When She Was Bad: A Thriller

by Jonathan Nasaw

  After wiping the cab clean of fingerprints, he abandoned the red pickup in a metered space in front of the Carousel Motel, across the street from the Boardwalk, then strolled casually back to the weedy lot behind the bowling alley where he’d left the Barracuda only—good Lord, was it only yesterday afternoon? It seemed like months had gone by—Pender had himself half-convinced that when he got there he’d find the car missing or up on blocks, stripped.

  But the ’Cuda was intact, only a thin film of dust marring the gleam of the hand-polished black finish. With a turn of the key and a little babying of the accelerator, the engine rumbled to life, setting the dust motes on the hood vibrating aimlessly like the little plastic players in one of those old electrostatic football games.

  From Santa Cruz, it was a relatively straight shot down Highway 1 to Pacific Grove. Driving at a sedate ten miles over the given speed limit, with the dashboard radio tuned to a Salinas oldies station, Pender made it in just under fifty minutes. Twice during the drive he tried to call Irene; twice he reached her voice mail. Detouring past her two-story cream and tan board-and-batten house, he saw that her driveway was empty. Since she rarely garaged her new beige Infiniti (central coast homes were built for the most part without basements or attics, so storage space was always at a premium), he assumed she was out and about.

  Just as well, he told himself, driving another three blocks to his cottage—he and his clothes were decidedly gamy by now. He took a quick shower, ran an electric razor over his jowls, and changed into plaid Bermuda shorts and a chocolate-brown Hawaiian shirt patterned with green palm trees and a yellow sunburst, which actually caused certain aesthetically sensitive souls to wince when they first saw it. Black socks and logan green Hush Puppies completed the outfit. He tried Irene’s phone again, got her voice mail again. Made himself a Pender-size sandwich of ham and Swiss on rye for supper. Redial; voice mail. Washed it down with a pony bottle of Rolling Rock. Redial; voice mail.

  Man, I hope she hasn’t left town, thought Pender. No doubt the BOLOs had been updated by now—cops in three states would Be On the Look-Out for the red Caddy. They’d have choppers out, dogs, the whole caboodle—and lord knows he wished them luck. But Maxwell had eluded the authorities successfully before. He had a talent for it that bordered on genius, and more than his share of luck. If he made it to ground with all that cash, there was no telling how long he could evade capture.

  That’s where Irene Cogan came in. She was Pender’s ace in the hole. Between the two of them, they knew more about Maxwell and Lily than anyone else alive—their histories, habits, and psychological profiles, their likes and needs, their dislikes and aversions—so it stood to reason they had a better chance of predicting the direction and object of their flight.

  Another twenty minutes went by, then thirty. The kitchen phone rang; Pender snatched it off the hook. But it was only Marti Reynolds from The People’s Posse show. She was hoping that in light of recent developments Pender wouldn’t mind doing a supplementary interview to discuss the latest murders. He told her he was kind of busy at the moment, asked her to call him back on Monday.

  “Of course,” she said. “By the way, do you have any other numbers for Dr. Cogan? I’ve been trying to reach her all afternoon, but I keep getting her voice mail.”

  That makes two of us, sister, thought Pender. “No, sorry. If I do see her, I’ll tell her you called.”

  It’s probably nothing, he told himself, pacing the tiny kitchen. Mountain out of a molehill. She’s out shopping, or jogging down by the rec trail. Or maybe she’s with a patient or taking a nap—you just assumed the car wasn’t in the garage.

  But assumed was a dirty word to a graduate of the FBI Academy, retired or not. He grabbed his madras sport coat and a powder-blue Pebble Beach golf cap on the way out the door, and walked the three blocks to Irene’s place.

  Cogan’s garage jutted out from the corner of the house, leaving only fifteen feet of driveway between the garage door and the street—a common enough arrangement in space-starved Pacific Grove. Tall as he was, Pender still had to rise up on tiptoe to peek through one of the narrow, horizontal windows set high in the garage door. At first he saw only his reflection. Cupping his hand over his eyes to block the glare, he pressed his nose against the cold glass. The garage was dark, but not so dark he couldn’t make out the outlines of the car inside.

  Now, in his day, Pender had seen some truly awful sights. Mutilated corpses, severed heads stacked like cannonballs, that sort of thing. This was only a car in a garage. Nothing world-shattering about that—other than the fact that it wasn’t Irene Cogan’s new Infiniti, it was Mick MacAlister’s Cadillac.

  He tried the handle of the garage door: locked. He tried Irene’s front door: ditto. Out of habit, he started to reach for his wallet—in the old days Pender had always kept a little jimmy in there for occasions such as this. But in those days, he’d also packed a badge—carrying one around without the other was a misdemeanor in all fifty states.

  A narrow cement walk led around the side of the garage to Irene’s office in back. The office door was locked, and the kitchen curtains drawn, but the horizontal sliding window that ventilated the downstairs half-bath was wide open. Irene often kept it open—not only was it six feet above ground, and scarcely large enough to admit a full-grown adult, but if memory served, there had been a fixed screen there as well.

  There was no screen now, though, and lying a few feet away, overturned in the flower bed bordering Irene’s back fence, was a sturdy plastic recycling bin Maxwell could easily have used as a stepstool. He came in through the bathroom window, chimed in that irrepressible, and often annoying, little jukebox in Pender’s head.

  Okay, this is the part where the retired old FBI guy calls the cops, he thought. You tell the nice policemen everything there is to tell, then you go home, pop a cold one, put your feet up on the hassock, and watch the ball game.

  Because this is no longer your business, old man. From here on in, all you can do is screw up somebody else’s crime scene. Or if Maxwell’s still inside, get somebody killed.

  Then he remembered where he was: The Last Home Town. Crime rate slightly lower than Vatican City. This would be the most exciting thing that had happened in Pacific Grove since Princess Topaz’s dragon boat had nearly sunk a few years ago during the annual Feast of Lanterns pageant. One call to 911 and the locals would be swarming the scene, sirens screaming and roof lights blazing. And if Maxwell was inside—whichever version of him was currently playing in the multiplex of his mind—and it was a hostage situation….

  Pender found himself picturing Irene wearing the filmy negligee she’d had on Monday night. Only now, in his mind’s eye, he saw Maxwell standing behind her holding a knife to her throat. Her eyes were pleading for Pender to do something—anything.

  Ah, fuck it, thought Pender, drawing the hickory-handled Colt from the flap pocket of his sport jacket. In for a dime, in for a dollar, he told himself, brushing off the muffin and Danish crumbs and jacking a round into the firing chamber before returning the gun to his pocket.

  2

  Perched on a wide flat boulder jutting out over the creek bank, bathed in the emerald light of the redwood forest, and serenaded by the babbling creek, Lyssy watched a dragonfly skimming lightly over the rippling water, its wings transparent and shimmering.

  Lily joined him a few minutes later, wearing a Stanford sweatshirt—a red hoodie—over a dark-brown, V-neck T-shirt and a pair of Guess? jeans she’d borrowed from Dr. Irene’s closet. Hours earlier, when they’d first arrived at her family’s rustic retreat deep in the Lucia Mountains south of Big Sur, she’d hung a string bag bulging with items liberated from Dr. Irene’s refrigerator—bottles of juice, sparkling Italian soda, a quart of 1 percent milk, and a pint of half-and-half—into the clear, cold running water from an eyebolt drilled into the underside of the rock. Now, kneeling and leaning out over the edge of the jutting boulder, she double-checked to be sure the bag was still there, st
ill securely fastened. “Mother Nature’s fridge, Grandma always used to call it.”

  “Cool,” punned Lyssy, who was now wearing a faded orange S.F. Giants T-shirt over Dr. Al’s button-fly 501s. The two had spent the first part of the afternoon unloading the car, sweeping out the cabin, putting fresh sheets on the bed, and hauling firewood from the shed—all the chores she and her grandmother used to take care of while Grandpa fished for their supper. (“Only the very rich or the very poor can afford to live this simply,” he used to tell Lily.)

  When the chores had been completed, Lily had selected a stout walking stick from her grandfather’s collection for Lyssy to use, and they’d spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the five-hundred-acre parcel known as La Guarida: the narrow canyon, the slow-running Little Bear Creek, the millennium-old redwoods.

  “So what do you think of our little hideaway?” Lily asked him, leaning back on her elbows—La Guarida meant den or hideout in Spanish.

  “I am so absolutely, I don’t know, knocked out.” Lyssy gazed about him in wonderment. “All these years, I never knew, I never dreamed—It’s so rich and full and busy, it’s like there’s all these worlds, all these realms. There’s a realm down there, with the fish and the insects”—the creek—“and another realm up there”—the redwood canopy—“with the birds. And we’re in the middle realm with the deer and the bushes and the flowers, and it’s all so full of, of life, it makes the arboretum look like a parking lot or something.”

  His eyes had all the colors of the forest in them, even the golden glint of the sun peeking through the redwood canopy. Suddenly Lily experienced a funny, melting feeling inside, and had to look away. Spotting a white-barked twig the size and shape of a slightly warped pencil on the boulder, she tossed it into the water, just to watch it float downstream.

  “You want to know what really bugs me about all this, though?”

  “Sure.” She followed the twig with her eyes as it began its downstream journey.

  “The timing.” The twig narrowly dodged a mean eddy, took a ducking but bobbed up again. “The stupid darn timing. It’s like, like—Did you ever see that movie Time Bandits?”

  “The one with the English kid and the midgets?” Lily asked him.

  “Right. And there’s this scene, this lovey-dovey couple in oldtimey clothes is standing on the deck of a big ocean liner holding hands. And you can tell how happy they are, how they’re thinking about how much they love each other, and how they’re going to spend the rest of their lives together. Then you see this life preserver hanging from the side of the ship, and then the camera gets closer so you can read the name of the ship on the life preserver: it says HMS Titanic—they’re on the Titanic.”

  Lily couldn’t think of anything to say. The twig had gotten itself hung up on an exposed root sticking out from the stream bank. She held her breath, watching it fight its way clear of the root, then shoot downstream and disappear around the last bend, bound for the ocean.

  “Made it!” Lyssy exulted.

  Somewhat startled to realize that their thoughts had been running in harness, that without saying anything, they’d both been rooting for the little twig, Lily turned to Lyssy, her dark eyes searching for reassurance. “Did you ever think maybe they made it, too?” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Those two on the Titanic. Maybe they made it to a lifeboat and survived—the movie never said they didn’t.”

  Their eyes met. Lyssy reached up to touch Lily’s hair, his fingers sifting gently through its dark silky heaviness. Lily noticed that funny melting feeling again; she wondered if he’d touched Lilith’s hair like that. “Pretend I’m her,” she whispered, over the sound of the rushing water.

  “Who?”

  “Lilith—I want to pretend I’m Lilith.”

  “But I already told you, I loved you first.”

  “Yeah, but you made love to her. And she wasn’t afraid, and she didn’t freeze up, she didn’t see…” An impossibly swollen, purple-headed penis forcing itself into her mouth, choking her; a flashbulb exploding into white glare. “Tell me about her. Tell me everything—what she was like, how she talked, how she moved, what she said, how she made love.”

  A fellow with some experience in these matters might have been more circumspect, but Lyssy took her at her word. He spoke uninterrupted for a good ten, fifteen minutes, for there was little about Lilith he hadn’t hungrily memorized. When he was through, she leaned in close and whispered, “Kiss me. Kiss me like you kissed her.”

  His mouth was soft, softer than she’d imagined a man’s mouth could be. And welcoming—instead of thrusting his tongue into her mouth, the sweet, gentle urgency of his kiss drew her tongue into his mouth. And here came that funny melting feeling, not so funny anymore. She felt herself tensing around it, her panic building. She broke off the kiss to whisper in his ear. “Talk to me,” she said. “Talk to me like you were talking to her.”

  Her hair was disarranged; a strand had fallen damply across her eyes. “There was a little girl,” Lyssy began, pushing it back gently, “who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead.” He kissed her on the forehead, then again, softly, on each eye. “And when she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad, she was—”

  “Lilith,” she broke in. “When she was bad, she was Lilith.” She kissed him again, more lasciviously, her mouth open, her lips soft and sloppy, her tongue expertly insistent, then broke it off. “Well,” she said, panting for breath.

  “Well, what?” He was breathing pretty hard himself.

  “Who am I? Lily or Lilith?”

  “Does…does it really matter?”

  “Hell no,” she replied, grabbing his head in both her hands and pulling it down to her breast.

  3

  You’re not breaking and entering, Pender reminded himself as he circled Irene Cogan’s house, looking for a way in. You’re just—what was it they used to say when they needed a warrant?—effectuating a surreptitious entry.

  He discovered an old wooden ladder lying on its side, next to a tarpaulin-covered stack of firewood by the side of the garage. It was in dubious condition, the mildew-splotched wood of the rails soft enough to dig his thumbnail into, but the rungs were dowels an inch in diameter, and appeared to be sturdy enough for the job at hand.

  Pender carried the ladder around the side of the house and leaned it against the overhang of the flat, tar-papered roof above the office extension in back. He already knew the trick to hauling two hundred and eighty pounds up an old ladder: distribute your weight among all four limbs so that no single rung has to bear even half the load. Fortunately, the preponderance of Pender’s avoirdupois had always been concentrated above the waist. His belly was the tipping point—once he dragged that over the eaves, the rest followed easily enough.

  From the flat roof above the office, Pender boosted himself another four feet to the roof below Irene’s rear bedroom window, which was closed. Balanced with difficulty on the slanting roof apron, he managed to get the merest fingertip purchase on the crossbar of the window sash, then let loose a prayer and leveraged upward with all the strength in his fingertips.

  The window flew open, causing Pender to lose his hold on the sash, and with it his balance. Toppling backward, arms flailing, he managed to grab the windowsill; behind him, his Pebble Beach golf cap fluttered to the ground like a powder-blue autumn leaf.

  Pender now found himself stretched out full-length on the sloping roof, hanging on to the windowsill with both hands, his Hush Puppied feet dangling in space. Kicking, grunting, he finally got his feet under him again, then duckwalked up the slope until he was at eye level with the windowsill, breathing hard and sweating harder. As he squatted there, trying to catch his breath, he felt an unaccustomed breeze from behind, and realized that with his shorts dragged down and his jacket rucked up, he was showing more crack than an inner-city coke dealer.

  After a hasty sartorial adjustment, and a quick peek to make sure th
e bedroom was empty, Pender climbed through the window feet first, then took the Colt out of his pocket again and flicked off the safety—no way Maxwell would be getting the drop on him again.

  Irene’s queen-size bed appeared slept in and unmade, but there were no bloodstains, no sign of a struggle. Pender flattened himself against the door jamb with the Colt held sideways against his chest, then peered into the hallway. Empty. With the gun in two-handed firing position he made his way down the hallway to the guest bedroom at the top of the stairs. Aside from a rumpled bedspread with a few coins strewn around it, the little room was in apple-pie order.

  He started down the stairs, keeping to the wall side of the carpeted treads to avoid any potential creaking. The paintings lining the staircase—landscapes, still lifes, and a portrait of Irene Cogan in her midtwenties, looking a little like the young Greta Garbo—all bore the signature of Irene’s late husband, Frank.

  The stairway opened out onto the white-carpeted living room. No sign of trouble there, but in the tiny downstairs bathroom, the rectangular screen lay on the tiled floor beneath the open window, and the state of the kitchen suggested either a break-in or a hasty departure—the cabinet doors were ajar, the counters littered with cans and cartons, and the usually tidy pantry appeared to have been ransacked.

  As he looked around, Pender caught a glimpse of himself in the glass front of Irene’s china cabinet. Hatless, dark circles under his eyes after his nearly sleepless night, his shoulders slumped and his once-snappy madras jacket practically in rags, Lily’s Uncle Pen was now a ringer for Uncle Fester from the Addams Family.

  Satisfied? Pender asked the poor dejected SOB, as he dropped the gun back into his pocket. Are you good and satisfied now? Maxwell’s gone, he’s taken Lily and Irene with him, and however much of a head start he had, it’s now half an hour longer thanks to you.

  Pender turned away, hitched up his shorts, and crossed the kitchen. His intention—to call the police from Irene’s wall phone—was a measure of his turmoil: he had the phone to his ear and his finger poised to call 911 before he caught himself on the verge of a classic rookie cop error. Not even rookie—trainee: calling in the crime on the crime scene phone, thereby destroying not just potential fingerprints or saliva for DNA (not all that relevant in the current case, which wasn’t exactly a whodunnit), but also the ability to call *69 and instantly recover the last number accessed.