The idea that Jennings had come back tonight to polish off the rest of the clan fell apart like cheap shoes, too, when you thought about it. Jennings’s beef had been with Jack, not the whole famn damily. And it was true that Jennings could have taken care of everybody and the dog last night after doing in Castelar. Or before, while awaiting his arrival from the airport.
All right, then, assuming Vince was neither mistaken in his identification nor hallucinating, why was Jennings skulking around tonight?
To see Kate.
I rested my head against a windowpane. The cold glass was soothing on my slightly feverish forehead. I lifted the window a fraction of an inch, for the room seemed stuffy and warm.
It made sense. Some. It explained a few things. Kate’s disappearance had been kept out of the news; if Jennings had not abducted her, then he’d have no reason to expect her to be anyplace other than home sweet home. With every cop in the lower forty-eight looking for him, naturally he’d have to come furtively, under cover of dark, to meet with Kate and tell her—tell her what? Gee whiz, kid, sorry I offed your old man; no hard feelings, I hope.
Not too likely. Try again: Gee whiz, kid, everyone says I offed your old man, but I didn’t.
But if he hadn’t, who had? And where, oh where was Kate?
Good work, amigo, you’ve managed to bring the thing around full circle and give yourself a five-alarm headache in the process.
I lowered the window and meandered back to the couch.
Well, maybe Kennerly was right: Kate kidnaped herself. Maybe she feared for her own safety and went into hiding. But wouldn’t she go to the police? Wouldn’t she at least get word back to her family?
I sat with my feet on the coffee table and a hand on my throbbing gut. To say the least, it had been one hell of a day. Only one day? It felt more like three. And no wonder: This case, if “case” was the word for this abysmal mess, was really three separate but entangled cases: the murder, the missing person, and the manhunt. (Every writer knows, when in doubt, alliterate.) It was interesting to note the order in which those three sprang to mind, because Kate and her thin-air act was indeed at the center of everything, although all the overlapping pieces threatened to obscure her image.
Where was she?
Or was Vince right? Had Jennings killed her, either before or after killing Castelar, for some reason that I couldn’t imagine? And had he now come back to finish the job, to wipe out the rest of the family and simultaneously, in his mind, wipe the slate clean?
Even so the question still remained: Where was she? …
Sometime, somehow, I got the half-empty cup repositioned on the coffee table. I must have, because that’s where it was six hours later when I woke from a short, fitful, and not at all refreshing slumber.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
She was small and slender and fine-featured, with long straight chestnut-colored hair that she wore gathered at the back of her neck. Her eyes were large and very, very blue, her mouth was small and very, very pink. She wore a smart gray suit, a red blouse with a floppy bow tie, and a countenance equally startled and amused as I stumbled into the dining room.
Who could blame her? I had awoken, if in fact I had, feeling like yesterday’s breakfast warmed over. My head pounded, my gut ached, my eyes stung, and my mouth felt like some joker had carpeted it while I slept. After spending several minutes in the downstairs half-bath trying to comb my hair into shape, or at least get it to stick out symmetrically, I had given up and stuck my head under the spigot, letting cool water pour over the back of my head for a good long time. It made me feel a little more human, but with my slicked hair and my patchy beard I looked like I should’ve been selling hot watches at the airport. To make matters worse, my clothes looked like they had been slept in. They had.
I padded in on stockinged feet, half-smiled sheepishly, and pushed on through to the kitchen where—huzzah!—coffee awaited. The dog tap-tapped over, his tail flapping in such wide arcs that it thumped against his sides on the end of each wag. I patted him absently, then stood looking out the window over the sink, slurping hot coffee. The morning was gray, a little foggy, and the large barn at the edge of the yard was just a whitish smear against the dust-colored sky. A light but consistent snow fell at an angle that indicated a slight north wind.
I watched it vacuously for a few minutes until I felt the caffeine collide with my brain; then I topped off my mug and went back to the dining room. The woman looked up again from the leather portfolio she was studying. “Good morning,” I said, but it came out more like gr mrg, so I cleared my throat and tried again.
“Good morning,” she answered, with emphasis on the second word. She spoke with the barest trace of an accent that I could not identify on the strength of two words. I indicated the chair nearest her and she nodded in invitation.
I sat, drank, smiled. At least, it was a smile from my side of my face; no telling what it looked like from hers. “You’ll have to forgive me,” I said. “I’m useless until I’ve had my first pot of coffee.”
“You and everybody else around here; they’re all sleeping late today.” Was the accent Scandinavian? “The after-effects of yesterday, I suppose … although you look more like you were at a big party that I wasn’t invited to.” She smiled and her eyes glittered like blue diamonds.
“We had some excitement around here, but I don’t know that you’d call it a party. Incidentally”—I extended a paw—“my name’s Nebraska. I’m your friendly neighborhood private detective.”
She laughed. “That would have been my last guess.” She took my hand. “I’m your friendly neighborhood headshrinker. Koosje Van der Beek.” She pronounced the first name the way some of my East Coast acquaintances pronounce “kosher”—KO-shuh—and the last name to rhyme with “heck.”
“Van der Beek,” I repeated. “Sounds Dutch.”
Koosje nodded. “Nebraska,” she said. “Sounds … Nebraskan. Are live-in private detectives the new status symbol, like aerobics instructors who make house calls?”
I smiled into my cup. “Do I look like a status symbol to you? No, I’ve been hired to look for Kate, the oldest daughter. But apparently Walt Jennings, the suspected perp—private-eye talk—was skulking around here last night, so I was moonlighting as a bodyguard.” I frowned. “By the way, how did you get in?”
“Amy came down and let me in, after I had pounded on the back door until my knuckles were raw. Didn’t you hear me?”
“No.”
“No one else did, either. Didn’t you even hear the dog barking?”
“Not a thing. Some bodyguard. Well, then I guess Amy is much improved; yesterday you could have driven a Panzer division through here and she wouldn’t’ve so much as glanced up.”
Koosje nodded gravely and guided a spoon in narrow ovals through the pale surface of her café au lait. “The key is to begin intensive treatment immediately. It’s fortunate that Dr. Bruhn, the family physician, knew that. A lot of people, including a lot of professionals, still believe that a troubled child will ‘snap out of it.’ The rising suicide rate among adolescents, and pre-adolescents, says otherwise.”
“Will Amy be all right?”
She sipped contemplatively. “I think so.” Her words were measured, guarded. “The thing is, her father’s death is only part of Amy’s problem. I’m convinced of that. My guess is she’s been seriously bothered by something for some time, perhaps something not even related to the murder. That event merely—well, you could say it was the last straw. Her troubles overwhelmed her, and she withdrew into herself. Now, yesterday we were able to break through that to an extent, to overcome somewhat the huge shock of her father’s death. What we need to do now is go further, find out what really is upsetting her, and work on that. Otherwise I can almost guarantee a regression, perhaps a severe one, in no more than six months.”
“Makes my job sound like a snap by comparison. Listen: Last night Vince was concerned that my presence here would upset Amy further. Do
you think that’s so? Should I make a run for it before she comes down?”
Her eyes went past my head toward the stairs behind me. “We’re about to find out,” she said calmly.
Amy emerged from the staircase, wearing blue jeans and a lemon turtleneck and the same infinitely sad expression as yesterday, and stopped dead in her tracks when she saw me. The dog bounded over floppily to say good morning, but the girl ignored him. Koosje greeted her brightly and asked if she remembered me. Amy nodded emptily as I sat there smiling until my ears hurt. “Why don’t you get something to eat,” Koosje said in that same chipper voice, “and then we can get started.” The girl said nothing, but she moved past us and into the kitchen—giving me wide berth, or so I thought—and soon we heard the opening of cupboards and the fridge.
I looked at Koosje, who shrugged expressionlessly.
Amy returned presently with a bowl of cornflakes and a glass of orange drink. She said nothing, but her eyes were locked on me as she went around behind Koosje and sat opposite me at the big wooden table. I tried another smile, to no apparent effect. Damn this ratty beard.
After a few silent moments Koosje said, “Are you having any luck with your job? I wouldn’t even know where to begin looking.”
I glanced at the kid. It didn’t seem to me that we should be talking about this in front of her—but then, I wasn’t the doctor. “Mainly I’ve been nosing around, talking to people who knew Kate or Jennings, hoping to get some idea of where they might have gone to ground—the assumption being that the hideous weather in any direction you’d care to go has effectively trapped them in the immediate area. I thought I was on to something last night, but it dead-ended on me.”
Abruptly Amy said, “Are you a policeman?”
I looked at Koosje. Her face was blank. I turned back to Amy. “No, I’m a private detective. Your mom hired me to find Kate.”
Amy went back to work on the cereal. I polished off my coffee and was about to ask Koosje if she wanted more when Amy again spoke: “Do you have a gun?”
This time Koosje raised one delicate eyebrow a fraction of an inch.
“I own a couple, but I’m not wearing one now. I usually don’t. I don’t like them very much.”
“Have you ever shot anyone?”
“Yes …”
“Did they die?”
I always have to think about that one, because of Viet Nam. Somehow, those deaths aren’t supposed to count, like self-defense isn’t supposed to count, but they do. It was a long time ago and it was on the other side of the world and sometimes it seemed as if it had happened to somebody else instead of me, but it still counted. Every one of them counted, even the ones I’ll never know about.
“Some did,” I hedged.
“My dad was shot,” Amy said quietly, solemnly. “He died.”
“I know, honey. That’s why I don’t like guns.”
A single tear slipped down her long face. She wiped it away with the edge of her hand.
“Ready to go to work now?” Koosje asked. Amy nodded without looking up. “All right, why don’t you run down to the family room and I’ll be along in a minute. Okay?” Another nod. She stood and took her dishes into the kitchen, moving somnolently; a little later we heard three pairs of feet—Amy’s and the spaniel’s—on the basement stairs.
“How’d I do, coach?”
Koosje fastened the brass catch on her portfolio. “She had questions and you answered them. The questions indicate that she’s preoccupied with her father’s death—which is natural. She’s trying to come to terms with a violent and senseless act. The answers were the only ones you could give. Generally speaking, it’s less risky in these cases to tell the truth than to lie. We’re into honesty here. I have to help Amy become honest with herself and her feelings, and it’s hard to be straight with yourself when no one else will be straight with you.”
I opened my mouth and made the phone ring. Koosje stood. “I don’t think anyone else is up yet.” She moved briskly into the kitchen. I followed with both of our coffee cups and busied myself with them as Koosje lifted the receiver and identified herself. There was a pause, and then she turned toward me. “For you.” She slipped a hand over the mouthpiece and stage-whispered, “It’s a woman—with a very sexy low voice.”
“I told her never to call me here,” I said, trading coffee for the phone. Banner was on the other end of the line. She sounded a light-year away; I guessed she was patched through from a car. “How did you find me?”
“Hey, Marlowe, you’re not the only detective in town, y’know. I’ve been calling your place since eight; finally the light went on and I called your Kennerly. Say, your friend there’s got a pretty sexy voice.”
I watched Koosje dribbling milk into her coffee. “The feeling seems to be mutual. Would you like me to introduce you?”
“Maybe some other lifetime,” Banner said coolly. “Right now I want to get together for a little council of war, talk about this and that, whether you’ve made any headway, whether we’ve made any headway, that sort of stuff. I’m at the Jennings place.”
“Can’t it wait? I feel like death itself, I slept—badly—in my clothes, and I could use a shower and a bite to eat first. What are you doing at the Jenningses’?”
“Working,” she said slowly. “Let’s just say you’re not the only one who feels like death this morning.”
I was just as glad not to have breakfasted. By the time I arrived, just over an hour later, the body was gone, but the condition of the house was all my imagination needed to work up a fairly graphic sketch. To put it succinctly, the dingy little place was an abattoir. The slaughter had begun in the tiny bedroom, with the killer then following his fleeing victim into the living room, where the grisly job was finished. Blood had dyed the tatty blue carpet deep purple, almost black. Furniture was turned over and smashed. Splatters of gobbets of things that didn’t bear thinking about decorated the walls and furniture and drapery.
Oddly, what horrified me most was the bloodstained doorknob and the dark vertical streaks on the door and wall, trailing down to the baseboards.
I thought of Christina Jennings the way she had looked last night, talking about Jennings, engaging in flirtatious badinage about her mysterious date, flashing her legs at me. And then I thought of her as she must have looked later last night, slashed, mutilated, dying … groping for the doorknob in a desperate and futile attempt to attract help. The thought made my stomach pitch.
“She didn’t make it,” Banner’s hoarse voice said from behind me. I turned. She stood in the doorway between the wreck of the living room and the minuscule kitchen at the back of the house. “She bled to death.” She nodded at the white tape outline in the middle of the purple-black patch.
I picked my way through the debris that used to be the living room and came close enough to catch a whiff of Sucrets. “I didn’t see you when I came in.” The front door had been barricaded by yellow plastic ribbons promising the ancient and terrible curse of the Omaha Police Division upon him who dared enter here. I had been admitted, by a uniformed officer, through the back.
“Ah, but I saw you.” She widened her eyes melodramatically. “I was calling in some stuff. From the car.” She hefted the phone and the severed line dangled limply.
“I’ve never had the guts to do that,” I said distractedly. “Judging by the looks of the room, I suppose Christina …”
“To ribbons,” Banner confirmed quietly. “Even if there had been a passerby to help her—and that’s doubtful; the coroner set the time of death at between eleven p.m. and two this morning, give or take—they don’t think she’d’ve made it to the hospital.”
“Good Christ. Was she raped?”
Banner shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her overcoat and eyed the room not-quite dispassionately. “The post-mortem will tell. I doubt it, though. The setup’s wrong. The way I see it, she was in there, in bed, with the guy. He had the knife, and he may have hoped to get it over with quickly
: There was a deep wound in the stomach that appears to have been inflicted first. The rest, the slashes came later, when she tried to get away.” She paused. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
I followed her out the back door. She simply stood for a moment, hands in pockets, staring out over the back yard. The snow had completely filled in the tracks from yesterday. If the precipitation had come a day sooner, the garbageman would have gotten the murder weapon, not us. Like the song says, what a difference a day makes.
“Sorry,” Banner said suddenly. “You’d think by now I’d be used to this kind of scene.” She began to walk, and I followed her along the narrow path leading around to the front of the house, where any number of cops, some in blues, most in plain clothes, went about their chores with quiet, routinized efficacy.
“I don’t think anyone ever really gets used to it. Different people develop different ways of handling it, that’s all, and some are better than others at closing it off or redirecting it. That’s how it was in the army, at any rate.”
“Did you see combat?”
“Some. Not like a lot of guys. I spent the majority of my hitch in Military Intelligence—how’s that for an oxymoron?”
“And I was guessing you were Lithuanian.”
“An oxymoron is a self-contradiction—you know, military intelligence, voluntary compliance, business ethics.”
“Oh, that’s right; I bet you author types know all sorts of big words. Tell me, how does a private investigator come to be a writer?”
I shrugged. “Same way anyone else does, I suppose; same way anybody comes to be anything: You just do it. In my case, the wonder is more how come it took me so long. I think I always knew it’s what I wanted. Other stuff just kept getting in the way. And speaking of other stuff … That’s what we writers call a transition.”
Moving Targets Page 17
