The Exile

by Allan Folsom

  Barron’s voice was strong. Maybe he was guessing about Raymond, maybe he wasn’t, but whatever was going on—hunch, hard knowledge, or something Barron couldn’t talk about—the electricity of it carried over to Ford as he watched the monitor in front of him waiting for the information to come up.

  “Come on,” Barron urged.

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Jesus.”

  Suddenly the information popped up on Ford’s screen. “Okay, here it is.”

  British Airways, Continental, Delta, Lufthansa, American, Air France, Virgin Atlantic, KLM, Northwest—Ford scanned the list. Any number of flights left Los Angeles that day for the three cities. But the only nonstops were to Frankfurt. The others had changes in London, Paris, and Amsterdam. It was now 6:53 P.M., and of the three nonstops that evening only one had yet to take off.

  “You want a nonstop, John, you lucked out. There’s only one still on the ground. Lufthansa, flight four-five-three. Leaves LAX for Frankfurt at nine-forty-five.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Lufthansa.”

  “Four-fifty-three.”

  “Thanks, Dan.”

  “John, where the hell are you? What’s going on?”

  Click.

  Ford stared at the phone. “Dammit!”

  47

  LAX, TOM BRADLEY INTERNATIONAL TERMINAL,

  LUFTHANSA TICKET COUNTER. 6:55 P.M.

  “Etwas geht nicht?” Something wrong? Raymond asked in German, puzzled, smiling at the pert blond Lufthansa ticket agent across the counter from him. She was hanging on the phone waiting for some kind of reply.

  “Your reservation is not on the computer.” She continued their conversation in German.

  “I made it myself, this afternoon. My seat was confirmed.”

  “Our computer was down for several hours.”

  She looked at her terminal, then typed something on the keyboard. Raymond looked to his right. There was only one other coach class ticket agent working. Behind him passengers were backing up. Twenty or more waited impatiently, a number with their eyes on him as if it were his fault the line was being held up.

  “You do have seats?” Raymond tried not to show his growing concern.

  “I’m sorry, the flight is full.”

  Raymond looked away. This was not something he’d even considered—what to do if—

  “Thanks,” she said suddenly in English and hung up the phone. “I apologize for the confusion, Mr. Speer, we do have your reservation. May I have your passport and a credit card, please?”

  “Danke.” Thank you. Raymond smiled carefully with relief, then took Speer’s wallet from his jacket and handed her the dead man’s passport and his Euro/MasterCard. To his left was the first class check-in, where a lone, well-dressed businessman railed at the Lufthansa attendant behind the counter. His seat was not the one he had reserved; he wanted accommodations made, and quickly. First class, where Raymond knew he should be, but wasn’t.

  He looked back. The ticket agent had his passport open and was looking at it; then she glanced at him, comparing his likeness to the photograph on the passport.

  “Ah!” he said quickly and smiled.

  Immediately he lifted his L.A. Dodgers cap to reveal his purple hair. “I was younger, you know, but—” He smiled again. “The hair is the same.”

  The ticket agent grinned and handed him the credit card receipt to sign. Effortlessly he scribbled Speer’s signature—something he had practiced over and over on the Santa Monica bus—then handed the receipt back, and she returned his passport and the credit card.

  “You have luggage to check?”

  “No, I—” Raymond had rid himself of Josef Speer’s backpack at the LAX Transit Center, slipping the second Beretta into his belt under his jacket at the small of his back and then stuffing the backpack into a trash receptacle just before he’d boarded the shuttle into the airport. The thing had become cumbersome and was an added burden he no longer wanted, but he’d forgotten about the obvious need for some kind of luggage. One did not travel six thousand miles without some kind of personal belongings. Quickly he covered it with a smile. “I have only a carry-on bag,” he said, still speaking German, then nodded toward a fast food restaurant on the far side of the ticketing area, “I left it with a friend in the sandwich shop over there while I came to check in.”

  She smiled and handed him his ticket and boarding pass. “Gate One Twenty-Two. Boarding will begin at approximately nine-fifteen.”

  “Gute Reise,” she added as he turned away. Gute Reise. Have a good trip.

  “Danke,” he said and walked off.

  48

  7:15 P.M.

  Barron drove west on the Santa Monica Freeway, the same highway he’d taken a little over two hours earlier with Halliday. Traffic crawled, jammed from downtown all the way to the beach. It made him wish to hell he had a police car instead of the Mustang, something with flashing lights and a siren.

  7:20 P.M.

  Traffic still crept. Maybe he was crazy. Maybe this was nothing. The report said the German student group believed the composite sketch was their missing friend. So he had purple hair; thousands of people had purple hair. Why should he be struggling to get to the airport to intercept a possibly/probably/maybe missing Josef Speer when he should be collecting Rebecca and getting out of L.A? It made no sense, especially if his guess about the Frankfurt flight was wrong and there was no one at all named Speer when he got there.

  Immediately he clicked on his cell phone and dialed information. Identifying himself as an LAPD homicide detective, he asked to be connected directly to Lufthansa Airlines at LAX. Forty seconds later he had a reservations supervisor on the phone.

  “Flight four-five-three for Frankfurt tonight,” he said distinctly. “Do you have a reservation for a Josef—with an f—Speer? S-P-E-E-R.”

  “One moment, sir.” There was a long silence and then, “Yes, sir. Mr. Speer purchased a ticket nearly thirty minutes ago.”

  “Lufthansa is in which terminal?”

  “Tom Bradley International Terminal, sir.”

  “Thank you.” Barron clicked off.

  Jesus, he was right. Suddenly another thought came. Maybe it was Speer after all. Maybe he’d had a personal reason and just decided to go home without telling anyone. The trouble was—to locate him inside the terminal and verify his identity, he would need the cooperation of Lufthansa security. In asking for it he would have to say why, and because there was a possibility this Josef Speer might be Raymond, Lufthansa would alert the Airport Police Division, a situation that would bring McClatchy and the others, red light and siren, directly to the Lufthansa terminal. And they had red lights and sirens.

  7:24 P.M.

  A large delivery truck slowed to a stop in front of him. Barron stopped behind it and glanced in the mirror. An ocean of headlights stretched into the distance. The truck crept forward. So did he, only now he changed lanes, working toward the inside so that he could get off at the next exit ramp and take surface streets to the airport. Again, he glanced in the mirror. This time he saw not only the wash of headlights behind him but his own image, and for a moment he held there, looking into his eyes.

  Never mind Red McClatchy and the 5-2. What he saw was a sworn police officer charged with enforcing the law and protecting the public. Yet he was a police officer so blinded by personal beliefs he had not seen the depth of Raymond’s cunning or sensed his capability for cold-blooded butchery. As a result he’d taken no precaution at all against them. It was a flaw paid for with the lives of four policemen, one of them a woman, a man wearing a black jacket, a New Jersey consultant, and a purple-haired kid hardly out of his teens. The feeling of responsibility for those deaths and the guilt that went with it were gargantuan.

  7:29 P.M.

  He glanced at the radio on the seat beside him. All he had to do was pick it up and call Red, tell him what he had learned, then turn for Pasadena and let the sq
uad deal with whoever Josef Speer was or wasn’t. But he knew he couldn’t, because if he did and it was Raymond, it would be as if he had ordered his murder himself.

  7:32 P.M.

  Barron left the freeway and took the La Brea off-ramp. His thoughts went to Rebecca, and he realized that in the name of his own conscience he could be killed himself, and not by the squad but by Raymond. He had life insurance, and Rebecca was his sole beneficiary, and he had seen to it that there was enough money in his policy to provide for her for the rest of her life if something happened to him. Except she would be alone. He was the only person she had left in the world. She fared well with the nuns and took care of herself because of him. Both Sister Reynoso and Dr. Flannery had told him so. He was the anchor to what little sanity she had; her silent, fragile existence held together because she loved him and depended on his being there. It was true that upon his death Dan Ford and his wife, Nadine, would become her legal guardians, but Dan Ford, as much as he was loved by both of them, was not her brother.

  7:33 P.M.

  Barron stopped behind a dozen cars at the traffic light at the top of the ramp and buried his head in his hands. “Christ,” he said out loud, his sanity pushed to the point where he had to struggle just to think. Turn right when he reached the traffic light, collect Rebecca, and be five hundred miles away by daylight. Turn left and go after Raymond. If it was Raymond.

  Ahead, the light changed and traffic eased forward. It was still green as Barron reached it. It was now he had to decide what to do. And he did. There was only one answer. Rebecca was his to care for. Their parents had already died a terrible and violent death; he would not subject her to that kind of horror again no matter what he felt he had to do for himself.

  He tugged on the wheel and took a sharp right, accelerating for Pasadena. In an hour they would be out of L.A. heading north/ south/east, it made no difference. In a week things would have calmed down; in a month they would be calmer still because by then Red would have realized he was no threat. And in time everything would be forgotten.

  Then it came—the chilling, overpowering sense of truth. Josef Speer was the dead kid in MacArthur Park, and it was Raymond who had purchased the Lufthansa ticket to Frankfurt. In that blinding moment all the momentous considerations of before vanished. Only one thing mattered. That he get to LAX before flight 453 took off.

  49

  GIFT SHOP, TOM BRADLEY INTERNATIONAL TERMINAL 6, LAX. 7:50 P.M.

  Raymond walked down the aisle doing his best to act like any other traveler looking for something in particular—in this case a piece of luggage he could carry onto the plane. The Lufthansa ticket agent had accepted his explanation of having a carry-on bag left in an airport sandwich shop. It was a detail, not much at all, but he had overlooked it and someone else might not, especially at the boarding gate with no carry-on luggage and no baggage receipt clipped to his ticket envelope.

  Learn well from your mistakes; another directive from the Baroness, repeated like so many others since childhood. Annoying? Yes, but again her teachings were valid. The last thing he needed, especially with the high state of airport security, was a question to arise, any kink in the flow of airline procedure that might raise eyebrows and call attention to him.

  At the end of the aisle he saw them—a dozen or more canvas shoulder bags hanging on a display rack. Selecting one in black, he picked it up and started toward the cashier. At almost the same time he realized he needed something to put in it. In quick order came a LOS ANGELES sweatshirt, an L.A. LAKERS T-shirt, a toothbrush, toothpaste; anything to give it bulk and be something that he might use en route.

  Finished, he went to the checkout stand to wait behind several customers already in line. Then he froze. Not a foot away was a rack filled with the latest edition of Los Angeles Times newspapers. The booking photograph the police had taken of him at Parker Center filled the front page. Above it in bold letters were three words—“Cop Killer Fugitive.” That he had been on television was bad enough, now the newspapers. Newspapers that would be available throughout the airport and might even be brought on board the aircraft.

  Now he saw a subheadline and things grew worse—May Have Purple Hair! The police again. Fast, efficient. Correctly presuming he had taken Josef Speer’s identity.

  Abruptly he set his items on a side counter and retreated down another aisle and in rapid succession picked up several more things—a small hand mirror, a battery-powered electric razor, batteries for the razor.

  The line was gone when he reached the cashier, and he set his items on the counter beside her, letting his hand slide under his jacket to take hold of one of the two Berettas in his belt as he did. If she recognized him and acknowledged it in any way, he would kill her right there and walk away, leaving the terminal building under cover of the horror and confusion that would follow. The same way he had planned to escape the police trap at Union Station and the Southwest Chief before Donlan changed everything.

  He watched her carefully, waiting for her to look at him, but she didn’t. Just watched the items as she rang them up. It was the same when he handed her Speer’s Euro/MasterCard to pay for them. The same, too, when he signed the receipt, and when she put the items in a large plastic bag. Finally she handed him the bag and glanced at him. “Have a nice evening,” she said by rote and turned to the person in line behind him.

  “Thank you,” he said and walked off.

  He’d stood right there in front of her, his picture full on the front page of the Times inches from her sleeve, and she’d never even seen him. The only rationale he could give was that she was like the people on the buses. They saw hundreds of people every day, day in and day out for months, even years, on end, and by now not one looked any different than another.

  8:00 P.M.

  Barron turned hard off La Brea at Stocker. Three-quarters of a mile later he took a left onto La Cienega Boulevard, then looked for the La Tijera cut-across to Sepulveda a mile or more farther south. Altogether he had maybe four miles to go before the airport turnoff at Ninety-sixth Street. Suddenly several big, fat raindrops splattered across his windshield, the thing Dan Ford told him was coming though the weather people had forecast only a ten-percent possibility. He hoped Ford was wrong and the forecasters right.

  Another hundred yards and the drops became a steady rain and then a heavy downpour. The traffic in front of him slowed to nothing. In no time the roadway was as backed up as the freeway he’d abandoned.

  “Dammit!” he swore out loud. Again he wished for a light bar and siren. Those three miles could take forty minutes, even an hour if the rain continued the way it was. An hour to Ninety-sixth Street. Another ten minutes through the airport loop traffic to the International Terminal. Then identifying himself to Lufthansa security and collecting the Airport Police and afterward trying to locate Raymond without alerting him inside the terminal. It was too much time and risked putting him dangerously close to losing Raymond altogether.

  Carry-on bag over his shoulder, Raymond entered a men’s restroom twenty yards from the Lufthansa security checkpoint. He walked past a row of sinks and a half-dozen men standing at urinals. He entered a stall and closed the door, latching it.

  Inside he took off Speer’s jean jacket, unzipped the bag, and took out the mirror, electric razor, and batteries, then snapped the batteries into the razor. Seconds later he passed the razor over his head. A minute, then two and the last of the purple hair dropped into the toilet bowl. He flushed, put the mirror away, and pulled on the LOS ANGELES sweatshirt. Then, putting the jacket in the bag, he flushed the toilet once more, left the stall, and went to one of the sinks to shave. Two minutes’ work with the razor and his face was cleanly shaven. A quick, casual glance around the room followed. No one was paying him the least attention. With the same casualness he looked back to the mirror in front of him, moved the razor to his head, and shaved his skull bare.

  8:20 P.M.

  Barron crept along La Cienega Boulevard, using the highw
ay’s inside shoulder to pass backed-up traffic. Fifty yards, a hundred. In front of him a car straddled both the shoulder and the traffic lane, giving him no room to pass. He pounded on his horn and flashed his lights, trying to get the driver to move. Nothing worked. He swore again. He was stuck where he was like everyone else. The rain came down harder. He could picture Raymond inside the terminal. He would be cool and extremely professional, simply waiting for flight time and trying to pass himself off as just another faceless passenger. But—and here was the rub—what if the ocean of media attention they had so strongly courted to get the public’s help in finding Raymond turned against them? What if someone who had seen his picture on television or in the newspapers recognized him and pointed him out? They knew all too well what Raymond was capable of when he was cornered. What would he do if that happened in a packed airport terminal?

  Barron looked to the radio beside him. Then abruptly past it to his cell phone. He hesitated for a heartbeat, then picked it up.

  8:25 P.M.

  “It may be Raymond Thorne trying to pass himself off as passenger Josef Speer.” Barron’s call was to Lufthansa security at LAX, his tone urgent and emphatic. “If it is Thorne, he will be trying to act like any other traveler. Thorne or Speer, assume he is armed and extremely dangerous. Just locate him and do nothing else. Don’t give him any reason to think he’s being watched until I get there and make the ID. Give me twenty minutes and have an agent meet me at the door. Repeat, give him no reason to believe he’s being watched. We don’t want a shootout in the terminal.”