A shadow at her door, indifferent of exposure, trying to open it with a key which had worked yesterday. Casey knew he was on the right track now. And picturing a bitterly, murderously thwarted being, he felt his skin crawl. Capable of anything. Anything. The world would be destroyed for an idea someday, and against the lunatic who harbored it, nothing sane would prevail.
“Start pulling ’em in,” Timms was saying wearily as Casey left the squad room. “Known hard guys. Narco suspects. Anybody we can lay our hands on…”
“It’s coming in,” a puffy-eyed policewoman in Communications told him. “Up to ‘H’ so far. You want to wait till it’s finished?”
“No, give me what you have, please.”
Casey’s eyes flew down the print-out from DMV headquarters in Sacramento listing Citroёn owners for a radius of fifty miles: Aaron…Appleby…Asnar…Axton…Baker…Beaker…Benson…Bepple…Bernstein—
Bernstein, Solomon A.
Casey ran for the stairs, taking them three at a time.
THIRTY
“What’re you talking about, investigating? What’s to investigate with a car that’s for months sitting in the garage, I ask you? It’s not enough my Sol’s flat on his back, couldn’t drive if he had to with his heart condition, you got to come here worrying his poor wife about a car nobody uses?”
A formidable woman, Mrs. Solomon Bernstein. And poor, in the sense of pitiable, was the last word you would ever apply to her. She was not to be pushed or even persuaded, Krug and Casey found, until at last they managed to convince her that it was her duty as a citizen to cooperate with the police.
“So go already, look,” she told them irritably, handing over the garage key. “Take a picture if you want, it’s nothing to me!”
Second garage from the end of the line of single garages facing the alley behind the Bernsteins’ two-story apartment house. The garage doors were wood but well preserved, the easy-to-open overhead type. Inside stood a Chrysler Imperial.
“Simmons,” Casey groaned. “Frank Simmons, our friendly Realtor.” And now he knew what it was he had forgotten. “Remember the Parsons kid mentioning that Sandy used to make it with some motorcycle dude?”
Charles “Tay” Taylor. At last they had their connection.
“Sure, months ago I turned the keys over to Frank,” Solomon Bernstein told them a few minutes later. “The wife doesn’t drive, so what else was I going to do to keep it running? ‘All I ask,’ I told him, ‘is you keep the thing going so it’s not a pile of junk by the time I can drive again. A favor, Frank.’ ”
As his wife had said, he was flat on his back, not in the hospital any longer, but in the comfort of a bedroom at the back of their spacious apartment. A cylinder labeled Caution: Contains Oxygen—No Smoking stood in a corner. On the nightstand beside a rented crank-up hospital bed sat a tray of medicines. Bernstein had been watching television, but when his wife reluctantly let Krug and Casey into the room, he had switched it off with a remote-control device.
“So what’s this all about? I mean police,” he was saying anxiously, “must be serious. Look, I’ve got full insurance, so if, God forbid, Frank’s had an accident—”
“Nothing like that,” Krug told him. “This is in connection with his daughter. He ever talk to you much about her?”
“Better you should ask if he ever talked about anything else!” Bernstein shook his balding head. “So that’s it. Sandy.” A frail, waxy-looking prophet now, he said mournfully, “I told him. Believe me, years I’ve been telling him. ‘Frank,’ I used to say, ‘you keep worshiping that kid the way you do, you’re going to end up getting hurt bad. She’s only a kid,’ I used to tell him. ‘A young human being, Frank. You got to let loose a little or she’s going to break your heart. Just to grow up, Frank, she’ll have to break your heart!’ ”
“Mr. Bernstein,” Casey began, “after Sandy died—”
“No, wait, let me finish.”
“Haven’t much time,” Krug said. But nothing short of a gag would have silenced the sick man.
“This is my partner we’re talking about. My partner for twenty years. A man I respect. And whatever he’s done, I’m going to stick by him.”
“We don’t know that he’s done anything.”
“But I’m telling you he needs consideration. Because he’s a troubled man. A sick man, Frank is. Ever since that poor girl, may she rest in peace, met that momser on his motorcycle.”
“Did Mr. Simmons ever mention a name?”
“How could he when she wouldn’t tell him? None of his business, she says. Imagine, her own father, it’s none of his business some junkie she’s running around with!” He sighed gustily. “Tragic, tragic. Couldn’t call it anything else. A situation like that, couldn’t end up anything but tragic.”
He had missed the funeral, of course, he went on, but Emma, his wife, had attended. A strange small ceremony, only the parents and a preacher at the graveside. No friends of Sandy’s had been permitted…
“Not that I’m criticizing,” he added hastily. “Only mention it—Well, enough, she was buried, it was over and done with. Time, I told Frank, to forgive and forget.” But Simmons had neither forgiven nor forgotten. “Like a poison it was. Something eating at him, you understand? Poor kid’s not cold in her grave and here’s Frank all of a sudden raving about filth. Filth, that’s all he can talk about. Things she said about him, he meant. Maybe in a diary he finds? Anyway, it’s driving him crazy. ‘Frank,’ I kept telling him, ‘whatever this is, it’s kid stuff. And she’s gone, Frank, you got to accept it.’ But he don’t listen. Can’t, maybe. Just keeps poisoning himself, brooding.” And he sighed again. “To tell the truth, it’s got so I dread the sight of him. Isn’t that something? My own partner for twenty years…”
Following procedure, they checked at the Simmons house near Ninth and Georgina next, but Mrs. Simmons refused to open the door more than a crack. Her husband was out showing a property, she told them fiercely. Frank had been working night and day for months now. If they wanted to speak to him they would have to try at the office. Didn’t they have anything better to do than bother decent people?
“Scared,” said Krug when she slammed the door in their faces. “You think she don’t know he’s cracked up?”
On the off chance they might get lucky, they whirled by Adrian Crewes’s apartment building, receiving the disheartening report from the stakeout there that the crippled woman hadn’t been seen yet. The plainclothes team canvassing the neighborhood had gathered nothing in the way of information either. Obviously any luck this night was not to be on the side of the angels.
THIRTY-ONE
The titans on the screen were locked in mortal combat. Socko-whammo. No Union troops over the hill this time.
Curiously detached from the many-times-life-sized action on the distant projection screen, the sound track shouting and screaming issued tinnily from a microphone suspended by a metal clip over the half-opened car window beside her. Titans squeaking like mice. Ridiculous, Adrian thought, and bored by the endless fight scene, she finally turned off the volume. Much better.
On the huge screen, gallons of ketchup blood flowed in every direction. The hero’s, of course. Must be, Adrian thought, because the bestial-looking one who was systematically beating the heroine now had to be the bad guy. But such a tireless brute, you almost had to admire him. He kept beating and beating the star’s near-nude body from every conceivable angle, but she seemed impervious to serious injury. It’s all that silicone, Adrian decided. Her secret weapon. He doesn’t scare her nearly as much as the annual bill from her plastic surgeon.
Although there had been plenty of empty spaces nearer the huge screen, Adrian had chosen to park in the last row as usual, having learned from experience to avoid the chance of neighboring cars full of baby-sisters or lovers without the price or desire for privacy. Hers was the only car in her row.
Ahead of her, across the driving aisle, the next row was completely empty also. But beyond that, in semicircle ranks separated by wide aisles, cars stood in orderly rows facing the screen, each hitched, as she was, to a microphone on an expandable cord connected to a metal post.
Her mind wandering, Adrian tried to imagine what some future discoverer might make of this place. In the year 2500, say, some keloid-scarred mutant digging through the atomic dust of the Last Great War, finding this mysterious ceremonial place. A temple? No, a burial ground once enclosed by a high fence. And such curious sarcophagi those old pre-holocaust people used. Metal in various sizes and shapes large enough to hold whole families. Ford. Chevrolet. Cadillac. Possibly these were tribal names? Inside the sarcophagi were couches and seating places. Obviously couples and tribal units had been buried together in sweet repose. Very strange, those unknown pre-Bomb people.
Two rows beyond hers, only its top visible over the ranked cars ahead, a vehicle with its lights out drifted slowly along the aisle. Directly ahead of her, clearly visible across the empty row, someone was backing out awkwardly. Not a courteous type, either, for he switched on his lights to drive out, and two horns beeped in angry protest.
On the screen the bloody but unbowed hero was crawling grimly toward the lady-beater. Get him, tiger. Adrian yawned hugely and settled deeper in the seat. From the corner of her eye she spied the drifting car turning slowly into the last aisle. Another misanthrope, she thought vaguely, expecting it to pass by behind her, seeking solitude down the aisle. But the vehicle pulled in beside hers. A foreign car. A Citroën.
“Got an APB out,” Krug reported when they checked in. “Simmons and the Citroën. And just in case we miss him, we included his Chrysler.”
“Better stake out his house right away,” Timms decided. “Christ, what we need tonight is the whole goddamn force on hand! If only we knew where that woman—”
“Something coming in, Lieutenant,” Smithers sang out. “Sweep team just found a neighbor who spotted a blue Citroën parked in the alley behind the Crewes building.”
“Hardly news, we already know he was there.”
Smithers said “Okay” into the phone and banged the receiver. “This was early, Lieutenant. Before that manager called us.”
“Christ,” Timms groaned, “then he did see her go. That’s why he was so free trying to get into her apartment.”
“Maybe he even followed her,” Krug suggested. “Like to a restaurant, or something. That way he’d know he had time to toss her place.”
Consumed by a bitter realization that they had failed their first covenant to preserve and protect life, Casey predicted that if Simmons had followed Miss Crewes, he would go back after her. A crippled woman who couldn’t run. A proud woman who wouldn’t scream in time. “He’s got to get to that briefcase. Her notes from the tapes. That’s all he’s living for now. To destroy that filth he kept telling Bernstein about.” And he would kill her if he had to. But of course they all knew that now.
“Okay, let’s have it”—Timms kept snapping his fingers—“friends, bars, restaurants. Any place she’s mentioned going to. Putting out a bulletin on her isn’t going to help much now. We’ve got to have specific places to look.”
“Claimed she didn’t have any friends here,” Krug muttered. “But she did say something once about picking up a hamburger—”
“—at a drive-in,” Casey said. “And she goes to drive-in movies, too.”
“Better hope she didn’t tonight,” Timms said grimly, “because I don’t know a better place to commit murder.”
THIRTY-TWO
Between one breath and the next, it seemed, he was out of the Citroën and at the window beside her before she could roll it up—one swift hand knocking the microphone aside, sliding through the half-opened window, hand like a mitt clamping over her mouth and nose pressing her brutally back against the headrest.
Air trapped in her swelled like a monstrous bubble as Adrian clawed frantically at the iron hand. Her heart banged wildly. To die this way. While all those people sealed in their cars stared at giant-sized, make-believe Technicolor death. Even if she could scream, no one would hear…
Suddenly the hand was gone, and as she dizzily gulped air, he opened the car door beside her. “Move,” she heard him whisper, and he pushed her hard. She slid, half falling, across the seat. Her canes fell clattering. Her head knocked the passenger door. Trying to straighten up, she felt the seat lurch and then he was in beside her, a huge presence filling the car with curious breathing. “Told you,” he wheezed. “Didn’t I…tell you…I’d have to…do something?”
Barreling eastward on Olympic, Casey kept thinking, Needle in the haystack. Needle. Haystack. Even if Adrian Crewes had gone to a drive-in movie, chances of their finding her seemed slim at best, dependent more on luck than police work. There were at least four drive-in theaters within reasonable freeway-driving distance, but one was in Culver City, two in the sprawling West District covered by the Los Angeles police, only one—the Olympic—in Santa Monica. One out of four. Which meant they had to depend on other-city patrol cars to check out the other three, and as Casey well knew, local dispatches would take precedence over any out-of-town bulletins. All they could hope for was a quiet night in neighboring police divisions. A quiet night, and a fast pickup on the Citroën.
“Christ, will you look at that,” Krug was growling beside him. “You see what I see?”
They were nearing the Olympic Drive-In Theatre, and on the huge projection screen towering over the fence surrounding it, Casey glimpsed an enormous full-color nude. “Not bad, but I’ve seen better.”
“Not fifty feet high in public you haven’t!” Talk about permissiveness, he raved. Talk about crumbling moral values. Good old Uncle Al, your friendly neighborhood censor. He was still going strong when Casey pulled up behind the Santa Monica patrol car parked just west of the drive-in entrance.
With the window rolled up, the inside of her car pulsed like a bellows, filling, emptying, filling again with his huge sighing, gulping breaths. He seemed to be eating the oxygen, disgorging an acrid steam which stifled and sickened Adrian. A lunatic. A madman. Shadow in every city dweller’s claustrophobic nightmare. “Told you,” he kept wheezing, voice strained by unbearable tension. “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I?”
She knew she must respond. “Yes, I’m sorry—”
“Don’t say that!”
“I only meant I should have listened to you.”
Through the windshield, reflections from the distant screen made planes of shifting light on his face. An ordinary middle-aged Babbitt face distorted by aberrational fury. He didn’t look at her once, but squeezed in behind the driving wheel; turned halfway toward her, he was obliquely watchful. Cat with a mouse, Adrian thought. She knew she dared not move or even stir. Anything might set him off.
“Could be the one you’re looking for,” the patrolman behind the wheel of the squad car reported to Krug and Casey. “Guy at the ticket office doesn’t remember the car, but the woman’s description sounds right.”
“Okay, watch the exit in case we miss her,” Krug instructed. “You got that APB on the Citroën?”
“Yes, sir, we’ll keep our eyes open.”
“Yeah, she came in right after the feature started,” the man who sold tickets told them. “Reason I noticed her, she kind of hesitated out there”—pointing toward the street—“like she changed her mind or something. Nice-looking woman. Like I told the cop—”
“Okay,” Krug cut him off, “when’s the next intermission?”
The man consulted his watch. “Feature’ll be over in seven minutes. Then there’s a three-minute short, advertising our snack shop here.”
Krug thanked him sourly and they pulled into the huge darkened arena. Casey doused the Mustang’s headlights. In low gear, he began creeping up one aisle and down the next, working from the f
irst row nearest the screen backward. All his urgency was gone now, erased by a certainty that she must be there. When they found her they would take her into protective custody. The real thrills would begin when the Citroën was apprehended.
“You want my notes,” Adrian said carefully. “Everything I’ve written?”
“Filth. All of it. Lies and filth. They made her say those things. He made her say them!”
“It’s all in my briefcase. At my apart—”
“She never talked like that till she met him.” He made a sound in his throat. She saw tears on his cheek. His gloved hands kept clenching the steering wheel convulsively. “Such a good child. Sweet. Innocent. And she loved her daddy. More than anybody in the world she loved her daddy! That’s what’s so terrible, you see,” he said reasonably, “he taught her not to. Taught her everything vile.” But that filth wasn’t his baby. He made her say all those terrible things. But that wasn’t really Sandy. “D’you hear me,” he shouted. “That isn’t Sandy, and nobody’s going to say it is! I won’t let you kill her with your obscene lies!”
A long list of film credits rolled on the screen. People were getting out of their cars now, heading for the food stand at the front. The three-minute film ad picturing hot dogs, hamburgers, sundaes, candy bars, sickly-yellow buttered popcorn began, a child’s gigantic, gluttonous dream writ high against the night sky.
Through the densely ranked cars it was impossible to see more than one row at a time in the darkness. And no cars were pulling out, Casey noticed. Obviously, drive-in patrons were relentless double-feature fans. But as he crept down the second aisle from the last, he spied an empty space. Glimpsed the vacant row beyond. Glimpsed two cars in the row beyond that, parked side by side. He stamped the brake pedal. “Al, it’s—”
Rouse the Demon: A Krug & Kellog Thriller (The Krug & Kellog Thriller Series Book 3) Page 15
