Bannerman's Law

by John R. Maxim

  “Maybe.”

  “Lesko . . . what else?”

  ”I think it's not the same guy. And I think Andy Huff knows damned well it isn't.”

  Bannerman was silent for á long moment. “Why?”

  “You're going to start with why?” Lesko sputtered. “First you ask me to talk to fucking Katz and now you want to get rational?”

  Bannerman suppressed a smile. “What I want are your instincts,” he said quietly.

  “If I followed my instincts, you would have been in the hospital the first time you came within a mile of my daughter again.”

  ”I know.” Bannerman closed his eyes. Someday he'd have a conversation with Lesko in which he did not become homicidal on the subject of Susan becoming involved with him. God forbid that she should become pregnant. Which they'd been talking about. A little. He'd have to tie Lesko down, sit Billy McHugh on his chest, before he told him. “Lesko,” he said patiently, “tell me what you think.”

  “Huff’s sure. He knows it's not the same guy.”

  He was repeating himself. Bannerman waited.

  “If that's right,” Lesko finished his thought, “which is a big if, you tell me. How could he be that sure?”

  Bannerman hesitated. “He must have a suspect. For the others, I mean.”

  “Keep going.”

  “They've had him under surveillance. When Lisa Benedict was killed, Huff’s suspect wasn't anywhere near.”

  “You said it. I didn't.”

  “But you agree.”

  Lesko grunted. The equivalent of a shrug. ' ‘Or else the real killer called in to say he didn't do this one. That happens sometimes.”

  “So you think we're dealing with a copycat.”

  “Maybe. More or less.”

  “Why are you hedging?”

  “There are three kinds of copycats,” Lesko told him. “One is another psycho and the chances are he also picks a victim he doesn't know. The second is someone who reads the papers, has a specific victim in mind who fits the profile, and sees this as a way to pull it off. The third is your basic crime of passion. Guy loses his head, strangles a woman, then uses what he knows about the serial killer to cover his tracks. Except most times it doesn't work because the cops usually keep some of the details, like teeth marks or mutilation, for example, out of the press.”

  Bannerman nodded, thoughtfully. “But if it was a copycat,” he asked, “the two task forces will look for him just as hard, won't they?”

  “They'd say yes but they won't. Priorities.”

  “Would you?”

  “Same way. First things first. The copycat will keep because the chances are he won't kill again and the other guy will.

  Bannerman said nothing. But he understood.

  “Bannerman?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you going to do with this?”

  ”I don't know. Maybe nothing. It's not . . .” Bannerman stopped himself. Too late.

  “Not your field. Not your basic assassination or car bombing.”

  “Lesko . . .”

  “Cheap shot. Sorry.” Lesko tried to sound sincere. Nor did he wish to invite a rebuttal that asked how what he was doing for the Brugg family of Zurich differed from what Bannerman had done for a dozen or so governments.

  “Bannerman?”

  “I'm here.”

  ”I think of anything else, hear anything else, I'll call you.”

  “I'd appreciate it.”

  “In the meantime, you want my advice, don't say anything to Carla. She's fucked up enough already. Me, I'd let her bury her sister and then get her back to Westport.”

  ”I agree. But thanks.”

  “Later on, I'll call her. Tell her I'm sorry.”

  “That would be nice. Thank you.”

  “Meanwhile, you take care of Susan.”

  “Sure. Kiss Elena for me.”

  “Like hell I will.” Lesko broke the connection.

  10

  One week earlier. Sur La Mer. They talked for two hours that night. Haltingly, at first. There were many silences of five minutes or more. At times, the mind of the old woman seemed clear and sharp. At other times it wandered.

  Marion, the wooden actress whom Nellie had mimicked, and then apologized for it, was Marion Davies. The film was Beverly of Graustark made in 1926, now on a cassette. Barbara read the label as Nellie Dameon poured her a sherry. Having set down the glass Nellie took a framed photograph from an antique chiffonier and handed it to Barbara. In it, smiling for the camera, were Nellie herself, Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst, and a very young Gary Cooper. The latter three had autographed it. Marion Davies had written, “Just found this. Popsy and Gary say get well. Love you.” It was dated, in her hand, October 1931.

  “She was Hearst's mistress, you know.”

  And protege, Barbara nodded. She'd read about them somewhere.

  “Marion didn't do much after sound came, either,” Nellie said wistfully. “She had a stutter.”

  “Um . . . Miss Dameon?”

  “Nellie will be fine.”

  “Thank you. Why do you pretend you're . . .” She searched for a word that would not offend.

  “Crackers?” Nellie offered. “Because I am. I think.”

  “Not that I can see. But, at the window, you tried to make me think you're catatonic. It would have worked if I hadn't heard you laugh.”

  The old actress glanced at the drapes, now fully drawn. “I'll keep those windows closed,” she said.

  “Nellie? Please tell me.”

  The eyes drifted. They glazed over. She was doing it again. But not for long. “It's a place I go,” she said, as if upon waking. “It keeps me out of trouble.”

  That word again.

  “Would somebody harm you? If they knew you could speak?”

  She hesitated. ”I don't know.”

  “Are you afraid of the Dunvilles? If you are, why don't you leave?”

  She smiled, sadly. She shook her head.

  “There are hundreds of places,” Barbara told her. “You'd be with people your age. You could talk to them all you want.”

  The glaze returned. It hovered. It did not settle. ”I went on a picnic this morning,” she said, sitting back in her chair.

  Barbara waited.

  “Not here. At Malibu. Just girls. Me, Marion and Colleen Moore.” She pointed to another old photograph. An actress with bangs.

  Barbara looked but said nothing.

  “We gossiped, and laughed, and ate everything we're not allowed.” Nellie smiled at the memory. “We had horses there. We rode them, bareback, through the waves.”

  “You went ... in your mind?”

  The actress shook her head. She touched her fingers to the back of her hand. ”I can still feel the salt.”

  Barbara understood. A little. “You're saying . . . you were really there.”

  “Yes.”

  “You can do that? Go off, be young again, anytime you like?”

  She nodded slowly. “You learn. But everything has to be just so. It only works from this chair. And from my bench.” She reached for her sherry and sipped from it. The light flooded back into her eyes. “Of course,” she said, smiling, “it helps to be crackers.”

  Barbara laughed aloud. She clamped a hand over her mouth as the old woman, still smiling, shushed her. She picked up her own glass and, with it, saluted Nellie Dameon.

  “Nellie? Why did you say that I'm in more trouble than I know?”

  he smile faded. “Is Barbara your real name?”

  “It is now.”

  “Will you tell me who you were before?”

  ”I want to. But it's better if I don't.”

  “You don't seem . . .” She stopped^herself.

  ”A bad person? I hope not. I like to think not.”

  Nellie wet her lips, deciding whether to speak. “Some never leave,” she said at last.

  Barbara stared. “Why would that be?”

  “They break rules.”
/>
  Tuesday morning. Los Angeles.

  “Get off here,” Carla Benedict pointed. “Go east on Slauson.”

  They were traveling southbound on the Harbor Freeway. Minutes earlier, they had passed the University of Southern California campus on their right, then the Los Angeles Coliseum.

  Molly Farrell followed her directions, turning at last onto Alameda Street in the section called Huntington Park. There was nothing parklike about it, she thought. Not a good neighborhood at all. Seedy apartment buildings, most of them two or three stories, gratings over store fronts, the residents mostly black or Hispanic.

  Carla pointed toward a row of apartments, wood frame, white, probably built just after World War n, in need of paint. Molly pulled up at the curb. Carla took a long breath, held it, then stepped from the car.

  Lisa's apartment was on the far end, second floor, reached by an outside stairway. Two keys opened the two locks of the door. The hinges squeaked. Molly had half-expected some sort of police notice to be taped to it, sealing the apartment while the investigation proceeded, but there was nothing. She would have assumed that the police had been there, and a few reporters as well. Apparently they had not.

  The apartment consisted of one good-size living room, a small bedroom, and a tiny bath. The living room had a kitchen at one end. Someone, long before Lisa, had removed the partition between kitchen and living room to give it a loft effect. Sparse furnishings made it seem larger than it was. It had a pullout couch. Carla had probably slept on it when she visited. There were framed posters on the walls, one Italian, one French, and a number of artifacts that were obviously European, probably sent by Carla over the years. Carla moved through the room, slowly, touching things.

  Molly said nothing, reluctant to intrude, as she watched Carla' s eyes. For the most part they were soft, unfocused, even lost. Now and then they would begin to melt as a memory passed behind them. But at other times they would narrow, and they would shine. Molly knew that they were seeing, trying to see, the man who had killed her sister. Trying to feel him, as she said she had where Lisa's body had been found.

  It was strange, she thought. Like watching two different people. The Carla she'd known for years, and the Carla she was just getting to know as she'd finally stroked her to sleep in their bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  Molly had known, of course, that Carla and her sister had been born almost fifteen years apart. She'd presumed Lisa to have been an accident. Parents well into their forties by the time she was born. But the accident, it turned out, had been Carla. Her mother, unwed, became pregnant. Father forced into marriage. Embittered by it. Resented Carla. Mother was much closer to her but became a drunk. Lisa born while Carla was in high school. Parents, especially the father, doted on Lisa, took her everywhere, bragged about her, rarely mentioned Carla except in terms of the scrapes she got into and the cars she wrecked, possibly to get their attention, although she'd deny that, possibly to hurt them back. And yet Carla, far from resenting Lisa, doted on her the most. She loved her, she had said last night . . . “with the passion put to use in my old griefs . . . and with the love I seemed to lose with my lost saints.''

  Molly had to shake her head. Carla Benedict, Calamity Carla, quoting sonnets from the Portuguese. The second bottle of wine had done it.

  They moved toward the bedroom. Molly entered first.

  A queen-size bed, no headboard, stacked with pillows. More poster art on the walls but these were of movies. Old movies. Some of them silent films. By the window stood a scarred oak desk with a computer and printer on it. A telephone answering machine, not blinking. There was a two-drawer filing cabinet, and three shelves crammed with books.

  Something was wrong here. She didn't know what, exactly. Perhaps it was the answering machine. After two days, there should have been a call on it. She reached for the switch and moved it to Play.

  “Hi, gorgeous. It's Kevin.”

  The sound, a young man's voice, startled Carla. She stepped closer.

  “Listen, I got a tape of Flesh and the Devil. Gilbert and Garbo with a whole new score by the London Symphony. Great stuff. We're going to watch it at nine at DiDi Fenerty's. If you get this in time, just come over.”

  Molly heard a TV in the background. The end of a car commercial followed by a loud ticking sound. “The mail this week was unusually . . .” The caller disconnected. But the television show, she realized, was 60 Minutes.

  There was a second message. A woman's voice, no name but obviously a friend, asking if Lisa planned to run in the morning. Two calls, thought Molly. Both on Sunday evening. But who had played them? Not Lisa. She was long dead by then.

  “That wasn't flashing,” Carla said quietly.

  Molly nodded. ‘The police were probably here.” But now her eyes were roaming the room. They fell on the surface of the desk. She sniffed it. It smelled of a cleanser. She felt it. It seemed to have been wiped clean. She leaned over the keyboard of Lisa's computer. Same odor there. And on the answering machine. But on the outer reaches of the desk she could see an accumulation of dust and soot. And on the bookcase.

  She noticed something else. The bookcase had not been dusted, probably for a week or more. And in front of each book she saw tracks in the dust, fresh tracks, as if each of them had been examined. Why, she wondered, would the police look inside every book? The answer: they wouldn't. Not unless they had reason to believe that something had been hidden between the pages. Molly reached into her purse. From a zippered compartment she produced a pair of thin surgical gloves and slipped them over her hands.

  She flipped the power switch of Lisa's computer. Molly knew the machine. It was a Leading Edge, an IBM clone, hard disk, fairly inexpensive. It hummed to life. At the C prompt, she typed in the access to Lisa's word processing software. The words . . . GENERAL FAILURE ... appeared on the screen. She lifted the monitor and placed it to one side, then, carefully she raised the front end of the computer. Underneath, in the dust, many months of it, she saw what she was looking for. A pattern of marks and scuffs where there should have been none. Someone had moved the computer, roughly, probably banged it up and down until the hard disk crashed and everything on it was destroyed.

  Molly turned to the bookcase. She'd noticed several computer manuals there. She looked through them, hoping to find that Lisa had owned and used a backup system that guarded against such a crash. There was none. Months of work, all gone. Personal records, correspondence . . . everything. Molly could not believe that a graduate student would risk so devastating a loss. She searched through the drawers of the desk, looking for files of disks. She found two sets. One, in a plastic case, contained a variety of utility programs and games but no duplicate files. The other, in a Maxell box, contained eighteen disks, each numbered in sequence. She took the first one, locked it into the computer, and booted it on the A prompt. The screen filled with symbols. They were scrambled. Hopelessly. She tried several more at random with the same result.

  “What's wrong?” Carla asked. “What did you find?”

  Molly shrugged. “I'm not sure.” She tried to hide her concern. No use setting Carla off just when she'd calmed her down. But someone, for some reason, had deliberately destroyed all of Lisa's records and the contents of her disk file—which might or might not have been her backup disks—as well. She tried to imagine what it could have meant. That Lisa had known the killer? That she had written something about him on her computer? Stranger things had happened. Yet it hardly seemed likely.

  “Molly?”

  ”Uh-huh?”

  “Don't jerk me around,” she said evenly. ”I know what a crash looks like. And I know this place has been picked over.”

  Molly hesitated. “It could still have been the police. Or the FBI.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Then who else, she wanted to ask, but didn't. “Can you think of anything else that's missing?” she asked instead.

  “She kept one of those month-at-a-glance calendars right here.” Carl
a pointed to a nail hole in the wall by the desk. Even the nail was gone.

  “How about an address book? Diaries, tape recorders, anything like that.”

  Carla scanned the room. Then, slowly, silently, she began opening drawers and closets. She moved into the living room. Molly could hear her. More drawers and now the hall closet. Molly waited, the Maxell box in her hand, thoughtfully tapping it against her chin. The light from the window caught some scratchings on the box's lid. Initials. Marked with a ballpoint pen. They read DF/FB.

  Their possible meaning struck her at once. She was reaching for Lisa's telephone directory when she heard a sound coming from the front door. It was being opened. By someone who had a key. She sat still, listening. The hinges squeaked. Whoever it was, was hesitating. Now she heard feet, more than two, moving slowly over the thin carpet. Where was Carla? She took a pen from the desk, removed the top, and concealed it in her hand.

  A man's face flicked into the doorway, then withdrew. Almost instantly, it returned, this time behind a revolver held in outstretched hands. A second man, also armed, stepped from behind the first. Both men, wearing suits, filled the doorway.

  “Do you mind?” Molly asked quietly, nodding toward their weapons.

  “On your feet,” the older of the two ordered. “Slowly.”

  Molly made a face. “Identification, please.”

  ”I said”—he gestured with his gun—“on your feet.”

  Suddenly, the second man collapsed. One knee shot forward, his head whipped back. He crashed heavily to the floor. The first man swung his revolver toward the man who was down. Too late. His head jerked back as well. Molly saw a flash of metal. A large bread knife. A hand attached. They appeared from nowhere. The serrated edge glistened at the throat of the man still standing.

  “For Pete's sake, Carla,” Molly said disgustedly.

  Calamity Carla.

  Irwin Kaplan, Drug Enforcement Administration, Washington, was eating breakfast with his daughters when he took Lesko's call. At the first mention of Bannerman's name, he told Lesko that he would get back to him in twenty minutes.

  He returned the call from a Peoples Drug Store several blocks from his home.