss disorder. She’s in Fielding’s Nursing Home — a very good one, but still a nursing home.
“Putting her there was a difficult decision to make. I guess in her own way, she made it for me in October. Mother was being taken care of by a private nurse in her own home. This was about the tenth nurse I had hired within the past year. I paid top dollar, but unfortunately, my mother’s condition is one that causes her to be violent and verbally abusive at times.
“Her memory loss has become much, much worse this past year as well, so she’s harder to care for. Anyway, she wandered out of the house when the nurse got a phone call. Managed to catch a bus. I didn’t find her for another five hours — downtown, in Sheffield Park. She had a scrape on her head, never knew how or where she got it. She didn’t know me. She didn’t even know who she was. That was about all I could take.”
We talked a little longer, as much to take his mind off his problems with his mother as to gather any information. When we were leaving, he thanked me again, bestowing one last, rare smile on me.
It didn’t endure any longer than the other smiles. When I looked from the car to his doorway, where he stood watching us, I thought he looked sad. For a moment, I was certain that sad look meant that he had more to tell us, but dismissed this as the product of an imagination still suffering from lack of visual stimuli.
“WHAT’S ON YOUR mind, Irene?” Mark asked.
I realized that I had been brooding as we made the long drive from Justin Davis’s house toward Don Edgerton’s place.
“Not very good company, am I, Mark? Sorry. I was just thinking about Peggy Davis.”
THE ANCIENT GREEKS believed that the dead drank from the River Lethe and were transformed from beings with remembered lives into shades, existing in a state of oblivion.
Now, it seems, some of us come to that river long before we die.
22
THE TWO DOBERMANS behind the chain-link fence were barking at us as if it were something personal — loud and unrelenting, their lips curled and bodies bristling with focused tension. It was clear that they wanted to release that tension by ripping our throats open.
Show no fear, the old wisdom says.
You have to have a lot of faith in fence-builders to trust the old wisdom.
Across the street, three young men leaned against a car parked on a lawn, huddling in their jackets and smoking cigarettes. We were the best show on the block. They weren’t the only ones with front row tickets. Two detectives sitting in an unmarked car were clearly amused by this spectacle of the intimidation of the press. Mark recognized them, but didn’t know them by name.
“Shit,” Mark said. “I hate this.”
I could tell it was more than an expression of irritation or embarrassment. No one else could hear what we said to each other over the racket the Dobermans were making, so I ventured to ask him if he was afraid of dogs.
He gave me a tense shrug. “I was attacked by one when I was ten. I’m a married man, or I’d moon those two jerks in the car so you could see my scars.”
A porch light came on, and a man opened the front door. The dogs became even more determined, jumping against the fence and causing the metal to sing. “Are you from the Express?” the man yelled out to us.
“Yes!” we shouted in unison.
He whistled once and the dogs immediately stopped barking.
“Are you Mr. Edgerton?” Mark asked.
The man nodded. He said something to the dogs in a low voice, some words I couldn’t make out, and they ran over to his side. “You can come on in now,” he called to us.
I glanced at Mark. “Mr. Edgerton,” I called, “I wonder if you could pen the dogs for me.”
“They’re very well-trained,” he answered. “They won’t hurt you.”
“It’s okay, Irene,” Mark said, but I wasn’t convinced.
“Mr. Edgerton, I’m sure those dogs are very well-trained, but I’ve got a real fear of dogs. If you can’t pen the dogs, maybe we could meet you somewhere else.”
There was snickering from the trio behind us.
Edgerton looked thoroughly disgusted with me. “If you’re going to be a baby about it, I guess I’ll put them out back.” He walked into the house, dogs in tow.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Mark said. “We’re off to a bad start with him now.”
I put my fists on my hips. “He knew we’d be here about this time, we called him a few minutes ago from a pay phone to let him know that we’re nearby, and he lets us sit out here for ten full minutes while his Doberman pinschers bark their asses off. We were off to a bad start before we got here.”
Mark started laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
“Remind me never to piss you off, Kelly.”
DON EDGERTON WAS about 6’ 2”, lanky and lean. He was as fit as Justin Davis had been, but his face had a kind of rugged handsomeness. A cowboy without hat or horse or rope. Or cows. His skin was leathery, as if he worked in the sun, or had done so before we all got the bad news on tanning. He wore running shoes and faded jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. There was gray in his light brown hair, and a kind of tired but wary look in his blue eyes. James Dean, all grown up?
No, James Dean would have slouched a little by now. Don Edgerton’s nearly perfect posture made me wonder if he had been in the military.
The house was small, one of the wood-framed bungalows that populated this part of town. The only part of it we saw much of was the first room we walked into. A table and four chairs sat at the far end of the room, a worn sofa and a television at the other. A cheap stereo and a record collection sat on a set of shelves made from four cinderblock bricks and two unpainted pieces of particle board. Don Edgerton was apparently unworried about the advent of compact-disc players.
Except for a cheap battery-operated clock and one framed black and white photograph, the walls were bare, but in this house, the effect was not the same as in Justin Davis’s. It was as if Don Edgerton hadn’t really decided that he wanted to stay here.
The framed photo was of a baseball team. From where we sat at the table, I couldn’t make out the team insignia, but it was obviously one of those posed team photos. Not exactly gorgeous, but at least it gave me the idea that he might have interests beyond training his dogs.
Edgerton picked up the beer that had been sitting half-empty on the table and drank from it, not saying anything. I was tired and didn’t like ending an otherwise productive day with this apparently hostile source.
Mark didn’t let Edgerton faze him. He began by gently reminding Edgerton that we were there in part because he had contacted us. He went on to make it sound like Edgerton had done a major public service to Las Piernas, that receiving Edgerton’s call had been this terrific turning point in the investigation. Edgerton started looking a little less sullen, more interested. Mark commended him for his courage and said that the Express shared many of his concerns about Thanatos.
“The Express is especially concerned,” Mark said, “not only because of the way this affects our community, but also because this individual who calls himself Thanatos has focused on Miss Kelly here. We don’t know why, and we don’t know what he has in mind. But he has done his best to make her fearful of him. He has discovered where she lives and on one occasion, broke into her home.”
“He broke into your home?” Edgerton asked, looking directly at me for the first time since we walked in.
“Yes,” I said, and told him the story of being carried into the bedroom.
“Jeee-zus.” The sullenness was gone. He shook his head. “Too bad you’re afraid of dogs,” he said to me. “I feel a lot safer with the Marx Brothers around.”
“The Marx Brothers?”
“Harpo and Zeppo. My dogs. My ex-wife kept Groucho and Chico.”
“Irene’s not the one who’s afraid of dogs,” Mark said. “I am. She was just trying to keep me from being embarrassed in front of those two detectives out there.”
“You covered for him?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “He would have done the same for me.”
He shook his head again.
I asked him about the Olympus Child Care Center, going over the same ground we had covered with Justin Davis and Howard Parker.
“No, I really don’t remember much about it,” Edgerton said. “Some kid got taken off in an ambulance. I remember that.”
“Do you remember moving to Las Piernas?”
“Yeah, sure. During the war. I liked the kids here better than the ones at my school in L.A. And before my mom met her second husband, there was a nice old couple that took care of me in the afternoons. Mr. and Mrs. York. He taught me how to play baseball.”
“So you didn’t go back into child care after that?”
He laughed, but not as if he were amused. “No, not unless you call running from the end of some drunk’s belt child care.”
“The Yorks abused you?” Mark asked.
“No. My stepfather was a drunken asshole.” He turned to me. “Pardon me, Miss Kelly, but it’s the truth. I used to run away all the time. I’d go over to the Yorks’ place. He’d fetch me back. One day, about three years after they were married, he was driving over to the Yorks’ to come get me. I remember seeing the car come down the street — in one lane, then the other. He was looped, as usual. Then all of a sudden, a dog ran out in front of the car. He swerved to avoid hitting the dog, and ran the car up over the curb and hit a tree instead. Killed him. I’ve loved dogs ever since.”