The Devil's Analyst

by Dennis Frahmann

  Danny looked at her so oddly that she wondered what he was thinking, but she continued. “He said he thought of Pete Peterson. Remember that guy? What was it that the cook at the Loon Town Café always called him?”

  “Reverend Willy,” Danny said.

  He was flushed. Cynthia remembered how uncomfortable Danny always seemed when they were teenagers. Something else also clicked into place—how the cook Thelma always tried to protect Danny.

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Cynthia. “Thelma did talk about him a lot. But I don’t think she ever said his name when you were around. Was it because he was your neighbor? Do you even know how he got that odd name?”

  “Because he went to every church service in town.”

  That didn’t sound right to Cynthia. “Really? Wasn’t it connected to his showing silent movies on his garage door and acting like doing that was as holy as a church Mass? Oh, I don’t know, I just remember he was an oddball.”

  “I think we should be going back. I just felt some raindrops.”

  Cynthia felt the chill sting as well, but she didn’t mind. Compared to Wisconsin, this California weather felt almost balmy. Getting wet in a sudden storm would only prove she could survive. But Danny had turned around. He was motioning her back toward the parking lot.

  “But I know it wasn’t Reverend Willy or Pete or whatever you want to call the man who was following Chip.”

  Danny slowed his pace. “Of course not, what would Pete be doing in Los Angeles?”

  “Maybe looking for you,” Cynthia joked.

  Danny didn’t laugh.

  Cynthia went on, “But Pete’s dead. I talked to Daddy. He told me the guy was found murdered a few years ago, and no one knows who did it.”

  Danny turned the switch; the gas fireplace in his bedroom flared to life. Outside, the threatening storm was gaining force. Rain-streaked windows overlooked the city below where city lights disappeared into the veil of water. In the distance, where Cynthia and he walked earlier in the day on the shores of the Pacific, nothing could be seen.

  Cynthia had retreated to the guest room at the other end of the floor. Her room, like the master bedroom, occupied an entire wing and its windows faced in three directions. When she entered the room earlier in the afternoon, she went from one window to the next, locking the frames, pulling down the shades, and drawing the drapes. When she glanced over, Danny tried to hide his bewilderment at her actions, but he didn’t ask what she was blocking out.

  And she offered no real explanation. “I can’t feel exposed,” is all she said.

  The storm was now in full force. It had only been impending as they first drove east from the beach. By the time they reached the house atop the hill, their car was being pelted. The rain was now assailing the tiles overhead. The Spanish-style roofs were low-pitched, and had no attic to dampen the noise. For a moment, he considered moving Cynthia to a guest room on the lower level, where she could escape the constant rain that beat from above.

  Cynthia placed her suitcase on the bamboo-style luggage stand, opened it, and pulled from among her clothes a small set of speakers and Walkman. After a moment connecting the pieces, she pressed a button and low tones of classical music filled the room. “That sounds better, don’t you think?”

  The day slowly edged forward. Lacking energy to cook and with the weather precluding a drive to one of the restaurants in the village area below, Danny called in an order for Thai food. As he waited for the delivery boy, he made sure to turn on all the lights at the front of the mansion. Often service people claimed that they couldn’t find the house, although sometimes he wondered if some lingering reputation connected to the previous owner scared people away.

  But the pad thai and mee krob arrived quickly. Sitting at the marble counter of the kitchen island, with lights blazing and Cynthia’s music playing, they discussed the day ahead. After Danny told Cynthia about his visit with Lopez, Cynthia wanted to visit the Pacific Dining Car restaurant to try to talk to the waiter who served Chip that day. Maybe he would remember something. She also suggested stopping by the Premios offices to see whether Kenosha had finished her research on potential investigators. And, of course, they needed to visit the Bonaventure Hotel. Cynthia had arranged for Chip’s luggage to be stored there when he failed to return to the room, and she needed to retrieve it on the chance that they could find some clue in his stuff. Left unsaid was the likelihood that the local police had already done similar things.

  Danny left unvoiced his earlier conversations with Josh, who admonished against encouraging Cynthia’s pursuits. “You’re not a private eye,” Josh snapped, “and you and Cynthia aren’t in some Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys mystery. Leave the detective work to the professionals.”

  But how could Danny do that?

  The evening ended early. Cynthia retreated to her room with the excuse that it had been a long day. Danny watched the fire within the bedroom fireplace and the rain outside the room’s windows, and he brooded.

  Cynthia’s bringing up the name Pete Peterson troubled him and he couldn’t understand why. Admittedly, for years, he avoided thinking about Pete, but then just a few days earlier he saw that hat. Of course, there was no chance that the person he glimpsed in the museum was Pete, and he was just as certain that Pete had not been outside the warehouse when Chip had been searching for the computer hackers. Pete wasn’t the kind of person to stalk anyone.

  Still, even though he had no reason for clinging to such a belief, he was also certain that Pete wasn’t dead. He didn’t care what Red Trueheart once told his daughter. If Pete had been murdered, Danny knew he would have felt the loss. Something connected them. Danny couldn’t imagine a universe in which he wouldn’t have been touched in some way when the man died, for if the psychic world had seen fit to forewarn him about his mother, then surely those same emanations would have alerted him to Pete’s death.

  Maybe he was being superstitious, but he could never be completely rational when it came to Pete. God, how he hated that some people back in Thread used to call the man Reverend Willy. That nickname turned a good man into an object of derision and the taunt had taken over so fast in town. Danny always felt responsible for that. When the man faced a fork in the road, Danny turned him down the wrong one. That choice broke Pete. But no one else knew that, and, like so many things in his life, Danny wasn’t ever going to tell anyone.

  The wrong path all started with watching that movie. That day was going to be the last time Pete would be able to show a film in the old Thread Theater. The bank was repossessing his building. He joked that the future would force him to screen the images against his garage door. Danny laughed because if Pete did that then he knew he would be able to watch them from his bedroom window since his house was next door to Pete’s.

  The film that night was an obscure silent film called The Sad Vampire. In the years that followed, Danny never heard anyone else ever talk about the movie, but he remembered how Pete loved it. The opening scene zoomed in on a crowded nighttime street in a Middle European city gone wild with Oktoberfest. A young man, really a boy, was lost in the revelry and unable to speak the language. Danny remembered how even the subtitles distanced the viewer by being written in German. An aristocratic man appears. The light seems to change as he sweeps the boy up and helps him to reunite with his mother.

  The mother is so thankful. Her son is a violin virtuoso on tour, and the savior, supposedly a German count, soon attaches himself to both mother and son. As they travel the Continent together on the musical tour, the count appears only at night. Danny was fourteen when he watched this film with Pete, but even at that age he recognized that the story hinted at some larger tragedy than a vampire sucking the blood of a boy. The horror of the mother and of her friends grew as they began to suspect why the boy is ill, and the mother, without explanation, begins to pull back from the victim as much as from the predator.

  Even now, Danny wasn’t certain that the veiled ideas of this movie from the twenties ha
d anything to do with so-called inverts (as he later learned homosexuals were sometimes called then). He only knew that Pete grew increasingly distressed by the film. When the lights were turned back on, tears were streaming from his face. Danny felt that his old protector—the man who guided him even as his own parents, each in their own way, abandoned him—wanted to say something and Danny, as young as he was, sensed that he couldn’t let Pete speak, so both sat as silent as the film that just ended.

  The dark rain outside the window transformed the glass into an imperfect mirror in which Danny saw his own reflection. In his image was something of Pete’s emotions that night. The memory made him shudder.

  Something else about that film’s credits niggled in the back of his mind before suddenly bursting into his consciousness. The memory of the projected black and white lettering of the director’s name seemed so clear: the credit was for Augustus Cambrian, the same man who had died in this house.

  He jumped to search the bookshelves on the other side of the room. Josh had purchased some thick book about Cambrian, but Danny never read any of it. He preferred not to think about the house’s past history. By now, the largely gutted and modernized mansion was their creation, not someone else’s legacy. He found the title: The Life and Work of Augustus Cambrian. Thick and heavy, it was more a coffee table book than a traditional biography. He scanned the table of contents to find a filmography, and then turned to it. He moved his finger down the titles beginning in 1919. He didn’t have far to go. The table for the year 1924 listed The Sad Vampire.

  Danny repressed his urge to rush down the hall, wake Cynthia, and exult over this amazing coincidence. He wanted to grab the phone and call Josh in New York. But he stopped. What could he tell either of them? That he had once seen a movie directed by the man who owned this house? Cambrian’s occult and horror talkies from the Thirties remained popular to this day. Probably everyone had seen at least one of his films. The coincidence would only seem amazing if Danny could explain what seeing the film with Pete had meant to him.

  Danny’s discovery was one of those strange things in life destined to never be more than a private memory. To quiet his emotions, he paged through the book. Several photos from the later films highlighted familiar ghouls from many a famous film. He never liked horror pictures as a boy. They gave him nightmares, even though sometimes the thrill of looking into the face of something frightening was just too alluring to resist.

  When he found a chapter on this house and Cambrian’s movie memorabilia collection, he stopped paging through the book, and instead quickly read the text, which provided details that largely matched what the realtor told them about the house. Over the decades, the director had amassed a major assortment of horror movie props and stills, as well as medieval instruments of torture. Danny reread one paragraph more carefully. The author claimed that Cambrian kept his most valuable items in a secret room off a basement chamber. He described an elaborate light sconce that when moved triggered the opening of the hidden door, and Danny recalled that his friend Francesca referenced a similar secret chamber a few weeks ago.

  After all they had done to rebuild this house, could a hidden room still be there? Could someone be looking for it?

  Josh sat alone at the table in the corner of the Charlotte Bar just off the lobby of the Millennium Hotel in Manhattan. The seat provided a perfect angle for spotting anyone entering the place. His day had been long, filled with meetings, and it wasn’t over yet. The most important session of the day was still ahead, and for that he sent Orleans away.

  The way he insisted she go back to her room likely prompted her to wonder if he was having an affair. But he had to get rid of her. The presentations had been grueling. Both needed more than one drink to wind down. After a long day, she talked too much and asked too many questions. And she wouldn’t let any detail go. She wanted to recap every question and recall each special slide she had been forced to present. But he was tired of it all. After all the questions at Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and the half dozen other executive conference rooms they had entered and exited over the past three days, he was pretty certain Orleans pulled up every single slideshow she ever created at Premios. He felt no need to repeat the performance over cocktails.

  Still he questioned whether her stellar performance was enough. Kenosha had failed to think broadly enough when she created her comprehensive set of media questions and answers. Or maybe Orleans underestimated the Wall Street crowd. Whatever the truth, they had prepared for the wrong set of questions. Not one banker doubted the value in Premios’s heavy burn rate; they understood the need to build up customer loyalty and a well-known brand because everyone believed in the promise of being the first mover. But bankers were an impatient lot. They badgered Josh over how long it would take to achieve dominance. Thank God the extra million dollars had been invested by Endicott-Meyers. Without that financial cushion, Orleans and Josh might have been laughed out of many of the conference rooms. But as he liked to remind Orleans, people want to believe what others believe. As long as someone was willing to pour money into this business, no banker was going to walk away—no matter how much of a rat’s nest they feared existed in the bowels of the business. There was one thing Josh knew for sure: the potential to win big would always win out over the possibility of a loss.

  Until it didn’t. Then all of Wall Street would become a gold rush in reverse. As quick as the money guys embraced those it deemed winners, they could be even faster fleeing the potential losers. Given the recent gyrations of mainstream stocks, Wall Street was already in a tizzy with everyone questioning whether the new world of the Internet was the great hope they had convinced themselves it was. Time was running out. Any initial public offering carried with it a certain number of legal requirements that couldn’t be rushed, but that didn’t mean it was wise to allow the process to get delayed. In every room Josh and Orleans entered on this trip there lurked a contagious bearer of fear.

  The payoff was tantalizingly close. Josh could feel it, but he knew it wasn’t guaranteed. For Orleans’ sake, he pretended it was. Despite her otherwise remarkable acumen, he found that she was easily lulled into complacency. Tonight he worked his magic to ensure that she would leave the bar with all qualms about the tour erased. He diverted her with misdirecting indications that he was nervously awaiting a meeting with someone special. Even when she reminded him that he had a loyal partner at home, he didn’t protest or explain otherwise. Let her think he was waiting for some hot Times Square hooker.

  He knew that Danny had never cheated on him. That was why he had to have this meeting tonight. It was for Danny.

  Josh leaned back against the leather of the wingback chair. Few guests were left in the lobby bar. Because the hotel was just off Times Square and the theater district, Josh thought more people might show up when the shows let out. But that didn’t worry him. He had chosen this specific spot because it offered dark corners. An added bonus was that his chair gave him an excellent view of 44th Street and the hotel’s entrance. No one could enter without him seeing the person first. An extra moment of preparation was always useful.

  “Hello, Josh,”

  He looked up startled. Where had this man come from?

  The man laughed. “Did I interrupt your sleuthing? Were you expecting me to come into the lobby from that street? The hotel lobby runs through to 45th Street, and I entered from the north. Hope that doesn’t upset you in any way.”

  The man sat down opposite him without requesting permission. Josh, noticing how well trimmed and polished the man’s nails were, remembered how they once were so rough. But the hands still looked strong, and the man himself was handsome in a tough sort of way. If Orleans happened to walk by and noticed the two of them talking, it would only confirm her suspicion that he was meeting with some street trade. Of course, if she noticed the quality of the Brioni suit, she might also realize the man spent more money on his clothing than a well-paid male hooker would dare.

  The man mo
tioned for the waitress. When he caught her attention, he said, “Cognac, please.”

  “Hello, Oliver,” Josh said. This was certainly not Josh’s first meeting with Oliver Meyers, although he would prefer it to be his last. That wasn’t likely.

  Oliver replied, “Do you have good news for me?”

  Had this asshole been so smug when they first met? Josh couldn’t recall. He always knew there was something about the man that he shouldn’t trust. But beggars can’t be choosers.

  “The tour’s good,” he replied. “We’ve encountered a lot of interest in the initial offering. The stock should soar on opening day . . . as long as we get out there on time.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Oliver said. The waitress appeared with the cognac and set it on the small table. She placed a small glass of water on a separate cocktail napkin beside the snifter. Oliver’s smile promised a big tip ahead.

  Josh had to admit the man had charm. Over the years, Oliver had clearly put it to good use. He had many friends, and worked a web of connections with various sorts of people, both good and bad. It was the bad ones that worried Josh.

  “Really? Endicott-Meyers are the biggest investors in Premios. Why did you put in all those millions if you weren’t anxious to see us go public?” Josh tried to make a joke out of it.

  Oliver was having none of it. “You know why we invested.”

  There was just one problem with that statement. Of course Josh clearly understood the “why” of the firm’s investment; he just had no insight into the “we.” He only knew two things for certain. One was that the firm of Colby Endicott didn’t care one bit about the source of Oliver Meyers’ money and the second was that Josh knew the money certainly wasn’t Oliver’s.

  When Colby and Oliver first showed up waving their checkbook, it had appeared too good to be true. But then the heady days of Internet investing were like that. Everyone wanted a chance at the golden ring. Still, Josh was cautious. He researched how Colby inherited his wealth; he wanted an equally solid understanding of Oliver. He dug a little and concluded that it might be mob money, but that didn’t particularly bother him. Mob money turned remarkably respectable after a generation. Just look at how Joseph Kennedy transformed a rum running past into becoming the scion of an American aristocracy. Josh wasn’t one to judge.