by Stuart Woods
It was a cat’s head this time, and suddenly Larsen felt sick about Helen Mendelssohn. He put the box back in the fridge and went back to his car, leaving the key under the doormat.
The trip was superfluous, really, but it had to be made. At the city morgue he showed his badge to an attendant. “I want to see the head picked up in Beverly Hills this morning,” he said.
“Sure,” the attendant replied. “Been a regular parade of folks in here this morning wanting to see it. You’d think nobody’d ever seen a head before. I turned down a hundred bucks from one of those supermarket tabloids that wanted to photograph it.”
The Los Angeles morgue had not wasted an entire body slab on this case. The head was in a stainless-steel drawer in a cold room, wrapped in a sheet. The attendant unwrapped it almost tenderly, Larsen thought, and when the head was exposed he knew he didn’t need the photograph; he remembered the face well.
“Can I use your phone?” he asked the attendant.
“Sure. You through with the head?”
“Yes. You can put a new tag on it; the name is Helen Mendelssohn.” He spelled it for the man. “That’s an official ID,” he said. “I knew the girl, and there’s no point in putting her parents through an identification.”
“If you say so,” the attendant said. “There’s the phone.”
Larsen called Beverly Hills Homicide and got the right detective on the phone. “This is Jon Larsen; I’ve got an ID on the head that turned up this morning.”
“How the hell did you do that?” the detective asked.
“She was an inactive case of mine. I knew her, and I have a photograph from her parents. I’ve ID’ed her myself, so don’t call them. I’ll handle that part of it. And do me a favor, will you? Stop the artist’s drawing from being released to the newspapers.”
“Sure.”
He gave the detective the address of Helen’s apartment. “The key’s under the doormat, so you won’t have to break in. There’s a cat’s head in a box in the refrigerator, too; make sure you go over the box for prints.”
“What’s a catshead?”
“The head of a dead cat.”
“Yuck. You know who did this, Larsen?”
“No, but it could be the same guy that’s involved in another stalker case I’m working on.” He hung up and walked slowly back to his car.
The Mendelssohns were glad to see him at first. He sat them down in the living room.
“Have you finished with the key yet, Mr. Larsen?”
“Not yet.” He hesitated, then took a deep breath and plunged in. “I wish there were an easier way to tell you this, Mr. and Mrs. Mendelssohn; I’m sorry to have to tell you that Helen is dead.”
There was an audible gasp from the girl’s father, and the mother burst into tears.
Larsen waited for him to quiet her, then continued. “Her…remains were found up a canyon this morning, and the case is already being intensively investigated.”
“Was it that stalker fellow?” Mendelssohn asked.
“I have reason to believe it was, but it may be a while before we know for sure.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“Not for certain; we have some leads, though. I think he may be stalking another young woman.”
“I hope you get the bastard,” Mendelssohn said.
“We will, I promise you. Mr. Mendelssohn, there’s something else I have to tell you, however unpleasant it may be.”
“What could be more unpleasant than what you’ve already told us?” Mendelssohn asked.
Larsen tried to look the man in the eye. “I’m afraid that only Helen’s head has been found. They’re still searching the canyon for the rest of her body.”
Mendelssohn stood up and paced the room while his wife wept again. “These crazy people,” he said. “You’ve got to get them off the streets.”
“I know; we’re trying. It won’t be necessary for you to identify the remains; I’ve already done that. The coroner’s office will contact you when Helen’s body is ready for an undertaker.”
Mendelssohn sat down next to his wife again and tried to comfort her.
Larsen stood to go. “There’s going to be a lot in the papers and on television about this. I would suggest that you not talk to anybody but the police about what’s happened. Your phone will be ringing a lot, so you might ask a friend or a relative to answer it for you. Also, there’s a team going through Helen’s apartment for evidence; it might be best if you didn’t go there for a few days. Someone will return the key to you when they’re finished.”
Mendelssohn stood up and offered Larsen his hand. “Thank you for coming here personally to tell us,” he said. “I’m grateful for that, at least.”
“I’m very sorry for what’s happened,” Larsen said. “I hope we have a quick resolution.”
Larsen sat in his car for a few minutes, trying not to cry. He hated to cry.
CHAPTER
50
Larsen drove absently toward Santa Monica, his thoughts on the head of Helen Mendelssohn and the pain of her parents. He felt glad that he had been able to tell them of her death before they read of it in the newspapers or, worse, saw it on television. He wondered: if he had done something differently in the case, would it have turned out differently? He thought not. He couldn’t have stayed on a case when the stalker had ended contact. Or apparently so. Had Helen Mendelssohn continued to hear from him?
Certainly, she had received the roses and the cat’s head. A cat’s head in a box would frighten anyone; and what the hell was it doing in the refrigerator? Was she so obsessively neat?
Had Parker done this? If so, how did it connect with Chris’s case? And why hadn’t he told Homicide about Parker? He knew the answer to that one; they’d bust him in a hurry, and then they wouldn’t be able to hang it on him. Parker would walk. And he didn’t want Parker to walk.
He was nearly to the hotel, and he passed the parking lot. Danny’s car wasn’t there, and that meant that Chris was alone. He accelerated. Convinced that he hadn’t been followed, he parked at a meter in front of the hotel, next to a dark blue van.
He ran up the steps and across the lobby to the elevator. He pressed the button and waited impatiently; he didn’t like the idea of Chris being alone. Others, plump dieters dressed in sweat clothes, crowded into the elevator car with him, and stops were made on nearly every floor. Finally, on the twelfth, he hurried down the hall. As he approached the end he saw that the door stood ajar.
Alarmed now, he drew his pistol and held it near his right ear. Flipping off the safety, he edged along the wall toward the door, fearful of crossing the threshold. He stopped and listened for a moment, but all he could hear was a fluttering noise from inside the room. Taking a deep breath, he pushed open the door with a foot and stepped into the room, the pistol before him.
A window was open, and the curtains fluttered in the breeze. He moved into the bedroom, the pistol still ready, but no one was there. He checked the bathroom and the kitchenette; nobody.
Alarmed now, he ran down the hall. Unwilling to wait for the elevator, he took the fire stairs, descending as rapidly as he could without breaking a leg. At the bottom he shoved open the emergency door to the street, then, realizing the weapon was still in his hand, he holstered it.
He ran to the corner and looked both ways, toward the service entrance, then back toward the parking lot. No sign of her. He ran back up the street, noticing Danny’s car parked at a meter near his, then around the corner of the building. A concrete walkway led to the beach, and he sprinted down it until he came to sand, then stopped and looked desperately around. A couple were on a blanket thirty yards away, basking in the late-afternoon sun and talking; the next cluster of people was a couple of hundred yards to his left, and he turned in that direction, trotting with difficulty through the loose sand. He stopped; someone had called out.
“Jon!”
He turned and the couple on the blanket were waving to him; he ran toward t
hem, puzzled.
“Hello!” the woman called out.
He realized that they were Chris and Danny. “What the hell…?” He sank to his knees on the sand, out of breath.
“What’s wrong?” Chris asked. Her hair was black, and she was wearing huge sunglasses.
“I thought…” He couldn’t find the breath to speak.
“You thought something had happened to us?” Danny asked.
Larsen nodded. “The door was open; you were gone.”
“The maid needed to clean the room,” Chris said, “so Danny disguised us and we went for a swim. We’re perfectly all right.”
“The maid must have left the door open,” Danny said.
Larsen sank onto the blanket and lay on his back. “I’m so glad you’re all right,” he said. “I was so worried.”
“We’re okay here,” Danny said. “There’s no way he can know.”
“What’s new?” Chris asked. “Any progress on Parker?”
Hardly, he thought. “No. He seems to have gone away; his office said he was out for a few days, and there doesn’t seem to be anybody at the house. I’ll check again tonight. I don’t suppose he’s getting your notes, Danny. Maybe that’s why he’s vanished.”
“Oh, the hell with him,” Chris said. “Let’s go out to dinner tonight.”
“Out?”
“Why not? You think Parker frequents good restaurants?” Danny asked.
“Maybe not,” Larsen admitted.
“Let’s go to Market Street.” Chris asked. “The place that Tony Bill and Dudley Moore own. Dudley sometimes plays piano.”
“Where is it?”
“In Venice.”
“Oh, no; we’re not going anywhere near Venice.”
“Well, we’re sure not eating at the Pritikin Hotel,” Danny said. “I had a look at the food, and if I start eating there I’ll waste away to nothing.”
“I’ll decide,” Chris said firmly. “Let’s go and get cleaned up, and I’ll make a reservation somewhere. Trust me.”
“I’ll trust you,” Larsen said. “God knows, we need a night out.”
CHAPTER
51
Chris chose the Maple Drive Cafe, and Larsen liked it. They were given a booth at the rear, still in earshot of the piano, but nicely private.
They dined well and were into a second bottle of wine before Larsen began to relax and realize that he was having a good time. It seemed a very long while since he had had some pleasant experience that had not been interrupted by Admirer, and he devoted himself to enjoying it.
He was especially enjoying Danny, who was at once bitchy and funny. Danny knew everybody in town; he had done the hair of most of the important actresses, and he was greatly in demand by both the studios and the independents.
Larsen had known many homosexuals, some of them cops, but he had never had a friend who was gay, and he was enjoying his new one. Danny was affectionate, hilarious, and brave, and he was no threat to Larsen’s relationship with Chris. Danny, in fact, seemed to take the role of a benevolent brother who wanted to see his sister happy, even if it was with a policeman.
Danny was telling a story about one of the old-time movie queens he’d known in her later years.
“I’d been working as an assistant to Robert Koenig, who was very big at the time, and Bobby was shacked up with some chorus boy and didn’t make it to work, so there I was, trembling, wondering what the hell I was going to do with her hair, which was awful, take my word for it. I was about to suggest a wig when she looked at me in the mirror and saw that I was less than confident.
“She got up from her chair and turned around to face me—she was a head taller than me, of course. She reached down and took me by the lapels and just about hoisted me off my feet; then she gazed at me like a rattlesnake at a rabbit, and she said, ‘Listen to me, you little faggot. Today we’re shooting my only decent scene in this movie, and if you fuck up my hair I’ll beat the shit out of you.’ Then she sat down.”
“What did you do?” Larsen asked.
“I didn’t fuck up her hair,” Danny said. “That little chat had a curiously calming effect on my nerves, and I made her look great. She would never let anybody else do her hair after that, and I used her patronage to leave Bobby and go out on my own. I don’t care what anybody else says about her, she was a great lady.”
Danny raised a hand for a waiter. “I’m buying; no arguments.” He paid the check, and the three of them walked out of the restaurant arm in arm.
Back at Pritikin, Danny let them out of his car. “I’m going home,” he said. “It ain’t much, but my clothes are there, and besides, I haven’t spent this much time in a bedroom with a woman since I left my mother. It’s unnatural.”
“You watch yourself,” Larsen said quietly, so that Chris wouldn’t hear him. “This isn’t over yet.”
“Don’t worry, I’m still carrying,” Danny said, slapping his pocket. “You kids enjoy.”
The lobby was deserted, with not even a desk clerk in sight, and as Larsen rang for the elevator, he was so caught up with the thought of spending a night alone with Chris that he didn’t notice the delivery box of flowers laying on the front desk.
Larsen put the chain on the door, and they began undressing in the living room, abandoning their clothes there as they worked their way toward the bed. Two people in one twin bed made it small, but they didn’t let it bother them; Larsen was grateful to finally be alone in bed with Chris, secure from interruption. They made love sweetly, passionately, with tender regard and with abandon, and for the first time in his life Larsen understood the meaning of two people becoming one flesh; he could not tell where his body ended and hers began. They found release together, and Larsen was sure their cries could be heard a couple of floors down.
Chris wiped the sweat from his forehead and kissed it.
“Lower,” he said.
She worked her way down his body and took him in her mouth. “Is this low enough?” she asked, pausing for a moment.
“Oh, yes,” he said as she began again. He wouldn’t have believed he could have two erections so close together, but there it was. He held her head in his hands, ran his fingers through her hair. He tried to pull her on top of him, but she wouldn’t let go until he had come again.
She put her head on his shoulder. “How are you?”
“I can’t make a fist,” he replied.
“That’s okay,” she laughed. “You won’t need to now.”
“That’s one I owe you,” he said.
“And I’ll collect, too,” she said.
They fell asleep pressed against each other, oblivious to all else.
He didn’t know what time it was when he woke, and at first he didn’t know what had awakened him. Then he knew; it was the sound of a door latch operating. Opening or closing? He couldn’t tell.
Slowly, so as not to awaken Chris, he slipped out of bed, tiptoed naked to the closed bedroom door, and pressed his ear against it. There was a sound, but he couldn’t place it. Then he realized that his gun was in the living room with his clothes, and so was Chris’s little automatic.
He heard the latch noise again, and he was almost certain he heard the outside door of the suite close. Very, very slowly he turned the bedroom doorknob and opened the door half an inch. He put his ear to the opening and listened hard. He could hear nothing but the wind off the Pacific rattling the windowpanes.
He opened the door a foot and looked into the living room, now lit by part of a moon. The room seemed empty. He stepped through the door, looking around him, ready to defend himself. His coat was on the coffee table, and the pistol was inside it, still in its holster. He freed the weapon and flipped off the safety, turning slowly around in the room, watching for any motion. He seemed to be alone.
He reached for a lamp on a small table and switched it on. The light illuminated the room sufficiently for him to notice the only thing that had changed. Near the door was a small chest of drawers with a mirror
hanging above it. A tube of Chris’s lipstick rested on the chest, and there was writing on the mirror in bright red.
YOU’LL NEVER GET AWAY FROM ME.
A.
Then he looked at the front door and saw that the chain was off the latch.
CHAPTER
52
Larsen sat and watched Chris sleep in the morning sunlight. When she showed signs of waking, he put the pistol back into its shoulder holster. She opened her eyes and felt for him.
“Jon?” she said sleepily.
“I’m over here,” he said. “I woke up earlier than you, so I got dressed.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?”
“It was too early. Besides, I like watching you sleep; you’re like a little girl.”
She smiled. “I’m hungry.”
“So am I. Come on, get dressed, and I’ll buy you a good breakfast.”
“We’ve got some cereal here,” she said.
“I’m hungrier than that. Anyway, it’s time we got out of this place.”
“Where will we go?”
“Back to my house.”
“He’ll find us there, won’t he?”
“I’ve begun to think that he’ll find us anywhere, so what the hell? I’m going to stay with you from now on, so if he finds us, it’s okay with me.” It was, too. All he wanted was one clean shot at the bastard.
“Where are my clothes?” she asked, sitting up.
“On the other bed.” He loved looking at her naked.
“Are you looking at me?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I think I like it.”
“I know I do.”
“Why don’t you come back to bed for a while?”
“That’s a wonderful idea, but I’ve got you all packed and ready to go. Let’s make love where we belong, not in this place.”
“Sounds good to me,” she said, feeling for her clothes.
