When I finished, Bundy said, “Well, shit.”
“I don’t see what Jessica could have gotten herself into in a week that would be worth three homicides. She’s fourteen years old.”
Bundy glanced at some papers on his desk. “Brandy was seventeen. Brenda Weinstein AKA—you want to guess?”
“Brandy Wine?”
“Yeah. Original. Chronic runaway since she was twelve, been hooking for at least three years. Her pimp’s down the hall but we’re cutting him lose. His alibi’s tight.”
“You have any ideas?”
“I think the dead girls were into some bad business and someone didn’t want them talking.”
“Brandy wanted money. She said she had to get out of town or they’d kill her.” Nobody’s going to kill you. I rubbed my hands hard down my thighs.
“Yeah,” Bundy said. “So maybe whoever’s in charge of this bad business—let’s call him Mister X—recruits Jessica and then finds out you’re spreading her picture all over town. He starts worrying about someone talking. Hookers can be hard to find, no permanent residences, no phone listings. But Dobbs and Baylor were living halfway normal lives. They were easy to find. So maybe Mister X figures that with you stirring things up, two ex-hookers trying to go straight might decide to blow the whistle on him. So he gets rid of them, just in case.”
“Why not—No, I was going to say why not kill me. But I can be replaced. Kill me and someone else comes along asking questions. Kill the girls and there’s no one to answer the questions.”
“And maybe he figures we’ll take a little more interest in a PI getting blown away than in a few dead hookers. Not that we would. Homicide is strictly equal opportunity around here.”
“So how did Mister X find Brandy tonight?”
Bundy grinned. “I think he was tailing you.”
There was no point in trying to pass myself off as Super Sleuth of the Year. “Could be, I wouldn’t have noticed.”
“No reason for you to be watching for a tail,” Bundy said graciously. He laced his fingers behind his head and tilted his hair back.
“So what do you think?” he asked.
“I think I’d better find Jessica in a hurry.” I could see him thinking it over. “I can put a lot more hours into looking for her than you can. I’ll stay clear of the homicide investigations. You don’t have any concrete evidence connecting Jessica with them.”
He thought it over a bit longer then brought his chair legs down hard against the floor. “Okay. You look for her, but if anyone contacts you I want to know about it right away. And if anyone stops you on the street claiming to know where she is, for Christ’s sake, grab them and take cover. And watch for a tail. Why do you drive that old heap?”
“My car? I like it. Why?” He didn’t answer. “Have you been snooping again?”
“I’m a cop. I don’t snoop. I ask questions. We’ve got some guys in the Bureau who put in some time with Mackie PD before Portland hired them. They tell some interesting stories. Ten acres of prime Oregon land and a big house, all paid for. I got twenty-three more years on my mortgage.”
“The land was a wedding present from my parents. And I built the house.”
“Why’d you throw the pumpkin through the window?”
“What kind of business do you think Mister X is in?”
“I don’t know. Drugs, most likely. That’s where the money is.” Bundy drummed his fingers against his desk then rapped his knuckles hard against it. “I’ve got this funny little coincidence with Dobbs and Baylor and I don’t know what to make of it. I asked Dobbs’ pimp why he let her go. Pimps don’t usually like their girls taking early retirement. He said about six months ago she took a couple weeks off, said she had to visit her sick mother, which was a lie. Her parents live in Idaho and hadn’t seen her in years. When she came back, she was nervous, jumpy, acted like she was scared to death. The johns didn’t want anything to do with her so he let her go. She told him she’d been raped. And Karen Baylor told her sister she’d been raped.”
“Rape’s an occupational hazard for prostitutes.”
“Yeah. It happens. But it doesn’t make them quit hooking. Dobbs and Baylor were raped and they got out as fast as they could. Which makes me think there was more to the rapes than some guy ripping them off for a freebie.”
“Brandy didn’t strike me as the type who would be concerned about Jessica’s welfare. She was looking for a stake to get out of town.”
“Yeah. So we got three scared hookers who didn’t want to hook anymore.”
Bundy left the room briefly to talk to a uniformed cop who had beckoned from the doorway. When he returned he said, “No luck at the fountain. They rounded up a dozen or so people who were there. Most of them thought you shot her. Damn. I hate this job. Three homicides and not a clue in sight.”
“Lead,” I said. “Cops have leads. Private eyes have clues.”
“Yeah, well, if you stumble over a clue, let me know. Get some sleep, you look like hell.”
I had arrived at the Justice Center in a patrol car. Nobody offered me a ride back to my car so I walked. Rain riding on a strong east wind pelted my face. I didn’t mind the rain. Brandy would never feel it again.
I stopped briefly at the Skidmore Fountain where some cops were still doing cop things. Brandy’s fake fur was a sodden heap on the steps. The rain dimpled the water in the pool. I wondered how they cleaned the fountain. I walked quickly to the car and headed off into the night.
I made it an entire block before indecision took hold. I stopped at an intersection and watched the wipers sweep rain off the glass. Left turn to Virginia’s, a warm bed and a warmer body. Right turn to the motel, a cold bed and a sleeping seventeen-year-old.
A car pulled up behind me, its lights glaring harshly off the rearview mirror. The driver honked impatiently.
Virginia or the virgin?
I let the clutch out and turned right. I knew one seventeen-year-old who wasn’t going to end up dead in the Skidmore Fountain.
Chapter Twenty-One
Allison rolled over when I entered the room but she didn’t wake up. I stood by the bed for a while and watched her sleep. Then, in the heavy silence of the wee hours, I searched her purse, her suitcase, the clothes she had hung in the closet, and the paper bag of art supplies. She had finished the picture of the rose and started another. A conch shell was emerging from the blackness of the scratchboard.
I was pulling out the first drawer to check behind it when I decided to use a little common sense. She would keep her ID where she could get it in a hurry if she decided to run. What would she take? The suitcase if she had time. If she was in a big hurry, she would take what she came with—her purse and her sweater. And I already checked both of them. I yawned at myself in the mirror. Bundy was right. I did look like hell.
I looked at the sweater again. It was hanging up, pressed between the wall and my suit bag. Bulky-knit white sweater, big white buttons, big empty pockets, hood. Hood. I slid my hand into the hood and pulled out a plastic wallet insert. Nothing to it.
A Connecticut driver’s license was right on top. The name on it leaped out and hit me right between the eyes. I blinked. Looked again. Same name. My heartbeat was suddenly audible in the still room. I flipped through the rest of the little packet. Blue Cross card, library card, Social Security card, card from a dentist’s office reminding her of an appointment last March. Every card with the same damn name. I looked at the driver’s license again. The address was in a town I’d never heard of. The name refused to change.
I returned the packet to its hiding place and sat on the edge of my bed to watch Allison sleep. I seemed to be spending a lot of time watching Allison sleep. But then, Allison spent a lot of time sleeping. The great escape.
She was facing me, one hand curled against her chin, her hair a halo of gold across the pillow. Sleeping like a baby. Somebody’s beautiful baby girl, trusting, angelic, innocent.
Innocent.
Mar
y Allison Vanzetti didn’t look anything like a killer.
I slid to the floor and leaned my back against my bed, resting my arms on my upraised knees. I sat there for a long time in the darkness putting together the few facts I knew and the half-truths Allison had told me.
I tried, hard, to come up with a scenario in which she wasn’t the killer. The facts didn’t lend themselves well to an alternate theory. Vanzetti was shot at four-thirty in the morning. By five-thirty Allison was in Allentown and in bad shape.
Could she have been a witness? Not likely. The killer would have shot her, too. If she somehow managed to witness the murder without being seen, why did she run? If she panicked and ran, why was she still running?
Could she have been an accomplice? Also not likely. If someone else killed Vanzetti with Allison’s complicity, he never would have let her go off on her own with thirty-seven dollars, no place to hide, and enough information to put him on death row.
The conclusion was inescapable. My sleeping beauty was a murderess.
Opportunity, means, and motive.
Opportunity was easy. She flew to Portland and took a bus east, just as she said. But she went to Mackie, not to Pendleton. And she met someone, just as she said. The someone was Carl Vanzetti. And just as she said, it didn’t work out. With a vengeance.
I spend enough time chasing people on the run to have the bus schedules memorized. Allison arrived in Mackie at eight Sunday evening. She walked the three blocks to the hotel. She went to Room 301 without calling any attention to herself. Eight and a half hours later she picked up a gun and shot Carl Vanzetti four times in the chest at point bank range.
She got out of the room and out of the hotel without being seen. She found a nice old man and asked him for a ride to wherever he was going, which turned out to be Allentown. Allentown wasn’t much of a place to hide so she tried to steal a car belonging to a kind—if not overly bright—private investigator who carried Good Samaritanism to the limit by aiding and abetting her escape and taking her to the big city where he hid her away in a motel room and fed her and clothed her and hugged her and kissed her. Another fine mess I had gotten myself into.
Means. She couldn’t get a gun past airport security and she couldn’t buy one in Oregon. So the gun was Vanzetti’s. She took it with her and got rid of it later, probably in the woods outside of Allentown before I picked her up.
Motive. I didn’t have a single good guess as to why a seventeen-year-old would stick a nightie and a few necessities in her purse and fly across the country for a clandestine meeting in a hotel room with a sixty-eight-year-old male relative. I didn’t have even a bad guess as to why she would shoot him.
What had they done in that room for eight and half hours? What were they doing up and dressed at four-thirty in the morning anyway? Allison had obviously missed at least one night’s sleep. What happened in that room that drove her to murder?
I ruled out sexual misbehavior on Vanzetti’s part, not because of his age or their apparent relationship, but because of Allison’s subsequent behavior toward me. A victim of rape or molestation wasn’t likely to snuggle up to a stranger a couple days later. No matter how much she wanted my help, she would have been unable to disguise her fear and anger. And I had seen enough of Allison to know there wasn’t a bruise anywhere on her body. Whatever struggle had taken place in that room had been a war of words, of wills, of conflicting wants.
Motives for murder: greed, passion, fear, vengeance, and anger. Not greed, she left the bag of money. Not passion, whatever relationship they shared had to be one of blood and not of love or lust. Not fear, Vanzetti had been in Mackie for three days. Allison came to him. Fear should have kept her away. Not vengeance, vengeance meant premeditation and I couldn’t believe Allison would deliberately, cold-bloodedly, set out to commit murder. Which left anger. What did Vanzetti do, or fail to do, that made Allison mad enough to kill?
What were they to each other anyway? Mary Allison Vanzetti, age seventeen. Carl Anthony Vanzetti, age sixty-eight. Husband and wife was unthinkable. Brother and sister was pretty much impossible. Father and daughter was possible but highly improbable. Grandfather and granddaughter made the most sense.
Why would she kill her grandfather? Not that Vanzetti was a typical grandfather. He was an ex-con and a criminal and he was on the run from the law. Did Allison know that already or did she find it out in Room 301 of the Mackie Arms? Was he an idolized father-figure whose feet suddenly turned to clay? Did she kill him out of outraged disappointment? Could be. People kill with less reason every day.
I studied the sleeping girl and tried to picture her with a gun in her hand. Other pictures intruded. Allison, a slender figure in pale blue running up the gentle slope of a lonely country road. Allison, hands clenched on the wheel of a car she couldn’t drive. Allison, doubled over in pain after I casually flipped on the car radio to catch the latest news about a murder in Mackie. Allison, sitting very still, listening to me get my vicarious cop-thrills by discussing a homicide case on the telephone. Allison, long honey hair hidden beneath a floppy-brimmed straw hat, raindrops on her sunglasses. Allison, trying to survive, trying to steal a car, trying to steal a wallet, trying to steal a heart, a sacrificial virgin offering her body to a stranger in desperation. But she changed her mind. Does it work better now? Allison, blue velvet eyes, soft satin skin beneath my lips. Brandy’s skin was warm and wet when I pulled her from the cool water of the fountain. I had to find Jessica. I felt myself sliding floorward.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I woke up when Allison stepped on my chest. She seemed a bit surprised to find me underfoot. Holding my T-shirt tight against her thighs, she asked what I was doing.
“I was sleeping.”
“On the floor?”
“It’s good for the back.” I sat up slowly, groaning. “Maybe it isn’t good for the back.”
She grinned and asked if she could have the bathroom first.
“Sure,” I said. “It’ll take me half an hour to walk that far.” I made it to my feet, arching my back to realign the vertebrae. Allison collected some clothes and locked herself into the bathroom. Water started running immediately. I smiled at the closed door. I could remember being young enough to worry about people hearing me pee.
I eased down on the bed and stared at my old friend the ceiling. What does one do when one discovers one has a killer in one’s motel room? One calls the cops. One might; I wasn’t going to. I had, in my sleep, I think, arrived at a decision.
If I hadn’t found her identification, I wouldn’t know who she was. I wasn’t going to tell her I knew and I wasn’t going to tell the cops. I was going to remain officially unaware of her identity until her picture made the front page, which I suspected would be any day now. My conscience has always been more flexible than it probably should be and wasn’t going to trouble me. The fact that I would derive a bit of perverse pleasure from watching Chief of Police Robert H. Harkins flounder in a puzzling homicide investigation was something I acknowledged but chose not to dwell upon. The fact that my best friend would flounder along with Harkins bothered me a bit, but Phil was a lot tougher than Allison. He’d get over it. Eventually, he would find it funny. Eventually, he would even forgive me. He always did. Besides, the way things were going, they were never going to solve the case and Phil would be so damn glad to have the perpetrator handed over to him that he would be willing to overlook a few irregularities. In the meantime, I could give Allison some time. She might have killed once but she was no danger to anyone now. Except to me and it wasn’t bodily harm I was worried about.
The telephone jangled, interrupting my thoughts. It was Marilyn. “Call Hank Johnston. Call your sister. Is it raining there?”
“Yeah, it’s been in the low seventies.”
“It was eighty degrees at seven this morning here.”
“Enjoy it while it lasts. We’ll be trudging through snow in a few months.”
“That sounds good.”
&nbs
p; “No, it doesn’t. I’ll check in later.”
I dialed Carrie’s number and talked to her answering machine, then I called Hank Johnston. Same song, third verse. I broke the connection and called Finney. After relaying Jessica’s latest message, I told him about the three dead girls.
There was a deep silence before he said, “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying three girls have been murdered and the cops think Jessica might be mixed up with the same people.”
Another deep silence. “Maybe I should come out there,” he said.
I was as discouraging as I could be without coming right out and telling him to stay the hell in Mackie and not fuck things up any worse than they already were. “I’ll call you as soon as I have any news,” I said.
He hung up on me. The man definitely didn’t like good-byes. Maybe he just didn’t like me.
Allison emerged from the bathroom, wearing my Pendleton shirt and looking clean and shiny and slightly damp and innocent as a new-born babe. With incredible guile and cunning, I asked, “What time have the cleaning ladies been showing up? I don’t want to be in the shower when they get here.”
“I don’t really know.” She unwrapped the towel she was wearing turban-style and shook her hair loose. “I’ve been going for a walk every day after you leave. They come before two o’clock because I’ve been back by then.”
“I guess I’m safe in the shower then,” I said.
I stood under the hot spray for a long time, thinking about the hitches in my not very well-laid plan for turning Miss Vanzetti over to the cops.
I didn’t want to turn her in to the Portland police, partly because they wouldn’t let me stay with her. Mostly because I wanted to give her to Phil, and not just to placate him. Allison would look into Phil’s faded blue eyes and see compassion and understanding and just the slightest trace of humor at the messes people get themselves into. She’d like Phil and she’d trust him. And Phil could talk a confession out of just about anybody.
Cat's-Paw, Inc. Page 14
