“He was always safe from Mike. My clients aren’t such dumb clucks they’d risk being charged with murder in the middle of a racketeering investigation. Hunter thought he was meeting with Mike, to get him to bid against Greenwood for something that already belonged to his family. That’s what I wanted him to think, when he called me from his ex-wife’s home. I didn’t hang up on him; but you’ve guessed that by now.”
Another transmission came over the air: a two-man team of officers breaking for lunch.
“Are you saying Grundage knows nothing about tonight?”
“He knows almost nothing, period. He directed me to handle Hunter as I saw fit. I suppose he meant legally, but I sent Pollard and Wirtz to meet Hunter at the Grotto instead. He must have spotted them for what they were while they were waiting for the crowd to thin out, and that’s when he called you.”
“You admit you hired these goons to beat Craig to death and break his arms so you could pin it on your client.”
“Elizabeth Grundage was my client long before Mike was. She still is. I’d do anything to protect her privacy and spare her the kind of attention that comes with dredging up her late husband’s dirty dealings.”
“How would framing her son for murder manage that?”
“She’s had very little to do with him for years. Without that film as evidence, the press will never connect her with the case.” A bitter smile passed across his well-fed countenance. “I’m afraid I underestimated Hunter when I advised Elizabeth against doing business with him. He sealed his own fate when he went so far as to steal the film. I had no choice but to bring in the professionals.”
“Why didn’t you have my arms broken at the Oracle?”
“You needed them to carry the reels. I borrowed these fellows from Mike, not that he’s aware of it. He never got them off a murder charge in open court. Isn’t that right, Pudge?”
“Sure thing, boss.”
Valentino understood then. “So it’s true love, you and Elizabeth Grundage.”
“More like respect. I wish it were more, but she’s made it clear she values our friendship too much to jeopardize it with a romantic relationship.” His smile turned sad. “One takes what one can get.”
“Including, no doubt, a cut of the action when Greenwood buys the film.”
“Don’t be foolish. I’m one of the highest-paid lawyers in private practice. My beach house in Malibu cost more than those reels will ever bring at auction. I only wanted them to keep from surfacing and causing Elizabeth unnecessary embarrassment. My second mistake was having your apartment searched before they came into your possession. I guessed that much afterwards, and confirmed it when Pollard called you tonight and you let slip that you had them.”
“They didn’t just search my apartment. They caught a colleague of mine doing the same thing and threw her downstairs.”
“That was unfortunate, but she shouldn’t have put herself in that position. In any case, I made up for that miscalculation when I used the film to enlist Greenwood’s cooperation. In addition to authenticating it, he arranged this venue through his connections with the owners. They’re under the impression he’s hosting a private party, and we can make our exchange undisturbed. That, at least, was the plan.”
As if it were timed, a call came onto the scanner from the bored-sounding female dispatcher. “All units in the vicinity, proceed to sixty-seven-sixty-seven Hollywood Boulevard. Possible hostage situation.”
The archivist knew the address as well as his own. He was standing in the middle of it.
“I’m afraid that’s your exit cue, Mr. Valentino.” Lysander jerked his chin at Pollard and Wirtz, who spread their feet in target stance, Wirtz retrieving his weapon from his holster.
“Wait! What have you done with Lorna?”
“One moment, gentlemen.” The attorney turned and walked a few feet to the nearest wall. Something clicked and a series of fluorescent lights that had been left off flickered into life, illuminating another exhibit.
Valentino recognized the dungeon set from The Pit and the Pendulum, another of Corman’s garish tributes to the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The painters and carpenters were every bit as talented as the craftsmen who shaped the wax figures. The walls looked realistically of ancient stone, streaked with white mold, and a drop of ruby-colored blood on the razor-sharp axe suspended above the victim’s pallet appeared to tremble on the verge of falling. But in place of a lifeless effigy, Lorna Hunter lay spreadeagle, bound with leather straps and gagged with duct tape. Apart from that she was naked. Her eyes were wide open and rolling with terror.
“There wasn’t time for her to dress,” Lysander said. “Her kimono came off in the struggle.”
“Let her go. She has nothing to do with this.”
“Hardly nothing. She brought you here. The blade is plywood, I’m sorry to say. Ordinary bullets will have to do.”
“This isn’t necessary. Teddie Goodman has a chance. You can plead that down to simple assault. Craig Hunter was a has-been, who’d have drunk himself to death sooner or later, or died of an overdose. You of all people know what a smart lawyer can do with motives like love and loyalty. Two cold-blooded murders on top of his would put you in prison for life or worse.”
“Why me? A pair of corpses with arms broken above the elbows points squarely at Mike Grundage. He had Hunter killed for welshing on his gambling debts, and his ex-wife and best friend for playing Dick Tracy. Those missing reels were never reported. You didn’t, or they’d be in police custody. Without them as evidence, Elizabeth’s name need never appear.”
“You don’t have time to kill us both and get away!” He strained his ears hard for the sound of sirens.
Lysander shook his head. “Greenwood’s role was serendipitous. He shared a secret known only to himself and the owners of the museum, a hidden escape route only yards away from this spot. It leads through the storm drains, a feature built into the structure in case a major earthquake sealed all the other exits. But it’s useless if I waste any more time delivering my summation to the jury.”
Pollard and Wirtz thumbed back the hammers of their pistols.
At the opposite end of the corridor, something crashed, and pieces of it rattled on the polished linoleum of the floor, sounding as hollow as plastic pipe. One of them came tumbling their way down the middle of the corridor: Lon Chaney, Sr.’s grinning skeletal head from the original 1925 Phantom of the Opera. Dickey Wirtz pivoted that way and fired. The head flew into a hundred pieces.
The echo of the report rang off the walls and deadened Valentino’s hearing. He, too, had turned in the direction of the disturbance, and saw a ragtag army charging his way in eerie silence, dressed anything but uniform in high silk hats, stiff bowlers, tailcoats, riding boots, and one ivory-lace evening dress with the train slung over one tattooed arm, exposing a pair of galloping legs in laddered hose; the person wearing it raised something shiny to her lips, and then a screeching whistle shattered his deafness.
“They have guns!” he shouted, lunging and bumping up Pudge Pollard’s arm just as he jerked the trigger. Another shot clapped his ears shut and a shower of plaster came down between them. Then something grazed his ribs and he was sure Wirtz had shot him, but then he saw a brass-knobbed walking stick he’d seen before go bouncing down the corridor and spotted the wheezy-voiced thug gripping the elbow of his gun arm, his lips forming curses that were lost in the aftermath of Pollard’s blast: The stick’s owner had hurled it at Wirtz, disarming him when it connected. It had then glanced off Valentino.
But rescue was still steps away. Valentino looked around frantically for Wirtz’s gun. He saw it on the floor and dived for it, but just then the white light burst in the same spot in his head where he’d been hit before, a split second before he identified the heel of Pollard’s shoe coming his way. The blow left him conscious, but unable to react physically as the man, evaluating his targets, spurned him and swung his gun around toward Lorna, who was struggling helplessly with he
r bonds on the exhibit platform.
A shadow intervened, albeit one with substance; Jason Stickley, charging past Valentino, slashing right and left with his top hat at Pollard’s head and upper body, laying open his face and scalp with the toothy brass and steel gears attached to the crown and sending the pistol flying.
Valentino wheeled toward Wirtz, but saw things were in hand there as well, with two steampunks pinioning his arms and Whistler’s Daughter blasting her whistle sadistically in his face. Valentino’s ears popped again. He heard the sirens at last and Horace Lysander’s footsteps slapping the floor, no doubt in the direction of the secret escape route.
IV
HARNESS THE LIGHTNING
23
“I WONDER ABOUT us,” Harriet said. “I do.”
Valentino sat absolutely still on the edge of the examining table, feeling only the slight tug as the resident stitched up the gash in his temple. The local anesthetic had kicked in. But he’d have felt numb regardless.
The doctor looked ten years his junior. Sometime during that endless night he seemed to have passed the point where physicians and police officers had surrendered the role of elder statesmen.
“I don’t suppose it would do any good to say I’m sorry,” he said.
“That’s not the magic word your mother told you it is.” Harriet was gazing at an anatomical chart on the wall opposite her, not at Valentino. It wouldn’t be the surgical operation she found difficult to watch; she’d attended more autopsies and visited more crime scenes than he’d ever heard about. “It implies you won’t do it again, but that’s not the truth, is it?”
They were in the emergency unit at Cedars Sinai Hospital (formerly Cedars of Lebanon, although longtime Angelinos still called it by its original name). She was wearing the same rumpled traveling clothes she’d worn on the flight from Seattle, not looking rumpled at all inside them; just chillingly resolute. Incredibly, the calendar date was still the same as when she’d arrived.
“Believe it or not, I’ve learned my lesson. From now on, I’ll do my job and let the police do theirs.”
“We’ve had this conversation before. You’ve gotten so accustomed to withholding information to get what you’re after, your first instinct in answer to every question is to lie. You can’t build anything on that, especially a relationship.”
“I knew if I told you what I was doing, you’d try to talk me out of it. I should have gone ahead and let you.”
“Why? No one could talk you out of doing anything that involved salvaging some hunk of celluloid nobody but a few people cared about.”
“Is that what you think of my work?”
“Don’t you dare turn this back on me!”
The fire in the retort struck him speechless.
With a show of being oblivious, the doctor tied off the thread and snipped the end with a pair of surgical scissors. “Now we’ll just apply a patch. Some nights it’s like working in a tire repair shop.”
“I didn’t want you to worry,” Valentino said.
“How’s that working out so far?”
“All’s well that ends well. I’m the only one who got hurt, and it’s just a scratch. Craig’s killers are in custody, and the man who hired them soon will be. A prominent lawyer like Horace Lysander can’t run or hide long.”
“Teddie Goodman got hurt. She’s hooked to a machine down the hall. Lorna Hunter’s upstairs, under sedation. Are those just scratches?”
“No one could have predicted what happened.”
“That’s just another way of saying you went off half-cocked.”
“All set.” The doctor finished bandaging the wound and gathered up his things.
Harriet thanked him before Valentino could. “Sorry we tangled you up in our domestic dispute.”
“I finished my internship just last month. I’m looking forward to having the time to fight with my girlfriend, assuming I ever have one.” He smiled at the patient. “There are two men waiting for you outside. They’re with the police.” He left.
“I admit I didn’t handle things well.” The archivist stood and pulled his sweatshirt over his head. “No one knew anything at the start. Gill and Yellowfern were working the theory that Mike Grundage was behind the whole thing. Lysander’s obsession with Grundage’s stepmother made him deranged. You’ve investigated psycho killings. There’s no telling what a man will do when he’s lost his mind.”
“I know. I’ve been keeping company with one.”
“I mean it, Harriet. No more amateur sleuthing for me.”
“The only way you could keep that promise is to quit your job. It’s all sleuthing. Are you prepared to give up what you do for my sake?”
“Are you?”
She looked at him finally. “We’ll talk about it later, after someone bails you out—again.” She smiled at his reaction, maliciously and without warmth. “Yes, I know about that. I’ve spoken to Fanta.”
“Don’t blame her. I led her to believe I’d keep you informed.”
“I know who to blame.”
He shook his head. “If it’s any consolation, I screwed up all down the line. The police have the film now, and they’ll keep it under the worst conditions through the trial and the appeals process. That can take years. I brought about the one thing I was trying to prevent.”
“Not to mention putting a bunch of kids at risk.”
“That was their decision. I specifically told them to sit still and wait for the police.”
“Leading, of course, by example.”
He nodded. “Okay, I deserved that.”
“Would you rather they’d followed orders?”
“No. If they hadn’t charged in, Lorna and I would be dead, and an innocent man charged with our murders as well as Craig’s.”
“If you consider Grundage an innocent man. I’ve seen his handiwork. He casts a wide loop, but you never find any of his DNA on the scene. Locking him up for something he had nothing to do with would be poetic justice.”
“I doubt you believe that.”
“I would, if I didn’t think leaving another murderer running around loose was sloppy police work.”
“I’m sorry I lied, and that’s sincere. With everything that’s happened, it’s the thing I’m most sorry about. Is it too late for us?”
“We’ll talk about it later, I said.”
“I think you know the answer. Tell me now, or I won’t be in any shape to face what’s coming.”
She was silent for a moment.
“Under normal circumstances I’d say, yes, it’s too late. But it so happens I’m guilty of the same thing.”
He watched her, watching him. He didn’t want to ask the question, but he couldn’t bear not knowing the answer.
“What did you lie about?”
“Remember when I told you I was up late attending a panel at the convention?”
He didn’t respond. His body temperature slipped a couple of degrees.
“Well, I wasn’t. I was at Jeff’s house.”
“Jeff?” At that moment the name meant nothing. It was as if the anesthetic had spread to his brain.
“Jeff Talbot. The antiques dealer who used to work for the FBI.” She glanced down at her watch. “My shift starts in two hours. I have to go home and freshen up. And you have an appointment with the San Diego PD.” She went out, leaving him standing there.
*
An orderly conducted the three men to a vacant private room and left them alone. There was only one chair, but it was superfluous, because no one sat in it. The bed looked inviting—as inviting as any hospital bed ever managed to look—but the archivist knew instinctively that if he so much as sat down all his defenses would dissolve, and he was in dangerous company to let that happen.
Sergeant Gill, for his part, looked as fresh and youthful as always, despite the pre-dawn hour and the probable fact that he, too, had not slept in many hours. People in law enforcement appeared to observe different sleep patterns from the rest of hu
manity. He had his neat notebook in hand. “Back to scratch, Valentino. We’ll tell you where we came in.”
“Funny. Like they used to say in theaters.” But Detective John Yellowfern showed no sign of amusement. His Indian-penny features looked haggard, more likely on account of weariness with others of his species than ordinary fatigue. Day or night, he looked as if he could cause milk to curdle at a glance.
So Valentino went back to scratch.
Back to that first call from Craig Hunter, Lorna’s anxious summons following his disappearance, the books he’d left behind, the conversations with Lysander and Grundage and J. Arthur Greenwood, and continuing uninterrupted until the point where the two plainclothesmen from San Diego arrived at the wax museum in response to a courtesy call from the LAPD. He left out Lorna’s inebriated advances the night before, from the same motives that had compelled him to cloak her nudity with his Windbreaker before he freed her from the straps. Telling the rest from start to finish was like watching a movie he’d once liked and couldn’t remember why. He wasn’t the same person he’d been the first time around.
Yellowfern broke the silence that followed. “Forget about who killed Hunter, Columbo. Tell us when you found time to eat.”
“One mystery at a time, Detective.” Gill was staring at what he’d written as if he couldn’t figure out how it got there. “They always say don’t call the police. It’d be nice if square citizens had as much faith in us as crooks do. Well, your story about what went down at the museum hasn’t changed since you told it the first time; that’s refreshing. Also it checks with what we got from the freaks.”
“They’re not freaks.” It came out automatically.
“Have it your way. At least they hollered cop before they bulled in. Greenwood’s in custody. If his lawyer’s any good he’ll tell him to give us what we need. Old guy, rich, my guess is he’ll never see the inside of San Quentin. I doubt he knew what Lysander had in mind after he left. We’ve got an APB out on that shyster. The way he likes to talk, he just might filibuster himself onto Death Row.”
Loren D. Estleman - Valentino 03 - Alive! Page 18
