“You’re pretty cute, aren’t you?” Krug heaved himself upright, glaring down at Casey. “Real cute. A regular little gold-plated Sherlock Holmes.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about! You’ve screwed around and screwed around till you finally got all the pieces to fit Farr’s story—”
“It didn’t take screwing around to make them fit—it took detective work, and you know it, Al.”
“Detective work. Why, you two-bit genius, what the hell do you know about detective work? I been fifteen years running my ass off—”
“And fifteen months running mine.”
Krug’s mouth snapped shut as if he’d bit hard on something. His eyes blazed. His face was flaming.
“You’re a good teacher, Al,” Casey said quietly. “But you’d be a better one if you could bring yourself to give an ‘A’ once in a while.” He looked at his watch. “It’ll be light pretty soon. Nice time of day for a drive up the beach to Malibu.”
With his hands shoved in the pockets of his robe, slippers flapping against his bare heels, Krug walked around the room for a minute. Then, with his back to Casey, he said, “Drink your coffee,” and he started for the door. “By the time you’re finished I’ll be ready to go.”
TWENTY-NINE
“Hubb Payley,” Krug kept muttering as they screeched around the curves north of Wilshire on Bundy. “Hubb. Hubbard.” He made an exasperated sound. “For chrissake, all the movies I’ve sat through, how come I can’t remember this guy?”
“It was a long time ago, Al—1951.”
“Not that long.”
Casey smiled to himself. In 1951 he was in kindergarten.
“But come to think of it,” Krug was saying, “not all these ham actors make the big time, do they? Maybe that Africa thriller was the only movie the guy ever got a part in.” He sucked in his breath as Casey ran the stop at San Vicente, crossed the divider and rocked left, his tires screaming. “Look, how about we get to Malibu in one piece, hunh?”
Casey dropped back to sixty as they headed westward on San Vicente. The air through the open windows smelled damp and fresh, springlike. Over the Mustang’s roar, he caught a meadow lark’s three-note descending trill. Morning, he thought, and shivering, savored a flicker of apprehension. Every man’s day is an enigma at dawn.
“Long as we’re this close,” Krug was saying, “let’s run by Farr’s place. Not that I expect any miracles,” he added dryly.
Casey passed Seventh, which curved down into Santa Monica Canyon, and continued on San Vicente to its end at Ocean Avenue. Turning right on Ocean, he cut his speed to a crawl while they looked for the stake-out. The car was out of sight, parked around the sharp turn which led onto a narrow road plunging down the side of the canyon. Headed downhill, Casey pulled up beside the light-beige unmarked vehicle. “Hi, Paul,” he called quietly out the window. “Any action?”
With a sour grimace, the bored detective behind the wheel answered graphically, thumbs down. “What you guys doing out so early?”
“So late, he means,” Krug muttered. “Come on, let’s go before he starts bumming smokes.” Paul was a notorious tobacco cadger since he had quit smoking, obviously believing his habit beaten because he no longer bought any. “Last week he got me for four cigars,” Krug groused as they went on. “Four, would you believe it? Not to mention all the cigarettes he bums one at a time. Christ, the guy smokes more now than he ever did!”
At treetop height as they descended into the wooded canyon, the fog thinned, Casey noticed, the closer they got to Pacific Coast Highway. Only a light haze hung over the surf. The tide was low, the sea calm, milky under the pearly half-light of the coming dawn.
“Nice,” Krug commented as they turned north toward Malibu. “Real surf-fishing weather,” but he sounded glum and preoccupied. “So you catch something, you eat it, you get mercury poisoning. What a world. I’m glad I was a kid while it was still livable.” Then he fell silent again.
Northbound traffic on the highway was heavy, mostly trucks at this hour—gigantic long-distance rigs headed for San Francisco, Portland or Seattle. The smaller ones were local wholesalers delivering supplies as far as Oxnard, and even to Casey their speed seemed excessive.
As they passed a modest sign, Malibu, 27 Miles of Scenic Coastline, Krug said, “Won’t be long now. Let’s hope this guy Payley’s an early bird.”
Casey laughed. “Since when did you worry about getting anybody out of bed?” He glanced over at Krug. “Come on, Al, what’s bugging you now?”
“The smell, that’s what’s bugging me. That good old stink of something phony going on. Christ, what a case! We get a line on something, right away something else comes along and puts a kink in it. We got a murdered girl who disappears a whole week before she turns up dead. We got the boat that dumped her, but it could’ve been stolen. We got her junkie brother which our prime suspect locates for us—but we find him dead. Now we got this name somebody points our noses at—”
“Somebody named Farr, you mean.”
“You think it couldn’t happen? Okay,” he went on before Casey could argue, “you say he’s been framed—I say why? That’s Point One. Point Two is—if he was framed, why isn’t he yelling his head off for justice and all that shit instead of spooking around playing mystery man? I tell you, there’s got to be a connection between him and that so-called uncle!”
“There is, Al—the girl and that card she had sealed in plastic.”
“Uh-hunh. Okay then, genius, answer me this one. If Farr was framed—if he’s really innocent—there’s a fifty-fifty chance, isn’t there, he doesn’t know the brother’s dead? All right, I know the story, he’s scared we’ll book him, so he gives you the dope, hangs up and runs. But then what? You think Farr doesn’t know if that kid was alive we’d have the whole story pumped out of him by now? So the next question is—”
“I know—where is he?”
“You answer that one, you get the gold star.”
Casey sighed. “I admit it’s a hole—”
“Hole, hell! You got to have a doughnut to have a hole. What you got so far is a lot of thin air—and just remember that when we get there, will you? Unless this Payley guy fits the uncle’s description, we’ll be strictly on eggshells all the way.”
To the north, Malibu Creek had formed a small lagoon. On the land side of the highway, the hills periodically burned off by fire rose in gentle undulations, becoming wilder, steeper with each mile inland. On the beach side of the highway, the land was wide here, accommodating a shopping center, a supermarket and huge parking area. Behind this, Malibu Road skirted the seafront, a solid line of fenced houses which closed off public access to the beach.
Casey turned left at the signal near the market, then right again onto Malibu Road. They began to look for numbers on the rural-style postboxes at the edge of the asphalt pavement. Then, silently, Krug pointed, and Casey pulled up. Hubbard Payley’s house was an old frame behind a high fence which connected with his street-side garage, shutting him off from the world.
THIRTY
Thing on a wire, he kept reeling wildly in and out of a consciousness so cruelly disorienting he could not believe it, for it was far worse than the dreams he dreamed in the turbulent dark which came so unmercifully. He had shrunk, he knew, lost substance, become hollow, for he had felt himself lifted, carried as if he weighed no more than a child or a pet. But not a child, a pet. Perhaps not a man any longer, either? In the red roaring world of his pain, Farr knew he must soon become nothing at all.
At the bottom of his mind, the fragments his senses had gathered lay like a heap of unidentifiable debris. Pieces of a puzzle, he thought, numbed; put them together—all the blues for sky, greens for trees—and the picture emerges. Hell. No, Bedlam. A nightmare full of agony and hooting laughter, hissing whispers, his own cries, idiot v
iolence. Face like a mask always hanging over him. High priest over sacrificial victim, muttering incantations: They’ll find you…Bottom of a gully…All solved, like an act of God. Laughing and laughing insanely. Like an act. Of God.
Farr strained his eyes open. Saw animal heads in the gloom; saw gigantic shadowy photos which were vaguely, troublingly familiar. But no mask hung over him now. And wherever this was, it was very still. A blessed stillness. He rested for a time.
Then slowly he became aware that this new floor he lay on felt damp, cold. And he could smell the sea. Staring across the dusky room, he tried to focus. Black shutters over there. Which meant windows? His eyes twitched as bright chinks appeared suddenly. Tiny glittering specks of—sunlight? But unsteady, flickering. He realized finally they were water reflections.
This was a beach-front house, then. In Venice, surely. Had to be. Farr breathed in deeply. Wherever this was, it might be near the lot where he had left his car. And morning now? They might have found the Jaguar. And if they had, wouldn’t they realize something must have happened? The young one will. The one he had phoned. Hadn’t he said I believe you’re innocent? God, Lord, Farr prayed, let them be looking for me.
Like a signal ending the spell of silence, hope, Farr heard a door slam somewhere. Heavy footsteps jarred the ceiling over him. He heard them pounding hollowly—down a stair, he decided—and felt his flesh shrink in dread against his bones.
A lock turned and light sprang into the room, streaming across one wall full of hunting trophies and what Farr saw now to be huge poster-sized publicity photos gone dull and yellow with age. Then a human shadow cut the light. Farr groaned before he could stop himself, but there was no answering laugh this time, guttural and thick with pleasure.
No, this time he carried a huge roll of adhesive tape and shears which glittered cruelly in the light. Farr waited, eyes slitted, gathering himself, savagely resisting the urge to cry out as the man squatted near him. Brown, leathery, powerful as some hairless beast, he was hastily cutting strips of the tape which he fashioned into a pad. And he was sweating, Farr saw, grimacing. Something had gone wrong with his lunatic game.
As he leaned forward, the pad of adhesive dangling from his fingers, Farr tried to speak before the tape sealed his mouth. Last words. But they were smothered. Breathing shallowly through his nostrils, he stared up into the lashless, almost pupilless amber eyes as the hard strong fingers pressed sticky strips across his cheeks. Over the faint, slightly medicinal smell of adhesive, he caught a sharp acrid body odor. The thick dry lips were moving, and Farr held his breath, trying to hear the eerie whispering. Like a child’s, he thought, playing some secretive game. Someone was—here? They. Always something. Tricky. Bad. Something to spoil—
The whispering stopped as a muffled bell note vibrated like sound underwater. And as the man leapt up, running out light and soundless as a jungle creature, Farr began to struggle wildly.
“Punch it again,” Krug said.
Casey leaned on the bell button beside the gate. “Maybe it doesn’t work.”
“He vants to be alone.” Looking exasperated, Krug pounded on the solid wood gate so hard it rattled on its hinges. “That ought to wake him up. For chrissake, this is probably a waste of time, anyhow. Five’ll get you ten he don’t know from—”
There was a click, and the gate suddenly swung inward. For an instant transfixed, they stared at the theatrical figure posed against the shadowy patio inside—a bald tanned athletic-looking man wearing a short Japanese kimono, black tights, thong sandals. Casey’s heart sank.
“Mr. Payley?” Krug inquired. “Hubbard Payley?”
Oblivious of the identifications both were displaying, he yawned loudly. “God, salesmen—at this hour?” and started to close the gate again.
“Not so fast, Mr. Payley,” Krug said. “This is police business.”
“You’re kidding. Let’s see those again.” He made a joke of peering at each badge and identification card. “Santa Monica Police Department. Aren’t you slightly off your beat? Officer Krug and—”
“Detective Sergeant Krug,” Casey corrected. “Mr. Payley, unless you’d rather talk out here—”
“No, of course not. Sorry, come in.” He swung the gate wider, letting them into a flagstoned patio shaded by huge Australian fern trees growing in redwood tubs. “My hobby,” he explained as he bolted the gate behind them. “Tropicals. I’m thinking about trying orchids someday. But that’s another sort of thing. Too fussy for me, probably. Would you like to sit out here in the patio? Those chairs are very comfortable, and now the sun’s coming up—”
Casey glanced at Krug, catching an acid look as he settled his bulk into a flimsy plastic and aluminum chair. No notebook this time—that was Casey’s job. A slight breeze swayed the huge fronds hanging over their heads, releasing a damp verdant fragrance. As he chose a chair, droplets of dew spattered on the flagstones nearby, and Casey seated himself gingerly on the edge of the plastic webbing. Payley seemed oblivious of the fact that his very comfortable chair seats were wet and cold.
“Mr. Payley,” Krug began, “your name was found on the body of a boy who died last night in Venice…”
Like a snail on the damp lacquered floor, Farr inched on his side toward the door, the bones in his twisted shoulder grating as he heaved his body a bit at a time. Had he locked the door? Farr couldn’t remember. In the dimness the knob looked ten feet high, impossible to reach even if he managed somehow to brace himself and slide upward with his back to the panel, far enough to reach the knob with numb hands bound tight behind him.
The whistling of his breath through his nostrils seemed deafeningly loud. Farr kept swallowing convulsively, terrified by the nausea which threatened to choke him in his own bile. His lips felt seared against the tight adhesive gag. He had tried to loosen the tape by rubbing it against his shoulder, but it was slick, plastic, impossible to catch on the nylon fabric of his jacket.
Someone here. But he could have heard wrong, Farr thought groggily. And the man was mad enough to imagine anything. Even so, if he could knock over something, pound on the floor—
Trying to quiet his breathing, he strained to hear. But no sound filtered through the thudding pulse in his head, no footfall or movement of any sort. There was no one in the house.
Closing his eyes, Farr felt himself beginning to drift again into darkness. He was helpless. There was no hope. Whatever he might do, he could not save himself. They’ll find you, the whispering promised over and over. Bottom of a gully…All solved…
Tears stung his eyes, burned his throat. Blinking dizzily, Farr focused again on the door, seeing a table nearby which held a tall lamp. From his floor-level perspective, he could see the electrical cord hanging down behind the table. It was plugged into a baseboard outlet. If he could reach it, he thought, somehow grasp the cord—
Wheezing, his heart and lungs pumping frantically, Farr began to inch forward again. With nothing to lose, anything was worth trying.
“Delbert Berry,” Payley was saying. “Berry? But I never heard of any such person. How did he get my name?”
“We think he sold you some gas, Mr. Payley,” Krug said. “On the second.”
“Eleven gallons,” Casey added. “Charged on your oil company account.”
“Oh, I see.” With his powerful shoulders hunched, Payley leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands dangling limply. Was it that shaved head which made him look obscene? Casey wondered. Repelled, he stared down at his notebook as Payley studied the flagstones at his feet. “What you’re talking about”—he straightened abruptly—“is a receipt of some kind? That’s what had my name on it?”
Casey read off the address of the gas station from his notebook, but Payley looked blank.
“What we’re wondering,” Krug said, “is why he took the station copy.”
“Couldn’t it be a mistake? If he was busy tha
t day, and just slipped it in his pocket and forgot about it—”
“Could be, yeah.” Krug hesitated. “But we think he went back and got it, Mr. Payley. On the seventh.”
“You mean—almost a week later?” Payley looked baffled now. “Why would he do that, I wonder? Unless for some reason—” He snapped his fingers. “My car, that’s it! I can’t remember the station, but there was someone a few weeks ago who wanted to buy my car.”
“What car is that, Mr. Payley?” Casey asked.
“A sixty-eight Dodge. I remember he seemed to want it very badly. I told him it wasn’t for sale, but he was very insistent.” He looked at Krug. “I agree, it does seem odd, though, his taking that receipt when all he wanted was my name.”
“There’s something else, too, Mr. Payley.” Casey explained about the page torn out of the TV magazine.
But the significance seemed to escape Payley. Instead, he appeared pleased. “So that’s it. He must’ve recognized my name. Not that I’ve acted for years,” he added modestly, “but with this television exposure of old films, I find myself a bit of a celebrity again. I suppose he wanted my address, poor boy. Fans do all sorts of odd things to make contact.”
“Yeah, I bet.” Krug glanced at Casey—a bleak bored I-told-you-so message. “Just for the record, Mr. Payley, can you give us some idea where you were last night?”
“Why on earth—? Now see here,” he said indignantly, “I’m perfectly willing to be cooperative, but if there’s any suggestion I might be involved—”
“Nobody’s suggesting anything, Mr. Payley. This is strictly routine. See, this boy who had your name was murdered.”
“Good heavens! No wonder you’re here at the crack of dawn.” He settled back in his chair, depressingly willing and serious now. As a matter of fact, he told them, he had spent a quiet evening at home. A bachelor dinner. Yes, he lived alone. And the balance of the evening watching television. Then he hadn’t gone out at all? Well, yes, briefly. But only long enough for a breath of air.
Poor Poor Ophelia Page 17
