“Are you the owner of that dog?”
The vet stood in the doorway behind me. Her voice was harsher than I expected. I’d put the dog in harm’s way. Maybe she blamed me. Maybe she thought I’d shot him.
“I don’t exactly own him,” I said. “I found him a little over a week ago, after the fire out in Malibu. But he’s my dog now, no question.”
Her stare was inquisitional, the kind of stare cops give me when they learn I have a record.
“I didn’t shoot him, if that’s what you’re getting at,” I said.
“Somebody pulled his teeth, and I don’t see the reason for it.”
“That’s the way I found him.”
“Does he exhibit signs of aggressive behavior?”
“No, ma’am. He’s the kindest, gentlest dog you could ask for.”
“If I could see some evidence of gum disease, I’d understand.”
“Will he be okay?” I asked, meaning, will he live?
She shrugged, said, “I can’t say for certain. He’s young and otherwise a healthy animal, but he lost a lot of blood. The bullet passed beneath his shoulder and deflected off his rib cage. Another inch to the inside and he would have died instantly. He won’t walk for a while, and his gait will probably be affected by the ligament damage, but mostly, I’m concerned about the loss of blood. We should know in eight hours or so. If he doesn’t run well or limps,, will you still want to keep him?”
“I want you to do what’s best for the dog.”
Her glance probed mine a little deeper, dropped to take in my black leather jacket and bloodstained jeans. “I’m required by law to report all gunshot wounds,” she said. “The police might want to talk to you about what happened.”
As though that might make me turn and run, abandon the dog. My screams had broken through his terror of the Belgards to trip an ancient instinct to protect. He’d saved my life.
“You’ll take my check?”
She said a check would be fine, her assistant would be out in a moment to prepare a preliminary bill.
“I’ll pay whatever you ask, but I’m a little short right now,” I said, stripping off my leather jacket. “I’ve got about two hundred dollars in my account. I’ll have more in the next few days. If the bill is more than two hundred, take my coat as collateral.”
She looked at the coat as though it might jump up and bite her. “A hundred dollars will be fine for now. You can keep the coat. I can’t tell you what the full cost will be until we see how the dog does over the next twenty-four hours.”
I thanked her, asked again that she do everything she could to save him: She said she would, added, “If you locate the original owner of the animal, I’d like to talk to him. It’s possible there’s an innocent explanation for what happened to his teeth. But I suspect something different, and if my suspicions are correct, the police should be notified.”
“They already know,” I said.
Troy Davies bolted from his Las Flores Canyon apartment before midnight, a duffel bag slung over one shoulder and a suitcase in his opposite hand. He tossed the bags into the back of a green Isuzu Rodeo, the cabin light clicking on to a tight, pale face, and sped down-canyon, toward the sea. He turned north on the coast highway and drove it with a controlled fury, taking the corners past advisable speed and stitching between lanes when passing slower cars. Still, it wasn’t difficult to keep pace. The coast highway is heavily patrolled, and the lights are timed to slow Porsches. I hung back, accelerated when I saw he was going to make a traffic light and I might not, just enough cover traffic to keep my lights out of his rearview mirror.
South of Ventura he cut east on Highway 126, four lanes through rolling oak hills, and I thought then his destination might be the Mojave Desert, where the topography of mountains, arroyos, and salt flats serve as a twenty-five-thousand-square-mile body dump for every professional killer in Southern California. If Angela Doubleday was buried in the desert, Davies would want to move her to a fresh grave before the Belgards confessed the location. He had to fear one of them would make a deal for a lighter sentence. If he was the only one who knew where the body was buried, he might never be convicted of her murder. But then Davies veered course again, swinging north on Interstate 5, toward the vast agricultural flats of the San Joaquin Valley, and I knew we were in for a long drive.
I’d staked out his apartment equipped for a long watch, jumbo cup of coffee and sandwiches on the seat beside me. Though I’d topped off the tank earlier that night, I was concerned that I’d run out of gas before he did. But his run had been a spontaneous one, and he pulled off the freeway at the base of Tejon Pass into a cloverleȧf road stop with two fast-food restaurants, a sit-down café, and four gas stations. I wheeled behind the pumps of the next station down from the Exxon station chosen by Davies. While the tank filled I snapped open the glove box, and fumbling through the discarded film canisters and candy wrappers for a highway map of California, my fingers stumbled over an eight-by-ten glossy head shot of Troy Davies and a boxed tube of foot cream. Davies had given both to me on the day Frank and I had interviewed him for Scandal Times, He’d played a construction worker with aching feet, he’d said, even got to drive a bulldozer. Playing a construction worker didn’t make him one, no more than an actor in medical whites makes a doctor, but he’d probably learned enough about operating a bulldozer to push Ben’s trailer off a cliff. He was in Douglas the night I was attacked, too. When Davies emerged from the cashier’s, office he carried a bottle of water, nothing more. He didn’t need coffee. He was running on adrenaline.
The speed limit on Interstate 5 increases to 70 mph between the base of the Tejon Pass and Stockton, 250 miles north, but excluding major holidays the route is thinly traveled by private traffic, and those obeying the speed limit are likely to get rear-ended by the stream of trucks doing 75. The freeway is straight and lightly patrolled on the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. Davies risked 90 mph and even then we weren’t the fastest ones. The white lines streaked to a continuous blur, the thin fog common to the valley blotted out the stars, and the road stretched on and on like a tunnel through the night and fog. The hum of tires on the road provided a meditative rhythm, like the bass line in a jazz trio. My thoughts spun in wide loops over the Rott struggling to live through his loss of blood and Ben asleep in his hospital bed, around Arlanda dreaming of inheritance in a $250-a-night hotel room, and Frank, huddled over the keyboard as he hacked out another story about blood and scandal, as though writing about such things had the power to change a society that gave them pride of place.
But most of all, my thoughts wound in tightening spirals around what Troy Davies had done and why. His outrage during Angela Doubleday’s funeral had seemed so legitimate that I’d discounted him as a suspect, but then, I hadn’t appreciated his acting talent, and this was quite obviously the role of his lifetime. He knew the terms of Doubleday’s will. If he was her confidant—and I didn’t seriously doubt that he was—he would also be aware that she was nearly broke on paper but rich in one unknown asset: diamonds. The police would take one look at Doubleday’s finances and conclude that Davies wouldn’t inherit enough from the estate to make murder worth his while. But if the diamonds were to appear later, in a safe-deposit box or some other location, he could, according to the will, legitimately claim them. The diamonds were motive enough for murder, but I suspected his real ambition was something even diamonds can’t buy: fame. He could exploit his newfound notoriety in Hollywood—as Doubleday’s last intimate he was rapidly becoming a celebrity in his own right, if Kato Kaelin types are considered celebrities—and live high on a seemingly legitimate source of wealth. He must have considered himself one lucky man.
Just north of Sacramento Troy Davies struck a new course, jumping east on Interstate 80 toward the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas. The fog dispersed as we climbed toward the suddenly clear sky, rolling oak falling away and pine forests marching down steepening mountain sides, our headlights spraying across hu
ddled pines at each curve in the road. We drove with the turn of the earth, east into a bluing sky, leaving the night behind as we climbed ever higher. As the sun broke over the trees Davies turned south toward Lake Tahoe, The road descended, through slants of golden light, toward a (giant blue pearl of water set against the mountains.
Midway around the western rim of the lake Davies slowed and turned across traffic onto a lane winding toward the water. I braked well behind him, not wanting the Caddy’s distinctive grill to show in his rearview mirror when I made my turn. The lane split in three directions, each hidden by dense pines. I powered down the windows, cut the engine, and listened. A faint rumble moved through the pines straight ahead. I started the engine again and followed at a cautious distance. A couple of hundred yards down the lane a private road tracked to the left. I switched off the ignition again and listened. The carpet of pine needles and dense drapery of trees muffled the thump , of a car door shutting, the only urban sound in that quiet place. I drove on, to where the gap in the trees widened, and parked the Caddy.
My first breath outside the car cooled and cleared my lungs. I hadn’t been to the mountains in years and had forgotten how a single breath could be like a sip of spring water. I slung the Nikon around my neck and set out for the lane. The trees grew densely together near the lake, and little thrived in the dim light at their base. I skirted the lane and slipped past the first rank of pines. The needles gave softly beneath my boots. I moved quickly from trunk to trunk, making little noise with each step. The house was set a hundred yards back from the access road, peaked roof showing against the blue of the lake. The pines sectioned my view into narrow, geometric shafts, like an abstract painting, but even at a distance, I didn’t mistake it for a humble cabin. I approached it head-on, flitting quickly and quietly between trees, waiting, and moving again. Somewhere in the forest behind me a car door thudded shut. I leaned against a tree trunk, forehead pressed against the bark as I listened, and heard nothing above the thumping footsteps of my own heart. I crept forward again. The house contained one sprawling story studded with gun-slit windows nearly as tall at the peaked center as the surrounding pines. At first, when I didn’t see the Isuzu, I feared that my ears had misled me, that Davies had taken some other road to some other place, but the house was anchored on the far end by a three-car garage, and he’d want to park out of sight.
I uncapped the lens and put my eye to the Nikon’s viewfinder. The sun was rising above the lake, casting the front of the house in deep shade. If anyone stood behind one of those windows, I couldn’t see them. If I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t shoot them. They could see and shoot me easily enough, which discouraged too direct an approach. I kept my distance, slid around the near side of the house. The forest floor sloped as I neared the lake. When I couldn’t take another step without swimming, I stopped.
The color of Lake Tahoe is a sparkling blue created by the clarity and depth of the water, the thin mountain air, and pure-blue skies. I’d been told that a few hundred feet below the surface the temperature remains so perfectly cold throughout the year that the drowned never decompose and so never swell to the surface. Not just the drowned drift in the lake’s chilled depths. The authorities aren’t capable of dragging a lake a thousand feet deep, not one with over seventy miles of shoreline, a fact that didn’t escape those looking for a place to dump what they wanted to stay dumped. If Angela Doubleday had been murdered, I suspected her body would be drifting somewhere below the surface, skin as blue as her grave.
The plate-glass windows at the rear of the house stretched from floor to ceiling to take advantage of the lake view. A redwood patio extended from the house on stilts, the steps descending from the sides of the deck onto well-worn paths to the lakefront. I crawled the stairs on the near side and peered over the top. Sunlight raked through the windows at the low angle of morning, casting long shadows into the rooms beyond. I lifted the viewfinder to my eye and peered through the telephoto lens. The furniture clustered around the chiseled-granite fireplace had the casual leather look of a decor meant to be woodsy but probably cost over a thousand dollars per piece. I panned from the fireplace to a seating group near the window, where someone might sit and watch the lake. Every chair in the room was empty.
The room directly before me, ten yards across the redwood deck, was faced in roughly hewn timber. Gold draped the window above it. The drapes were slightly parted at the center, but from the angle of the bottom step I lensed nothing but ceiling. I stood and climbed, one step at a time, until the top of a painting of trees on the far wall came into view, then the arch of a bed frame, and then something distractingly white, half hidden behind the edge of the drape. I nudged the focus ring and the object sharpened into hair, drawn tightly back above white gauze.
The edge of the drape concealed the rest of the figure and room, like a curtain parted midway on a mysterious tableau. I ran off a few frames of film but knew if I wanted to see what lay behind the drape I would need to change my angle. I couldn’t move to my right without falling off the patio, and if I moved left, I’d expose myself to every window in the house. I bellied down and crawled forward. The timber facade extended waist high below the window. I pushed myself into a crouch and put the viewfinder to my eye again, knowing that the black of a camera peeping into a window is not as startlingly visible as white skin. I rose up like a telescope, fragments of the room sharding into my eye—a blurred doorframe, a chest of drawers, a nightstand with a water glass, half full. I pulled back from telephoto to a wider angle. A body lay on the bed, half covered in sheets, arms folded neatly across the stomach. The face was so heavily bandaged it took a moment of focus and concentration to recognize it as Angela Doubleday’s, and even then, I wasn’t sure. Gauze bandaging wove a white tapestry from her hairline to her chin and wrapped her neck to the collarbone. Behind the shroud of gauze her eyes were heavily purpled, as though she had been badly beaten. I admired her then, even as I clicked the shutter again and again, for the courage of her resistance. They had beaten her nearly to death, it looked, and yet still she lived, which meant she hadn’t yet yielded the secret of her diamonds. I shifted my feet on the deck and took another photograph, from a different angle, and as I moved to bracket exposures a shrill chirping pierced the air, like the song of a deranged, electronic bird.
My mobile phone.
I gripped the camera with one hand and fumbled through the side pocket of my leather jacket, the phone chirruping twice before I pulled it out. I recognized the calling number as Frank’s before I thumbed open the line.
“Can’t talk,” I whispered, ready to thumb the line closed again.
“Then just listen for once,” Frank said. “Troy Davies changed his name. I know, I know, that’s what actors do, they change their names. Only our Troy Davies changed his from Tom Davis.”
Frank paused, waiting for me to get it.
I didn’t.
“The brother!” He shouted, as though that made it obvious.
“Gotta go.”
“Where are you?”
“Outside a cabin in Lake Tahoe, looking at Angela Doubleday.”
“Look, get out of there. It’s—”
“Hey, Frank, I got the pictures,” I said and thumbed the connection closed.
I put my eye to the viewfinder again and raised the lens to finish bracketing exposures before I fled, unsure how much light the tinting in the windows would cut. At first I confused the white of pillow for gauze and pulled back to a wider angle. The pillow where Double-day’s head had lain was bare, and the covers twisted across the bed as though thrown back in a hurry. I panned the lens around the room. She was gone. I needed to be gone too, and fast. I pulled into a crouch and scurried across the deck, preparing to vault the railing and run. I accelerated near the corner of the house, counting steps for the jump. Something came from my left so fast I barely had time to turn my head away from the blow and I went down hard, rolled, and came up eye to barrel with a pump-action shotgun three
feet from my head. Troy Davies stood behind it. My ear stung and the side of my head ached where the barrel had struck a glancing blow, but I felt momentarily fortunate that he’d used the shotgun as a baseball bat and not blown my head off.
“Mobile phone,” he said.
I dipped two fingers into my side pocket, pulled it out by the stubby antenna, laid it on the deck beside my knee.
“Camera,” he said.
I unstrapped the Nikon from my neck and set it next to the mobile phone.
“Hands behind your head, lay flat on the deck.”
That wasn’t as easy to do as it sounded, but I accomplished it, dropping to elbows and knees and then going flat. Davies stepped around me. I flinched when his boot lifted above my face, but the sole came down on the mobile phone. The little things are more rugged than they look. When the casing held after two stomps, he took the heel of the shotgun to it.
“Keep your hands behind your head, get up.”
“I gotta roll onto my back to do that,” I said.
He kicked me then, for talking or just from spite.
I rolled onto my back, sat up, got my knees under me, and stood from there.
“Walk,” he said.
I walked toward the wall of glass at the back of the house.
“You see the door. Open it.”
A sliding-glass door leading to the living room had been left cracked open. I stopped a few feet short of it.
“I’m not going inside,” I said.
“You have to open the door!”
The discordant note in his voice sounded like anguish, and that surprised me. I didn’t expect anguish from a killer. I kept my hands behind my head and turned to face him, knowing it’s harder to shoot somebody in the chest than in the back. “I’m not going inside. I’m going to lower my hands, take the car keys out of my jacket pocket, leave them here for you. Then I’m going to walk into that forest. You know, I don’t really care if you get caught or not. I’m not a cop. I didn’t come here to arrest you. I came to take photographs. You were right. I’m a cheap camera snoop. I’m also a real slow walker, and I don’t like knocking on the doors of strangers. You’ll have all the time you need to get into your car, get far away before anybody knows what I’ve found here.”
Burning Garbo Page 25
