“It’s Christmas.”
“I know.”
“I haven’t got a tree.”
“We’ll go get a tree. Right when I get back.”
“I haven’t seen Gump’s windows, either. I always see Gump’s at Christmas.”
“We’ll go there first. Then we’ll get a tree. I know a guy out in the Avenues, has the best trees in town.”
“He has? Does he have Douglas fir?”
“You bet. Now go get in bed. Get some sleep. I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Then we’ll get that tree.”
“And Gump’s?”
“And Gump’s.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
The house was light blue and forbidding, but more from neglect than from grandeur. There were too many windows and too many doors in the facade, and too many broken slates in the roof. The yard was unclipped and patchy, the fur of an alley cat that has to share the alley. I could almost hear the neighbors complaining. Somewhere behind and below the house the ocean punched at the base of the cliff.
The front door stood ajar, a breach of security more pathetic than threatening, given the condition of the house. I pushed my way inside, sensing I was the first visitor in months.
The smell struck me first, the smell of disuse, the smell of old air. It seemed to rise from every surface, like steam off warm water. Someone had stripped the place of value; in the foyer alone three picture hooks protruded from the walls like naked claws. In the living room there were dents in the carpet where furniture had been but wasn’t. Somewhere a toilet made the sound of distant cheers.
I went into the kitchen and flipped on the light. A roach stopped in mid-journey, hoping to be mistaken for linoleum. There were scratching sounds from behind cupboard doors. I shivered from more than cold.
I moved quickly through the rest of the rooms, expecting nothing and finding it. There had been a woman in the place once, but not for years; she hadn’t left anything but memories behind. There had been a cat once, too. What it had left behind was detectable best with the nose. There were drawers and closets and other secret places as well, but they could be left for later, for anyone who wanted to know why. I yielded the house to darkness and went outside and followed the driveway to the back.
The garage was blue, too, its door appropriately untracked and askew. A white wood stairway led up the side of the garage to a red door in the second story. The light over the door was burning. I climbed toward it, the white steps creaking beneath my weight. The paint on the step faces was chipped and faded and marred with black streaks. Three steps from the top I pulled my gun.
When I reached the door I stopped and listened, but heard nothing but my own body and, seemingly from directly beneath me, the froth and fury of an angered sea. I opened the door for me and my gun.
It was bright as day inside. The room was a studio, as Gwen had said, almost a duplicate of the one at Hazen’s office except this one had a bed and dresser and wardrobe as well, along with an efficiency kitchen in the far corner. Hazen was there, standing with his back to me. From the smell of the place he had recently been welding yet another piece of captive metal. In light of what he had done in the past hour it made me all the more certain he was nuts.
When he heard me coming Hazen turned to face me, his eyes wide and feverish, his breathing labored—tuberculoid. He started to move and I raised my gun, the memory of the welding torch hot in my brain. But all he did was walk over and sit on a gigantic steamer trunk, an antique from the look of it, and dangle his short legs down the side like a kid on the edge of a pool. One of his hands was red, badly burned. From the dance in his eyes it seemed possible he would no longer notice anything the rest of us could see. A half-full suitcase lay open on the floor beneath his feet.
“Going somewhere?” I asked pleasantly.
“Going?”
“The suitcase. The trunk.”
“Yes. That’s right. I’m going away.”
“I’m going to have to stop you, you know. I’m going to have to call the police.”
“Are there prowlers?”
“No. A murderer.”
His eyes widened. “Who’s been killed?”
“Max Kottle.”
“Max. I know Max. He was my patient. Do you want to know something about Max?”
“What?”
“He’s very wealthy. Millions and millions. Everything he touches turns to gold. Some men are like that.”
“Yes.”
“Everything I touch turns to mud. Do you know something else about Max Kottle?”
“What?”
“He’s a bastard.”
“Why?”
“Simple. With all that money he has, all those millions, he never once bought one of my sculptures. Not a one. What do you make of that?”
“It’s terrible.”
“It is, isn’t it? Max deserves to die.”
“He has died, Doctor Hazen.”
“He has?”
“You killed him.”
“I did?”
I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly and put my gun back in my pocket. Hazen’s legs began to swing again, back and forth, back and forth, slamming heavily against the canvas sides of the trunk. His eyes seemed no longer linked to his brain. The song he was humming sounded like “Ramona.”
There was a telephone over by the work table and I went to it and called the Central Station. Charley Sleet came on the line with a grunt. I told him where I was and who he would find when he got there and what he should do with him and why I wouldn’t be around when he arrived. I assured Charley I’d be in his office first thing in the morning to explain it all. Charley grumped and growled and said he had a couple of stops to make first, but that he’d be there in a half hour. I told him that would be fine. Then I made another call.
I talked a little, then she talked a lot, then I talked a little more. She had a million questions and I only answered half of them. She wanted a lot more than I gave but I told her that what she had was enough for the first installment. The Girl Reporter didn’t like it, but I cut her off anyway and went back to Hazen.
He was sitting where I’d left him, apparently regressed even further into the misfortunes of his past. I took off my tie and fashioned a slipknot and put one end around his left wrist and knotted the other around his right, leaving six inches of the tie stretched in between. When I tugged, Hazen obediently hopped down off the trunk and followed me over to the workbench. He sat down where I told him to and raised his hands when I told him to do that. After guiding the six inches of slack between the clamps of the vise I wound the screw as tight as I could. As though he were a boy with a bruise I patted his head and told him someone would be along soon to set him loose. I didn’t tell him that same someone would also take him to jail. When I asked him about his burned hand he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.
I turned toward the door, then stopped. There was someone in it. He was as thin as straw, his face livid with barely governed rage and stiff with pain, his eyes sinking slowly into bone. His clothes were loose-fitting and comical, but there was nothing comical about what he carried in his hand. It was an M16, that slick piece of weaponry that seems so much like a toy—light and plastic, with an easy-to-cary handle—until you pull the trigger and in the next second it spits fifteen rounds of 5.56 millimeter ammunition at you with a muzzle velocity of three thousand feet per second. Then somebody dies or wishes he had.
Karl Kottle had his rifle trained somewhere between Hazen and me. He looked ready and able to use it. I yawned, from nerves.
Karl looked over the room, then did the same with me. “Who are you?” His voice was soft as down.
“Tanner.”
“The man on the phone?”
“Yes.”
“Is it true?”
“Yes.”
“Even about my father?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Why did he
do it?”
“The fire. The girl who died was Hazen’s patient. He’d cured her of cancer, using a new technique. Nixon was just cranking up his war on cancer, throwing money at everyone who had anything remotely promising going for him. The Luswell girl’s death took Hazen out of the game; without money for further research he didn’t have a chance. He was a man determined to make a big splash. He blamed you for draining the pool. You must have gone to see him for treatment sometime after that.”
He nodded soberly. “I had a virus. I thought Doctor Hazen would help me and still keep my whereabouts secret, perhaps not from my father but from the authorities. He’d always seemed like a nice man. A concerned physician.”
“Hazen used that visit to begin inflicting punishment for what you’d done. He gave you rat poison, Karl. One particular brand. It turned you into a diabetic. After that he gave you enough insulin to keep you alive, along with enough poison to keep the pain at maximum levels. Year after year.”
“He said I was getting better.”
“All you were getting was tortured.”
Karl let the gun muzzle drop toward the floor and it became a toy again and I could look elsewhere. Karl was clearly struggling to grasp what had happened, to believe that the agony he had endured was inflicted by the little man on the floor by the workbench. He kept glowering at Hazen, but Hazen was oblivious. “You know what?” Karl asked finally.
“What?”
“I didn’t even set that fire. I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Who did?”
“It’s not important, he’s dead now. A few people used the movement as an outlet for their own aggression. They were only in it for the violence, just like the cops on the other side of the barricades.”
“Not all of them.”
“A lot. Too many.”
Karl looked down at his weapon as though surprised to find it there, as though aware of how it undermined his nonviolent stance. Then he looked over at Hazen again. “Did he poison my father, too?”
There was a long answer to that and a short one. I gave him the short one.
“Max was sick anyway, wasn’t he? Cancer?”
“That’s what Hazen said.”
“If it was cancer, then maybe it was a favor. Maybe it was an easier way to die.”
“Maybe.”
Karl couldn’t take his eyes off Hazen. He was rapt, as though entranced by a conjurer’s indirection. “It’s not the pain I mind so much, you know,” Karl remarked, almost casually. “It’s the time. He stole nearly five years from me. Redirected my energies, my concerns. There was so much else I could have been doing.”
“It’s been a lost decade for all of us, Karl. No one did anything right in the seventies. In two weeks we get a new chance. Go away and get well. Come back and start again. You’ve got plenty of time. A lifetime.”
“What about him?” He gestured to Hazen.
I shrugged. “Since he’s a doctor his lawyer will be able to find lots of prestigious experts to say he’s insane. Then after he’s found not guilty by reason of insanity other experts will say he’s been miraculously cured. But he’ll spend a lot of time at Vacaville no matter what, in the wing for the criminally insane. You ever been to Vacaville?”
“No.”
“Those poor bastards go to hell for a vacation.”
“Can anything else be done?”
“One thing. I’ve already done it.”
“What?”
“Called a reporter. The whole story will come out in the Investigator—Hazen, Greer, the kidnap, all of it. Hazen won’t be able to put together a life no matter what happens in court.”
Karl smiled sadly. “They’ve usurped everything, haven’t they?”
“Who?”
“The media. Even the system of justice has become irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what’s printed in the papers or shown on TV. There’s the real revolution. The media used to be for imagination—religion, myth, Howdy Doody. Now no one believes anything until they see it on the tube. Truth, morality, legality—they’re all determined by people who don’t have any obligation to anything but their own ambition.”
“We’ve always been in the hands of people like that, Karl. The faces change, but they’re the same people.”
“No, they’re not. Not all of them. I think maybe my father wasn’t always like that.”
“Maybe he wasn’t,” I said.
“Where is my father? His body?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did Hazen kill him, too? Because of me?”
“I think it started that way. But it changed. Hazen came to resent your father’s money, his success. Most of all, he couldn’t stand having his artistic creations ignored by someone who could do so much to make him a success. I’ve seen it before. A man creates something and suddenly his friends are reevaluated on the basis of how they like it. It’s not nice, but it’s true.”
No one said anything for a minute. The only sound was the beat of Hazen’s palm upon his thigh—regular, percussive, mindless. Karl looked earnest and harmless, despite the rifle.
“You know what your father took when the nausea got too bad?”
“What?”
“Marijuana.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
Karl smiled. “That’s nice. That’s really nice.”
“You’ve got to get out of here, Karl. The cops are on their way. If you stick around you’ll be hauled in on a felony-murder charge for the Berkeley killing. Take off. Get yourself well, then turn yourself in. They don’t have much of a case. A good lawyer will get the charge dumped, especially if you give him a crack at your father’s will.”
“What about my father? I should do something for him, if only a gesture.”
“Just do what I said. It’s all he’d want.”
Karl began to pace. “I need to think,” he said. “I need to decide what’s right.”
“Sure. Just do it somewhere else. If you don’t leave now you’ll do your thinking in a cell.”
Karl turned toward the door, then looked back at me. “Would you do one thing? Would you ask the reporter at the Investigator to print the manifesto I wrote? As long as the whole story is coming out? It’s an important statement. The perspective is unique. I worked very hard on it. It says things that need to be said.”
“I’ll do what I can. Sure.”
I glanced over at Hazen to see if he was still secure. He was staring at one of his sculptures and then at the trunk, back and forth. The smile on his face was the smile he was wearing the first time I’d seen him.
I looked at the trunk. It was a beauty. Leather, iron, canvas, brass. There was something funny about it, though. The locks and hasps were welded shut with shiny new beads of metal. When I looked around at Karl he was gone.
Suddenly I knew what was in the trunk. Worse, I knew that it wouldn’t have been in there if I hadn’t spooked Dr. Hazen, hadn’t tried to take him alone. And then, God help me, I knew, or at least I needed very badly to believe, that there was a chance that what was in the trunk was still alive.
I hunted up a hammer and a sixteen common nail and drove the nail into the side of the trunk, then pried it out and drove it in again, and then again. I found a piece of paper and wrote Charley Sleet a note. I taped the note to the trunk and gave Hazen another pat on the head.
Then I went out to buy a tree.
Turn the page to continue reading from the John Marshall Tanner Mysteries
1
The building was broad and squat and thick, designed to house a substance that was heavy and unwieldy and potentially hazardous, as dense and inert as the granite blocks that had been quarried to contain it. Form followed function, for the substance that eddied and bubbled within the building was Justice, and the steps I was climbing had been worn concave by the footfalls of the convicts and petitioners, litigants and constituents, who had marched toward that abstraction over the years.
Unless I missed my guess, most had gone up the steps a lot faster than they’d come down.
The fluted columns flanking the iron doors were nicked and gouged from errant bullets fired during an attempt to assassinate a governor at the end of the previous century. Atop the columns the Corinthian capitals bore protrusions that resembled tongues more than acanthus leaves. The words “El Gordo City Hall” had been chiseled into the architrave, deep, immutable, forbidding, but splashed with pigeon droppings all the same. Like the building itself, the city of El Gordo was old and tough, without pretense or allure, decades past its prime. I felt a bit that way myself.
I buried my cigarette in the sand urn next to the door and pushed my way into the municipal gloom of the interior. A dyspeptic elevator with an operator to match raised me to the third floor. Along the way I muttered unrequited words about the weather. The only other passenger had the look of a lawyer who specialized in champerty.
The girl behind the desk behind the door marked Wilson P. Ridges, District Attorney, nodded after I told her my name and told me to go on back, second door on the right. Then she plucked a crumb of tobacco off her tongue. I followed my nose and came to an office with an open door, a ceiling fan, and two men in it.
Like the fan, the men were motionless, waiting for whatever it was I was bringing them. They were seated on either side of an oak desk piled high with manila file folders, open law books, and teeming ashtrays. The walls of the room were lined with Pacific Reporters and Federal Supplements and the floor was covered with green and white linoleum, which sagged ominously as I crossed it. The desk and its cargo were dotted, as if by the droppings from some great bird, by a score of tea bags in various stages of dampness.
When he saw me, the man on the far side of the desk stood to shake my hand. His movements were measured and precise, the acts of a man accustomed to being watched and judged. His hand was puffy but hard, and skillfully used.
He introduced himself as Ray Tolson, the Chief Trial Deputy to the El Gordo District Attorney, then released my fingers. He was short and stout, half-blond and half-bald. His face wore the open, almost addled, look of a clergyman or a politician on the top of his game. His eyes were perched directly atop his cheeks, emerging from their lairs like young and eager marsupials. Two wide red suspenders were visible between his vest and his belt, and a plaid coat embraced the back of the chair he had vacated.
Death Bed Page 27
