Silencer

by Campbell Armstrong

  Amanda asked, ‘What am I hearing, Kelloway?’

  Kelloway continued to address Wom. ‘She had these profiles in the newspapers, Sonny. Magazines. How sharp she was. What a legal brain. Strange thing is, I never saw much mention of the back-room staff, the guys that lit the stage for her. The scriptwriters, the researchers, the little guys. She hogged it.’

  Amanda stared at Kelloway. The penny drops. ‘Oh Christ. How long have you been breast-feeding this grudge?’

  ‘Grudge? What grudge?’

  Exasperated, Amanda said, ‘OK, I confess. You handed me cases on a shiny silver platter. Some of them were perfect, beyond perfect. Is that what you want me to say?’

  Kelloway said, ‘I’m not asking you to say anything, Miss Scholes.’

  ‘Because you didn’t get your share of the spotlight, you want to make life awkward for me,’ she said.

  ‘Awkward?’ Kelloway feigned surprise. ‘My department has always been the soul of co-operation, Miss Scholes. You’d agree with that?’

  ‘Wholeheartedly,’ she said.

  ‘You’d also agree my people always walked the last few yards for you. Always.’

  ‘More,’ she said. She considered Kelloway’s ego and what a delicate thing it had to be. Female prosecutor gets headlines and stories, macho Chief Kelloway gets none. So this was the source of his attitude: he was crying out for attention and he wasn’t getting what he wanted and he was stamping his feet with a petulance that had been festering inside him for a long time, a resentment out of control. If you added to this the rancour he still hauled around because she’d refused to prosecute the Hood case, you got a guy who was a twisted bundle of bitterness.

  ‘And now you need my help,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, I need your help.’

  Kelloway got up from his chair. ‘Get one thing straight, Miss Scholes. The only important factor for me in all this is Willie Drumm. I’ll have a man visit the Hideaway Knolls and check out the guy you claim pilfered the letter, so we’ll need a description from you. I’ll get in touch with Justice and see if we can arrange a meeting with somebody who knows about the Witness Protection Program, and we’ll sit down together and look at this thing closely.’

  Somebody who knows about the Witness Protection Program, she thought. The phrase created disturbances inside her. How could Kelloway know this somebody was trustworthy? And when it came to the question of trust, how did she know she could put any in Kelloway, riddled as he was with pettiness?

  ‘As a bonus, we’ll also talk to Mrs Vialli who’s so worried about her kid. You see how co-operative we are.’

  She said, ‘I want you to understand one thing. I didn’t write those goddam interviews. I didn’t go out looking for publicity, and I still think the Hood case was too damn weak to take into court.’

  ‘I don’t actually give a shit who wrote them any more than I give a shit about Hood,’ Kelloway said, and adjusted his belt buckle. ‘I’m a mean-spirited bastard and I just got what I wanted.’

  He smiled at her fiercely, an expression of satisfaction and voracious spite. She heard the whirr of feathers, wings ruffling then settling back in place. Lay an egg, Kelloway. Lay it so it chafes your ass.

  60

  Dansk checked into a hotel five miles from downtown. The place was a dump but he didn’t plan on staying. It was a base, nothing more, a place to freshen up. The porter who touted for Dansk’s case wore grubby black shoes and a tacky brocade vest with a grease-stained pocket.

  Dansk chilled the bag-man with a stare, and got his room key. He went to the pay phones and opened a Phoenix directory. He found what he wanted and scribbled the information down inside his notebook.

  He went up to his room. Stuffy. He opened the bedroom window just as his cellular phone rang.

  Pasquale said, ‘It went off OK.’ He had a sullen distance in his voice.

  ‘Go to a place called the Sidewinder on McDowell. You’ll meet McTell. I’ll be in touch.’ Dansk cut the connection and looked out the window. Something was smouldering in the distance, a garbage dump, maybe garden trash. A stack of thin white smoke rose into the sun, like a pope had just been elected.

  This would be a great room if you were thinking of suicide: long drop. Jumpers heaving themselves over the ledge, air whining in their ears as they fell, maybe even changing their minds halfway down, when it was too late to reverse the polarity of the situation.

  Like it was too late for Amanda.

  Amanda, Amanda. You got a guy that loves you. A guy you love. Life should’ve been more precious to you, but you took a wrong turning.

  He picked up the telephone and dialled a number.

  ‘Phoenix Police Department,’ a man said.

  ‘Put me through to Lieutenant Drumm,’ Dansk said.

  ‘He isn’t in the office at the moment.’

  I bet. ‘When do you expect him?’

  ‘It’s hard to say.’ This guy was following the official line: no death announcement at the moment. Keep a lid on it. ‘Maybe somebody else could help you,’ he said. ‘I’ll connect you.’

  A woman came on the line and introduced herself as Sergeant Friedman. She sounded dispirited.

  Dansk imposed a little authoritative weight into his voice. ‘This is Morgan Scholes. Amanda Scholes is my daughter. She left a message on my answering machine, something about how she was going to see Lieutenant Drumm, something about Rhees being hurt and hospitalized. Is she around? Can I talk to her?’

  ‘You just missed her, Mr Scholes.’

  ‘Father and daughter, we’re like ships in the night. You any idea where she went?’

  Betty Friedman was quiet a moment. ‘She left the building with Chief Kelloway and Lieutenant Wom.’

  ‘She say where she was going?’

  ‘All I know is they went to interview somebody.’

  ‘What hospital is Rhees in?’

  ‘He’s here in the building at the moment. A physician gave him a painkilling injection, knocked him out.’

  ‘This world,’ Dansk said. ‘What the hell’s it coming to when vandals can just go inside somebody’s home?’ He made a clucking noise of irritation and bewilderment. An older man’s sound of bafflement at the condition of today’s society.

  ‘You wanna leave a message you called? If I see her I’ll pass it along.’

  ‘Don’t bother. She’ll be in touch with me soon, I’m sure.’

  So, they were going through the motions, interviewing somebody. He guessed Mrs Vialli. Who else? Running a check on her. Some flowers on her birthday and a card she feels isn’t kosher. Loeb’s fuck-up, he thought. Correspondence was Loeb’s department, but he’d failed to keep track of nuances and quirks and simple stuff like accurate birth dates. Ma. Mom.

  And Rhees was drugged and dozing inside the police building. He’d wake soon enough and he’d have to come out, and Amanda would be pushing him in the wheelchair, very touching, lovers looking out for one another. Be my valentine.

  He remembered he’d received a valentine once in his life. Aged twelve, a giant red rose and the words, ‘You Are My Secret Love.’ Unsigned. He’d wondered about the sender, hoping it was Louise Andersen who wore her yellow hair in Nordic braids and dressed in pretty frocks, who’d been the inspiration behind his first masturbation when he’d sat on the john with his underwear round his ankles and thought of what lay under her frock and her panties, and he’d jerked off and nothing was the same ever again. That feeling, that hot eruption, the discovery that you had fluids inside you never even knew about.

  But when he’d looked at the handwriting on the envelope he’d recognized it as his mother’s. A valentine from his own goddam mother.

  He took the Ruger from his case and studied it. The exactitude of the architecture was impressive. You could lose yourself in the interior of the weapon, like you were something very tiny strolling a vast tubular passageway and the cartridges were the size of nuclear warheads.

  He stuck the gun in his waistband at t
he base of his spine. His jacket concealed it neatly. He thought, Life can be good, Anthony. Life doesn’t have to be pity valentines from your own mother.

  He looked at himself in the full-length mirror.

  Babyface Dansk.

  He was ready now.

  61

  Bernadette Vialli wasn’t answering her doorbell. Her maroon Toyota was parked in the garage and Kelloway was trying to open the door that led from garage to house, but it was locked.

  Sonny Wom, who’d disappeared round the side of the house to peer through the windows, returned and said, ‘I can’t see anyone inside, and the back door’s locked. Place feels empty.’

  Amanda smelled the hot air of the garage, motor oil and a scent of paint-stripper. She moved outside and stood under a sumac tree and looked at the upper windows of the house, where curtains were drawn across what might have been Mrs Vialli’s bedroom. One-thirty in the afternoon, curtains still shut. Maybe she popped sleeping-pills and slept through the sound of her phone ringing and straight into the early afternoon.

  Kelloway emerged from the gloom. The temperature was well above a hundred. ‘We’ll give this one last try.’ He laid a fingertip on the bell and left it there. You could hear the constant maddening chimes indoors.

  Amanda gazed again at the curtains, thin and floral-patterned. She imagined light passing through the flimsy material and into the room. She moved out of the shade a moment but withdrew as soon as she felt the full force of the sun. The world was burning up. This climate lashed and punished you.

  A scrawny woman dressed in Bermudas and a baggy silk blouse appeared on the edge of Mrs Vialli’s lawn. Her mouth was set in a suspicious pucker. ‘Is there a problem here?’ she asked.

  Kelloway showed her his identification, which relaxed her up to a point. She introduced herself as the next-door neighbour, Mrs Christian, spelled as in Jesus, she explained solemnly. ‘Something wrong with Bernie?’ she asked.

  ‘She usually sleep this late?’ Kelloway asked.

  ‘She’s normally up at the crack.’

  ‘You happen to see her today?’

  Mrs Christian shook her head.

  Kelloway said, ‘Her car’s in the garage and she’s not answering the doorbell.’

  ‘Maybe she’s sick,’ said the woman. She fell silent a moment, making a worried sucking sound on her grey dentures. ‘You need to go in and have a look, I got a key. Bernie likes me to keep an eye on the place if she goes away. I water her plants. Keep an eye out.’

  ‘If it’s no problem,’ Kelloway said.

  ‘Always help the police. Rule of mine.’ The woman dug a cumbersome clutch of keys from her pocket. She separated one from the bunch and handed it to Kelloway. He turned the key in the lock and stepped inside the house. Amanda and Wom followed, but Mrs Christian, looking wary, lingered on the threshold.

  The house had a moody silence. Amanda stood at the bottom of the stairs while Kelloway and Wom explored the ground-floor rooms. Her eye was drawn up to the shadows at the top of the stairs. Hot air was trapped in the house.

  ‘Nothing,’ Kelloway said.

  Wom was already climbing the stairs, Kelloway followed. Amanda came behind, thinking of the room with the closed curtains.

  Kelloway went inside the bedroom. The bedsheets were drawn back and the pillows indented, but Mrs Vialli wasn’t there. He opened the curtains and the room burst into brightness. Amanda blinked and stepped back out into the hallway where Wom was already opening another door leading into a room that had obviously been Benny Vialli’s once upon a time. Sports posters on the walls, Magic Johnson frozen in mid-flight above a hoop, a couple of dated rock posters, Madonna clutching her groin, a shot of The Rolling Stones before they became raddled capitalists.

  Amanda wandered away from Benny’s old room. Across the landing the door of the bathroom was open a couple of inches. Damson tiles, peach-coloured towels on a rack, a mirrored medicine cabinet that reflected a small area of the room’s interior. Amanda moved towards this door and stopped. She saw something reflected in the mirror. A shower rail at a bad angle, a shower curtain twisted. Kelloway appeared at her back. He moved past her and stepped inside. Wom, directly behind him, blocked Amanda’s view.

  ‘Eureka,’ Kelloway said.

  Amanda shifted her position slightly, glanced over Wom’s shoulder and saw how the shower rail had broken free from the wall at one end and the curtain was crumpled. A length of rope had been twisted round the rail and Bernadette Vialli lay in the centre of this tangle with a noose round her neck and an overturned chair a few feet away.

  Amanda pushed past Wom into the bathroom. Kelloway, stretching out an arm, tried to hold her back, but she was already past him and kneeling over Bernadette Vialli, whose mouth was open, tongue swollen. Her robe was damp and her big silly slippers had slipped off her white feet to the floor.

  Amanda looked at the nylon rope, the knot, the way it had cut into the dead woman’s throat, the angry purple abrasions created by the tension of the noose. Kelloway, leaning forward, touched Amanda’s shoulder and said something about how she shouldn’t be looking at this. But Amanda ignored him, her attention fixed on the woman’s open eyes, the whites bloodshot and a smear of cream that had adhered somehow to her eyelids and the darkness in the pupils. She found herself wondering if it was true that the eyes retained an image of the last thing a dead person had seen, or if that was just nonsense, a fantasy, and what did it matter anyway? Something about the cream bothered her.

  ‘She got up on the chair and kicked it over,’ Kelloway said. ‘I guess the rail held out long enough for her to choke.’

  ‘I don’t buy that,’ Amanda said.

  ‘Let me guess. You think she was murdered and then strung up,’ Kelloway said.

  ‘That’s exactly what I think.’

  ‘By the mysterious Dansk.’

  ‘Or one of his minions.’

  ‘There’s no sign of forced entry,’ Wom said. ‘No broken windows, smashed locks, anything like that.’

  ‘So she opened the door to somebody she knew,’ Amanda said, and finally looked away from Bernadette Vialli. She thought, A crushed plastic shower curtain with the tiny label ‘Kaeskoo Products, Seoul’ wasn’t much of a shroud.

  Kelloway asked, ‘You’re saying she knew her killer? How come?’

  Amanda rose. ‘I don’t know how come.’

  Kelloway was quiet a moment.

  She thought of Dansk, the way he’d tracked her. He must have watched Drumm come to this house, and the idea of a conversation between the cop and Mrs Vialli worried him to the point where he’d ordered the deaths of Willie and Bernadette. Let’s just close this situation down, he might have thought. Let’s nip this in the heart of the bud.

  Amanda stepped out of the bathroom. She felt unwell, giddy. Kelloway followed her. Wom remained behind, notebook in one small hand, a scribe of death.

  ‘No way was it suicide,’ she said.

  ‘Convince me,’ Kelloway said.

  ‘She’s got some traces of moisturizing cream round her eyes. You think she slaps cream on her face before she hangs herself?’

  ‘You’re talking a trace, that’s all. Maybe she started to apply the stuff then changed her mind. What the hell. I’ve seen suicides in tuxedos. You’ll have to do better.’

  She struggled against her dislike for this cop. But she had to accept the fact she needed him, she was dog-tired of going it alone, and he had behind him a large law-enforcement organization whose help she wanted. His scepticism, his abrasive manner, she’d tolerate these until it became impossible.

  She stopped halfway down the stairs. A uniformed cop appeared in the hallway. It was Sergeant Thomas Gannon, whom she’d last seen during the fruitless search for Isabel in the desert. He touched his little moustache, nodded at her, then looked directly past her at Kelloway.

  ‘I went to the Hideaway Knolls,’ Gannon said. ‘The only guy vaguely resembling the description Miss Scholes gave checked out this morni
ng. He’d registered under the name of John J. Coleman.’

  Kelloway looked at Amanda. ‘Dansk checks out of his hotel, now this other character checks out. These people have quite a knack for timely disappearances, don’t they?’

  Amanda had a stifling sensation. She was caught up in filaments that, no matter how hard she tried to claw them from her skin, still clung to her. People check out, from hotels, from life.

  Gannon said, ‘I also have a message for you, Chief. Somebody from Justice will meet you at five in your office.’

  ‘Quick response,’ Kelloway said.

  ‘Apparently this guy happened to be in LA and your enquiry was forwarded to him and he caught the first plane,’ Gannon said.

  ‘Lucked out,’ Kelloway said.

  Lucked out, Amanda thought. Mrs Vialli hadn’t lucked out.

  She reached the foot of the stairs and strolled past Gannon into the harrowing sunlight. She lit a cigarette and sucked smoke inside her lungs and wondered where Dansk was, what crevice of this city concealed him, what step he was planning next.

  62

  Eddie McTell and Bruno Pasquale sat in the big drab empty lounge of the Sidewinder Motel, a room that had the ambience of a charity clinic run by an indigent religious order excommunicated long ago.

  McTell said, ‘I’ve had it to the scrotum with crummy joints like this. Gimme Tijuana. Lead me to a bordello. Slamming tequila with some hot-blooded little chickadee sitting in my lap. ‘Way to fucking go.’

  ‘I never been in Mexico,’ said Pasquale.

  ‘I’ll take you there one day, Bruno. Who needs shit places like this? The pits. Christ.’

  Pasquale leaned back in his chair. He had a cinematic notion of Mexico, musicians with guitars strolling under fancy wrought-iron balconies. ‘I hear they got cock-fights down there. I never seen one.’

  ‘It’s all blood and feathers and flying guts. You’d enjoy it.’

  Pasquale was quiet for a time. ‘I’m still thinking about this guy Loeb I met. He showed me some heavy ID, I mean, impressive. He’s like up there. Way up. He knows everything going on, Eddie. You name it, all the work we done for Dansk, he knows about it. And it goes back a ways. I’m not just talking about recent stuff. And we’re supposed to keep him posted on the moves Dansk orders, except Dansk ain’t to know.’