A Death Before Dying (The Lt. Hastings Mysteries)

by Collin Wilcox

  “But I—”

  “Nine o’clock, Edwin. Be there, with the money. Don’t send anyone. Come yourself. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nine o’clock.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are the videotapes safe? Hidden?”

  “Yes,” Corwin answered. “Certainly.”

  “Well, you’ve got to destroy them.”

  “Destroy them? But—”

  “If the police ever find them, they’ll have the whole thing laid out for them. Don’t you understand that?”

  “Well, yes. But—”

  “I want to ask you something, Edwin. Before I hang up, I want to ask you something. And I want you to tell me the truth.”

  “Wh-what is it?”

  “Am I on those tapes? I know you’re on them. But am I on them?”

  A silence. And with the silence came certainty: the raw, chilling certainty.

  Yes, he was on the tapes.

  2:35 P.M. “Okay,” Friedman said, “we’re all set. Culligan has two men staking out Corwin’s mansion, and Sawyer and Allingham are staking out Charles’s place.”

  “Where’s Charles live?” Hastings asked.

  “It’s a loft on Bryant Street. The building was a warehouse, converted into lofts for artists.”

  “Has either of them been spotted?”

  “Culligan’s pretty sure Corwin’s inside his house. And even if he isn’t, assuming that he’s guilty, I can’t imagine him running, somehow. But Charles isn’t home, and he hasn’t been seen after he left the gallery.”

  “Are you getting warrants?”

  “I don’t think we’ve got grounds to search Corwin’s place,” Friedman said. “I mean—” He spread his hands. “I mean, what’ve we got? A sorehead artist saw Corwin and Meredith together at a couple of parties. Tell that to a judge, and we’d use up a year’s credibility. Minimum.”

  “If we can tie Corwin to Allegro, though—tie him to the ownership of her condo …”

  “That, obviously, is something else. Meanwhile, though—” Frustrated, Friedman sharply shook his head. “Meanwhile, I’m having a hell of a time getting a line on Charles.”

  “Why?”

  “For one thing, I can’t find out his last name, if you can believe that. And without a last name, no judge in the world is going to issue a search warrant. It’s also impossible to check out his car, obviously, without a last name.”

  “It’s a blue Fiat convertible. How many can there be in San Francisco?”

  “Except that the color doesn’t scan, for the computer.”

  Hastings nodded. “I know that.”

  “I’ve got a computer guy checking Fiats registered to owners with the given name Charles. And, obviously, he’s running Fiats registered to Charles’s address. Incidentally, how’d you get Charles’s address and phone, without a last name?”

  “I got it from the gallery. He manages the place, apparently.”

  “Ah—” Friedman nodded. Then: “Did Canelli tell you about that confessor?”

  “Canelli said you let the guy go. He didn’t say why.”

  “Well,” Friedman said, “it didn’t take a genius to see that Granville was bonkers. He’s the homeless guy who found the body. Nice old guy, lives in Golden Gate Park with his faithful dog Chum. Crazy, but nice. Harmless, too, obviously. As near as I could figure it, he began to identify with her. Or maybe he wanted to see himself on TV. Or, more likely, it was a combination, plus the chance to live in a nice warm prison cell for the rest of his life. Anyhow, I listened to him for a while and petted his dog—who growled at me. And then I explained to Granville that if he confessed to murder, he’d go to prison for a long, long time—without Chum. And that was that. A half hour later he and Chum were on their way back to Golden Gate Park.”

  “So what about Corwin and Charles? What’s next?”

  “Obviously,” Friedman said, “the best-case scenario would be to find Charles, ask him a few questions, run him by that kid—” He glanced at his notes. “Lee Persse, who was parked outside the victim’s building Wednesday night. Then, when Charles confesses, we talk to Corwin. Who, in the meantime, we’ve tied to ownership of Meredith’s building and the ownership of the paintings and the art in her apartment. No sweat.”

  “Except that Charles has disappeared.”

  “Except that Charles has disappeared. Correct.”

  “So?”

  “So,” Friedman said, moving forward in his chair, ready to rise. “So, while we’re waiting, let’s see what Edwin Corwin has to say about his relationship to Meredith Powell.”

  “You and me?” Hastings pretended disbelief. “Out in the field? You?”

  “I save myself for the big fish. Exclusively.”

  3:20 P.M. Grimacing, Hastings turned the windshield wipers to full speed. Rain was falling in sheets, whipped by the wind. Overhead, the sky was a solid, leaden gray.

  “We should’ve picked up a couple of slickers,” Friedman said.

  Switching on the headlights, Hastings made no response.

  “You didn’t have anything to do with that girl who died at one of Corwin’s parties, did you?” Friedman asked.

  “No.”

  “So you’ve never met Corwin, never been inside his house.”

  “No.”

  “Well,” Friedman said wryly, “you’ve got a surprise in store.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean the guy’s downright bizarre. And so’s his house. You’ll see.”

  Hastings turned left from Octavia into Jackson and began looking for a parking place. In the twin crescents left by the windshield wipers, he saw both curbs lined solidly with cars. No loading zones, no passenger zones. Just cars.

  “Culligan probably has the last parking place,” Friedman said, peering through the rain. “Do you see him?”

  “No.”

  “Jesus, what weather. They’re flooded in Marin County. They’ve called out the—” He interrupted himself. “There’s a fireplug.” Friedman pointed across the street, then pointed to a three-story mansion set on a double lot. It was a brick-and-stone imitation of an English Tudor country estate: slate roofs, towering chimneys, lead-paned windows. “And there’s the house. Good. We won’t get soaked.”

  “From the outside, there’s nothing bizarre about it.”

  “Just wait.”

  3:25 P.M. As Friedman pressed the small illuminated button set into the stone frame of the door, Hastings stepped back, saying “Why don’t you go first? You know him.”

  Friedman’s round, bland face registered mild amusement. “I wouldn’t say I know him. However, I—”

  The carved oak door swung open. A small man dressed in a white jacket stood in the open doorway. His features were classic Chicano: olive skin, black eyes, black hair. With his shield in his hand, Friedman stated their business. “We’d like to see Mr. Corwin,” he finished, using his bulk to intimidate the small brown man.

  With his eyes fixed on the shield, the houseman spoke in a soft, reluctant voice, transparently lying. “He isn’t here. Sorry.” As if to close it, he put an uneasy hand on the door.

  “Well, then—” Friedman stepped forward. “We’ll wait.”

  “But—”

  “It’s okay. We won’t be any trouble.”

  Finally the houseman looked up, with great effort meeting Friedman’s gaze. The houseman’s soft brown eyes were timid, his voice hesitant. “Please. I—I don’t think I’m supposed—”

  “Don’t worry,” Friedman said, crossing the threshold. “I’ll take full responsibility. It’s no problem.”

  “But—”

  Once inside the entryway, with Hastings beside him, Friedman confronted the houseman squarely: two hundred forty pounds and a gold shield bulking over a blinking, twitching hundred forty pounds. Friedman spoke slowly, heavily, investing the standard opening question with the full force of the law. “What’s your name?”

  “It—it’
s Luis. My name is Luis Raiz.”

  “Well, Luis, we’re both officers, Lieutenant Hastings and myself. We’re not just policemen. We give the orders to other detectives. Do you understand?”

  With great effort, Raiz still managed to meet Friedman’s flat, relentless stare. “Lieutenants. Yes. I know.”

  “And we’re here—both of us—because we’re investigating the murder of a woman named Meredith Powell. Comprende?”

  “Sí—” Raiz gulped. “Yes. Yes, sir.” At his sides, Raiz’s small, nervous hands were clenching and unclenching.

  “We think Mr. Corwin can help us, give us some information we need. So it’s very important that we talk to Mr. Corwin.”

  Raiz nodded. “Yes …”

  “So, because it’s important that we talk to Mr. Corwin—very important, to our investigation—anyone who keeps us from seeing Mr. Corwin is actually breaking the law. It’s called obstructing justice.” Friedman paused, waited while his victim squirmed. Then he said quietly, “And people can go to jail, Luis, for obstructing justice. They can go to jail for a long, long time.”

  “But I—I can’t—” Raiz drew back miserably. As if to look for a way out, his eyes slid aside. On his forehead, sweat glistened.

  Friedman shifted his attack expertly. Pitching his voice to a confidential note, he asked quietly, “Did you know her, Luis? Did you know Meredith Powell?”

  “I—” Raiz licked his lips. “I saw her, yes.”

  “Here? In this house?”

  The houseman silently nodded.

  “How many times did you see her, Luis?”

  “I—I saw her many times.”

  “She was—” Friedman paused delicately. “She was with Mr. Corwin. Here. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Y-yes, sir, that’s what I’m saying.”

  Smiling encouragement, Friedman stepped back. Now his bulk was teddy bear friendly, no longer menacing. “Okay,” Friedman said, “you’ve been helpful. You’ve got nothing to worry about. At least, not so far. Do you understand?”

  Slowly, tentatively, Raiz nodded, plainly suspicious of this casual gift of hope. “I understand. Yes.”

  “Okay—” Now, briskly, Friedman moved to his left, away from the front door. “Now, Luis, we’re going to sit down, Lieutenant Hastings and I”—he gestured to a large room off the entry hall—“and we’re going to wait for Mr. Corwin to show up. We’re going to wait for as long as it takes for him to show up. And we’ve got men outside, waiting. They’re on stakeout. You understand about stakeouts, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes—” Still speaking softly, hesitantly, Raiz said, “Cops and robbers. Stakeout. Yes.”

  Friedman nodded solemnly. “That’s right, Luis. Cops and robbers. Exactly.”

  3:30 P.M. It was happening again—happening still. Always. The same sensations registering the same voices, the same nameless phantasms of recollection.

  Voices from downstairs. His mother’s voice. His father’s voice, dimly remembered. Lawyers’ voices, from behind closed doors. Overheard voices. Bedroom voices: his mother’s voice, and the voices of strange men overlaying hers. First he’d been a child, crouched in the hallway darkness. And now he was a child grown into a man, still listening in hallways, unconsciously pressed against the balustrades, clinging, trying to make himself even smaller.

  Hearing the sound of their voices, from just below.

  After all the voices, a lifetime of listening, it had finally come down to one voice: Luis Raiz, betraying him.

  3:32 P.M. Hastings watched Luis Raiz leave the room, then turned his attention to the mansion’s decor as he circled the room with baffled eyes. Like the building’s exterior, the interior was imitation Tudor: rough-hewn beams, natural wooden paneling and trim, slate floors, roughly troweled white plaster walls, a majestic stone fireplace crowned by a heraldic coat of arms. The leaded windows were small; the panes were imperfect, distorting the outside view.

  Except for a huge iron-studded plank-top table in the center of the room and the benches on either side of the massive fireplace hearth, the room was unfurnished. A huge circular wrought-iron candelabra was suspended by chains from exposed ceiling beams in the center of the room, but interior light came from many small concealed spotlights set into the beams. The spotlights illuminated the paintings and collages that covered the walls and the statuary that rested on individual display pedestals.

  Like the paintings at Meredith Powell’s flat and the Corwin Gallery, most of the canvases were overscale abstracts. But these paintings, Hastings sensed, were subtly different. With Friedman standing by, Hastings stepped closer to one of the paintings. The background was a textured blue-black, with color clustered irregularly at the center. From a distance, the colored portion was abstract. But seen close up, the cluster of color was actually an intricate collection of nude figures, animal and human, pornographically intertwined.

  Hastings glanced at Friedman, shrugged in response to the other man’s small, knowing smile, then turned again to face the wall. A huge three-dimensional wall sculpture hung beside the painting. The sculpture was a surreal representation of a human eyeball that had been torn from its socket, sinews and nerves and blood vessels dangling, the white of the eye a network of red lines. In the pupil of the eye, Hastings saw the figure of a beautiful nude woman. One of her eyes was missing, leaving a bloody socket.

  “Kinky,” Hastings said.

  “Definitely kinky.” Friedman sat on one of the rough wooden benches.

  “So what now?”

  “I figure he’s probably here,” Friedman said. “All we’ve got to do is wait.”

  “I don’t see why both of us should wait.”

  Friedman considered the point, then said, “Let’s give it a half hour, see what happens. If Charles gets collared somewhere, Communications’ll beep us.”

  “Is the rest of the house like this?”

  “I only saw a couple of rooms—this one and another one, if I remember. Plus the hallway, which looks like it’s a medieval castle, for God’s sake. You know: suits of armor, crossed swords. And, of course, a few shrunken heads.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “I’m half kidding.”

  “Shrunken heads are African.”

  “Not if you stir them in a witches’ stew.”

  “We should’ve gotten a bio on this guy.”

  “I ordered one.”

  “Did you check any priors? What about that girl who died at one of his parties?”

  “I don’t know about priors on him. And I can’t remember the girl’s name, to run it.”

  “Christ—” Hastings shook his head. “This is crazy. We can’t get a search warrant on Charles because we don’t have a last name. And we can’t run Corwin because we can’t remember a victim’s name. What good are million-dollar computers?”

  “Patience,” Friedman said. “We’ll get her name. I’ve pulled out all the stops, gone to afterburners.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Hastings asked sourly.

  “It means,” Friedman answered solemnly, “that I posted a notice in the bathrooms. Ten bucks, for anyone who remembers the girl’s name.”

  4:15 P.M. With the storm raging outside the second-story window, the bedroom was in half darkness. Standing before the full-length mirror, Corwin carefully studied his reflection. Yes, the image was satisfactory, a convincing representation of the casually dressed Ivy Leaguer: tweed jacket, button-down white oxford shirt, flannel trousers, loafers. Even the socks fitted: wool argyles, an evocation of his earliest childhood returned to fashion favor.

  He turned from his reflection, sat at the desk, took the straw, bent over the two lines of cocaine on the sheet of dark paper. Yes, for this performance, two lines would be required. One line for courage, one line for inspiration.

  Quickly he inhaled. One line, and the other line. He leaned back in the chair, let his eyes close, felt the rush begin. Heard the cymbals. Saw the light that made the shadows g
low. At Andover, he’d gotten a part in the junior play, one of his most vivid memories. On opening night, alone on the stage, utterly alone, just himself and the multicolored lights rendering the audience invisible, he’d become a second person, released. Reality had fallen away, leaving him omnipotent. It had been a magical moment. His first moment of pure magic, and his last.

  He opened his eyes, drew a long, deep breath. His eyes were fixed on the telephone, close to his hand. He should call a lawyer. He knew he should call a lawyer. But then the nightmares would begin: voices of lawyers, shredding his soul. Faces of judges: monsters, dangling from their fingers the strings that controlled his life. Lawyers—judges—his mother—his aunt. All of them, dangling the strings. Leaving him with nothing. From earliest memory, nothing.

  He was walking to the bedroom door, unlocking it, opening it, stepping out into the hallway. From downstairs, he could hear their voices: the two detectives questioning Luis, who had been summoned back into their presence.

  This time there was no glare of lights. And no one to prompt him, give him the lines. There was just the sound of cymbals, sizzling softly: his own thoughts, slowly frying.

  4:17 P.M. As Raiz left the room, Hastings frowned at his watch. “This is dumb. We’re not outwaiting him. He’s outwaiting us.”

  Impassive, Friedman made no response.

  “I’m going to at least call Communications,” Hastings said, “find out whether they’ve got anything on Charles.”

  “If they had anything, they’d beep us.”

  “These walls are rock. Maybe the signal can’t—”

  In the archway that opened on the central reception hall, a man appeared. His body was improbably slim: not athletically slim, but desiccated. The graying hair was thin, combed forward over a balding scalp. The deep-set eyes were manic, perpetually fix-focused. The face, too, was desiccated, etched with lines deeper than aging. It was a ravaged aristocrat’s face, destroyed from within.

  Rising, Friedman stepped forward. “Mr. Corwin.”

  The man nodded. Friedman made the introductions, then fell silent. The three men remained motionless for a moment, looking at each other in turn, making their separate assessments. Finally Corwin came into the room, leaned against the huge central table, gesturing for the two detectives to take their seats on the benches that flanked the fireplace.