Stop that. Look ahead there: a block away, the long wall of the drive-in theater. On the immense screen towering over the wall surrounding the arenalike drive-in, Technicolor images flickered, distorted from this view. Crowd in there, Adrian reassured herself. Safety in numbers. She could ask them to call the police from the box office if the Citroёn followed her in.
Whirling into the drive-in entrance, she stopped with a screech, ignoring the man in the ticket office, who beckoned to her to move ahead. In her rear-view mirror the Citroёn was a white blaze of headlights, a flash of blue, then it disappeared down Olympic. Adrian expelled her held breath with a deep sigh. My God, she thought ruefully, all that sound and fury over nothing. You are a case, Ms. Crewes. What would Gloria Steinem say if she could see you now? You have definitely not come a long way, baby.
TWENTY-NINE
“Where the hell did you run off to?” Krug’s rasping voice came ear-splitting through the receiver. “Christ, I leave for two minutes—”
“Save it, Al. I’ve got a lead on those keys.” Rapidly Casey filled him in. “Clay, the assistant manager here, doesn’t remember any Brown. But it can’t be a coincidence. He picked the biggest and busiest hotel around. The perfect place to stay anonymous.”
“Too bad you didn’t do the same.”
“Al, you’re not listening. This is a legitimate—”
“Would you believe there’s some brass around here that’s beginning to wonder if you’ve started your own private police force going? Get your ass in here.” Krug added furiously, “And I mean pronto,” then he hung up.
Casey made it back in record time, and adrenals pumping, stiffened with righteous rage, took the stairs up to the bureau three at a time. But except for Smithers, who was catching tonight, the squad room was empty.
“Beats me,” he said when Casey asked what was going on. “Some guy named Argyle just phoned in a complaint about somebody trying to get in an apartment. Al and the lieutenant took off like a pair of striped-ass apes.”
Casey dived for the nearest phone. A professional killer. Or a lunatic. Ah God, he thought, we’ve really bitched it this time. But maybe she’s all right. Thick-fingered, he dialed Adrian Crewes’s number, heard it ring only once, then the receiver was picked up. Loud and clear, Krug said, “Yeah—who’s this?”
“Me, Al. What’s happening?”
“Don’t ask me, sport, you know as much as I do. Hang on, the lieutenant wants to talk to you.”
“Looks like we might just have that confirmation of your old lady’s mysterious stranger,” Timms said. “All we can get out of the neighbor who saw him trying to get in here is a general description. A glimpse was all she got on her way in her own door, she says. She kept hearing him fooling with the lock here, so she got nervous and called the manager. He didn’t waste any time getting hold of us.”
A faceless shadow. Brown. Burns. Double, possible triple murderer with a clear obsession. And thwarted now.
“…safe enough to presume she’s out someplace,” Timms was saying. “Her car’s gone, and there’s no purse lying around.”
“Is the cat there, sir?”
“Yeah, I spotted it when the manager let us in.”
“He’s after her briefcase, Lieutenant. Something in her notes he’s afraid of. He tried to get at it yesterday, but she had it with her.”
“Those goddamn tapes again.” Timms’s sigh was a hiss. “Okay, if you’re right, it means he’s been watching this place. Saw her leave, maybe, and hotfooted it up here. Which means somebody else might’ve seen him…”
They were back in ten minutes, and the lieutenant immediately assigned two night-tour men to the apartment house—one to watch the front entrance, the other to keep a surveillance on the subterranean garage until Adrian Crewes arrived. She was to be taken into protective custody and on no account released again until Timms gave the order. Three plainclothes patrolmen from a downstairs detail would be borrowed for a quick sweep of the neighborhood around the apartment house with the hope of finding someone who might have noticed a man watching the building.
While the orders went out rapid-fire, Casey kept poring over his notebook, trying to coax his memory. Something seen or heard. A dim connection, but it felt real. He’d almost had it when Al and the lieutenant had roared in like two bulls into a bullring…
“For my dough, it’s the hit man,” Krug was saying, “and one of those kids knows him. All that crap about vandalism is him making sure nobody fingered him.”
“Good enough guess,” Timms conceded. “So his entry into the Crewes apartment was a double check she didn’t hear anything on one of the tapes and make a note of it? Sounds logical.” He looked at Casey. “Fits your theory about the briefcase, too.”
“But it doesn’t fit that voice I heard on the tape, sir.”
“Ah, for Chrissake,” Krug growled, “he’s a pro and he’s tricky, we know that. He gets us thinking it’s a nut, what’s he got to lose?”
Something precious, Casey’s intuition told him. Something an unbalanced, obsessive mind will go to any lengths to protect. An idea?
“…Still don’t have anything to get our teeth into,” Timms was complaining. “A shadow, that’s all we’ve got so far.”
A shadow at her door, indifferent of exposure, trying to open it with a key which had worked yesterday. Casey knew he was on the right track now. And picturing a bitterly, murderously thwarted being, he felt his skin crawl. Capable of anything. Anything. The world would be destroyed for an idea someday, and against the lunatic who harbored it, nothing sane would prevail.
“Start pulling ’em in,” Timms was saying wearily as Casey left the squad room. “Known hard guys. Narco suspects. Anybody we can lay our hands on…”
“It’s coming in,” a puffy-eyed policewoman in Communications told him. “Up to ‘H’ so far. You want to wait till it’s finished?”
“No, give me what you have, please.”
Casey’s eyes flew down the print-out from DMV headquarters in Sacramento listing Citroёn owners for a radius of fifty miles: Aaron…Appleby…Asnar…Axton…Baker…Beaker…Benson…Bepple…Bernstein—
Bernstein, Solomon A.
Casey ran for the stairs, taking them three at a time.
THIRTY
“What’re you talking about, investigating? What’s to investigate with a car that’s for months sitting in the garage, I ask you? It’s not enough my Sol’s flat on his back, couldn’t drive if he had to with his heart condition, you got to come here worrying his poor wife about a car nobody uses?”
A formidable woman, Mrs. Solomon Bernstein. And poor, in the sense of pitiable, was the last word you would ever apply to her. She was not to be pushed or even persuaded, Krug and Casey found, until at last they managed to convince her that it was her duty as a citizen to cooperate with the police.
“So go already, look,” she told them irritably, handing over the garage key. “Take a picture if you want, it’s nothing to me!”
Second garage from the end of the line of single garages facing the alley behind the Bernsteins’ two-story apartment house. The garage doors were wood but well preserved, the easy-to-open overhead type. Inside stood a Chrysler Imperial.
“Simmons,” Casey groaned. “Frank Simmons, our friendly Realtor.” And now he knew what it was he had forgotten. “Remember the Parsons kid mentioning that Sandy used to make it with some motorcycle dude?”
Charles “Tay” Taylor. At last they had their connection.
“Sure, months ago I turned the keys over to Frank,” Solomon Bernstein told them a few minutes later. “The wife doesn’t drive, so what else was I going to do to keep it running? ‘All I ask,’ I told him, ‘is you keep the thing going so it’s not a pile of junk by the time I can drive again. A favor, Frank.’ ”
As his wife had said, he was flat on his back, not in the hospital any longer, but in the comfort of a bedroom at the back of their spacious apartment. A cylinder labeled Caution: Contains
Oxygen—No Smoking stood in a corner. On the nightstand beside a rented crank-up hospital bed sat a tray of medicines. Bernstein had been watching television, but when his wife reluctantly let Krug and Casey into the room, he had switched it off with a remote-control device.
“So what’s this all about? I mean police,” he was saying anxiously, “must be serious. Look, I’ve got full insurance, so if, God forbid, Frank’s had an accident—”
“Nothing like that,” Krug told him. “This is in connection with his daughter. He ever talk to you much about her?”
“Better you should ask if he ever talked about anything else!” Bernstein shook his balding head. “So that’s it. Sandy.” A frail, waxy-looking prophet now, he said mournfully, “I told him. Believe me, years I’ve been telling him. ‘Frank,’ I used to say, ‘you keep worshiping that kid the way you do, you’re going to end up getting hurt bad. She’s only a kid,’ I used to tell him. ‘A young human being, Frank. You got to let loose a little or she’s going to break your heart. Just to grow up, Frank, she’ll have to break your heart!’ ”
“Mr. Bernstein,” Casey began, “after Sandy died—”
“No, wait, let me finish.”
“Haven’t much time,” Krug said. But nothing short of a gag would have silenced the sick man.
“This is my partner we’re talking about. My partner for twenty years. A man I respect. And whatever he’s done, I’m going to stick by him.”
“We don’t know that he’s done anything.”
“But I’m telling you he needs consideration. Because he’s a troubled man. A sick man, Frank is. Ever since that poor girl, may she rest in peace, met that momser on his motorcycle.”
“Did Mr. Simmons ever mention a name?”
“How could he when she wouldn’t tell him? None of his business, she says. Imagine, her own father, it’s none of his business some junkie she’s running around with!” He sighed gustily. “Tragic, tragic. Couldn’t call it anything else. A situation like that, couldn’t end up anything but tragic.”
He had missed the funeral, of course, he went on, but Emma, his wife, had attended. A strange small ceremony, only the parents and a preacher at the graveside. No friends of Sandy’s had been permitted…
“Not that I’m criticizing,” he added hastily. “Only mention it—Well, enough, she was buried, it was over and done with. Time, I told Frank, to forgive and forget.” But Simmons had neither forgiven nor forgotten. “Like a poison it was. Something eating at him, you understand? Poor kid’s not cold in her grave and here’s Frank all of a sudden raving about filth. Filth, that’s all he can talk about. Things she said about him, he meant. Maybe in a diary he finds? Anyway, it’s driving him crazy. ‘Frank,’ I kept telling him, ‘whatever this is, it’s kid stuff. And she’s gone, Frank, you got to accept it.’ But he don’t listen. Can’t, maybe. Just keeps poisoning himself, brooding.” And he sighed again. “To tell the truth, it’s got so I dread the sight of him. Isn’t that something? My own partner for twenty years…”
Following procedure, they checked at the Simmons house near Ninth and Georgina next, but Mrs. Simmons refused to open the door more than a crack. Her husband was out showing a property, she told them fiercely. Frank had been working night and day for months now. If they wanted to speak to him they would have to try at the office. Didn’t they have anything better to do than bother decent people?
“Scared,” said Krug when she slammed the door in their faces. “You think she don’t know he’s cracked up?”
On the off chance they might get lucky, they whirled by Adrian Crewes’s apartment building, receiving the disheartening report from the stakeout there that the crippled woman hadn’t been seen yet. The plainclothes team canvassing the neighborhood had gathered nothing in the way of information either. Obviously any luck this night was not to be on the side of the angels.
THIRTY-ONE
The titans on the screen were locked in mortal combat. Socko-whammo. No Union troops over the hill this time.
Curiously detached from the many-times-life-sized action on the distant projection screen, the sound track shouting and screaming issued tinnily from a microphone suspended by a metal clip over the half-opened car window beside her. Titans squeaking like mice. Ridiculous, Adrian thought, and bored by the endless fight scene, she finally turned off the volume. Much better.
On the huge screen, gallons of ketchup blood flowed in every direction. The hero’s, of course. Must be, Adrian thought, because the bestial-looking one who was systematically beating the heroine now had to be the bad guy. But such a tireless brute, you almost had to admire him. He kept beating and beating the star’s near-nude body from every conceivable angle, but she seemed impervious to serious injury. It’s all that silicone, Adrian decided. Her secret weapon. He doesn’t scare her nearly as much as the annual bill from her plastic surgeon.
Although there had been plenty of empty spaces nearer the huge screen, Adrian had chosen to park in the last row as usual, having learned from experience to avoid the chance of neighboring cars full of baby-sisters or lovers without the price or desire for privacy. Hers was the only car in her row. Ahead of her, across the driving aisle, the next row was completely empty also. But beyond that, in semicircle ranks separated by wide aisles, cars stood in orderly rows facing the screen, each hitched, as she was, to a microphone on an expandable cord connected to a metal post.
Her mind wandering, Adrian tried to imagine what some future discoverer might make of this place. In the year 2500, say, some keloid-scarred mutant digging through the atomic dust of the Last Great War, finding this mysterious ceremonial place. A temple? No, a burial ground once enclosed by a high fence. And such curious sarcophagi those old pre-holocaust people used. Metal in various sizes and shapes large enough to hold whole families. Ford. Chevrolet. Cadillac. Possibly these were tribal names? Inside the sarcophagi were couches and seating places. Obviously couples and tribal units had been buried together in sweet repose. Very strange, those unknown pre-Bomb people.
Two rows beyond hers, only its top visible over the ranked cars ahead, a vehicle with its lights out drifted slowly along the aisle. Directly ahead of her, clearly visible across the empty row, someone was backing out awkwardly. Not a courteous type, either, for he switched on his lights to drive out, and two horns beeped in angry protest.
On the screen the bloody but unbowed hero was crawling grimly toward the lady-beater. Get him, tiger. Adrian yawned hugely and settled deeper in the seat. From the corner of her eye she spied the drifting car turning slowly into the last aisle. Another misanthrope, she thought vaguely, expecting it to pass by behind her, seeking solitude down the aisle. But the vehicle pulled in beside hers. A foreign car. A Citroën.
“Got an APB out,” Krug reported when they checked in. “Simmons and the Citroën. And just in case we miss him, we included his Chrysler.”
“Better stake out his house right away,” Timms decided. “Christ, what we need tonight is the whole goddamn force on hand! If only we knew where that woman—”
“Something coming in, Lieutenant,” Smithers sang out. “Sweep team just found a neighbor who spotted a blue Citroën parked in the alley behind the Crewes building.”
“Hardly news, we already know he was there.”
Smithers said “Okay” into the phone and banged the receiver. “This was early, Lieutenant. Before that manager called us.”
“Christ,” Timms groaned, “then he did see her go. That’s why he was so free trying to get into her apartment.”
“Maybe he even followed her,” Krug suggested. “Like to a restaurant, or something. That way he’d know he had time to toss her place.”
Consumed by a bitter realization that they had failed their first covenant to preserve and protect life, Casey predicted that if Simmons had followed Miss Crewes, he would go back after her. A crippled woman who couldn’t run. A proud woman who wouldn’t scream in time. “He’s got to get to that briefcase. Her notes from the tapes.
That’s all he’s living for now. To destroy that filth he kept telling Bernstein about.” And he would kill her if he had to. But of course they all knew that now.
“Okay, let’s have it”—Timms kept snapping his fingers—“friends, bars, restaurants. Any place she’s mentioned going to. Putting out a bulletin on her isn’t going to help much now. We’ve got to have specific places to look.”
“Claimed she didn’t have any friends here,” Krug muttered. “But she did say something once about picking up a hamburger—”
“—at a drive-in,” Casey said. “And she goes to drive-in movies, too.”
“Better hope she didn’t tonight,” Timms said grimly, “because I don’t know a better place to commit murder.”
THIRTY-TWO
Between one breath and the next, it seemed, he was out of the Citroën and at the window beside her before she could roll it up—one swift hand knocking the microphone aside, sliding through the half-opened window, hand like a mitt clamping over her mouth and nose pressing her brutally back against the headrest.
Air trapped in her swelled like a monstrous bubble as Adrian clawed frantically at the iron hand. Her heart banged wildly. To die this way. While all those people sealed in their cars stared at giant-sized, make-believe Technicolor death. Even if she could scream, no one would hear…
Suddenly the hand was gone, and as she dizzily gulped air, he opened the car door beside her. “Move,” she heard him whisper, and he pushed her hard. She slid, half falling, across the seat. Her canes fell clattering. Her head knocked the passenger door. Trying to straighten up, she felt the seat lurch and then he was in beside her, a huge presence filling the car with curious breathing. “Told you,” he wheezed. “Didn’t I…tell you…I’d have to…do something?”
The Complete Krug & Kellog Page 51
