Dommerich never sped. Six different times he had girls in his car and he had had to be just as careful. He would keep them in the well of his front passenger seat, all scrunched, covered with pizza boxes, because the well was easier to clean than seats. You could hose it out. But a Lexus probably had leather seats so that wasn't so bad. And another reason he never sped was that his company fired anyone who got a ticket while on a delivery. At one point a Corvette with its high beams on passed both of them. Just then, the other man's hand had reached up, trying to grab the driver's shoulder, but it seemed to have no strength. It just sort of laid there, twitching a little, until the driver knocked it away with his elbow.
The driver, he now saw, was trying to talk on a cellular telephone. Dommerich moved closer, halving the distance between them. He knew he wouldn't be able to hear but it was fun to get closer anyway because he was pretty sure that the driver would be talking about him. Or about what he found back in Burbank. What Hickey looked like. Smiling up at him. All dead.
The only thing he still felt a little bad about was that they must have shot Carla's friend. The first one must have walked in on him—maybe the door was still open and he saw the smile drawn on it—and he saw Carla's friend standing over Hickey and he thought he must have done it. But Carla's friend must have heard him coming and shot him, too. In the throat. And in the shoulder, it looked like.
Dommerich shivered. He didn't like guns. They really bust you up. A knife is so cool and clean, and if you're careful, it doesn't kill until you're good and ready. And it's quiet.
Ahead, the man driving put the phone down. The Lexus sped up just a little. The sign said eight miles to Santa Barbara. Dommerich wondered how much cellular phones cost these days. He had a CB radio once but it got stolen. If he had one of those phones he could be calling Carla right now to ask if her friend is okay and to tell her he was following the two who walked in on him and that they must be friends of Hickey's because they're going to the same place Hickey went to before.
The Lexus signaled. Off the ramp. Two right turns. Dommerich smiled. He'd been right. But suddenly, on this dark part of the street, the Lexus pulled to the curb. The driver turned in his seat, on his knees, and reached down into the well behind him. Dommerich couldn't stop. The man was looking up at him. He went on past and kept going, around a bend and then, out of sight of the Lexus, he turned up the hill. The best thing to do, he decided, was to go right up near those gates, turn off his lights, and wait.
It was not so much that he noticed the black Mercedes coming down the hill. It was more of an afterimage. A woman, blond, had been driving and she had white tape across her nose and chin as if her face had been cut up and then put back together. And she'd looked at him.
Dommerich felt a thrill of fear. In the afterimage, she seemed all the more like a ghost. One of his college girls. And then in the back there was this other white ball, a face, totally covered with bandages, just like Claude Rains when he was invisible and couldn't make himself visible again. Dommerich remembered the way Claude Rains unwrapped his head, starting from the top, and there wasn't anything underneath.
Dommerich was scared. There were other shapes in the car but he couldn't make them out. If he had dreamed this, he would have thought that it was all six girls, their faces taped together, in this black car from hell, and they had him, the invisible man, in the backseat, wrapped up in bandages so he wasn't invisible anymore, and they all had knives, and . . .
He punched his head. It drove away the thought.
Ahead, on his right, were the gates. There was some activity there. He thought he'd better not get too close. On his left, almost across from them, was a big house and there must have been fifteen cars parked outside it. He heard music. Sounds of a party. Dommerich swung off Tower Road and into the oval driveway of the house. He got out of his car, gathered two empty boxes, and pretended to be checking an order slip.
The gates were shut but just behind them he could see men in gray uniforms struggling with a little truck that seemed to have gone off the road. He could hear the revving of the engine and the whirring of tires. Three or four men were pushing it. Another man, who must have been in charge, wasn't doing anything but yelling.
They had just heaved it back onto the road, sideways, blocking it, when the white Lexus appeared. It pulled up to the gate. The driver stuck his head out, shouted something. The man inside, in charge, held up a hand telling him he should wait. They were still maneuvering the truck, trying to straighten it. It stalled. Dommerich could hear the engine grinding.
The man in the Lexus got out. He walked up to the gate and stuck his arm through it. The man in charge seemed surprised. Then angry. He raised his hands, then said something over his shoulder. The guards hesitated. He yelled at them. One shrugged. They pushed the truck off the road again. Seconds later, the gates swung open and the Lexus sped through. Dommerich watched the tail lights disappear.
Wait’ll he tells Carla.
Wait’ll she hears that he knows where she can find the two men who walked in on her friend and shot him. Probably. That they must be Hickey's partners. That they probably know all about why he robbed her sister, and killed her, and tried to blame him.
But Carla knew better. She was his friend. She said so.
He still wasn't real sure she meant it. Not enough, anyway, that he'd take a chance on meeting her someplace.
But after this, who knows? Maybe.
In her whole life, Sumner Dommerich would bet, Carla never knew anyone who could do the things he could. And already did. In her whole life, she never had a friend like him.
For thirty minutes, Bannerman listened about Yuri, and Sur La Mer, and especially about Claude, wishing, not for the first time, that he had never let Carla out of Westport. There was a soft rap at the door. Susan answered this time, greeting Leo Belkin with a handshake and a touch of both cheeks.
He was a man of middle-age, average height, balding, rumpled in dress. Tortoiseshell glasses, and a pipe Bannerman had never seen him light, added a scholarly appearance. His expression, normally one of detached amusement, was now grave.
Susan led him into the room. The television was on, the sound low. A network film had already been interrupted twice by fragmentary reports of the events in Bur-bank. Even now, a crawl came across the bottom of the screen suggesting that the Campus Killer had chosen a male for his eighth victim. Details at ten.
“Yuri is alive,” said Belkin to no one in particular. “There is hope. He is very strong.”
He touched Bannerman’s arm in passing. The touch said that Paul should feel no guilt for asking the favor. He could not have known. There was no touch for Carla or for Molly. He looked longingly at a scotch bottle that sat unopened on a corner table. Bannerman fixed him a drink over ice. He took ice water for himself. Belkin noticed.
“Do you intend to take action?” he asked.
Bannerman's gesture was noncommittal. “We have a man,” he said, “Joseph Hickey, who apparently burglarized Carla's sister's apartment and may also have murdered her. We have a maniac, known to us only as Claude, who is a serial killer being hunted by the police.”
Standing, one foot on a chair, Bannerman outlined the events of the day as recounted by Molly and Carla. That this Claude, apparently, had known Lisa by sight. That he resented being blamed for her death. That he had spotted Carla this morning, followed her, and later felt compelled to tell her that he was innocent of her sister's death. He told her that she was also being followed by another man who turned out to be Hickey.
“You keep saying apparently.” Carla stared at the floor. “The man had Lisa's things. Everything else Claude told me turned out to be true.”
Bannerman held up a hand. “For the record,” he told Belkin, “the police don't believe that Claude killed Lisa either.” He recounted how Hickey had been traced through his license number—provided by Claude—and how Yuri had rushed to that address while Carla tried to keep Claude on the phone.
“Yuri found Hickey dead. Murdered, no doubt, by Claude, who by then was gone. Claude had mutilated Hickey. He did so in much the same way that Hickey, we think, mutilated Lisa. Two other men came to Hickey’s apartment. One of them fired through the door, using a silenced pistol, which means he probably thought he was shooting at Hickey. Yuri, wounded by now, grappled with him. He had found a gun, apparently Hickey’ s. Yuri managed to injure one of the men . . . ”
“He tore out his fucking throat,” said Carla. “Half of it was still under his nails.”
“All the same,” Bannerman said patiently, “those two men were gone by the time Molly and Carla arrived. Yuri was unconscious. They did what they could for him. They stayed with him until an ambulance arrived.”
Left unsaid, was that they didn't have to stay. If Yuri were not a friend, they would, and should, have left unseen. A flicker of appreciation on Belkin’s face said that he understood this nonetheless.
“The complications are these,” said Bannerman. “Molly and Carla had an encounter with the FBI this morning. They were subsequently identified as former contract agents. By now, two women matching their descriptions will have been placed at Hickey's apartment. The FBI will know that they arrived after the fact but they'll surely want them arrested and held as material witnesses.”
“What do you intend?”
Bannerman looked at his watch. “Lesko should be here within two hours. The local police know him by reputation. I will ask him to act as intermediary. If I can, I'd like to keep Molly and Carla out of custody and certainly out of the media.”
“What of the two men?” asked Colonel Belkin. “Why would they want to kill Hickey?”
Bannerman shrugged. He gestured toward the television set. “All we know about him is that he's a former cop, fired for cause. Lesko should be able to find out what he's been up to since then.”
“Other than burglary. And murdering young girls.”
“Yes.”
Belkin sipped his drink. Doing so, he noticed that Molly Farrell was looking searchingly at Paul. He caught her eye. She looked away.
“What are you not telling me?” he asked Bannerman.
Bannerman had noticed the exchange.
“There is,” he chose his words, “another element. Molly thinks that Lisa Benedict may have been killed because of something she learned about an institution called Sur La Mer. It's a rest home for movie people. She thinks that Hickey may have been in this institution's employ.”
“And ordered to kill her?”
”I. . . find that hard to believe. Molly has been through all of Lisa's notes. Even she acknowledges that there was nothing in them worth killing for.”
“Someone surely had a reason to kill Hickey. And surely you intend to look into it.”
”I do,” Bannerman nodded. “But through the police. Through Lesko.”
“You will take no action on your own?”
Bannerman made a face. They had already argued this question. “Such as what?” he asked. “Carla wanted to go there tonight with John Waldo. Find someone in authority. Stick a knife against his eyes and begin asking questions. But that person, to say nothing of the institution, could be totally innocent of all this and John Waldo would probably have had to take out a guard or two on his way in.”
Belkin had been watching Molly. He cocked his head toward her. “May I?” he asked Bannerman. Bannerman frowned, but nodded.
“Are they innocent?” he asked.
”I don't think so.”
“You have reasoned, I take it, that because Hickey stole materials that pertained to this information, the institution must have sent him.”
“Yes.”
“And there is no doubt that Hickey stole them?”
“He had some of Lisa's things in his apartment. Claude described them to Carla. He has them now.”
“This . . . maniac.” Belkin seemed dubious. “This sequence killer.”
“Serial killer. Yes.”
“How do you know he didn't have them right along?”
Molly started to answer. She found that she could not.
“It's a very good question,” Paul said to her.
Carla shook her head. “Then he would have volunteered that he found them. He didn't. I had to tell him what to look for.”
“There's more,” Molly said to Belkin. “There's this girl, DiDi Fenerty, who had copies of the stolen notes. Hickey followed us to her house so he knew we talked to her. After I left, she called Sur La Mer to ask if Lisa had been there the day she died. They said no. Soon after that, she got a call warning her to lay low, keep people around her, and not to trust anyone she doesn't know except Carla
and me. The caller, a man, slight accent, probably Germanic, knew our names.”
The KGB Colonel looked at Bannerman, one eyebrow raised. “Paul? You intended to keep this from me?”
Bannerman sighed. “What would you have concluded?”
“That you have an ally at Sur La Mer.”
Bannerman shook his head. “Any number of policemen, FBI agents, perhaps even reporters, knew their names by that time. The Fenerty girl's name was left on Lisa's tape machine. They would have expected Carla to look her up. I don't know who would call with such a warning or why. But it's just as easy to believe that we have an ally among the authorities.”
Belkin heard little conviction in these words. A Los Angeles policeman or a federal agent with a German accent? He knew that Bannerman himself did not believe it. “You were afraid, I take it, that I would send my own people to this place?”
“It crossed my mind.”
Bannerman decided that he'd like a splash of Dewar's after all. “That's all we'd need,” he said, pouring. “First we have Carla and Molly, both of whom have had a KGB price on their heads at one time or another, identified as former agents of mine. Then we have a KGB captain, although not yet identified as such, found in a room where the possible killer of Carla Benedict's sister has himself been carved like a roast. We have Carla, who incidentally is known to work with a knife, placed at that scene. Next we have one faction or the other raiding an old folks home for actors, a place that may or may not have employed Hickey, and almost certainly leaving a few more bodies behind.”
Bannerman sipped. “The media would notice, Leo. And given the players, a dozen intelligence services would start wondering what's going on here. Your mission would be blown. You'd be expelled within a day.”
Susan, sitting on the bed, shook her head as if to clear it. Good point, she thought wryly. Can't let a Russian spy go home empty handed.
Belkin read her expression. He touched her shoulder in passing, patting it. The gesture was meant, variously, to say that he understood, that he was fond of her, and that his purpose here would not, in any case, result in nuclear winter.
“My suggestion,” Bannerman was saying, “is that we proceed in this way. We'll let the police investigate Hickey's role in all this and any connection he might have with Sur La Mer. They will look for the two men who shot Yuri, and, given that one of them is badly hurt, they'll probably be successful. We will involve ourselves only if they fail but by then, through Lesko, I hope to know everything they've learned in the meantime.”
The smaller man nodded. His expression said that this was sensible. He waited.
Bannerman’s eyes met Susan's. They moved to Carla. “We're also going to try to take Claude,” he said.
“Hey.” Her chin came up. “Wait a minute.”
Bannerman made a face. “What are you going to say, Carla? That he's on our side?”
“He's on Lisa's side. He gave us Hickey. Without him, Hickey would have been dead anyway and we wouldn't know shit.”
“We'll know even more if we can question him,” he said. “But that's not the point. If we take Claude we'll have something to trade. No publicity for us, none for Leo, Yuri is not detained and you two stay out
of jail.”
“He's been straight with me,” Carla said quietly. “He didn't have to stick his neck out for me.”
“For Pete's sake, Carla,” Molly muttered.
“He didn't,” Carla insisted. “He would have . . . ”
“What he did,`` Molly said through her teeth, “was rape and butcher six other college girls just like Lisa. What he will do is rape and butcher at least six more if he isn't stopped. Tell Paul the rest of it.”
“What rest?”
“Tell him what I heard while you were still on the phone with him.”
“What? That I didn't want Yuri walking in on him and ending up like Hickey? Sure. I told him to get away from there.”
“That's not the reason you gave Claude. Tell Paul what you said to him.”
Carla stared at her, angrily though blankly. She seemed not to remember.
“You said he was your friend,” Molly reminded her. She looked up at Paul. “She told Claude he was her friend.”
It was not so much that Weinberg was angry with her.
Well, yes he was.
He had as much as given his word that neither of the Dunvilles would be harmed. She answered that the father and son were at odds. To the son, killing seemed a last resort. To the father, it seemed a first principle. The father might well have prevailed. Better to leave the son unencumbered.
He could not deny the logic of her explanation. And he did, as always, trust in her judgment. She was there, after all. She'd heard them both. The son said that the father would leave no witnesses, perhaps not even himself. The father did not think to deny it. She made her decision.
Except that he did not believe her. Logic, he felt sure, had very little to do with her decision. He knew her. He had looked into her eyes as he listened to her words. He saw the remains of recent tears. They were hardly for Carleton Dunville the elder. Barbara wanted Carleton the elder dead. That was, the long and the short of it. Still, he would like to have been consulted.
Bannerman's Law Page 24
