Thief of Souls

by Ann Benson

  I turned back at the end of his fence and walked the route in reverse, with the same Rottweiler keeping me in his sights. When I reached the gate again, though, a voice crackled out over a speaker that I didn’t immediately see. I determined eventually that it was buried inside a finial ornament on one of the gate standards. Was this a clever detail that Durand, master of foolery, had conjured himself?

  No one knows better than a detective that attention to detail is everything.

  But they must have dug the speakers out of the rubble of the Malibu burger drive-through that slid down a hillside in the last big rain.

  Cnn hlp you?

  “No thanks.”

  Silence. Then, Cnn uh help you? It was more deliberate this time, but not a whole lot clearer.

  “No. Really. But thanks again.” If the sound came through the same on the other end, he probably hadn’t heard my chuckle.

  This was perhaps not the kind of response Durand’s sentinel was accustomed to hearing from a fence-hanger. Tourists would skedaddle in embarrassment. Creeps would beat it so as not to be questioned for loitering, which was one of those neat crimes that permitted us a closer look and often led to a more serious arrest. But I was just walking along the sidewalk; like any other citizen, I had every right to be there on a public thoroughfare on this sunny California afternoon.

  Then why did I feel so out of place? Probably because the only way I would ever get into a house like this was in the course of an investigation, or on the Architectural Digest Virtual Tour, which the recluse Durand would avoid like the plague.

  I wanted a nice juicy steak to toss to the drooling canine who had placed himself at the gate in the direct line between me and Durand’s front door. Not that it would have done me any good—fifty bucks says that this dog had been trained by the Son of Pavlov not to salivate over meat or any other kind of temptation. He’d probably been zapped but good every time someone other than his trainer or handler offered him something, to the point where the poor dog could probably only eat out of certain hands. Durand probably paid big bucks to rent this animal, who didn’t have that pet look.

  I stood there for a few moments, wavering back and forth between ringing the gate bell or just leaving them to wonder why I’d been there. What would I ask him if he was home and agreed to talk to me?

  Mr. Durand, do you truly enjoy creating the illusion of gore? It would end up being something stupid like that, because I didn’t have anything planned. I was just starting to hunt this guy; that isn’t the way to bring someone in.

  I walked nonchalantly back to the car, whistling, with my hands in my pockets. Somewhere inside that house, I was being scrutinized. My car was unmarked, a white Ford Taurus, Everywoman’s vehicle. I didn’t look like a cop, so I didn’t think they’d made me for one.

  Unless someone in there was already waiting for me to show up.

  Frazee wanted to know what I was doing so intently at the computer that afternoon.

  “Researching a suspect,” I told him.

  He practically leaped over the desk. “You have a suspect? Why didn’t you say something at the meeting?”

  “A potential suspect, I mean. He was involved with the museum exhibit.”

  He sat down at the chair next to me and stared at the screen for a few moments. “Any direct contact with the visitors?”

  “None at all. But he has a strong connection—he was the creator of the beast exhibit. Every one of my victims went to it. And he designed the security system. Everyone who visited was taped.”

  Spence stayed quiet for a moment, then said, “I think I read that a million people went to that thing.”

  “The guy’s an illusionist, Spence. I’m looking for someone who’s really good at that. And Doc talked about a bunch of qualities that just fit this guy to a T.”

  “You’ve met him?”

  “No.”

  “Then how can you say the qualities are right?”

  “I’ve read about him. Enough to give me some strong hunches.”

  “Great,” he said sarcastically. “The press is always a reliable source of information. We all know that. Let me know when you need some real help.”

  “I will.”

  After a long sigh and a worried shake of his head, he left me alone at the computer.

  I was looking for a fan club. Spielberg, Lucas, Hitchcock, Industrial Light and Magic—all of them had devoted groups of fans who seemed to have nothing better to do than exchange e-mail about their heroes all day. Wil Durand had nothing at all, which seemed completely nonsensical. People who are heavily into movies go all out to feel like they have some tangible association with their icons—it’s a form of wannabe behavior that sometimes overlaps into stalking, to the point where we have to step in and straighten them out. Tragically, sometimes we’re too late.

  But no one was getting that kind of piece of Wilbur Durand. There wasn’t one club, organization, or news group.

  “How would you discourage someone from starting a fan club for you if they wanted to?”

  “Have your lawyer write them a letter telling them to knock it off as soon as it starts,” Escobar called out from across the room. “Or call them yourself. This guy is famous enough to have a fan club?”

  “I don’t know if famous is the right word. But he must have some kind of cult following—he works on horror movies.”

  “Ah.”

  “Erkinnen said the perp was likely to be a recluse, so he probably wouldn’t contact fans himself. He’d probably use a lawyer. I think he’s right about the reclusive part; there’s nothing out there at all on my guy. Apparently he doesn’t need the spin; he’s so well-respected for his skills that he’s in big demand by producers and directors who want him to work on their movies.”

  “Dunbar,” Spence admonished, “this is Los Angeles. You can’t say movie around here. You have to say film.”

  “No, I don’t.” I rolled my chair back from the desk and stood up. “Think I’ll go run him now.”

  “I can do that for you,” Spence offered.

  After all that squawking about more help, I discovered to my own discomfort that I wasn’t quite ready to let go of anything yet. “I’ll do this myself,” I told him. “I’ll know by morning if I have any reason to move forward on this guy.”

  “Up to you,” Spence said. He frowned slightly. “Just don’t let it eat you up.”

  I guess it was already visible.

  Durand had been granted driver’s licenses in two states, California and Massachusetts. Three addresses came up on the California license; the first was in a tough neighborhood, probably where he’d lived in his salad days; the second was a better, safer area that attracted an artsy population with growing affluence. The third was his current address, where he’d lived for the past fifteen years. Three changes in twenty years of adulthood; not exactly a compulsive mover.

  The Massachusetts address came up as D Street, in Boston itself. It showed up on a computerized map more specifically as South Boston. The license itself had expired when Durand was nineteen years old and was never renewed. The expiration date roughly coincided with the initiation date of his California license. Way back in his ill-defined youth, he’d had a number of speeding tickets and minor traffic infractions, more than most ordinary folks. A couple were for reckless driving. There was some rage there, perhaps, that he liked to let out behind the wheel. One of the citing officers reported that he was “belligerent and uncooperative,” but Durand had apparently paid his fines quietly and without further protest. Back then we didn’t make them go through road-rage programs, we just took their money and noted their skyrocketing insurance rates with vindictive amusement.

  The violations stopped, about a year before he moved to his current residence. Had he gotten religion about driving? Probably not—these tendencies are statistically more likely to escalate than diminish. He might have found someone at traffic court who was willing to fix his little vehicular difficulties, which I could inve
stigate. The more probable explanation was that he’d hired a driver.

  Too bad. It would have been so sweet and poetic to have this guy get pulled over on a routine traffic violation with a backseat full of wigs and book bags.

  But he wasn’t going to be that careless.

  Running the first California address brought up something more. In his second year there, he’d made several complaints about a loud cat that belonged to his neighbor.

  “Hey, Spence,” I said, barely stifling a laugh, “you gotta see this.”

  He took the printed complaint form from my hand and read its sergeantese aloud. “Wilbur Durand,” he said, dwelling on the coveted name, “complainant, alleges that he has been frequently disturbed by howling from the male cat belonging to Edith Grandstrom, female of late middle age, who resides in the adjacent unit of the complainant’s apartment complex. Mr. Durand claims that the cat’s noisiness is disturbing both his sleep and his mental well-being. Officer T. L. Robison responded to the complainant’s apartment and found the complainant in a state of agitation. The officer managed to calm Mr. Durand after several minutes of discussion and then advised him that since the cat was not making any noise at the moment, he was unable to take any action. He advised Mr. Durand to contact the police while the cat was in the actual process of disturbing him so the disturbance could be properly documented, or to document the disturbance on audio- or videotape. The complainant Durand wanted to know if there was anything else that could be done at the moment, to which Officer Robison replied that there was not.”

  He handed it back to me, grinning. “The complainant is your suspect?”

  I nodded.

  “I never heard of him.”

  “Apparently he’s quite a muck-a-muck.”

  “Well, good for him. I gotta say, you don’t see too many complaints like that. He must be some kind of nut.”

  “And a good driver, to boot.” I handed him the printout of traffic violations. “You want to help, you could look into these. See if there was anything fishy about them. They all disappeared pretty quietly.”

  “Which is what I would do right now, if I had any brains. Couldn’t you have given me something juicier?”

  We both laughed. The daily chuckle was such a necessity in our business. He walked away, page in hand, shaking his head.

  But the next line down on the address search was no laughing matter. It was reported at the same building. But this time it wasn’t Durand complaining about Edith Grandstrom, it was Edith Grandstrom complaining about Durand.

  Her cat had suddenly disappeared. She wanted him arrested.

  “Miss Grandstrom?”

  All I saw as she opened the door cautiously were the gnarled fingers of one hand. She opened the door just wide enough to get a look at me. A stout-looking chain spanned the dark gap, taut enough that it would still be hooked into both ends. I saw bits of white hair and fear in the eyes.

  I held up my badge and ID card in one hand. She squinted and read them.

  “I’d like to speak with you for a few moments about a former neighbor of yours.”

  “Which one?” Her voice was high and thin. “They come and go all the time.”

  “Wilbur Durand. He lived here between the years—”

  She couldn’t seem to open the door fast enough. Chains clanked and bolts rattled in quick succession.

  “Come in, Detective,” she said.

  The odor of cat urine assaulted me. I followed her into the living room, which was cluttered to capacity or slightly beyond. Miss Grandstrom clearly never met a cat statue she didn’t like. And then there were the real cats—at least four in this room alone. The overall effect was very cloying and close.

  “It’s about time,” she said. “I was wondering when someone would finally get somewhere with this investigation.”

  I purposefully said nothing, hoping she would continue. She did.

  “He killed my Farfel, I just know it. That cat was as healthy as a horse, and he would never have run away from me.”

  For a couple of seconds I couldn’t decide what to do. Should I explain that even though I was there about Durand, it was not really in connection with the old cat case, which had been put in the unsolvable file two decades before? Or should I play along and let her think I was working on that case, to keep her talking?

  “I’m trying to clear up some old details,” I finally told her. It wasn’t exactly a lie, nor was it the whole truth. But it worked.

  “Could you just refresh me about the incident?” I asked. “I know it was a long time ago, but I’m going to need to ask you to tell me whatever you can remember. I wasn’t a detective when the original complaint was made.”

  My nose was already starting to itch. I wasn’t actually allergic to cats, but I never did like what happened to my sinuses in their presence. There would certainly be more than the four; cats were like cockroaches—for every one you saw, there were a dozen hiding. One of them, a big double-pawed tabby, was purring like a Rolls-Royce against my leg. Miss Grandstrom reached down and pulled him away by the ruff.

  “Now, Boris,” she cooed, “leave our company alone. Not everyone likes pussycats.”

  She smiled and gave me the opportunity to express my personal adoration for cats, which I declined to do. But I did smile, which seemed to satisfy her.

  “It was a very long time ago,” she said. “But when you lose a loved one, you don’t get over it all that quickly. At least I don’t.”

  “I understand,” I said. “Now, let me see . . .” I flipped through the file until I found the printout of the incident report. “Previous to your cat’s disappearance, Durand had complained about noise.”

  “That’s right. But I really don’t understand what he was upset about—Farfel did like to talk, but his voice was sweet and quiet. We had many fine conversations. Of course, he spoke human better than I spoke cat.”

  Mental illness can be so subtle and insidious. “It says in the report that the incidents of noise took place at night.”

  “I never woke up from any of my cats making noise,” she insisted.

  “Might you have slept through it?”

  “Well, that’s always possible, I’m a good sleeper. . . .”

  “Do you know how your cats behave at night?”

  “I assume they don’t behave any differently than they do in the daytime.”

  “But you don’t know that for certain?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “So you can’t say specifically whether or not there was noise, then.”

  “No, if you want to get technical about it. But I still think Durand was making it up. He just didn’t like me for some reason.”

  “It also says in the report that Mr. Durand worked at home at the time. Do you happen to know what kind of work he did?”

  “Some kind of sculpting, as I recall, but I would think you’d ask him.”

  “I like to try to get the other party’s impressions when I can. And I wanted to speak to you before speaking to him.”

  That pleased her; she started talking again. “He was always around, it seemed; he didn’t go out much. The people who were in the apartment before him worked all the time and were hardly ever there. The people who’ve been there since—way too many to tell you about all of them, but none of them have been around all the time like Mr. Durand.” She smirked when she said the name. “I went over there once with cookies to try to put a little peace between us, and he did let me inside, just for a few moments.”

  She gently pushed a cat off her leg. “Not the stockings, Maynard. You know better.” She looked at me again. “It was a strange apartment. Hardly any furniture, just a few things up on the wall. But there was this one room I saw in the back, where my bedroom is—the door was open and I could see into it—must have been some kind of workroom. It was full of . . . equipment, I guess you’d call it. Tools and materials; very cluttered. I don’t know how a person could live like that—you can hardly walk around.”<
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  I wondered how long it had been since she’d taken a serious look at her own living room. Someday a lot of stuff would have to be moved out of the way before someone scraped Miss Grandstrom off the floor. Some poor unsuspecting patrol cop would walk in here expecting to find a simple natural-cause demise, only to be pounced upon by skinny, starving cats in survival mode.

  “So when he first started making complaints, he came directly to you, and you tried to respond to him. Tried to ameliorate the situation to his satisfaction.”

  “Well, as much as I could. I mean, they are cats, after all—they have a will of their own. I sshed them all day, but it never seemed to make much difference to them.”

  “How was Mr. Durand as a neighbor otherwise, Miss Grandstrom?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Oh, personality-wise, I guess. Was he a nice guy outside of the cat difficulties?”

  She leaned a little closer. “Do you want to know the truth?”

  Well, duh. “Yes, please, if it doesn’t make you too uncomfortable.”

  She was fairly frothing to speak. “He was a nut, if you ask me. A mean-spirited, animal-hating nut. He had no friends that I ever saw, except a couple of young men who came and went now and then. And no girlfriend.” She sat up straighter, as if offended. “I thought that was quite unusual. After all, he was a good-looking young man. I don’t know how he’s aged, but he was handsome when all this happened. He must have had a very grating manner about him for the girls not to take to him.”

  “When you say mean-spirited, what do you mean?”

  “Oh, he was very unfriendly. I was always trying to be nice to him, to make conversation. Our verandas were connected to each other by a common railing, you see, and I would try to talk to him when he was out there. He hung his laundry out to dry.”

  So every time Wil Durand would go out on his balcony with a basket of laundry, Edith Grandstrom would fly out there with a cat in her arms and talk at him in that high, shrill voice of hers. That would drive anyone over the edge. But to kill her cat? It was an overreaction.