“What’re you going to do?”
Druze had shaken his head. “I don’t know. Finding a job is tough. Up on the stage, with the lights, with makeup, this face is okay. But getting in the door—people look at me, theater people, and they say, Whoa, you’re ugly. Theater people don’t like ugly. They like pretty.”
Bekker had asked, “What if Elizabeth Armistead went away?”
“What do you mean?” But Bekker had caught the quick, feral glint when Druze looked toward him, and he knew the idea was there in the back of Druze’s head. If Armistead went away, things would be different. Just like they would be for him, if Stephanie went away . . . .
Bekker had kept the coveralls in a sack at the back of his chest of drawers since he bought them, at a Sears, three months earlier. They were blue, the kind a mechanic might wear. He pulled them over his jeans and sweatshirt, found the matching hat in the closet and put it on. Druze knew about costumes and had put it together for him. This costume said service. Nobody would look at him twice.
Bekker glanced at his watch, and the first dislocation occurred, thrilling him: the watch elongated, a Dalí watch, draped over his wrist like a sausage. Wonderful. And the power was coming, darkening his vision, shifting everything to the ultraviolet end. He groped in his pocket for the cigarette case, found a tab of the speed and swallowed it.
So good . . . He staggered through the room, feeling it, the power surging along his veins, a nicotine rush times two hundred. He pushed the power back in a corner, held it there, felt the tension.
The time was getting tighter. He hurried down the steps, checked a window to see how dark it was, then carefully picked up the hammer and slid it into his right-hand pocket. The rest of his equipment, the clipboard, the meter and the identification tag, were piled on Stephanie’s desk.
The clipboard, with the paper clipped to it, went with the service costume. So did the meter. Druze had found the meter in an electronics junk store and bought it for almost nothing: it was obsolete, with a big analog dial on top, originally made for checking magnetic fields around power lines. The identification tag was Bekker’s old hospital ID. He’d laminated it and punched a hole in one end, and hung it from his neck by an elastic string.
He took a breath, did a mental checklist, walked out through the breezeway to the car and used the automatic garage-door opener to lift the door. He drove the long way out of the alley, then continued through the next alley, watching his mirror. Nobody.
Traveling by back streets, he made it to Elizabeth Armistead’s house in a little over eight minutes. He would have to remember that. If Druze was suspected, he should know the time of his arrival. He just hoped she would be there.
“She does one half-hour of meditation, then drinks an herb tea, then comes down for the warm-ups,” Druze said, prepping him. “She’s fussy about it. She missed her meditation once and spent the whole show dropping lines.”
Druze . . . The original plan had called for Bekker to phone Druze just before he left the house on the way to Armistead’s. As soon as Druze got the call, at a remote phone in the theater’s control booth, he would call the ticket office with his best California-cool accent. My name is Donaldson Whitney. Elizabeth Armistead said that she would put me on the guest list for two tickets. I’m in a rush through town, but I have time for her play. Could you call her and confirm?
They would call and confirm. They always did. Too many bullshitters trying to get in free. Donaldson Whitney, though, was a theater critic from Los Angeles. Armistead would gush . . . and the ticket people would remember. That was the point of the exercise: to create a last man to talk to the dead woman, with Druze already in makeup, onstage, warming up . . . alibied. Druze had suggested it and Bekker had found no way to demur.
He could, however, go early; Druze wouldn’t have to know. But the cops would figure it out . . . .
And after doing Armistead, he could call as though he were just leaving his house. Then Druze would make his Donaldson Whitney call, and if Armistead didn’t answer the phone when the ticket office called her, well, she simply wasn’t home yet. That could hardly be Bekker’s fault . . . .
Bekker took it slowly the last few minutes down to Armistead’s. He’d cruised her house before, and there were no changes. The lots were small, but the houses were busy. One man coming or going would never be noticed. A light burned in Armistead’s house, in the back. Her silver Dodge Omni was at the curb, where it usually was. He parked at the side of the house, under a tree heavy with bursting spring buds, got his equipment, leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes.
Like a digital readout: one-two-three-four-five. Easy steps. He let the power out, just a bit; when he looked, the steering wheel was out-of-round. He smiled, thinly, allowed himself to feel the burn in his blood for another moment, then got out of the car, changed the thin smile for a harassed look and walked around the corner to Armistead’s house. Rang the doorbell. And again.
Armistead. Larger than he thought, in a robe. Pale oval face; dark hair swept back in a complicated roll, held with a wooden pin. Face slack, as though she’d been sleeping. Door on a chain. She peered out at him, her eyes large and dark. She’d look good on a stage. “Yes?”
“Gas company. Any odor of gas in the house?”
“No . . .”
“We show you have gas appliances, a washer and dryer, a hot-water heater?” All that from Druze’s reconnaissance at an Armistead party. Bekker glanced down at the clipboard.
“Yes, down in the basement,” she said. His knowledge of her home had confirmed his authority.
“We’ve had some critical pressure fluctuations up and down the street because of a main valve failure. We have a sniffer here”—Bekker hefted the black box, so she could see the meter—“and we’d like to take some readings in your basement, just in case. There could be a problem with sudden flareups. We had a fire over on the next block, you probably heard the fire trucks.”
“Uh, I’ve been meditating . . . .” But she was already pulling the chain. “I’m in a terrible rush, I’ve got to get to work . . . .”
“Just take a minute or two,” Bekker assured her. And he was in. He slipped his hand in his pocket, gripped the hammer, waited until he heard the door close firmly.
“Through the kitchen and down the stairs,” Armistead said. Her voice was high and clear, but there was an impatient edge to it. A busy woman, interrupted.
“The kitchen?” Bekker glanced around. The drapes had been closed. The smell of prairie flowers was in the air, and spice, and Bekker realized that it must be her herb tea. The power came out now, out of the corner of his head, and his vision went momentarily blue . . . .
“Here. I’ll show you,” Armistead said impatiently. She turned her back on him, walking toward the rear of the house. “I haven’t smelled a thing.”
Bekker took a step behind her, began to draw the hammer, and suddenly blood gushed from his nose. He dropped the meter and caught the blood with his hand, and she saw the motion, turned, saw the blood, opened her mouth . . . to scream?
“No, no,” he said, and her mouth closed, halfway . . . everything so slow. So slow, now. “Ah, this is the second time today . . . . Got hit in the nose by my child, just a five-year-old. Can’t believe it . . . Do you have any tissue?”
“Yes . . .” Her eyes were wide, horrified, as the stream of blood dripped down his coveralls.
They were on the rug in the front room, and she started to pivot, going for the tissue. The power slowed her motion even more and demanded that he savor this. There could be no fights, no struggles, no chances. She couldn’t be allowed to scratch him, or bruise him . . . . This was business, but the power knew what it wanted. She was saying, “Here, in the kitchen . . . ,” she was pivoting, and Bekker, one hand clenched to his face, stepped close again, pulled the hammer from his pocket, swung it like a tennis racket, with a good forehand, got his back and shoulder in it.
The hammer hit with a double shock, hard,
then soft, like knocking a hole in a plaster wall, and the impact twisted Armistead. She wasn’t dead; her eyes were open wide, saliva sprayed from her mouth, her hips were twisting, her feet were coming off the floor. She went down, dying, but not knowing it, trying to fight, her hands up, her mouth open, and Bekker was on her, straddling her. One hand on her throat, her body bucking. Evading the fingernails, hitting with the blunt head of the hammer, her forehead, once, twice . . . and done.
He was breathing like a steam engine, the power on him, running him, his heart running, the blood streaming down his face. Can’t get any on her . . . He brushed his bloodied face with the sleeve of his coveralls, looked back down, her eyes half open . . . .
Her eyes.
Bekker, suddenly frightened, turned the hammer.
He’d use the claw . . . .
CHAPTER
9
The evening dragged; the feeling that he was waiting stayed with him.
He thought of calling Jennifer, to ask for an extra visit with their daughter. He reached for the phone once, twice, but never made the call. He wanted to see Sarah, but even more, he wanted to settle with Jennifer. Somehow. End it, or start working toward reconciliation. And that, he thought, was not a process begun with a spur-of-the-moment phone call. Not with Jennifer.
Instead of calling, he sat in front of the television and watched a bad cop movie on Showtime. He switched it off a few minutes before the torturously achieved climax: both the cops and the crooks were cardboard, and he didn’t care what happened to any of them. After the late news, he went back to the workroom and began plodding through the game.
Bekker stuck in the back of his head. The investigation was dying. He could sense the waning interest in the other cops. They knew the odds against the case: without eyewitnesses or a clear suspect who had both motive and opportunity, there was almost no chance of an arrest, much less a conviction. Lucas knew of at least two men who had killed their wives and gotten away with it, and a woman who’d killed a lover. There was nothing fancy about any of the murders. No exotic weapons, no tricky alibis, no hired killers. The men had used clubs: a grease gun and an aluminum camera tripod. The woman had used a wooden-handled utility knife from Chicago Cutlery.
I just found her/him like that, they told the answering cops. When the cops read them their rights, all three asked for lawyers. After that, there wasn’t anything to go on. The pure, unvarnished and almost unbreakable two-dude defense: Some other dude did it.
Lucas stared at the wall behind the desk. I need this fuckin’ case. If the Bekker investigation failed, if the spark of interest diminished and died, he feared, he might slip back into the black hole of the winter’s depression. Before the depression, he’d thought of mental illnesses as something suffered by people who were weak, without the will to suppress the problem, or somehow genetically impaired. No more. The depression was as real as a tiger in the jungle, looking for meat. If you let your guard down . . .
Bekker’s beautiful face came up in his mind’s eye, like a color slide projected on a screen. Bekker.
At twenty minutes after eleven, the phone rang. He looked at it for a moment, with a ripple of tension. Jennifer? He picked it up.
“Lucas?” Daniel’s voice, hoarse, unhappy.
“What happened?”
“The sonofabitch did another one,” Daniel rasped. “The guy who killed the Bekker woman. Call Dispatch for the address and get your ass over there.”
A little spark of elation? A touch of relief? Lucas hammered the Porsche through the night, across the Mississippi, west to the lakes, blowing leftover winter leaves over the sidewalks, turning the heads of midnight walkers. He had no trouble finding the address: every light in the little house was on and the doors were open to the night. Groups of neighbors stood on the sidewalk, looking down toward the death house; occasionally one would cross the street to a new group, a new set of rumors, walking rapidly as though his speed alone would prove to watching cops that he was on a mission of urgency.
Elizabeth Armistead was lying faceup on her living room carpet. A bloodstain marked the carpet under the back of her head, like a black halo. One arm was twisted beneath her, the other was flung out, palm up, the fingers slightly crooked. Her face, from the nose up, had been destroyed. In place of her eyes was a finger-deep pit, filled with blood and mangled flesh. Another wound cut across her upper lip, ripping it, exposing white broken teeth. Her dress was pulled up high enough to show her underpants, which appeared to be undisturbed. The room smelled like a wet penny, the odor of fresh blood.
“Same guy?” Lucas asked, looking down at her.
“Gotta be. I caught the first one, too, and this one’s a goddamn carbon copy,” said a bright-eyed medical examiner’s investigator.
“Anything obvious?” Lucas asked, looking around. The house seemed undisturbed.
“No. No broken fingernails, and they’re clean. There doesn’t seem to have been a fight, and there’s no doubt she was killed right here—there are some blood splatters over there by the table. I didn’t look myself, but the other guys say there’s no sign of a door or window being forced.”
“Doesn’t look like rape . . .”
“No. And there aren’t any signs of semen outside the body.”
A Homicide detective stepped up beside Lucas and said, “C’mere and look at the weapon.”
“I saw it when I came in,” Lucas said. “The hammer?”
“Yeah, but Jack just noticed something.”
They went out in the hallway, where the hammer, wrapped in plastic, was being delicately handled by another cop.
“What?” asked Lucas.
“Look at the head and the claw. Not the blood, the hammer,” the second cop said.
Lucas looked, saw nothing. “I don’t see anything.”
“Just like the fuckin’ dog that didn’t bark,” the cop said with satisfaction. He held the hammer up to a lamp, reflecting light from the shiny hammerhead into Lucas’ eyes. “The first time you use a hammer, drive a nail or pull one, you start putting little nicks in it. Look at this. Smooth as a baby’s ass. The goddamn thing has never been used. I bet the guy brought it with him, to kill her.”
“Are you sure it was his? Not hers?”
The cop shrugged. “The woman’s got about six tools—some screwdrivers, a crescent wrench and a hammer. One pack of nails and some picture hangers. They’re still in the kitchen drawer. She wasn’t a do-it-yourselfer. Why would she have two hammers? And a big heavy one like this? And how’d the guy just happen to get his hands on the second one?”
A bright light swept the front of the house and Lucas half turned.
“TV’s here,” said the first cop. He stepped away toward the front door.
“Tell everybody to keep their mouths shut. Daniel’ll issue a statement in the morning,” Lucas said. He turned back to the cop with the hammer.
“So he brought it with him,” Lucas said.
“I’d say so.”
Lucas thought about it, frowned, then clapped the cop on the shoulder. “I don’t know what it means, but it’s a good catch,” he said. “If it’s new, maybe we could check and see where they sell this Estwing brand . . . .”
“We’re doing that tomorrow . . . .”
“So what do we know about her?” Lucas asked, pointing a thumb back toward the living room.
Armistead was an actress, the hammer-toting cop told Lucas. When she hadn’t shown up for a performance, a friend had come to check on her, found the body and called the police. To judge from the body temperature, still higher than the rather cool ambient temperature of the house, she’d been dead perhaps four hours when the medical examiner’s investigator had arrived, a few minutes after eleven. There was no sign of a burglary.
“Where’s the friend?” Lucas asked.
“Back in the bedroom, with Swanson,” the cop said, nodding toward the rear of the house. Lucas wandered back, looking the place over, trying to get a picture of the woman�
��s life-style. The place was decorated with taste, he decided, but without money. The paintings on the walls were originals, but rough, the kind an actress might get from artist friends. The carpets on the floor were worn Orientals. He thought about the rugs at Bekker’s house, and stooped to feel the one he was standing on. It felt thin and slippery. Some kind of machine-woven synthetic. Not much of a tie . . .
The bedroom door was open, and when Lucas poked his head in, he found Swanson sitting in a side chair, rubbing the lenses of his wire-rimmed glasses with a Kleenex. A woman was lying faceup on the bed, one foot on the floor. The other foot had made a muddy mark on the yellow bedspread, but she hadn’t noticed. Lucas knocked on the jamb and stepped inside as Swanson looked up.
“Davenport,” the Homicide cop said. He put his glasses back on and fiddled with them for a second until they were comfortable. Then he sighed and said, “It’s a fuckin’ bummer.”
“Same guy?”
“Yeah. Don’t you think?”
“I guess.” Lucas looked at the woman. “You found the body?”
She was redheaded, middle thirties, Lucas thought, and pretty, most of the time. Tonight she was haggard, her eyes swollen from crying, her nose red and running. She didn’t bother to sit up, but she reached up to her forehead and pushed a lock of hair out of her eyes. They looked dark, almost black. “Yes. I came over after the show.”
“Why?”
“We were worried. Everybody was,” she said, sniffing.
“Elizabeth would go on with a broken leg. When she didn’t show up and didn’t call, we thought maybe she’d been in an accident or something. If I didn’t find her here, I was going to call the hospitals. I rang the doorbell, and then looked through the window in the door and saw her lying there . . . . The door was locked, so I ran over to a neighbor’s to call the cops.” A wrinkle creased her forehead and she cocked her head forward and said, “You’re the cop who killed the Indian.”
“Mmmnn.”
“Is your daughter okay? I heard on the TV . . .”
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