Barreling eastward on Olympic, Casey kept thinking, Needle in the haystack. Needle. Haystack. Even if Adrian Crewes had gone to a drive-in movie, chances of their finding her seemed slim at best, dependent more on luck than police work. There were at least four drive-in theaters within reasonable freeway-driving distance, but one was in Culver City, two in the sprawling West District covered by the Los Angeles police, only one—the Olympic—in Santa Monica. One out of four. Which meant they had to depend on other-city patrol cars to check out the other three, and as Casey well knew, local dispatches would take precedence over any out-of-town bulletins. All they could hope for was a quiet night in neighboring police divisions. A quiet night, and a fast pickup on the Citroën.
“Christ, will you look at that,” Krug was growling beside him. “You see what I see?”
They were nearing the Olympic Drive-In Theatre, and on the huge projection screen towering over the fence surrounding it, Casey glimpsed an enormous full-color nude. “Not bad, but I’ve seen better.”
“Not fifty feet high in public you haven’t!” Talk about permissiveness, he raved. Talk about crumbling moral values. Good old Uncle Al, your friendly neighborhood censor. He was still going strong when Casey pulled up behind the Santa Monica patrol car parked just west of the drive-in entrance.
With the window rolled up, the inside of her car pulsed like a bellows, filling, emptying, filling again with his huge sighing, gulping breaths. He seemed to be eating the oxygen, disgorging an acrid steam which stifled and sickened Adrian. A lunatic. A madman. Shadow in every city dweller’s claustrophobic nightmare. “Told you,” he kept wheezing, voice strained by unbearable tension. “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I?”
She knew she must respond. “Yes, I’m sorry—”
“Don’t say that!”
“I only meant I should have listened to you.”
Through the windshield, reflections from the distant screen made planes of shifting light on his face. An ordinary middle-aged Babbitt face distorted by aberrational fury. He didn’t look at her once, but squeezed in behind the driving wheel; turned halfway toward her, he was obliquely watchful. Cat with a mouse, Adrian thought. She knew she dared not move or even stir. Anything might set him off.
“Could be the one you’re looking for,” the patrolman behind the wheel of the squad car reported to Krug and Casey. “Guy at the ticket office doesn’t remember the car, but the woman’s description sounds right.”
“Okay, watch the exit in case we miss her,” Krug instructed. “You got that APB on the Citroën?”
“Yes, sir, we’ll keep our eyes open.”
“Yeah, she came in right after the feature started,” the man who sold tickets told them. “Reason I noticed her, she kind of hesitated out there”—pointing toward the street—“like she changed her mind or something. Nice-looking woman. Like I told the cop—”
“Okay,” Krug cut him off, “when’s the next intermission?”
The man consulted his watch. “Feature’ll be over in seven minutes. Then there’s a three-minute short, advertising our snack shop here.”
Krug thanked him sourly and they pulled into the huge darkened arena. Casey doused the Mustang’s headlights. In low gear, he began creeping up one aisle and down the next, working from the first row nearest the screen backward. All his urgency was gone now, erased by a certainty that she must be there. When they found her they would take her into protective custody. The real thrills would begin when the Citroën was apprehended.
“You want my notes,” Adrian said carefully. “Everything I’ve written?”
“Filth. All of it. Lies and filth. They made her say those things. He made her say them!”
“It’s all in my briefcase. At my apart—”
“She never talked like that till she met him.” He made a sound in his throat. She saw tears on his cheek. His gloved hands kept clenching the steering wheel convulsively. “Such a good child. Sweet. Innocent. And she loved her daddy. More than anybody in the world she loved her daddy! That’s what’s so terrible, you see,” he said reasonably, “he taught her not to. Taught her everything vile.” But that filth wasn’t his baby. He made her say all those terrible things. But that wasn’t really Sandy. “D’you hear me,” he shouted. “That isn’t Sandy, and nobody’s going to say it is! I won’t let you kill her with your obscene lies!”
A long list of film credits rolled on the screen. People were getting out of their cars now, heading for the food stand at the front. The three-minute film ad picturing hot dogs, hamburgers, sundaes, candy bars, sickly-yellow buttered popcorn began, a child’s gigantic, gluttonous dream writ high against the night sky.
Through the densely ranked cars it was impossible to see more than one row at a time in the darkness. And no cars were pulling out, Casey noticed. Obviously, drive-in patrons were relentless double-feature fans. But as he crept down the second aisle from the last, he spied an empty space. Glimpsed the vacant row beyond. Glimpsed two cars in the row beyond that, parked side by side. He stamped the brake pedal. “Al, it’s—”
“Yeah, I see. Keep going.”
The Mustang’s gears juddered. Casey fed gas delicately, his foot on the accelerator stiff with tension. “Citroën looked empty, Al. Unless he spotted us and ducked down…”
“He’s in her car. Behind the wheel.” Krug glanced at his watch. “Got about a minute and a half till the floodlights go on. Not a chance he won’t spot us, so we got to nail him fast.”
She saw people on the move, but in the wrong direction, away from her. No one to pass by this last row, no one. Adrian stared at the screen blaring REASONABLY PRICED SNACKS but her vision was blurred, peripheral: all she perceived was his gloved hands grasping the wheel. Sandy’s father. Her mind reeled crazily. He had killed Steve. Now he would kill her? No, lights soon, he couldn’t. Intermission. A chance someone would help her, if only she could get someone to notice.
Glacially slow while he raved and sighed and sobbed pitiably, she slid a hand toward the passenger door. If she could get it open fast enough, throw herself out—But oh God, did the latch handle work up or down? Trying to picture herself crawling out on the driver’s side as she had a hundred, no a thousand times, she found she couldn’t remember. A mechanical action. Mindless. Panic had erased it, scrubbed everything from her brain but the paralyzing certainty that he would never let her go.
“…wipe it all out,” he was saying breathlessly. “Scourge it, yes. Then she’ll come back again. My sweet little girl. And everything’ll be like it always…”
Abruptly he reached for the ignition switch, and for an instant Adrian believed he meant to take her keys. Instead he switched on the motor, and with a savage jerk, moved the gearshift selector into reverse. The motor roared, but the car didn’t move. “Brake,” he muttered. “Where is it? Show me!”
“Yes, all right.” Adrian shifted, straightening. Leaned toward him slowly, smelling his sweat, his fever. Into thy hands, O Lord. And yanked the keys out of the ignition, pitching them into the back seat.
As she lunged away, grabbing at the door handle, the Mustang turned into the last aisle and they saw the plume of exhaust from her car. “Go,” Krug roared, and Casey floored the accelerator pedal—one long surge, a screeching slide, and they had blocked her car, the wheels still moving while they jumped out. Casey dived for the driver’s side while Krug, in three giant strides, made it to the passenger door. “Police, freeze!”
But Simmons was already out of the car, a flailing wildman. Casey grabbed him, lost him, grabbed again, eyes tearing, ears ringing as the human windmill knocked him to and fro as if he weighed no more than a rag doll.
Suddenly he was flat on his back, blinded by glaring light. Two giants towered over him, Simmons a frozen man now with Krug’s Detective Special growing out of his ear. “One move, mister, and your brains go flying.”
“You don’t understand. I have to—”
“Over against the car, mister, move!”
Casey scrambled to his feet dizzily. “Miss Crewes…”
“She’s okay.”
“If you’d just let me explain,” Simmons kept saying sadly. “I can explain everything.”
By now they had an audience, but it didn’t seem to bother Adrian Crewes. “Need I tell you how happy I am to see you?” She laughed shakily. “No, really, I’m quite all right. He hardly touched me. Are you all right? Oh, that’s fine, I’m so glad. Look, if you could just find my keys in the back seat…”
THIRTY-THREE
For the protection of the department, as well as the suspect, Lieutenant Timms called in a staff psychiatrist to observe and advise while they questioned Frank Simmons. But Simmons was neither violent nor terribly irrational; only evasive, like most suspects, bewildered, swinging like a pendulum between self-protective lies and bitterly honest admissions of guilt. He seemed relieved to be able to shed some of his murderous secrets. But only some: Yes, he had bludgeoned Charles Taylor in the park. Yes, he had struck Myrick, but only because the hypnotist had surprised him; it was an accident. He would not talk at all about Judy Flesher, and when Krug and Casey pressed him on the subject, he retreated into another personality—the indignant citizen full of complaints that the police rewarded honesty with indifference.
“Talk about nuts,” Krug marveled when they finally gave up and went out to report to the lieutenant. “Here’s a guy confessing he’s killed two people so far, and he’s got the gall to squawk how we never protect the taxpayers. Says—quote, unquote—he’s going to take up the matter with the City Council. How d’you like that for an entry in the Nuthouse Sweepstakes?”
“Yeah, schizophrenia, the shrink already told me.” Timms sighed wearily. “Not a chance of a conviction, of course. Best we can hope for is a court review after he’s spent a few years at the funny farm.”
While they had been questioning Simmons, he told them, night-tour detectives had discovered some bloodstained clothing in the trunk of the Chrysler. A lab team had already checked out Simmons’s shoes at home, finding bits of a contact lens imbedded in the sole of one. No doubt but the prescription would turn out to be Myrick’s. As far as Timms could see, they had two of their three homicides wrapped up tight.
“Got a policewoman staying with the wife,” he added. “She’s a basket case, of course. For my money, she’s known all along Simmons flipped out. But maybe one thing led to another, and by the time she got the picture what was going on, it was too late to do anything but pray.”
As far as they could piece the story together, Casey reported, Simmons’s mental breakdown had probably begun long before his daughter’s death, starting with bewilderment at her rejection of his authority, a consuming rage when she transferred her loyalty and affection to a nameless young motorcyclist who was obviously corrupting her. “He must’ve realized she was doping, sir. Maybe even found some pills. And naturally he guessed where she got them, and the habit. If she hadn’t been meeting Taylor on street corners, Simmons probably would have killed him long ago.”
“How we figure it,” Krug said, “the girl wasn’t shaping up to suit Simmons after he sent her to Myrick. Sure she was off the pills, but she was still bad-mouthing him, like these kids do their folks.”
Timms nodded. “According to Mrs. Simmons, he expected miracles. Kept talking about how she’d be his sweet little girl again. And when it didn’t happen, he made her quit the group.”
“Yeah, so right away she picks up with Taylor again, and bingo!, tries the hard stuff and ODs.”
“That was the final break, I suppose?”
Casey said, “Yes, sir, we think so. After Sandy was buried he started watching Myrick’s house. Who he was after was Taylor, but it took him a while to decide how to find him.”
“Let’s get the dates straight.” The lieutenant picked up a pencil. “The daughter dropped out on July twentieth, right? Then, two days later, she died. Probably buried about the twenty-fourth?”
“The twenty-fifth, sir. There was an autopsy. A couple of days later, on the twenty-seventh, Simmons grabbed Miss Crewes’s handbag. His purpose, he says, was to get in and examine Myrick’s records to try to find out Taylor’s name and whereabouts.”
“So the tapes were a discovery after he’d gained entrance?” Timms tapped his teeth with the pencil. “Sounds logical. One thing leading to another.”
Casey agreed, one thing always led to another. “According to Miss Crewes, those sessions were pretty salty, sir. Lots of Freudian delving into parental hangups. Simmons would have heard his fatherly devotion described as everything else in the book—from egomania to incest.”
“Yeah, and if that ain’t filth, I don’t know what is. Guy may be crazy, but he’s got a point. These rotten kids, they’re always loading their hangups on their parents.”
“Sometimes with good reason, Al. All right,” Timms said briskly, “so for several weeks Simmons kept entering Myrick’s house, monitoring, then erasing the tapes, right? But he still wasn’t solving his first problem, Taylor. And finally, two weeks ago, around the fifteenth, he approached Judy Flesher, posing as a cop. She set Taylor up for him, supposedly for a bust, and Simmons killed him.”
“Crazy bastard should’ve quit then while he was ahead.” Krug popped a kitchen match alight with his thumbnail, puffing clouds of acrid smoke around the small cigar clamped between his teeth. “Instead he keeps sneaking into Myrick’s and getting an earful every night the housekeeper’s gone. Then, Monday night, Myrick catches him.”
“What we think happened, sir,” Casey continued the story, “the meeting probably broke up early, probably before Simmons got there. He probably waited as usual, and when he didn’t see any sign of activity, he slipped in. We think he was inside only a short time when Myrick heard him. He took one swing, he claims, and got out fast. But Judy Flesher was outside, waiting to waylay Myrick.”
Timms shook his head. “The day that kid was born, she was already out of luck. You think he bluffed it out somehow, then followed her home?”
They agreed it was possible, Simmons wouldn’t talk yet about Judy Flesher.
“Well, McGregor’s got all his clothes in the lab,” Timms said. “Only a matter of time till we get match-ups with those fibres and stuff they dug out from under her fingernails.”
Only a matter of time. And one thing leading to another. All human progress was either crazy or logical, Casey thought, and like a train, civilization seemed to run on both tracks. Anyone who doubted this had only to read police reports.
“What bugs me,” Timms was saying, “is how he made the next connection. To Miss Crewes, I mean. Supposedly nobody knew those tapes were going to end up as part of a book, so how the hell did he find out?”
“We told him, sir.” Casey ignored Krug’s scowl. A mistake was a mistake, it wasn’t their first or last. “When we were questioning him about Sandy at his office, something came up about Miss Crewes’s job, and we just happened to mention the book.” We, meaning Krug, but partners didn’t work that way.
“So, in effect,” Timms said, “you two blabbermouths handed him another victim?”
“Looks that way, sir.”
“Nice going. I’ll remember to mention that in my commendation. Okay,” Timms said disgustedly, “get your reports done. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Asshole,” Krug hissed at Casey as they returned to their own desks. “What’re you, George Washington or something? All you had to say was you didn’t know.”
“What about tomorrow when Simmons explains how he found out about the book, Al? Got any fast-talk ready for that situation?” Casey smiled sweetly. “I’ll get started on the reports. Good night, partner. Don’t talk in your sleep.”
Krug walked out looking ready to chew nails, but for once in his life he was speechless. Casey finished the reports in just over an hour, and dead beat, checked out, plodding down the stairs for the last time that day.
But it was tomorrow already. Yawning, he buckled himself int
o the Mustang, hoping for cold fried chicken in the refrigerator at home. After days of eating the garbage served by fast-food chains, he was famished for plain, home-cooked food.
The streets were deserted, faintly damp from the sea air—long empty avenues of an abandoned city. A squad car turned onto Wilshire, and Casey flashed his high beams hello and good-bye as it passed him. Then, without thinking about it, he decided to take a route home different from the usual, driving slowly by Adrian Crewes’s building, enjoying the idea that she was safe and probably sound asleep by now.
But her windows on the fourth floor were lighted, he saw, the draperies open. Bad dreams, Casey thought. Not surprising. Anyone listening to Frank Simmons couldn’t help but have nightmares. On impulse, he pulled the Mustang into a curbside parking place.
“Oh, it’s you.” She opened the door wider. “More questions?” she said, but she was smiling.
Casey told her no, no more questions, he was off duty now. “Just thought I’d check to see if you were all right.”
“I’m fine, but I’m starving—Isn’t that funny?” She laughed. “Come on in. Marmy and I are having a farewell feast. We leave for New York tomorrow.”
Her apartment smelled of coffee and garlic and spices. She had everything cooking she could find in her freezer, she told Casey. All those indigestible pre-cooked frozen marvels from the supermarket. Like spaghetti and meatballs. Eggplant Parmigiana. Mrs. Somebody’s Special Spicy Chicken and Dumplings. He could take his choice or have some of everything. The name of the game was dyspepsia.
“Sounds great,” Casey lied. Should he open the wine? By all means, she agreed, and he poured huge glasses, hoping those vintners’ ads were right in saying that wine was an aid to digestion. “Here you go.” He handed her a brimming glass.
The Complete Krug & Kellog Page 52
