“But he said one of them dropped out, and then the others forced him to get rid of another one.”
“And that’s why we argued. He was so anxious to keep the rest of the group together until the book was finished that he let them blackmail him. Result”—she gestured—“of course he lost control.”
“So they turned on him. It’s the Manson thing all over again. A bunch of mind-blown kids—”
“You can’t be serious!”
“Can’t I? Tell me this,” he went on, icily calm now, “was the fact that they’d be part of a book made clear to the group? That whatever they said in those meetings would be printed, made public?”
“No, that would have defeated Steve’s purpose. It was essential that they be absolutely unself-conscious.”
“So presumably they didn’t know every word they said was being taped?”
“Whether they did or not doesn’t matter, since we weren’t planning to use names.”
“Oh, yes, anonymity.” He smiled unpleasantly. “Rather meaningless, isn’t it? When you consider that they wouldn’t know unless they were told? And they weren’t told, were they? So if something or someone persuaded them that Steve was using them, betraying their confidences…”
“No, you’re wrong,” Adrian said helplessly. “You’ve got it all wrong. It was his own fault that the group—”
“His fault! Yes, you’d believe that, wouldn’t you? You damn bleeding hearts are all the same. The murderers are the victims, not the poor bastards they slaughter in cold blood!” He snatched up his hat and headed for the door. Then he stopped and turned around in the doorway. She could hear his heavy breathing. “Miss Crewes”—his voice came at her savagely quiet, a weapon—“whatever your purpose in hanging on to those tapes, you’d do well to keep this in mind: if Steve wasn’t safe from them, neither are you. Don’t forget that tonight when you’re here all alone.”
ELEVEN
Even after the door had closed and she knew he was gone, the room still seemed filled with his lacerating presence, the terrifying idea he had summoned, genielike, out of his anguish. Don’t forget tonight. A pulse fluttered in her ears, and she started to yawn uncontrollably. When you’re here all alone. Her scalp prickled. “Fool,” she whispered. “More fool you.” Then, bittersweetly, tears came. But whether she cried for the dead or for herself she didn’t know.
Imagine my surprise, she had written her sister a few days after she arrived, after all that claptrap about no lady collaborators, the misogynist greeted me with open arms. Paranoia set in at once, of course. I’m a cripple therefore genderless? Well, the hell with it. Those who come to laugh and stay to cheer (or to satisfy curiosity) deserve whatever doubts they may have. The fact is, the man is fascinating. An enigma. Maybe even a paradox. But, you know, I believe he’s a genuine sorcerer!
Adrian had liked Stephen Myrick’s house at first sight, for it looked old and substantial and Eastern to her. And the street where it was located seemed quiet and sedate. In fact, nothing she saw that first day came anywhere near her preconceived ideas of what life in California might be like. And Myrick himself was the biggest surprise of all…
“The ancient if not honorable art of animal magnetism,” he said humorously when they were settled over a drink in his oddly impersonal living room. “You know, I suppose, that it was lost to the Western world for centuries after the end of the ancient Egyptian civilization? Then Anton Mesmer rediscovered the trance as a method of treatment. Mesmerization. It was a doctor named Braid who first called it ‘hypnosis.’ ”
“Do you still use the word ‘trance’ professionally?”
“Frequently, yes—Why?”
“Well, it smacks so of spiritualism, that sort of quackery.”
“Does that bother you, Miss Crewes?”
“Not really. But I should think it would bother you, using the same terms as charlatans.”
“By which I take it you’re implying I am not one?” His laughter spared her the necessity of answering. “That’s the first hurdle,” he said cheerfully. “A major one, I might add. This book is very important to me. Without your confidence—complete confidence—in my methods and attitude, I realize we could fail before we begin.”
He was too handsome, too well dressed, too actorish, she decided. But she was disarmed by his simplicity and frankness when he went on to explain that no one knew how hypnosis actually worked, least of all the hypnotist himself. “It’s usually defined—in a loose way, of course—as a special state of aroused concentration which allows the subject to focus his mind on suggestions, responding to them beyond so-called normal limits.” Again he laughed. “Gobbledegook, of course. But it’s the best we can do.”
No one that unaffected could be a real phony, Adrian decided as she lay in the hard bed of the hotel room he had reserved for her, waiting to go to sleep that first night. The very nature of phoniness demands artificiality, self-dramatization. Soft air from the Pacific floated in through her open windows. In the garden below, tall palms clattered in the sea breeze. California, she kept thinking. Well, I’ll be damned. But she must reserve final judgment, she told herself, until she saw the sorcerer in action.
More fool you.
The Simmons house turned out to be a two-story Monterey-style stucco which probably dated back to the twenties, Casey decided. The windows had been modernized, the paint was fresh, the yard manicured. He wondered if the owner had any connection with a local Realtor of the same name.
Krug punched the doorbell and they listened to chimes inside. The door was opened by a small, trim middle-aged woman who smiled at them cordially. “You’re from the termite company? I’m Mrs. Simmons. We’re having so much trouble—” Then she saw their badges. “Oh, my God, something’s happened to Frank!”
“Nothing like that, Mrs. Simmons,” Krug assured her hastily. “Only a routine matter. We’d like to talk to your daughter, Sandra, if she’s home.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.” Stony in their nests of powdered wrinkles, her eyes fixed on a point just beyond them, blank, unseeing. “My daughter passed away last month. On July twenty-second.”
“Sorry to hear that, Mrs. Simmons. We won’t bother you, then. Like I said, this was just a routine inquiry.”
“Yes, I know all about your routine inquiries.” Her face twisted, ugly, bitter, old all of a sudden. “That’s what you always say, isn’t it? No matter what it is, it’s just routine. You can break people’s hearts—Oh, there’s nothing more to be said,” she cried and slammed the door.
“Well, we asked for the word.” Krug made a face. “And we got it, right?”
“Come on, Al,” Casey muttered, “she’s probably listening.”
“Yeah, okay.” They walked slowly back to the Mustang parked at the curb. “Well, that’s one we don’t have to worry about nailing down.” Krug crossed the name off the list. “Drops out of the group on the twentieth, dead the twenty-second. Want to bet it was an overdose?” The car rocked as he slammed the door. “Better check it out when we get back. Could still be part of this lousy case.”
Casey started the car. “Where to—Judith Flesher next?”
“Might as well. It’s the other side of town, down near Pico.” Casey heard him sigh. “Don’t let it get you down, sport. That kind, they always blow off to cops. Somebody but them’s got to be to blame, see. Whatever happens to their kids, they had nothing to do with it.”
“Sure, Al, I understand.”
“Okay, I’m just telling you. That kind of people, they’re always going to give you a hard time when they’re in the wrong. The fat cats. They got it made, see? Big house, money in the bank, nothing bad can happen ’cause they got the price.” Again he sighed. “Me, I’ll take the poor old hard-working stiff with the dirty fingernails. At least he don’t walk around thinking he’s got the high sign on Old Man Trouble.”
Summer traffic heading to and from the beach was heavy on San Vicente Boulevard. Convertibles full of sunburn
ed kids. Volkswagen buses loaded with surfboards. To be young, Casey thought. He felt a million years old, a pariah who spent his life breaking people’s hearts. At the Academy they’d said it didn’t bother you after a while, detachment came with experience. But how long did it really take, Casey wondered, twenty years behind the badge before you no longer worried about being hated for wearing it?
He turned south on Lincoln and headed for Pico.
In a neighboring apartment—across the hall, Adrian guessed—a stereo set blared I am Woman I am free! like a trumpet blast. Then the volume was turned down. The nervous pulse still fluttered in her ears, but she had stopped yawning. With all her heart, she wished she could stop thinking. But her mind would not leave off recollecting. The sorcerer in action…
The day after her arrival, observing Stephen Myrick at work, she had found herself even more convinced of his sincerity, the authenticity of his magnetic gift. The first case she sat in on was an obesity problem, a woman with a lifelong history of overeating. Like most fat people, the patient had lost weight dieting periodically, but every time had regained the loss, and more.
“The same pattern holds true of most fat people,” Myrick explained. “They’re fat because they eat, and they eat because they’re fat. But she’s on a physician’s diet now. My first job is to hold her to it this time. No, that’s wrong. To help her hold herself to it.”
Embarrassed at intruding on what she pictured as something like a private ceremony, Adrian seated herself in the corner of his office. Mrs. Banner, the patient, plumped down in the Eames chair in front of Myrick’s desk, ignoring Adrian after their casual introduction. Perching on the corner of his desk nearest her, Myrick began to chat in an easy fashion: How was it going for Mrs. Banner this week? Fine, Doctor, she had lost three pounds. Let’s see, that was a total of twenty now? Twenty-one, the woman corrected him proudly, Dr. Stein could hardly believe what the scale showed.
“He hasn’t seen anything yet,” Myrick said. Then his deep voice altered, becoming bland and soothing. “Now lean back, Mrs. Banner. That’s it. No, don’t close your eyes yet. First let me see you roll your eyes up and back. That’s it. Up and back. Now close them, and take a deep breath. Deep, Mrs. Banner. That’s it. Hold it as long as possible and start concentrating. When you can’t hold any longer, you’re going to exhale very slowly. And while you’re exhaling, you’re going to concentrate on feeling that your body is sinking downward. Slowly sinking. But your left arm will float upward.”
Holding her own breath in the silence, Adrian listened to the faint, wheezing exhalation. Surely hypnosis isn’t this simple, she thought. No flashing lights. No spinning discs. She wished she could see the woman’s face. But the arm was enough. That fat, heavy, bare arm rising off the arm of the chair as if it really floated weightless.
“Your hand floating is your signal to yourself,” Myrick was saying. “You’re in the state of concentration called hypnosis, Mrs. Banner. And it’s your concentration that put you there. So you see, if you can make your hand float as it’s doing right now, you can induce control other ways, too. You can make yourself feel that you only want to eat what is good for your body. And not by depriving yourself, but by rewarding yourself. And this way, you’re working toward the goal you want.”
Myrick repeated himself several times, then Mrs. Banner came out of her trance by counting backward from three to one, opening her eyes and making a fist of the hand that was floating.
With a thump, her hand hit the arm of the chair. Then she swung around, beaming at Adrian. “I can do it by myself, too,” she said proudly. “At home or any place.”
Appalled, Adrian blurted, “But aren’t you frightened?”
“Of what?”
“Why—being in a trance somewhere. Being helpless.”
“Oh, that.” The fat woman giggled. “It’s not like they show in the movies. Like sleepwalking or something. It’s really just concentrating hard.”
With another compulsive eater, also a woman, Myrick displayed a technique of deeper hypnosis. This time he set up a series of posthypnotic suggestions while his patient slumbered—one, that the woman would again “float” her arm after she had awakened; two, that she would hum a bar of a popular song; and three, that she would fall asleep again immediately afterward.
The woman awakened and began to discuss her bill. Suddenly her arm began to drift upward, and seeming unconscious of it, she said, “I’ll write you a check next time, if you don’t mind. I’m a little—” Breaking off, she began to hum softly.
As the woman’s head sank and she began to snore softly, Adrian’s scalp prickled. Superstition, she thought. But if he can do this so easily, why not miracle cures? Addiction to food must be like any other…
More fool you for not knowing his limitations.
The telephone rang, but only once, a wrong number. Shocked out of her reverie, Adrian stared at the depression in the Naugahyde where William Myrick had sat. In over his head, his voice echoed cruelly. No more capable of dealing with addicts…
True? False? Adrian realized now that she did not know; she had been blinded by the radiance of Stephen Myrick’s personality, her own commitment to their work. Sorcerer, she thought. But if, instead, he was like the apprentice in the musical fable…
Marmalade meowed and curled around her legs as she pushed herself out of the chair, settling her forearms into the crutch canes. She knew it was superstition and despised herself for it, but all the same a queer belief was gathering in her that the source of his power must have turned on the hypnotist. He had manipulated forces beyond his understanding, summoned something he could not control. Like a demon, she kept thinking as she levered herself into the kitchen to make coffee. Like a demon roused from hypnotic sleep.
TWELVE
There was no answer at Judith Flesher’s address, a shabby six-unit stucco built in the one-story sheep-shed style of a cheap motel. But from a next-door neighbor, Krug and Casey found out that the girl worked at a hot-dog stand on Pico and Lincoln, so they headed west again. “Ramirez is on the way,” Krug said. “Let’s swing by, maybe we can catch him, too.”
The district was a hodgepodge of small houses and modest apartment buildings with for rent signs advertising children welcome. Hector Ramirez’s address just south of Pico turned out to be a single-family frame house, neatly painted, with a picket fence and a lush fig tree growing in the front yard.
“Looks respectable, anyway,” Krug commented as they climbed out of the Mustang. “Some of these Chicanos are okay, I guess.”
Admiring the hanging baskets trailing ferns which screened the porch from the street, Casey opened the gate. The front door stood half ajar behind a new aluminum screen door. From inside they could hear what was obviously the soundtrack of a Western movie—the television, of course.
Krug punched the doorbell, then banged on the screen door. After a time a little girl with ribbons in her braids peered out at them. “Hi, kid,” he said. “Your mama or daddy home?” But she only stared at him solemnly. “Look, girlie,” he tried again patiently, “go get your mama, okay? We want to talk to her.” But it didn’t work. “Christ,” Krug muttered, “no spikka, I suppose. What the hell do they teach these kids in school?”
“Let me try.” Casey squatted so that he could look in at the little girl on her own level. “Chiquita,” he asked softly, “dónde está tu madre?”
She pointed back into the interior of the house.
“Tell her to go get the old lady,” Krug instructed. “And pronto.”
“If I could only remember how to say—”
A brown hand yanked the little girl backward. And as she whined behind the door, a fat black-mustached youth in skin-tight jeans and a sleeveless leather jerkin confronted them. “You the fuzz, hey? I been waiting for you.” He unlocked the screen door. “Parsons, he phones you gonna roust me, too. ‘So, big deal,’ I tell him, ‘let ’em, man. I got nothing I’m ascared of. Clean all the way, that’s me.’ ”
The house was as neat inside as out, Casey noticed, pleasantly cool and dim, nicely furnished, quiet when Hector shut off the television.
Striking a dude pose in the middle of the room, he grinned, stroking his Pancho Villa mustache. “Go ahead, ask me something,” he urged sassily. “I got answers, hey. Mr. Clean, that’s me. I’m strictly straight.”
“That’s just fine,” Krug came back, “because if you’re not, you get busted like in the next five minutes.”
“Oh, heavy, man, heavy.”
“Better believe it, sonny. And save the hard guy stuff for your buddies.”
His story was much the same as Eddie Parsons’s. Not surprisingly, Casey thought, since there had been ample time for them to compare notes. He had picked up Eddie on his Honda at seven, Hector declared, and they had gone to the meeting at Myrick’s, arriving ten minutes late. “Don’t matter, anyhow,” he went on, seeming to forget that it was all in the past tense now. “Doc, he don’t care. It’s like a rap session, see. We just sit around rapping when we feel like it. He gets us going about our hangups and all that. Man, it’s a real freakout sometimes!”
“Yeah, I bet it is,” Krug said sourly. “Who was there last night, Hector?” He checked the names against their list. “That’s the whole group, then. Six people, plus Dr. Myrick?”
“You keeping score, man, not me.”
Catching some fleeting difference in the boy’s tone, Casey suggested that they count again. “Just to make sure,” he said mildly. “I have a feeling Hector isn’t quite satisfied with the total.”
“What you talking about, man?” Looking from one to the other, the boy shifted restlessly. They watched him until at last he muttered, “Puta. What you want me to say? Listen, she was only there like ten minutes.”
“Who’s that, Hector?”
“The Flesh, man, who you think?”
The Complete Krug & Kellog Page 42
