It took them slightly over an hour of ringing doorbells to find the place—an old shingle-sided bungalow half buried under a tangle of bougainvillaea which hadn’t been trimmed in years. Under his middle name, Hower, Barrett had rented their garage for ten dollars a month, the old couple who owned the house told them. One of those bearded young ones, the wife added, but nice enough. No trouble at all, her husband agreed. Hower had paid on the dot every month regularly since last December.
Krug asked if they had a duplicate key and they admitted they had. But the old man refused to turn it over to them. “Him paying me like that kinda makes it his, don’t it?” he demanded. “Like an apartment or a house you rent? So that means you fellas got to give me some kinda court order to get in.”
“It’s the goddam TV,” Krug groused when they had finally persuaded the old people, and, key in hand, plodded through the weed-grown backyard revealed by the flashlight which Casey carried as standard equipment. “They’re all lawyers after watching sixteen reruns of Perry Mason. Give you an argument every time you so much as punch their doorbell.”
The gate which let into the alley looked ready to fall down, one hinge off, the other so frozen by corrosion that they had to force it. The alley was deserted at this hour, eerily quiet, and unconsciously they lowered their voices. Krug held the flashlight while Casey tried the key in the cheap padlock fastening the weatherbeaten double doors of the garage. The key worked easily. Grunting, Krug heaved the left door open while Casey struggled with the right one. Then silently they stared in at the glossy car which the flashlight revealed. A black sedan. Unmistakably a Mercedes-Benz.
“Glory hallelujah,” Krug breathed. “Could we be this lucky?” The car was a tight fit in the garage, and trying to squeeze by to get a look at the front, he got stuck on a nail. “Here, goddammit!” He tossed the flashlight to Casey. “Crawl over the top if you have to!”
But Casey was able to slide by on the other side. “Eureka,” he said softly. “One broken headlight. Red paint on the bumper—”
“Okay, stand by while I call the garage.” There was an ugly ripping sound, and Krug cursed furiously. “I’m gonna sue the goddam city one of these days, all the pants I’ve wrecked—”
Listening to the back gate slam, Krug’s number elevens plowing through the weeds, Casey leaned on the hood of the Mercedes, laughing helplessly. Who would have believed that Detective Sergeant Krug would wear tiger-striped peekaboo nylon underwear? Good old Uncle Al, no end to his marvels.
The tow truck from the police garage arrived ten minutes later. “Hands off the inside,” Krug instructed. “Nobody but Fingerprint gets the first look, right?”
“Anything you say,” the driver agreed, grinning. “Love your shorts, sweetie. Bet the wifie really gets turned on—”
“Shut up, asshole. And lock up that garage when you’re finished.”
“Sure thing, Tiger.”
Casey burned rubber getting back to the station, but for once Krug had no complaints about their speed. Fatigue forgotten now, they got a temporary release of the keys found on Barrett’s body from Property. Next they went to the lab, where they were in luck again, for McGregor wasn’t busy. Without delay, he assured them, he and his technicians would go to work on the Mercedes.
“Last stop,” Krug puffed as they climbed the stairs once more. “You start the reports. I’ll call Timms at home—”
But the lieutenant was still at his corner desk. “Got news for you,” he called when they walked into the squad room. “Looks like your hunch about Rees was right, Al. Take a look at this.”
“A record?” Krug scanned the rap sheet. “Served one year of a three-year sentence. Jesus Christ, for felony manslaughter! Released to San Francisco Parole Authority last month—”
“Too late to call them now,” Timms said. “But we’ll want to get hold of them first thing tomorrow. Could be they’re looking for the guy.”
“Better believe it,” Krug said grimly. “That lying son of a bitch, not one damn thing he told us is the truth. So maybe that goes for his story about just happening to see a homicide, too?” Then he rounded on Casey furiously. “And you been worrying about protecting him. Christ, for all we know he could be the fingerman for that bunch of murdering paperhangers!”
ELEVEN
In more ways than he had imagined, the Ultimate Perception turned out to be a surprise for Rees. First, it was a seaside place—which Susannah hadn’t mentioned—and, second, it catered to the sort of clientele that made her description of it as “a variation of the love-bead set” maliciously inexact.
A graveled parking lot almost filled with cars separated the two-storied wooden structure built on pilings from the Coast Highway. Counting the Cadillacs, Jags and a pair of Rolls-Royces as they crossed the lot, Rees decided he was in for a very expensive evening. Well, Malibu, he thought, sniffing the chill, salty sea air, you pay for scenery anywhere in the world. Like Sausalito, this was gilt-edged country. He was glad that at least his new shoes might measure up to the level of affluence inside. Certainly from head to toe, Susannah would.
“You look marvelous,” he told her as he opened the door of the restaurant. “I feel like a male Cinderella out with the Mod Princess.”
“Well, thank you, Cindy.” she giggled. “Just don’t turn into a pumpkin when you meet your wicked old sisters.”
Following her into the plush music-filled dusk of a tiny open foyer, Rees glimpsed huge windows across the bar lounge to the right, a breathtaking floodlit view of barnacled rocks, tide pools, a surging comber about to break with a roar. To the left was a long dining area and a panorama of Santa Monica Bay. All the tables were occupied, as were all the bar stools, and as his eyesight adjusted, Rees realized what Susannah had meant by her enigmatic remark: the customers were all men.
“You like?” she asked teasingly.
“Ask me in Pumpkin.”
“Oh, right on, man!” Her laughter was a shout. “As a matter of fact,” she subsided, giggling again, “the food is great here.”
“Well, if I can pass when the glass slipper starts making the rounds—”
A slender long-haired type in skin-tight yellow suede trousers and a striped shirt of neon hues bustled up to them carrying an armful of large elaborate menus. “Sorry, no deuces for at least—Oh, it’s you,” he said to Susannah. “For one mad moment I thought Suburbia had invaded us.”
“It has, sweetie, but don’t worry about it,” she said tartly. “We’ll just sup, and slum, and slither out quietly before the witching hour. Paul, this is Freddy. Freddy, Paul. Don’t do that,” she warned as Rees extended his hand. “It’s called groping here.”
“Bitch,” Freddy murmured. He shook Rees’s hand as if the gesture was strange to him. “All right, get yourselves a drink, sweeties. I’ll have a table for you in ten minutes.”
“You get a drink, Paul,” Susannah said. “I’ll go commune with my image a little bit.”
Feeling deserted, Rees located a space at the crowded bar and ordered himself a martini. While he waited for it to arrive he watched the waves lifting and crashing against the rocks outside, trying to ignore the heavily sibilant conversations around him. One end of the bar seemed to be a gathering spot for muscle boys in sleeveless tank tops and paper-thin jeans—a club within a club, Rees decided when he noticed that that section of the back bar was dominated by an elaborately framed life-sized photo study of a nearly nude Mr. America type. The proprietor, perhaps? Ultimate Perception, Rees thought wryly, studying the ridiculous muscleman pose. Meaning narcissism.
The martini was excellent, he discovered, and after the first couple of sips, he decided not to be annoyed with Susannah for bringing him here. After all, an actress, he thought. Show business was notoriously full of homosexuals. It probably meant nothing to her. Less uneasy, since he was being completely ignored by the nearby customers, he turned with his drink to watch for her.
But when Susannah appeared, it wasn’t out of the door mark
ed Powder Room as he’d expected. Instead, she ran lightly down the stairway clearly labeled Private, and at the bottom, turned to speak to someone on the stairs whom Rees could not see. More telephoning? he wondered. This time he wouldn’t make the mistake of asking. As she started toward the bar obviously looking for him, he beckoned, but to his surprise she walked right by him. Irritated and suspicious of some feminine game, Rees watched her until he realized that she was really searching for him. My God, he thought, she must be blind as a bat. “Susannah?” His heart turned over as she whirled, smiling.
“—And one of these days I’m going to invent a talking menu, too,” she said, finishing her astonishing tirade against eyeglasses when they were finally settled at a table by the window. “All the oculists’ll fight me, but I’ll make a million anyway. Bifocals will be a thing of the past.”
So she was near-sighted, too. “Be interesting to see what happens on the highways,” Rees commented dryly. “A million fatalities a year maybe? No more problems about overpopulation.”
“See, it all works out according to Roche’s Law. ‘What you can’t see’—”
“ ‘Can only kill you’?” Laughing with her, Rees was conscious of a subtle shift inside himself which made his delight in her false. What you can’t see. Headlights flared in his mind, then abruptly went out. He heard the soft solid thump of the impact—“My God,” he breathed, “you couldn’t even see that car this morning! Why didn’t you tell the police—?”
“I did see it! A blur anyway. A green—Oh, forget it, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“But you should have explained—”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it.” Their silence was like a vacuum instantly filled by the voices around them. Susannah turned to look out the window, her reflection on the dark pane remote, utterly withdrawn. “What a downer,” she said so softly he scarcely heard. “You’re one of those spoilers, aren’t you? Knew it when we were having breakfast. Man, did I know it! The Dude Who Kills Giggles—”
“Susannah, don’t. I’m sorry.”
“You’re always sorry.”
The waiter came by, and he ordered two double martinis in hopes that alcohol might mend the evening. And it did, but only partially: through more drinks and a winy dinner, he was sadly aware that she was performing for him rather than enjoying his company. Spoiler, he kept thinking. The Dude Who Kills—
“But think of the vitamins,” she was saying. “Stone-ground whole wheat. Organically grown veggies. Who cares about steak and baked potato?”
Dizzily recalling that their latest subject was vegetarianism versus the sort of cholesterol-laden food they had just enjoyed, Rees made himself smile. “Even full, the beast inside howls red meat when it hears the word ‘vegetarian.’ Man is, after all, a carnivore.”
“Getting off on words.” She made a face. “So how about the Chinese? How about the Hindus, man? The whole Third World is practically meatless.”
“That’s poverty, not conviction.”
“Oh, man, you are impossible. Vot does a Doktor do vit a patient like this?”
Comfort me with apples. Heal me with honey. And all the days of my life, Ellen’s voice echoed softly in him. All the days—“How about a brandy? Waiter, two Hennesseys here.” It was a long time since he had known the shallow, bittersweet surcease of drunkenness.
His head felt like a melon split in two parts by the time they left the restaurant—some sensitive heretofore-hidden core of consciousness exposed now, pithy and overripe. Aware of her scent, warmth which made the sensitized skin of his hands and face tingle, Rees glared straight ahead, driving extra carefully. From the corner of his eye, he could see her beside him, feel her breathing, sense her pulse. Desire, the appetite that feeds upon itself. And in this case, he thought, so uselessly. “How about another brandy someplace?”
“Such a thirsty dude.” He saw that she was smiling. “You keep this up, you’ll be wiped out before we get there. But Jervis boozes like it’s going out of style tomorrow, too.”
“I’ve missed something. Who’s Jervis?”
“The party, man.” She shifted in the seat, facing him. “Oh God,” she sighed after a moment. “Forgot to tell you. We're supposed to go on to this bash. But we don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
But we do, of course, because she called from the restaurant to say we would. Or did she? Confused, he vaguely remembered seeing the public phone in the restaurant located in the foyer by the restrooms—
The party was back in Santa Monica, Susannah was saying, literally only a stone’s throw from their own places on Ocean Avenue. A long stone’s throw, he discovered, for the house sat on the beachfront hundreds of feet below the palisades which Ocean Avenue skirted. Rees guessed it might be one of the long line of palatial-looking residences he had admired yesterday when he had walked in the narrow park at the top of the bluffs. From his bird’s-eye view, he had seen precious-looking pools and gardens, all shut off from the public beach by high walls and shrubbery. But the house they finally stopped at was south of these, one of a cluster of weatherbeaten frame cottages just north of the pier.
From the curbside they could hear the din of the party, and as Susannah opened the door without bothering to knock, a female voice shrieked clearly, “Ooo-wow-you-scare-me!”
Well, at least it’s on the straight side here, Rees thought gloomily. Maybe.
Ooo-wow-you-scare-me. He was to hear the same five words screamed with exactly the same emphasis like a running refrain for the rest of the evening. “That’s her thing,” Susannah explained one of the few times he was able to locate her in the crush of guests. “She’s not programmed for anything else this year.” Then she disappeared again.
Feeling like a foreigner, ignorant of custom, language, any mode of communication save smiles, Rees wandered around with a drink in his hand, watching blue-jeaned unisex dancers gyrating to deafening rock records. Other groups dressed in poor-boy overalls or High Tack finery clustered together, rapping and puffing joints. Fragments of conversations and glimpses of faces over shoulders wheeled like confetti in the electronic downpour which assailed Rees’s senses. He kept trying to locate Jervis, kept looking for Susannah, finding neither. That he didn’t even know what his host looked like seemed some final negative triumph of alienation.
The entire house had been given over to the party, he discovered as he drifted slowly from room to room, beginning to enjoy his Invisible Man status. It was not a home in any old-fashioned sense of the word, but a kind of kooky gallery—like a HaightAshbury headshop, he decided. Huge posters covered every wall space, ecology boxes like jackdaw collections, strange distorted anatomical drawings. One room was purple shading into a violent crimson, another was black, still another a stark clinical white. The kitchen had a wood-burning stove and a rusty sink cast in the McKinley era. On a wall near the swinging door hung a last year’s calendar of the sort stores and insurance companies give away for public relations at Christmastime. But instead of the usual girly or landscape photo, this one was decorated with a reproduction of a page printed in Gothic type. Gutenberg to Tantra seemed to be the sponsor’s message. Some bookshop, probably. Under the pervasive party odor of pot and incense, Rees could smell mildewed timbers and dry rot here. Poverty syndrome, he thought as he moseyed out again. The richest generation in history playing The Great Depression again as a lifestyle game.
Over the heads of the dancers, he spied Susannah finally, standing on a beachside patio reached through French doors which had been thrown open. With her was a tall blond woman wearing an orange caftan—girl talk, apparently, the woman seemed to be showing Susannah a hat. But in the half-dark, she looked furious. Must be some trick of light, Rees decided as he made his way slowly toward the door, aware now of his unsteadiness. But Susannah looked odd, too. Shocked. Something. Time for rescue anyway, he thought happily.
But by the time he reached the patio, they had disappeared. So much for the savior bit. They were probab
ly trying on dresses by now. Or clawing each other. Sagging into one of the plastic and aluminum chaise longues scattered around the patio, Rees breathed in deeply, finding the fresh sea air as tart as vinegar after the pungency inside. From where he was sitting, Santa Monica Pier looked in the distance like a docked liner, lights on, ready to sail. Imagining a long peaceful voyage, he dozed until his chair rocked, pitching him awake again. “Hey! Oh, it’s you—”
Perched precariously beside him, she smiled, her face radiant under the wide-brimmed, sequin-trimmed, black straw hat.
“Susannah,” he whispered, reaching for her. “Susannah, Susannah”—loving her name.
Their lips touched but so lightly that he could scarcely feel the contact. Delicately as a cat’s, the tip of her tongue touched his mouth, following the contour of his lips around and around until the skin felt seared. God, he kept thinking. God, God. It’s going to be. All right. The season of loneliness was over.
TWELVE
It was barely light when Casey wakened—one of those chilly overcast June mornings that send tourists home full of slanderous complaints about Southern California weather. Nesting mockingbirds squawked in the ugly old pines that lined his street. Somewhere a courting dove called mournfully, Where are you? Casey smiled at the ceiling, his imagination furnishing a clear picture of Ms. Joanna Hill across a restaurant table this evening. They would toast themselves with nectar, dine on ambrosia. And for dessert, what else but sweet kisses, et cetera? I hope, Casey thought. Oh, wow, do I hope.
Yawning, stretching until his muscles creaked, he looked at the clock. Ten after five, a wide-open temptation to an extra half hour’s daydreaming. But if he didn’t get up now he risked not finishing his reports before the morning rundown. And Lieutenant Timms was a stickler about keeping the paperwork current.
The Complete Krug & Kellog Page 25
