Feeling stricken, as if some heavy black suspicion of illness had turned suddenly virulent in her, Adrian fit the July 3 tape on the spindle. The subtle hissing where voices had been was like the whispering of something sentient but mindless. Then a kind of hesitation in the mechanism of the tape machine alerted her, made her lean forward. From the speaker came a clicking, then an unmistakably human moan.
Adrian sat like stone, all the hairs on her body stirring; her eyes were fixed on the slowly turning reel. A sighing breath whispered out at her, then another, and another. Then a strangled sob came, so eerie, so immediate and heartrending that it seemed torn from herself—echo of the nightmare cry that wakes you.
But it was not her voice. Nor was it her imagination. What she heard, Adrian knew, could be the voice of Stephen Myrick’s murderer.
“What I like about you day guys,” Smithers, one of the night tour men, was saying, “is your application. Know what I mean? Work all day and half the night. Don’t want to rub it in, fella, but—” The phone interrupted him.
It was scarcely eight o’clock, but to Casey it seemed as late as Smithers’s exaggeration—the middle of the night. Doggedly he kept pecking at the typewriter, scowling at the triplicate form rolled in the platen. Krug had gone to the airport to meet Judy Flesher’s mother. They would be lucky, Casey knew, to get out of there by midnight. Two murders now. His fingers felt thick as he typed steadily, translating violent death into flat official language. TV dinners and comic books. A fat, friendless sixteen-year-old strangled and left to rot…
“Yes, ma’am, he’s still here,” Smithers was saying into the phone cautiously, “but he’s off duty now. Is there something I can—Oh, I see…Well, just a minute, ma’am, I’ll see what I can do.” Grinning at Casey, he covered the mouthpiece. “Some babe for you, swinger, and only you. She says it’s important.”
Joey, Casey thought, consumed by a vision of softness and gaiety as he grabbed the receiver. With any luck at all, maybe he could get away by eleven and meet her somewhere…
“Kellog speaking,” he announced himself pompously, relief and joy ballooning in him. “Any little thing I can do for you?”
“Well, I’m not sure—But I must confess I’m awfully glad you’re still there.”
Casey’s balloon burst. “Who is this?” But he knew as soon as he spoke, and regretted his tone. “Sorry, it’s Miss Crewes, isn’t it? What can I do for you?”
“Don’t quite know.” Her voice was unsteady. “Suppose what I really need is someone to talk to.”
Casey glanced at Smithers, who was pantomiming a frantic embrace, kissing the air with a juicy smack. Clown, he thought bitterly. “Anything in particular, Miss Crewes?”
“It’s something on the tapes. On one tape, I mean. A kind of—well, I don’t know how to describe it without sounding melodramatic. Could you…” Her voice faltered. “Could you possibly come by Dr. Myrick’s now?”
Casey suppressed a groan. “Miss Crewes, you ladies shouldn’t be in that house after dark.”
“I realize. But when you hear this—”
“Can’t, Miss Crewes, that’s privileged material.”
“I suppose I deserve that.” He could hear her rapid breathing. “It could be one of the patients. I don’t know. Can’t tell. But I keep thinking—well, maybe it’s the one who killed him! Please,” she added quietly. “I know it’s foolish. It’s only a voice. But I’m here alone…”
“Be right there.” Casey shoved the receiver at Smithers. “Keep her talking till I get there.” Then he bolted out and down the stairs.
What it cost her to go into that gloomy hall, find the light switch and open the front door when he knocked, was more than Adrian would ever care to admit, even to herself. “There you are,” she said as calmly as she was able. And he smiled as if he had a finger on her pulse. “Come in, and welcome. Hope you don’t mind, but I hung up on your associate.”
“Doesn’t matter, Miss Crewes. Here, I’ll take care of the door. You go ahead.” And as she crossed the hall to her office, she heard him testing the deadbolt lock twice. Not courtesy, after all—policeman’s caution. “The back door is the same sort of lock, isn’t it?” she heard him saying, as if to himself. “And the French doors off the driveway are sealed.” A careful as well as cautious policeman. The kind of care, she thought, that makes you aware of peril. Even the windows in her office seemed hazardous now. But instead of drawing the shades, Adrian sought her chair, amazed by the weakness which had come with relief.
He didn’t waste any time discussing whether the tape was privileged material or not, for which Adrian was grateful. Instead he studied the list of tapes she had monitored, then seated himself on the scarred love seat, listening without comment to the hiss of the tape, the eerie sobbing so like that, she thought now, of a grief-stricken ghost.
“Lasts thirty seconds,” he commented. “Or is there more?”
“No, that’s all.” Adrian shut off the tape recorder. “I’ve listened to the rest. He must have realized he’d pressed the wrong button.”
“You’re sure it’s a man, Miss Crewes?”
“No, I’m not. I used ‘he’ meaning ‘X.’ ”
“You’re sure it’s not Dr. Myrick?”
“Positive. Whatever he was into,” she added, “this isn’t a stunt of some kind. It’s someone in real distress.”
“Sounds that way.” He hesitated. “You’re familiar with the machine—What do you think happened, Miss Crewes?”
“There’s only one thing that could have happened. He—X—erased the tape, then ran it back through the machine. But somewhere along the way he pressed the wrong button, and it started to record again.”
“Seems strange he wouldn’t have erased it.”
“Maybe he didn’t realize he’d—well, made any noise.”
“Possible. But anyone familiar enough with how the machine works to be able to do all that damage…”
“That’s assuming he’s rational.” Adrian hesitated. How bored he looks. And tired. Why would anyone want to be a policeman? “That sobbing sound,” she went on. “Surely no one in his right mind—” But she saw she had lost him; behind his courteous, seemingly attentive expression, she sensed his mind casting in other directions.
“Miss Crewes, do the dates have any significance for you? Can you think of anything?”
“Only the obvious.” She swallowed dryness. “Vandalism. But that awful voice seems to suggest—”
He kept nodding abstractedly. “You said before that only you and Dr. Myrick had access to these files. That means you both had keys?”
“Yes, but Steve kept his somewhere upstairs. We always used mine. I keep them locked in my desk.”
“Did Dr. Myrick have a key to your desk?”
“No, he didn’t. There’s only the one.”
“So Monday night, in order to play that June tape, he had to go upstairs and get his own keys for the files. And Tuesday morning the files were locked, leaving the tape he’d been listening to in his office, and the new one from the meeting still on the machine in the front room. Have to check if the file keys were on the body.” He was silent for a while, and she wished she knew what he was thinking. “Miss Crewes, in your opinion, could this much damage be done”—he indicated the list she had drawn up—“in a few hours?”
“No, that’s hours and hours of taping. Even if whoever—even if he didn’t listen to them, it would still take a great deal of time to erase that many.”
“So it couldn’t have been done in one sitting—between, say, midnight and four or five in the morning?”
“No, I don’t think so. In fact, I’m certain it couldn’t.”
He kept gnawing the side of his left index finger, biting, then smoothing the teethmarks, biting again. “How about your keys, Miss Crewes? You have a key for this house?”
“Two, for both doors. And my desk key, of course.”
“Three keys. How do you handle them, Miss Crewes?”
>
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Do you keep them somewhere special?”
“With my own keys. They’re always with me on one key ring. They’re never out of my possession. I’ve always been very care—” Her voice died, and appalled, she stared at him, her entire being infused by something dreadful as she read his thought. “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “Remember I told you—”
“Yes, your purse was snatched. When, Miss Crewes?”
“A month ago. The twenty-seventh of July.” They kept looking at each other intently. “The money was taken, nothing else. You remember my saying that? Just money, nothing else?”
“You said your purse wasn’t found till the next day.”
“In the morning, yes.” If only they could stop staring; her eyes felt pulled from their sockets. “You see, don’t you? Yes, of course you do. The keys could have been copied and put back in my purse. Then it was thrown where someone in the building would find it.”
“Did you see the person who attacked you?”
“Only a shadow. He was behind me.”
“You’re sure it was a man?”
“No, not really. Someone in pants. He knocked me down, you see. Not hard to do, as you can guess. And I was too frightened and shocked—”
“Yes, I understand. So it could have been anyone. Male or female.” He stood up abruptly. “Miss Crewes, have you had any dinner yet?”
“No, but I really don’t think I’ll be—”
“You have something at home in case you get hungry later?”
“Yes, some eggs and cheese, that sort of thing.” Why, she started to ask, but by that time he was saying that he would see her home. “That won’t be necessary, thanks,” Adrian told him. “I have my own car.”
“Then I’ll follow you,” he said firmly. “I’d like to have a look at your lock arrangements. If there isn’t a bolt or a chain on your apartment door, I’ll see that you get one on tonight.” He smiled reassuringly. “Don’t mean to frighten you, Miss Crewes. These are just precautions. We don’t want to take any chances.”
Then he told her about Judy Flesher, and she understood finally what he was getting at.
TWENTY-TWO
Something or someone waited to be recognized, but in his uneasy dream, Casey could see only a vague shadow. Then a ticking awakened him. Not the clock, he knew, for the tap-tap was uneven. What he heard must be a dripping from the eaves. Rain in August? He raised himself up and looked out. Gray-black, cottony silence beyond his windows, a thick sea fog. Jack the Ripper weather. The ugly old pines which lined his street looked black and menacing. A nut case, he could hear Timms saying. Two down, and how many more to go?
Against regulations, Casey had left the door on the latch, and after a quick check of Miss Crewes’s lock arrangements, he had returned to the house on Palisades Avenue. All fits, he kept thinking as he prowled the lower floor. But what pattern? Like a kaleidoscope, his mind turned bits of facts this way and that, creating enigmatic abstractions which connected no place. Narcosis. Psychosis. The words were legion. Crime of passion. Ritual murder. But the textbooks on homicide are being rewritten, he thought wearily as he listened once more to the eerie sobbing on the tape recorder. Perhaps even the victims hadn’t known why they were killed…
A car turned the corner, and through the lacy tangle of hibiscus which screened the front window of Miss Crewes’s office, Casey spied headlights. It was a cab drawing up across the street. As Casey watched, a man got out and paid the driver. For some time after the cab pulled away, he stood at the curb facing Myrick’s house. A tallish man wearing a dark hat and what looked like a raincoat.
His heartbeat quickening as he considered the possible significance of a coat worn on a summer night, Casey moved slowly away from the circle of light cast by the desk lamp. Then, catfooted on the crepe soles he habitually wore, he swiftly slid into the entry hall and waited by the front door.
Leather heels clicked on the pavement outside, a cautious pace. Then the sound stopped. Either thinking it over, Casey decided, or the man had reached the lawn. Opening his mouth slightly to quiet the hissing of breath in his nostrils, Casey waited for the scrape of soles on the steps. But no sound reached him, no hint of the sort of movement a caller might make. Loosening the .38 in the holster clipped to his belt, he leaned his back against the front door, his left hand resting lightly on the knob. But no hand outside turned it. No one fumbled a key into the lock.
Moving aside from the arc of the door’s swing, Casey reached out, turned the knob and flung the door open. No one was standing there. Taking the sort of chance he had learned not to, Casey stepped out onto the porch. The man was standing on the lawn near the hibiscus bushes, looking in through the lighted window.
It was William Myrick. “For God’s sake,” he cried furiously, “what the hell kind of a game—”
“Sorry to scare you, Mr. Myrick. It’s Kellog, Police Department.”
“Oh, I see. Wondered when I saw the light.” He crossed the lawn and came up the steps. “You fellows work late, don’t you?”
“As a matter of fact, we’re through here, but Miss Crewes called me.” Casey explained about the damaged tapes, but Myrick made no comment. “Will you be staying here tonight, Mr. Myrick?”
“Afraid I haven’t the stomach for that. I’ll be at the Miramar Hotel. Just came by to have a look before I check in.” Brushing by Casey, he stepped in and turned on the hall light. “God,” he muttered, “what a mausoleum. Why Steve didn’t modernize—By the way,” he added coldly, “shouldn’t I have been notified that this house would be unsealed before the inquest?” A loaded question, Casey realized from his tone. But it was not until the next morning that he discovered it was also a declaration of war…
He was half an hour late checking in, and Krug glowered at him, not bothering to say hello. Fog stuck to the second-story windows, the lights seemed dim. A curious quiet hung over the squad room. Weather blues, Casey decided, and ignoring Krug’s mood, he elaborated on the report he had filed on Adrian Crewes’s call last night. “So I checked to see if she had one of those burglar chains on her door,” he finished, “and she does, so I figured she’d probably be safe enough.”
“Our gentleman cop.” Krug’s smile was ominous. “You had a good night’s sleep, too, I guess?”
“Not particularly. By the time I typed my report—”
“While I was downstairs getting puked on by that Flesher kid’s mother.”
“Sorry, Al, but I figured the report was more important.”
“Yeah, I can see what you mean, I read it.”
“Then you know what she might be up against. Al, just in case, I think we ought to arrange some protection—”
“Protection, my ass!” Krug exploded. “Who needs it is you, hotshot. Couldn’t wait to get out there and play Sherlock, hah? Detective Third solos and makes bureau history.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Stick around, you’ll see.” And Krug strode out.
Baffled, Casey glanced around the squad room, but every head was bent in deep concentration over sheaves of paper. Not a single eye met his. A familiar face smiled out of the Westside Section—a Thursday feature in the Los Angeles Times—lying on Krug’s desk. SANTA MONICA REALTOR PREDICTS HIGH-RISE GHETTOS. It was Frank Simmons, and the prediction had been the highlight of his speech to last night’s meeting of the Westside Apartment House Owners Association.
Sitting at his own desk, Casey began to scan the overnights. Myrick’s inquest was slated for ten o’clock, he noticed. The old night clerk who had been held up at the hotel had died. From the captain’s office he kept hearing muffled voices, impossible to identify. Something was going on, all right, and from the mood of the office, it had to be dire.
The captain’s door banged open, then shut after Timms. “All right,” the lieutenant called wearily, “let’s get started. We got a hell of a mess here and the sooner we get at it, the better. Where
’s Al?”
“The can or some place,” Zwingler answered. “Want me to track him down?”
Timms shook his head. “Leave it—he knows, anyway. He’s due at Myrick’s inquest at ten.” He started assigning the day’s details—one detective to keep canvassing Judy Flesher’s street, another to continue on Palisades Avenue—“I want somebody who saw that girl Monday night. Saw her leave Myrick’s, and if somebody was with her. Ralph,” he said to Zwingler, “you keep bird-dogging that hotel holdup. Better check with Robbery, too. We had two come in last night that looked suspiciously like that hotel job. Haynes, you’re backup again today until further notice.” Then he leaned back against one of the desks, folding his arms, and said, “Okay, now for our new thrills.” He briefly reviewed Casey’s report about the destroyed tapes, the strange sobbing voice he had heard the night before. “According to Kellog, we’ve got ourselves a whole new ball game here. What we’re looking for is somebody who knew how and where to get keys. Somebody who knew about those tapes. Somebody familiar enough with the household to know that Myrick was usually out late, and the housekeeper was off Sunday and Monday.”
“Your fat girl was made to order,” Haynes commented. “To get back at Myrick for kicking her out of the group, she was busy vandalizing when he caught her—”
“Don’t strain your imagination,” Timms cut in sourly. “There’s enough of that going on here already.”
“What’s the hassle with the captain?” Zwingler asked.
“Myrick’s brother is in there lodging a formal complaint.” Timms glared at Casey. “We’re about to be charged with negligence. Specifically, being party to the destruction of private property. Start praying right now that he doesn’t specify it could be evidence, too.”
Bewildered, Casey stared at him. “You can’t mean the tapes…”
The Complete Krug & Kellog Page 47
