He said, “It seems… forbidding.”
“Eric didn't care about having a real home — a cozy, livable home, I mean. He never was much aware of his surroundings anyway. He lived in the future, not the present. All he wanted of his house was that it serve as a monument to his success, and that's what you see here.”
“I'd expect to see your touch — your sensual style — everywhere, somewhere, but it's nowhere in sight.”
“Eric allowed no changes in decor,” she said.
“And you could live with that?”
“I did, yes.”
“I can't picture you being happy in such a chilly place.”
“Oh, it wasn't that bad. Really, it wasn't. There are many amazingly beautiful things here. Any one of them can occupy hours of study… contemplation… and provide great pleasure, even spiritual pleasure.”
He always marveled at how Rachael routinely found the positive aspect of even difficult circumstances. She wrung every drop of enjoyment and delight from a situation and did her best to ignore the unpleasant aspects. Her present-focused, pleasure-oriented personality was an effective armor against the vicissitudes of life.
At the rear of the ground floor, in the billiards room that looked out upon the swimming pool, the largest object on display was an intricately carved, claw-footed, late-nineteenth-century billiards table that boasted teak rails inlaid with semiprecious stones.
“Eric never played,” Rachael said. “Never held a cue stick in his hands. All he cared about was that the table is one of a kind and that it cost more than thirty thousand dollars. The overhead lights aren't positioned to facilitate play; they're aimed to present the table to its best advantage.”
“The more I see of this place, the better I understand him,” Ben said, “but the less able I am to grasp why you ever married him.”
“I was young, unsure of myself, perhaps looking for the father figure that'd always been missing in my life. He was so calm. He had such tremendous self-assurance. In him, I saw a man of power, a man who could carve out a niche for himself, a ledge on the mountainside where I could find stability, safety. At the time, I thought that was all I wanted.”
Implicit in those words was the admission that her childhood and adolescence had been difficult at best, confirming a suspicion Ben had harbored for months. She seldom spoke of her parents or of her school years, and Ben believed that those formative experiences had been so negative as to leave her with a loathing for the past, a distrust of the uncertain future, and a defensive ability to focus intently upon whatever great or meager joys the moment offered.
He wanted to pursue that subject now, but before he could say anything, the mood abruptly changed. A sense of imminent danger had hung heavy in the air upon their entrance, then had faded as they progressed from one deserted white room to another with the growing conviction that no intruder lurked within the house. Rachael had stopped pointing the pistol ahead of her and had been holding it at her side with the muzzle aimed at the floor. But now the threatening atmosphere clouded the air again when she spotted three distinct fingerprints and a portion of a palmprint on one arm of a sofa, etched into the snowy fabric in a burgundy-dark substance which, on closer inspection, looked as if it might be blood.
She crouched beside the sofa, peering closely at the prints, and Ben saw her shiver. In a tremulous whisper she said, “Been here, damn it. I was afraid of this. Oh, God. Something's happened here.” She touched one finger to the ugly stain, instantly snatched her hand away, and shuddered. “Damp. My God, it's damp.”
“Who's been here?” Ben asked. “What's happened?”
She stared at the tip of her finger, the one with which she had touched the stain, and her face was distorted with horror. Slowly she raised her eyes and looked at Ben, who had stooped beside her, and for a moment he thought her terror had reached such a peak that she was prepared, at last, to tell him everything and seek his help. But after a moment he could see the resolve and self-control flooding back into her gaze and into her lovely face.
She said, “Come on. Let's check out the rest of the house. And for God's sake, be careful.”
He followed her as she resumed her search. Again she held the pistol in front of her.
In the huge kitchen, which was nearly as well equipped as that of a major restaurant, they found broken glass scattered across the floor. One pane had been smashed out of the French door that opened onto the patio.
“An alarm system's no good if you don't use it,” Ben said. “Why would Eric go off and leave a house like this unprotected?”
She didn't answer.
He said, “And doesn't a man like him have servants in residence?”
“Yes. A nice live-in couple with an apartment over the garage.”
“Where are they? Wouldn't they have heard a break-in?”
“They're off Monday and Tuesday,” she said. “They often drive up to Santa Barbara to spend the time with their daughter's family.”
“Forced entry,” Ben said, lightly kicking a shard of glass across the tile floor. “Okay, now hadn't we better call the police?”
She merely said, “Let's look upstairs.” As the sofa had been stained with blood, so her voice was stained with anxiety. But worse: there was a bleakness about her, a grim and sombrous air, that made it easy to believe she might never laugh again.
The thought of Rachael without laughter was unbearable.
They climbed the stairs with caution, entered the upstairs hall, and checked out the second-floor rooms with the wariness they might have shown if unraveling a mile of tangled rope with the knowledge that a poisonous serpent lay concealed in the snarled line.
At first nothing was out of order, and they discovered nothing untoward — until they entered the master bedroom, where all was chaos. The contents of the walk-in closet — shirts, slacks, sweaters, shoes, suits, ties, and more — lay in a torn and tangled mess. Sheets, a white quilted spread, and feather-leaking pillows were strewn across the floor. The mattress had been heaved off the springs, which had been knocked halfway off the frame. Two black ceramic lamps were smashed, the shades ripped and then apparently stomped. Enormously valuable paintings had been wrenched from the walls and slashed to ribbons, damaged beyond repair. Of a pair of graceful Klismos-style chairs, one was upended, and the other had been hammered against a wall until it had gouged out big chunks of plaster and was itself reduced to splintered rubble.
Ben felt the skin on his arms puckering with gooseflesh, and an icy current quivered along the back of his neck.
Initially he thought that the destruction had been perpetrated by someone engaged upon a methodical search for something of value, but on taking a second look, he realized that such was not the case. The guilty party had unquestionably been in a blind rage, violently trashing the bedroom with malevolent glee or in a frenzy of hatred. The intruder had been someone possessed of considerable strength and little sanity. Someone strange. Someone infinitely dangerous.
With a recklessness evidently born of fear, Rachael plunged into the adjacent bathroom, one of only two places in the house that they had not yet searched, but the intruder was not there, either. She stepped back into the bedroom and surveyed the ruins, shaky and pale.
“Breaking and entering, now vandalism,” Ben said. “You want me to call the cops, or should you do it?”
She did not reply but entered the last of the unsearched places, the enormous walk-in closet, returning a moment later, scowling. “The wall safe's been opened and emptied.”
“Burglary too. Now we've got to call the cops, Rachael.”
“No,” she said. The bleakness that had hung about her like a gray and sodden cloak now became a specific presence in her gaze, a dull sheen in those usually bright green eyes.
Ben was more alarmed by that dullness than he had been by her fear, for it implied fading hope. Rachael, his Rachael, had never seemed capable of despair, and he couldn't bear to see her in the grip of that emotion.
> “No cops,” she said.
“Why not?” Ben said.
“If I bring the cops into it, I'll be killed for sure.”
He blinked. “What? Killed? By the police? What on earth do you mean?”
“No, not by the cops.”
“Then who? Why?”
Nervously chewing on the thumbnail of her left hand, she said, “I should never have brought you here.”
“You're stuck with me. Rachael, really now, isn't it time you told me more?”
Ignoring his plea, she said, “Let's check the garage, see if one of the cars is missing,” and she dashed from the room, leaving him no choice but to hurry after her with feeble protests.
* * *
A white Rolls-Royce. A Jaguar sedan the same deep green as Rachael's eyes. Then two empty stalls. And in the last space, a dusty, well-used, ten-year-old Ford with a broken radio antenna.
Rachael said, “There should be a black Mercedes 560 SEL.” Her voice echoed off the walls of the long garage. “Eric drove it to our meeting with the lawyers this morning. After the accident… after Eric was killed, Herb Tuleman — the attorney — said he'd have the car driven back here and left in the garage. Herb is reliable. He always does what he says. I'm sure it was returned. And now it's gone.”
“Car theft,” Ben said. “How long does the list of crimes have to get before you'll agree to calling the cops?”
She walked to the last stall, where the battered Ford was parked in the harsh bluish glare of a fluorescent ceiling strip. “And this one doesn't belong here at all. It's not Eric's.”
“It's probably what the burglar arrived in,” Ben said. “Decided to swap it for the Mercedes.”
With obvious reluctance, with the pistol raised, she opened one of the Ford's front doors, which squeaked, and looked inside. “Nothing.”
He said, “What did you expect?”
She opened one of the rear doors and peered into the back seat.
Again there was nothing to be found.
“Rachael, this silent sphinx act is irritating as hell.”
She returned to the driver's door, which she had opened first. She opened it again, looked in past the wheel, saw the keys in the ignition, and removed them.
“Rachael, damn it.”
Her face was not simply troubled. Her grim expression looked as if it had been carved in flesh that was really stone and would remain upon her visage from now until the end of time.
He followed her to the trunk. “What are you looking for now?”
At the back of the Ford, fumbling with the keys, she said, “The intruder wouldn't have left this here if it could be traced to him. A burglar wouldn't leave such an easy clue. No way. So maybe he came here in a stolen car that couldn't be traced to him.”
Ben said, “You're probably right. But you're not going to find the registration slip in the trunk. Let's try the glove compartment.”
Slipping a key into the trunk lock, she said, “I'm not looking for the registration slip.”
“Then what?”
Turning the key, she said, “I don't really know. Except…”
The lock clicked. The trunk lid popped up an inch.
She opened it all the way.
Inside, blood was puddled thinly on the floor of the trunk.
Rachael made a faint mournful sound.
Ben looked closer and saw that a woman's blue high-heeled shoe was on its side in one corner of the shallow compartment. In another corner lay a woman's eyeglasses, the bridge of which was broken, one lens missing and the other lens cracked.
“Oh, God,” Rachael said, “he not only stole the car. He killed the woman who was driving it. Killed her and stuffed the body in here until he had a chance to dispose of it. And now where will it end? Where will it end? Who will stop him?”
Badly shocked by what they'd found, Ben was nevertheless aware that when Rachael said “him,” she was talking about someone other than an unidentified burglar. Her fear was more specific than that.
7
NASTY LITTLE GAMES
Two snowflake moths swooped around the overhead fluorescent light, batting against the cool bulbs, as if in a frustrated suicidal urge to find the flame. Their shadows, greatly enlarged, darted back and forth across the walls, over the Ford, across the back of the hand that Rachael held to her face.
The metallic odor of blood rose out of the open trunk of the car. Ben took a step backward to avoid the noxious scent.
He said, “How did you know?”
“Know what?” Rachael asked, eyes still closed, head still bowed, coppery red-brown hair falling forward and half concealing her face.
“You knew what you might find in the trunk. How?”
“No. I didn't know. I was half afraid I'd find… something. Something else. But not this.”
“Then what did you expect?”
“Maybe something worse.”
“Like what?”
“Don't ask.”
“I have asked.”
The soft bodies of the moths tapped against the fire-filled tubes of glass above. Tap-tap-tick-tap.
Rachael opened her eyes, shook her head, started walking away from the battered Ford. “Let's get out of here.”
He grabbed her by the arm. “We have to call the cops now. And you'll have to tell them whatever it is you know about what's going on here. So you might as well tell me first.”
“No police,” she said, either unwilling or unable to look at him.
“I was ready to go along with you on that. Until now.”
“No police,” she insisted.
“But someone's been killed!”
“There's no body.”
“Christ, isn't the blood enough?”
She turned to him and finally met his eyes. “Benny, please, please, don't argue with me. There's no time to argue. If that poor woman's body were in the trunk, it might be different, and we might be able to call the cops, because with a body they'd have something to work on and they'd move a lot faster. But without a body to focus on, they'll ask a lot of questions, endless questions, and they won't believe the answers I could give them, so they'll waste a lot of time. But there's none to waste because soon there're going to be people looking for me… dangerous people.”
“Who?”
“If they aren't already looking for me. I don't think they could've learned that Eric's body is missing, not yet, but if they have heard about it, they'll be coming here. We've got to go.”
“Who?” he demanded exasperatedly. “Who are they? What are they after? What do they want? For God's sake, Rachael, let me in on it.”
She shook her head. “Our agreement was that you could come with me but that I wasn't going to answer questions.”
“I made no such promises.”
“Benny, damn it, my life is on the line.”
She was serious; she really meant it; she was desperately afraid for her life, and that was sufficient to break Ben's resolve and make him cooperate. Plaintively he said, “But the police could provide protection.”
“Not from the people who may be coming after me.”
“You make it sound as if you're being pursued by demons.”
“At least.”
She quickly embraced him, kissed him lightly on the mouth.
She felt good in his arms. He was badly shaken by the thought of a future without her.
Rachael said, “You're terrific. For wanting to stand by me. But go home now. Get out of it. Let me handle things myself.”
“Not very damn likely.”
“Then don't interfere. Now let's go.”
Pulling away from him, she headed back across the five-car garage toward the door that led into the house.
A moth dropped from the light and fluttered against his face, as if his feelings for Rachael were, at the moment, brighter than the fluorescent bulbs. He batted it away.
He slammed the lid on the Ford's trunk, leaving the wet blood to congeal and the gruesome smell to
thicken.
He followed Rachael.
At the far end of the garage, near the door that led into the house through the laundry room, she stopped, staring down at something on the floor. When Ben caught up with her, he saw some clothes that had been discarded in the corner, which neither he nor she had noticed when they had entered the garage. There were a pair of soft white vinyl shoes with white rubber soles and heels, wide white laces. A pair of baggy pale green cotton pants with a drawstring waist. And a loose short-sleeve shirt that matched the pants.
Looking up from the clothes, he saw that Rachael's face was no longer merely pale and waxen. She appeared to have been dusted with ashes. Gray. Seared.
Ben looked down at the suit of clothes again. He realized it was an outfit of the sort surgeons wore when they went into an operating theater, what they called hospital whites. Hospital whites had once actually been white, but these days they were usually this soft shade of green. However, not only surgeons wore them. Many other hospital employees preferred the same basic uniform. Furthermore, he had seen the assistant pathologists and attendants dressed in exactly the same kind of clothes at the morgue, only a short while ago.
Rachael drew a deep hissing breath through clenched teeth, shook herself, and went into the house.
Ben hesitated, staring intently at the discarded pair of shoes and rumpled clothes. Riveted by the soft green hue. Half mesmerized by the random patterns of gentle folds and creases in the material. His mind spinning. His heart pounding. Breathlessly considering the implications.
When at last he broke the spell and hurried after Rachael, Ben discovered that sweat had popped out all over his face.
* * *
Rachael drove much too fast to the Geneplan building in Newport Beach. She handled the car with considerable skill, but Ben was glad to have a seat belt. Having ridden with her before, he knew she enjoyed driving even more than she enjoyed most other things in life; she was exhilarated by speed, delighted by the SL's maneuverability. But tonight she was in too much of a hurry to take any pleasure from her driving skill, and although she was not exactly reckless, she took some turns at such high speed and changed lanes so suddenly that she could not be accused of timidity.
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