Susannah Screaming (The Krug & Kellog Thriller Series Book 2)

by Carolyn Weston

  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 probably 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.

  Promising himself that when he made sergeant he would do his share of the clerical drudgery instead of leaving it all to his junior partner, Casey jumped out of bed, padding barefoot through the quiet house to the kitchen, where he plugged in the coffeepot. The dogs whined as usual on the back porch, but they’d have to wait the twelve and a half minutes—no margin for error or indecision—which was all the time he allowed himself for shaving and dressing. Squeezing orange juice took another couple of minutes, and by then the coffee was perking, two slices of bread almost browned in the toaster.

  The dogs scratched frantically to get in, and the youngest one, Bimbo, was tuning up to bark. Braced for their assault, Casey slid through the door to the back porch, and shushing the canine hysteria which greeted him, let the three dogs out into the fenced backyard. Bimbo ran in lunatic circles. But the other two sedately traveled from shrub to shrub, happily unaware of the several kinds of patented dog repellent with which his parents regularly sprayed their garden. Serves ’em good and right, Casey thought unkindly. If they insist on giving house room to every flea-bitten stray that wanders down the street—

  A thought struck him like a revelation. The dogs were surrogate grandchildren? Imagining his mother’s outrage if he suggested such an idea to her, Casey grinned. He had long since learned to keep his theories to himself, for although hip to Freud, his parents were offended by any analysis of themselves or their motives. From me anyway, Casey amended fairly. A son’s wisdom doth not a sage make.

  Trotting down the driveway, he scooped up the morning Times lying on the front lawn. Two more planes had been hijacked. In Belfast the trouble went on. Spreading the newspaper on the tile drainboard, Casey leafed through it quickly while he gulped orange juice and crunched toast, waiting for his coffee to cool. There was only a small item about the Barrett case which last night’s Evening Outlook had featured as headline news—hit and run death murder say police. No mention of counterfeiting. As a local resident, Susannah Roche had received some free publicity, but Paul Rees’s name had been left out.

  An ex-con, Casey thought. Three years for manslaughter. Felony. Which meant a merciful judge and extenuating circumstances, or a capital charge which a clever attorney had managed to get reduced in exchange for a guilty plea…

  “I say let’s drop on him,” Krug had insisted last night. “Right now, the quicker the better. Even if he’s clean on everything else, we got him cold—”

  “Not so fast,” Timms stopped him. “You’re jumping the gun, Al. Picking up Rees isn’t going to accomplish anything now.”

  “How d’you figure that? The way I see it, it’s two birds with one stone. We give him protection if he needs it, and we got him on ice—”

  But Timms kept shaking his head. “No, we’ve got to wait till we talk to San Francisco. No use going in blind, maybe scaring him off. He’s still the only real witness we’ve got.”

  “Some witness,” Krug had answered, and for the second time that day, Casey had been inclined to agree with him. But this morning, he wasn’t so sure. A guilty man, a parole breaker, wouldn’t have stuck his neck out the way Rees had. No man on the run deliberately involves himself in anything which will also involve the police.

  Five-thirty, according to the clock on the stove. By pushing the traffic lights a bit he could make it to the station in seven and a half minutes, maybe even less this early. But in deference to its middle-class, early-morning quiet, Casey spared his own street the howling screech of his customary high-speed departure. The residents along the rest of his route did not fare so well, however.

  “Heard you highballing that Mustang two miles off,” a night-tour man named Smithers said as Casey pounded up the stairs, slid into the squad room and checked the clock. “Real hotdog stuff.”

  “Hi, Smitty.” Casey beamed triumphantly. “Seven minutes exactly, door to door!” He glanced around the squad room. “You ge
t stuck here all night while everybody sacked in?”

  “Quit kidding. We’ve had two stickups, a break-in, a rape and last but not least, a jumper. Call came in about half an hour ago. Some dame with the shakes so bad she could hardly talk. Claimed she heard this screaming, so she got out of bed and looked out the window. Surprise, surprise, there’s a body splattered all over the pavement outside.”

  Suicide. Casey glanced at the call sheet. The woman who had reported it was a Mrs. Elizabeth Hale. Identity of the victim was as yet unknown. But the address rang a bell. Scrambling through his notes from yesterday, Casey checked to make sure. Then he started running.

  “Hey, where you going?” Smitty yelled after him.

  But by then Casey was already gone.

  THIRTEEN

  Light from somewhere stabbed through his eyelids. The bathroom, Rees thought groggily, and groaning, rolled over on the tangled bedsheets, drifting again on the edges of sleep. Then he sat up abruptly, listening. No sound from the bathroom. “Hey,” he called softly. “Good morning.” No answer.

  Staggering up, squinting in the glare, he peered into the bathroom. No Susannah there. And the light was not electric but gray hazy daylight let in through the pebbled window he had forgotten to close last night. Oh, lovely, he thought, smiling. An earful was had by the neighbors, no doubt. Ooo-wow-you-scare-me. That’ll be the day, he decided as he cranked the window closed; the man doesn’t live who can scare Susannah.

  Yawning and stretching, Rees turned toward the mirror, gasping as he saw it written there in blood across his hangover face. But after the first shock, he realized the red was lipstick: Ooo-wow-you-scare-me had been scrawled across the medicine cabinet mirror in wavering capitals. Oh, Susannah.

  Laughing hurt his head, but Rees laughed anyway, leaning on the basin. And drinking glass after glass of water, he savored the message. A private joke now. Our joke, he thought happily. Susannah’s and mine.

  His watch lying on the nightstand said nearly seven. She must have left only a couple of hours ago. He decided that it was like her somehow to slip away like this. And her apartment was only a couple of blocks north on Ocean Avenue. They couldn’t go there, she had told him last night. Rees had not asked why—or cared then.

  The bed seemed to swing gently under him as he lay back, his mind swarming with images of her lithe, greedy, predatory body clamped to his as if she had grown out of him, the succubus of some insatiable and exhausting dream. The new breed of woman, he thought, laughing and unsentimental, utterly free.

  Suppressing the vague distress this idea roused in him, he slipped into sleep, then was instantly awake again, conscious of something trying to surface in his mind. Something about last night. Susannah laughing. What you can’t see…But that was earlier, over dinner; no laughing then. So it was later on? At the party. Jervis boozes like it’s going out of style tomorrow, too.

  A dim impression of a bearded, pasty middle-aged face with staring eyes swam out of his murky recollections. Say good night to your host, Paul…Th at was it. They were leaving, and the man came plunging out of the crush of dancers muttering something cryptic about “M.” Something had been found. And Susannah laughing, yes, she knew. Play it for giggles, Jervy, keep living dangerously. Then they were out in the dark, twining like snakes in the car. Can’t go to my place…Because someone would be there waiting?

  Spoiler, Rees thought, staring gritty-eyed at the ceiling. He had no claim on her, so why torment himself as if he did? But he couldn’t stop thinking. Play it for giggles.

  Sick, dizzy, he swung his legs over the side of the bed, sitting with his head in his hands until the hangover vertigo passed. Drinking. Another parole violation. Reaching for the phone on the bedside table, he waited tensely until a sleepy voice answered, “Office,” and he gave Susannah’s number. Let her be awake, he thought as it rang once at the other end. Let her be there alone. Two rings. Damn, he’d forgotten her call service, and at this hour they would answer fast. Another half ring sounded, then the line was open. No one spoke, but he could hear breathing. “Susannah?”

  “Who’s this?” a rasping male voice demanded.

  “Sorry, I must have the wrong—”

  “No, you don’t. Who is this?”

  “None of your damn business,” Rees said furiously. “Let me talk to—”

  “Not so fast, mister. And not so smart either. This is Detective Sergeant Krug, Santa Monica Police Department. Been an accident here. Now you gonna tell me who you are, or shall I start guessing?”

  FOURTEEN

  “No, I didn’t say that, I said almost dark. I mean, if it’d been really dark, I couldn’t have seen—seen—Oh, my God, it was so awful—!”

  “Take it easy, ma’am,” Krug said soothingly. “We know it was a shock, all we’re trying to find out now is approximate time.”

  “Well, it must’ve been about five. I didn’t look at the clock. Just barely getting light, anyway. I was sound asleep, of course. What woke me up, you see, was the screaming. You never heard such a sound! Horrible. And it went on and on…”

  “Must’ve yelled all the way down,” the night-tour detective who answered the squeal had reported as soon as Casey arrived on the scene. “Got six people so far say they heard the screaming. All of ’em live on this side of the building, so it’s probably straight.”

  The body was in the ambulance sitting in the wide concrete drive on the south side of the high-rise apartment building. Tenants in bathrobes clustered near the lobby entrance, watching the ambulance attendants swabbing up the huge pool of blood. Wouldn’t think a human body could hold that much, the rubbernecks would be telling it later at the office, the shop, the beauty parlor. Worst thing I ever saw. But that doesn’t keep them from looking, Casey thought. Public appetite for gore seemed insatiable.

  “You take a look at the remains?” the night-tour man was asking.

  “Not yet.”

  “Nearly puked myself. Christ, what a way to do it. I figure ten stories or higher. Maybe from the roof. That’s seventeenth floor on this one. How long you figure it’d take to fall that far?”

  An eternity, Casey thought with a clench of horror in the pit of his stomach. Not like a dream of falling, where you float down and down harmlessly. No, a rushing plunge and the ground coming up as you shriek and shriek and claw the air—

  “Not positive yet,” the other detective was saying, “but a fast check of the upper floors makes 1005 the only one missing so far. Manager took a look, but with the head bashed in like that, could be anybody. Somebody off the street even.”

  “What’s the name?” Casey asked. “The tenant in 1005.”

  “Roach, I think he said. Female, anyway.”

  “Susannah Roche. About five-six. Gray eyes. Long dark hair.”

  “Well, the hair’s right—what’s left of it, that is. Sounds like you knew her.”

  Remembering that the night-tour man had been on sick report for two days, Casey thought of explaining, but there was no time for fill-ins: Krug had to be called immediately. “Tell you later,” he said. “Don’t let anybody in her apartment,” he called back over his shoulder as he rushed off. “Better separate anybody who knows anything—”

  Krug was there in twenty minutes, unshaven and red-eyed, savagely impatient with the onlookers still hanging around. “Get the names of anybody with anything sensible to say,” he snarled at the nearest patrolman, “and tell the rest of those turds to get back in their apartments, or we’re charging every one of ’em with interference.” Then he rounded on Casey. “You got the manager and that dame who reported it stashed some place handy?”

  “Both in their apartments, Al. Night-squad guy’s holding the fort in 1005.”

  “You call the lab yet?”

  “They’re on the way. I’ve got a list from the manager of all the tenants in adjacent apartments. So far there’s only one—a woman who was up feeding her baby—who heard anything that might’ve come from 1005.”

  T
hey talked to the neighboring tenants one by one then, starting with the young mother who seemed confused and distracted by the squalling of her newborn baby in the bedroom. “If only my husband was here,” she kept saying helplessly. “Everything happens at once, it’s too much for me! First the baby, and then his father has a heart attack. I mean, his first duty should be here, shouldn’t it? But he just fell apart when his mother called—”

  They had leased their apartment—1006—only two months ago, she explained, and what with her condition then, she hadn’t paid much attention to any neighbors. But of course she had seen the girl in 1005 in the hall once in a while, and a couple of times in the elevator. A model, she had decided, or an actress. Certainly nobody—as she had told her husband—she could ever imagine herself getting really friendly with later.

  “She do much entertaining you could hear?” Krug asked.

  “Well, no, not much. No parties, anything like that. But sometimes she played records awfully loud. I guess it was records. Anyway, rock stuff. Sometimes late, too. Came right through the walls of our bedroom—”

  “How about last night? You hear anything like voices or music last night?”

  “N-no, I don’t think so. But around three I thought I heard somebody come in. It’s so quiet, see, and I was sitting up in bed feeding the baby.”

  “Hear anybody talking?”

  “No, nothing like that. Just the door closing, and somebody moving around in there. I mean, I’m not all that snoopy I listen to be listening. But these new buildings, you can hear everything. Some man upstairs has even complained about the baby already, and I’ve only been home from the hospital—”

  “You’re sure about the time?” Casey interrupted. “Three o’clock?”

  She sighed exhaustedly. “You wouldn’t ask that if you knew anything about babies. He’s like an alarm clock. Starts fussing every night the same time. But even if he didn’t, I’d wake up. It’s the pressure, you see. When you breast-feed, it builds up—”