by Robert Bloch
“You forgot—only two hours earlier, Jack Lorch was killed in Culver City.”
“From Culver City to Bel Air is only a half hour’s drive.”
“But how did he know Edna Drexel would be going home?”
“For the same reason he knew he’d find Jack Lorch at his office. These people had nowhere else to go. No money, no food.”
“Sounds as if he was pushing his luck.”
“He didn’t have any choice in the matter. I think originally he planned to dispose of them en masse, that night when he had them all together in Griswold’s car. Again, according to the Drexel woman’s story, Tony Rodell was holding them all at gun-point. He might have intended to drive the whole group up to Rodell’s house and finish them off there, with Rodell’s help. But when they made a break for it, he had to track them down individually and take his chances.”
“You keep saying ‘he.’ Don’t forget, there’s two men still at large.”
“I know. But one of them was part of the group that ran off. And he’s still hiding somewhere, unless our man got to him, too, and we haven’t heard about it yet.”
“We don’t know a damned thing, except that two men are loose somewhere, and one of them is named Bruce Raymond. He’s either the killer or a potential victim. Take your choice.”
Vicente gulped coffee, then set his mug down on the desk top. “From what we know about Raymond, he could be either. I read that report from the VA. Marked instability, but cooperative, responsive to therapy—a lot of cautious phrases, all of which adds up to a lame excuse for releasing him and giving his bed to another patient. No definite prognosis, just something to protect the doctor making the decision.”
“Who handled his case out there?”
“A Major Fairchild. I tried to contact him yesterday, but he’s long gone. They had an address in Seattle—something called the Trade Clinic—but when I phoned, I was told he’d left for a vacation in Japan. You could probably reach him through—”
“No time.” Barringer shook his head. “And even if we did, how the hell is some army medico in Japan going to tell us if one of his former patients might have gone berserk here?”
“He can’t, and neither can I.” Dr. Vicente pushed his chair back. “But I can tell you something about the type of man who did commit these killings.”
“Another educated guess?”
“Not entirely. We’ve got certain facts to go on. Number One, as I told you, he’s undoubtedly a sociopath—”
“Can you give it to me without the psychiatric jargon?”
“Okay, no cautious phrases.” Vicente smiled, then sobered. “To repeat what we already know, our man isn’t recognizable as a nut. He looks and behaves like a rational human being. It’s an act, of course, but a convincing one—we know that because he managed to organize his whole break from the sanatorium without arousing the suspicions of the staff or his fellow patients. In fact, he was able to get the other patients to accompany him. He’s probably accustomed to taking over, to giving orders—”
“Raymond was an officer.”
“Noted.” Vicente nodded. “Another thing. From the nature of the crimes, we must assume we’re dealing with someone who has great physical strength. Even if we accept Tony Rodell as his accomplice, it’s apparent that force was involved as well as the element of surprise. Griswold was strapped into a chair, Jack Lorch was struck over the head, an orderly stabbed, two women strangled, Dorothy Anderson’s throat was cut—”
“That’s another thing that bothers me,” Barringer said. “Each killing was different. Usually there’s a pattern.”
“We’re not dealing with a compulsive murderer. There’s no fetishism, apparently, no overt sadomasochistic component.” Vicente paused, aware of his lapse into forensic phraseology. “On the conscious level, this man is killing merely to cover his tracks, using whatever means is practical at the moment. On the unconscious level, of course, it’s another story. Anyone who would plan the kind of death meted out to Tony Rodell—”
“We don’t know that he planned it,” Barringer interrupted. “It could have been accidental. Granted, those Dobermans were vicious, but they knew their master.”
“So do we.” Dr. Vicente riffled through the papers on Barringer’s desk. “You talked to his mother this morning.”
“And got absolutely nothing.” Barringer shook his head. “Aside from identifying her son as one of the missing patients, everything she told us was an obvious falsehood. Tony was a good boy, maybe a little disturbed, but no real problems.”
“She’s the victim’s mother. What do you expect her to say under the circumstances?”
“It doesn’t matter. We’ve got his record.” This time it was Barringer who pawed through the documents on the desk until he found a sheet and scanned it. “High school dropout. Stolen-vehicle charge at sixteen, suspended and probation. His mother swears he was always clean, but we’ve got two counts here involving narcotics.”
“Before or after he organized his rock group?”
“After. Apparently he was making it big in music—big enough to buy that house and maintain it. I got the mother to admit she hadn’t seen her son for almost a year before he went into the sanatorium, but she refused to talk about the commitment. I think he went in because he was hooked. Freaked out on speed.”
“Any reason to support that theory?”
“Two thousand reasons.” Barringer took a last gulp of coffee. “Two bottles, each containing a thousand amphetamine capsules, stashed away under the meat packages in the freezer. Turned up this morning when they went through the house. One of the bottles sealed, the other open.”
Dr. Vicente’s eyes narrowed. “What does that suggest to you?”
“That Rodell and the murderer arrived at the house together, possibly planning to spend the night there. They probably had Rodell’s car—for all we know, they’d been together during the evening, when the murders were committed.”
“You think Tony Rodell was involved in the slayings?”
“Could be. Particularly if he’d located his supply of capsules earlier, when they came to pick up the car. I don’t have to tell you what a speed freak is capable of when he’s really turned on.” Barringer shifted his empty coffee mug on the desk top. “Let’s say he was still high when they returned to the house, really flying. High enough to mistreat those dogs. They attacked him, and his companion got scared, took off in the car.”
“Any evidence that the dogs were mistreated? Did your people turn up a stick, or a whip at the scene?”
“No, nothing but a wrapper from one of the meat packages. Perhaps he was just teasing the dogs, showing them the meat and then snatching it away, that sort of thing.” Barringer shrugged. “When you’re dealing with a speed freak, anything’s possible.”
“Let’s stick to what’s probable,” Dr. Vicente said. “You say there’s no pattern in these slayings. What you really mean is there’s no consistency of method. But the pattern is plainly visible in the motive. One by one, the murderer is killing all the people who could identify him. We both agree that Tony Rodell could have identified the murderer. Which makes his death part of the pattern.”
“How did the murderer get those dogs to attack Rodell?”
“I don’t know.” Dr. Vicente stood up. “Any more than you really know whether or not Rodell was under the influence of amphetamine at the time of his death.”
“But I’m going to find out.” Barringer frowned and reached for the telephone.
Dr. Vicente was silent as the Lieutenant put through a call to the deputy coroner’s office. The conversation that followed was cryptic, but Barringer’s expression, when he cradled the phone again, told its own story.
“Okay, Doc,” he said. “The p.m.’s not completed, but preliminaries on Rodell’s blood samples and stomach contents show he was clean when he died.”
“No trace of amphetamine?”
Barringer shook his head. “Not in Rodell. But you we
re right—the dogs didn’t attack him by accident. They’d been fixed.”
“Fixed?”
“The dog’s were destroyed this morning. I asked for an examination. According to the report, their stomachs were full of meat—and indications are that they were fed at least half a dozen capsules along with it.
“No wonder they attacked Rodell when he came in. They would have attacked anything that moved. Somebody turned those dogs on with speed.”
CHAPTER 16
He spent the night in the car, parked inside the barricaded cul-de-sac of an abandoned freeway entrance. Shrubbery shielded him from the street as he slept.
Sleeping was never a problem; he merely closed his eyes and fell immediately into a dark hole. A hiding place, lightless and soundless, where nothing could find him, not even a dream. He hadn’t dreamed in years.
“Of course you dream,” the doctor always insisted. “Everyone dreams. It’s just that you repress such memories from your consciousness.” The implication was obvious; he was blocking out recall because his nightmares were too terrible to be borne. That’s what the doctor wanted to believe, but he was wrong. Nothing is too terrible to be borne. He had proved that beyond a doubt—not in dreams, but in reality. No one had ever suffered as he suffered, and yet he had survived. He survived, and the others—the dreamers—were dead. As for himself, he merely slept. Slept snugly, slept securely, slept with the certainty of one who knows he will awaken. For I am the resurrection and the life, forever and ever. Amen.
Awakening came with a rumble and a roar.
He blinked into instantaneous awareness, scrambling up out of the dark hole as the bombs fell—no, not bombs, that was in another time, another place.
Then he knew where he was, here in the cul-de-sac, and he recognized the source of the sound: garbage trucks, moving into the early-morning emptiness of the street in line of duty. Immediately upon realizing what he was hearing his heart stopped pounding and he was calm again.
He sat up, permitting himself a slight smile, not in acknowledgment of the content of his thought, but in appreciation of the discipline and control which enabled him to evolve it so effortlessly. How many others, under similar circumstances, could come up with something like that?
No one else could. Because there were no others, not really. They were only actors. Of course none of them knew it, any more than the doctor did. They thought they were real, but they were only figments of imagination. The world is my idea.
It was discovering this secret which made everything so easy.
At first he hadn’t been certain. He’d wondered what it would be like, wondered if he could actually carry out the part he had rehearsed over and over again in his mind. He had written the play, directed it, blocked out the movements, selected the cast, planned the whole production. He knew his own role perfectly, but the nagging doubt had remained—could he play it?
Now he knew the answer. There had been no stage fright. Grand Guignol, Theatre of Cruelty, call it what you will, was no different from the Theatre of the Absurd. Comedy and Tragedy alike were only masks to be worn and discarded at will. One had only to remember that it was all make-believe. The blood was merely ketchup, the twitching and grimaces and shrieks and cries all emanated from actors responding on cue, hamming it up for their big death scene.
Of course he had to be careful, because he was real, and his blood wasn’t ketchup. Everyone would be crying, “Author, author!” but he couldn’t afford to take bows; he had to avoid the spotlight at all costs. The best way was to keep changing roles.
Each man in his time plays many parts. The dutiful-patient character for Dr. Griswold and the staff; the all-powerful leader for the other patients. And then, for select audiences of one, the silent bits. The man in the closet for Dorothy Anderson, the man in the shadows for Jack Lorch, the man in the garden waiting for Edna Drexel. The swimming pool had been a great prop; something stirring in his memory told him he’d plagiarized it from that old Oriental melodrama, Kismet. Life copies art.
But Tony Rodell’s removal from the stage had been a matter of brilliant improvisation. Using the dogs that way had been a stroke of genius; perhaps he’d managed to fool the audience completely.
He leaned forward in the car seat and switched on the radio, then push-buttoned his way across the dial in search of the early morning news.
The announcer’s chatter gave him the answer he was seeking.
“—shocking and brutal series of murders climaxed in the early hours of this morning by the death of former rock-and-pop music star Tony Rodell—”
He listened until he was satisfied they’d found out about the dogs; that was important. They hadn’t found out about him, and that was more important still. The rest was merely an exercise in ill-tempered name-calling—“homicidal maniac still on the loose,” and all the rest of it. People who don’t understand the play always give it bad notices.
He switched off the radio and plugged in the shaver he’d picked up in the drugstore yesterday. Using the rearview mirror, he removed the bristle of beard from his face. Then he reached under the seat and brought out a change of clothing. Lucky there’d been so much cash in Griswold’s wallet, enough for a fresh outfit. He remembered how careful he’d been with Dorothy Anderson—actually taking one of the smocks hanging in her closet and tying it around his neck like an apron to protect himself from the spattering blood. He’d tossed the stained smock into a gully before picking up Tony Rodell’s car and they apparently hadn’t found it yet—not that the smock would be of any help to them.
He peered through the bushes at the street beyond. Some morning traffic was passing—people on their way to work—but nobody glanced his way. Even so, he slid down behind the wheel, concealing himself as much as possible as he shed his old garments and donned the new. Just his luck to be picked up for indecent exposure.
No, it wasn’t just his luck. His luck was good, had been from the beginning. Because the wise man makes his own luck, and he had everything worked out.
He slipped the trousers on, then picked the pins out of the new shirt. Once he’d buttoned it, he reached for the necktie and sat upright in the seat again as he knotted it, eyes intent on the mirror. Then he transferred the contents of his pockets to the new outfit, pausing to count the money remaining in Griswold’s wallet. Thirty-four dollars. Not a fortune, but enough to carry him through the day. And there would be more money. More money, and more days.
For the first time he permitted the thought to openly intrude. It had been waiting there for some time, waiting patiently until the stage was set. Why limit this to one performance?
Even at the sanatorium, he had sensed the notion. And last night it had made itself felt even more strongly. Now, today, he would reach the climax and the curtain would fall. His part would be over.
But did it have to end?
Eliminating witnesses was conceived of as a precautionary measure, and that made sense. But why stop there?
The world was full of candidates for oblivion. Like that ass on the radio, with his self-righteous braying about a “homicidal maniac.” Yes, and so many others.
A parade began to pass through his mind, led by a leggy, half-naked drum majorette, smirking and strutting in hot pants, fondling the silver phallus beloved by all such teasing bitches, licking her lips as she jabbed it up into the air in mockery of a man’s role. After her, the idiot cheerleader, breasts bobbing beneath her sweater, cavorting with grotesque grimaces and spastic gestures as she shrieked passionately, “Gimme a P, gimme a U, gimme a K, gimme an E!!” And then, burly, brawny, bulging brute in uniform, face of a fish fast-frozen, eyes like marbles, body moving mindlessly in the stiff-gaited rhythm of a robot—His Militant Majesty, the drill sergeant, barking incessantly and insanely the meaningless distillation of all stupidity, “Ten-hut!”
And behind him, all the others, the millions upon millions of others, who followed such leaders. Who accepted the orotund obscenities of the announcers and th
e lewd lies they burbled about people they’d never seen and products they’d never used. Who applauded the drum majorettes as “cute,” as part of the spectacle of “good, clean sports,” performed by lumbering cretins kicking and hitting and grabbing at one another. Who shrieked nonsense syllables on command of cheerleaders without the slightest concept of either cheer or leadership. Who obeyed without question the guttural growls of the goose-stepping parodies of pride who double-marched them to doom.
The parade was endless.
But he could end it.
For a fleeting moment he sensed some symbolic similarity about all those he evoked; every one was, in a way, an authority figure. If so, it merely intensified his impulse.
He thought about it as he reached into the glove compartment for a handful of tissues and carefully wiped the dashboard instruments, the steering wheel, the rearview mirror. Bundling his discarded clothing in the wrappings which had enclosed the new, he placed the package under his arm and climbed out. Again he used the tissues to wipe the door handles.
Peering through the shrubbery at the street beyond, he waited for a moment when no traffic was in sight, then stepped out onto the walk and started off. When he reached the intersection, he turned and made his way along a side street. Halfway up the block, he paused before one of a row of garbage cans, set out for emptying. Again he glanced around, making sure there was no traffic, no one to observe him. Then he lifted the lid of a container and dumped the wrapped clothing-bundle into the can, covering it with old newspapers. A grubby task, but the end justifies the means, however menial.
Turning away, he started down the street. There’d be a coffee shop somewhere near the intersection ahead. After he’d eaten, he must find another car—prowl the alleys behind the shops where the clerks and storekeepers parked, until he located a vehicle whose careless owner had left a key in the ignition. Another degrading exercise, but again he had to consider the end. The end he would bring to others.
What was that irritating inanity the hippies had leeched onto for their own? Life-style. A pretentious phrase for a filthy, irresponsible, empty existence with no style at all.
