Bad Desire (10 page)

The Malcolmsons' grill was smoking; Anne Malcolmson stepped into the frame bringing a salad bowl. It didn't make any sense. How could they be having a cookout with their neighbor murdered right next door? What kind of people were they? How could they act as though nothing had happened? It didn't add up, but his mind, jittery with exhaustion, swam with bizarre illusions. Had Sheila stayed out all night after the prom, at some friend's? Was Rachel's dead body still lying there in the house, alone and undiscovered? He looked at his watch. Quarter to two. He thought: something's got to start making sense. I can't stand this.

Once more, he scanned the house through the glasses.

Suddenly, off the screened-in back porch, Sheila was standing on the walk.
Sheila!
At the sight of her, he experienced a surge of pure joy—but, why was she wearing walking shorts and an old tank top. She shouldn't be dressed like that. Slater kept her in his frame, unable to take his eyes off her. She went into the garage and reappeared pushing a bicycle. When she turned her head toward the porch, he glimpsed her face. She was talking to someone.

Behind her, emerging from the house, he saw Rachel Buchanan.

She's still alive!
His heart slammed in his chest; he was frozen with shock.

The sonuvabitch didn't do it!

He didn't do it! He didn't do it!

Sweat crawled from his pores; he was tingling all over.
She's still alive!
He let the binoculars swing on the strap around his neck, threw his hand out and grabbed a cedar branch to keep from falling.

God, he thought. God, she's still alive! He took the money! He didn't do it! He didn't do it! What happened?

What
the hell
happened?

When he, again, put the lenses to his eyes, he could hardly lift them, much less hold them still. His field of vision pitched and vacillated badly. He caught a fleeting frame of Rachel getting into the station wagon. In the backyard, Sheila swung herself onto her bike and rode down the drive, lost from sight. His last impression was of the station wagon following down the drive after her.

He felt weak, cold with sweat.
What am I going to do?

He thought, Rachel will wipe me out. All she has to do is open her mouth. And she'll do it, too. She'll ruin everything.

The danger was so pervasive he couldn't grasp it. Calm down, he told himself, deny everything. And no more damned waiting. Try to find out what happened. And then—. Henry Slater began to pull himself together. It would have to be quick, decisive, extreme.

She had to be dead.

At police headquarters, the off-duty patrolmen hurried around him. Slater could feel the pandemonium in the room. A few of the men were huddled over what appeared to be a city map, and with them was a fastidious, heavyset man in a tan cotton suit, a bow tie hanging untied against his shirt. He stood a little apart from the others. When he saw Slater, he leaned into the group, issued final instructions and then came forward, his hands extended.

In his fifties, the balding police chief was everything Slater thought an officer of the law should be. He moved with an assurance that belied his position and he was keenly intelligent. Known to be much more flamboyant professionally than he was in his private life, the good-natured impression Reeves gave was real, but it was also a deception—one he liked to cultivate. He was also a cunning perfectionist, determined that, when he took on a job, he was going to do it right. Once started, there was no stopping him. Slater knew what he was capable of—even for minor offenses Reeves was legendary for his use of trickery, sometimes letting suspects go in order to wear them down.

“What's going on, Burris?”

Burris Reeves took him by the forearm. “All hell's breaking loose. Didn't you read the morning papers?” With a handkerchief, Reeves wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Those three convicts, looks like they're headed this way. I've been on the phone since ten this morning, trying to coordinate with the state.”

Side by side, the two men went down the hall toward the police chief's office. “These guys,” Reeves said, “they're maniacs. There's no rhyme or reason to the things they do. They broke into a farmhouse this morning at dawn, killed some people; Christ, I've got a make on the stolen car, we know what they look like and that's all. We've called in everybody we can locate; I've got men posted on all the main roads but they could still waltz right in here. All they have to do is change cars.”

Reeves stopped walking, his eyes fastened on Slater. “By the way, Henry, what're you doing down here on Sunday?”

Slater felt the impulse to make some excuse and get away—to bolt, right then—but before he could say anything, one of the younger patrolmen went past, buttoning himself into his uniform. “Klueger,” Reeves said, reaching out and taking the young man's arm, “you'll ride with Robertson for now. Tell Connors, I want him back here tonight for the graveyard shift.”

He turned back to Slater. “Then, for a little local color,” Reeves laughed and wearily shook his head, “this guy fries his ass to a crisp—right out here on Route 9.”

“What do you mean, fried his ass?”

“Power line's down; dumbass gets out of the car. Zap!” He suddenly popped his big hands together. “Presto: fried ass.” He was chuckling again. “It was the steel-belted radials that killed him—you know what I mean, the graphite.”

Behind them, one of the patrolmen yelled, “Chief, you got a call up here.” As he started to go Reeves moved close to Slater, all the mirth gone from his eyes. “Scared me a little,” he said, confidentially. “At first, I thought it was one of our escapees. You ought to see the artillery this guy was packing. Go ahead, take a look; it's all in there, on my desk. I'll be right back.”

Slater went through the reception area into the police chief's private office. Cluttering his desk was a big, battered gym bag, a stubby shotgun and a shoe box of odds and ends. The box held the shotgun shells, a handgun, and wedged up in its corner by a worn billfold, a pair of thin, wire-rimmed glasses. The sight sent a flash along Slater's nerves. In an instant, he knew what had happened.
My God, he's dead
.

Only when he heard Reeves out in the corridor did he realize how close to the edge he'd been. He had to pull together some outward semblance of composure—he knew everything he'd worked to build depended on it.

“Bogardus and the Wilson woman embezzled that money,” Reeves was telling one of his detectives. “They want to get caught. That woman, Margaret, in particular. Remember: give them enough rope to hang themselves and be prepared to bring them in. If there's no movement by tomorrow night, then I want you and Berger to start calling them at their homes. Don't say anything; just hang on, let it work on them, one against the other, until they crack …”

Slater listened half-heartedly as their conversation drew to a close; he was much more keenly aware when the footsteps started toward him, footsteps that hesitated, then entered the office.

“You still with me, Henry?” Reeves said.

How much do you know, Reeves?
Slater didn't dare look at him for fear of what his expression might betray. “I'm still here,” he told him, “if that's what you mean.”

“You want to see something? Look at this sonuvabitch.” Reeves took up the sawed-off shotgun, broke the breech, snapped it shut and shook his head. “If I shot you with this right now, at this distance, with the shells he was packing, it would tear you in half. Worse than a machine gun. But it's the barrels I can't figure out. Why would anybody go to all this trouble and not replace these Damascus barrels? It's crazy.”

In only those few seconds, Slater was in control again. “Any idea who the guy was?”

“No, not yet. We've got some things. He left behind some interesting artifacts, some fake IDs, some money. He sure as hell had it in for somebody.” He fished in his pocket and held up a stick of gum. “Want some?”

“No, thanks.”

Reeves peeled the wrapper off, stuck the gum in his mouth. “We'll find out who he was. One of these days.”

“Let me know what you find out, Burris. And good luck. I've got to get upstairs.”

“Luck?” Reeves laughed, but in his eyes there remained a cold resolve. “Don't believe in luck, Henry,” he said. “Never had any. I just go about my business an inch at a time.”

An inch at a time
, Slater thought as he walked down the hall.
I'm losing everything an inch at a time
.

There was a quiet resonance, an empty hum, in the city building that Sunday afternoon. Grateful that the elevator was waiting, Slater stepped in and pushed the button marked 6. The doors creaked shut. With a bottomless groan, the metal carriage began its slow ascent. But when the doors opened on the sixth floor, he didn't step out of the car. He had to do something to make the death real in his mind. He pushed the button in the bottom row, lower level 2, the morgue. It was perverse to go down there, he knew, but he had to come to grips with what had happened.

The chill basement rooms were divided by glass partitions. The main door carried the sign:
CITY MORGUE. RESTRICTED AREA
. In one of the spaces beyond the door, white drapes were pulled. Slater's moccasins whispered on the painted floor. From somewhere, like a sourceless echo, came a muffled voice. Abruptly Slater stopped, eyes carefully searching the glass enclosures. In the next-to-last cubicle, Dr. Alex Koslow, the coroner, sat at a desk, dictating his findings. Seeing his back was turned, Slater crept past without a sound. The door to the drape-enclosed room opened effortlessly.

The harsh, assaulting stench in the room caused him to snap his head back and catch his breath. Slater grabbed for one of the clean hand towels on the tray by the sink, immediately covering his mouth and nose. On an adjustable metal table in the center of the room, the body lay covered with a white plastic sheet. Slater's shadow loomed over it. Through the towel, he sucked in breath and with his fingertips, he drew the thick covering back.

The face he saw was dead. The closed eyelids had crawled back exposing filmy yellow slits that stared torturously, lips drawn in an agonized grin. Without those wire-rimmed glasses, Slater thought, he could have been anybody. But there was no question who it was.

The diamond gave off dazzling sparks of light as the sheet fell back across the gray features. Slater felt as if he had been kicked in the stomach. In the hall, he dropped the hand towel into a laundry bag and retreated, quietly. A muscle was jumping in the calf of his leg; his hands trembled. He stepped into the elevator. There was a sharp, mean smell in the air now, terrifying and thrilling, the lingering scent of really terrible trouble.
She's still alive
. He couldn't stop the tremors. With a sensation of falling, Slater rode the elevator up to his office.

The sixth floor was silent as he walked through the reception area. The air tasted stagnant and grainy. At the wall thermostat, he flipped the air-conditioning switch and the air began to stir. He shut his office door behind him and went directly to his private bathroom. He rolled his cuffs, drew cold water into the basin and splashed handful after handful on his face.

So that's what had happened.
An accident!
The seventy-five hundred dollars he'd paid up front was sitting in Reeves's credenza right now. Slater was sure of it. But he also knew he couldn't think about the money.
An accident!
He dried his face and hands and drained the basin. Now he would have to do something else—start all over again. The risk and tension of the past several days had been wasted—all for nothing. He had the feeling that something in the world had been violently disrupted, that the beautiful thing dreaming inside him had been smashed. Today was meant to be the start of a time when all could be hoped for; instead, an impossible problem had been thrust back into his hands.

For several minutes, Slater continued to stand in the dark bathroom, trying to sort things out. It was not the first time he had been in serious trouble, but he had never been in trouble like this. Was there any real evidence that could link him to the dead man?

There was that day in Delaney's—it was unlikely that anyone would remember him from that. No one had come to the table; only the dead man had been close enough to see what he looked like.

All of a sudden, Slater tried to sweep it all from his mind like so much clutter.

Still grasping the towel, he walked out into his office. The large open room was suffused with light. Through the west-facing windows, the afternoon sun flooded across the carpet in long shafts, and there, standing still as an apparition, clutching her purse in both hands, was Rachel Buchanan.

The blood drained from Slater's face, every nerve in his body alert to her threat. “What're you doing here?”

“I called your house,” Rachel said, walking toward him through the bars of light. “Your maid told me you were here.”

“So,” he said, “what do you want?”

“I thought we had an understanding,” she replied.

What's this woman saying?
You're supposed to be dead
.

“I thought I made myself clear,” she said. “But you won't leave my baby alone.” Rachel was coming closer. “You're still after her. I've got proof.”

“What proof?” he said. “What the hell're you talking about?”

She relaxed one of her hands from her purse strap, held it out in order to let him see and opened her fingers. The jewel encrusted sea horse lay on her palm. Her fist closed again.

He said, “I don't know anything about that, Rachel. I swear to God, some of the things you come up with.” He thought,
You've got to be dead
.

She was still talking: snick-snick, her voice went, snick-snick, like thin sharp blades cutting his nerves. He watched her lips move, tried not to listen to her.