Hocus (7 page)

It was a long drive from Bakersfield and a hot one. Frank didn’t care. His dad was a cop, and they didn’t often get this kind of time together.

With the windows down, he could smell the heady fragrance of the groves. They passed dirt driveways that began at the road, marked by tin mailboxes with red flags announcing who had mail, who didn’t. And down at the other end of each drive, there was almost always a modest white wood frame house.

The memory came back to him in the dream more vividly than it had in real life. In real life he had stood watching the house, wondering why he was feeling so spooky all of a sudden. Hell, the house looked haunted. The paint was peeling off the trim in large, curling flakes. The house was surrounded by a porch; the porch railing had supports broken out of it, leaving it gap toothed and sagging. Dead vines formed a thick and thorny gray lace that shielded the front door from view. Screens were torn or missing.

The ramshackle house sat on a large lot. Tall, dry grass grew in straw-colored clumps. A gnarled, leafless orange tree held two barren branches up to the cloudless sky as if in a gesture of despair.

He thought of the place as it might have looked thirty years before, of a bright red bougainvillea adding color to a white house surrounded by fruit trees.

He shook his head. He supposed a generation or two of heirs had carved up the original owner’s citrus grove and sold it off piecemeal. Nothing else could explain the odd mixture of lots and buildings that made up this street. A handful of trees remained here and there, but the groves were gone. The development that followed had been random. Train tracks ran along the far side of the street, parallel to the back fence of the industrial park that stood on the opposite side of the tracks. All that could be seen of the buildings beyond were windowless concrete walls and loading docks. He wondered if the industrial park had replaced a packing house.

As he stood on the gravel drive, a freight train came slowly rumbling by, horns sounding, echoing loudly off the concrete buildings. He watched it, read the names on the boxcars. AT&SF… Southern Pacific… Cotton Belt. Where was it going? Where had it been? Conrail… Golden West… GATX…. It slowed, stopped, began backing up, apparently switching or adding cars. As the head end passed him again, an engineer saw him and waved. Surprised, Frank waved back.

When he could no longer see the engineer’s face, he straightened his suit and turned back to the house. A mockingbird sang half a dozen verses of a borrowed two-note song, then fell silent.

He paused, listened. Nothing. Gravel crunched and grated as he walked up the drive.

He had never known any trouble from Ross, he told himself. And if Ross had information on the Novak case, he wanted to hear it. The Novak case had been a real pain. Absolutely no breaks in it so far. Probably all kinds of witnesses, but everybody too scared to talk. Nobody knew anything. It angered him. Novak had been a small-time dealer with all the wrong kinds of ambition; whoever executed him had probably saved the state a lot of money by ending his miserable life. But a murder was a murder, and as much as he hated the Novaks of this world, it bothered him more that people would aid a killer with their silence.

The porch steps creaked. When he came to the front door he halted, stepped to the side. It was open. Just a crack, but open.

“Ross?” he called.

“Come on in, Frank,” he heard Ross call. “It ain’t locked. I seen you comin’.”

He thought of every other time he had met with the junkie: the nervousness, the triple-locked doors.

He pulled out his gun.

“Come out here, Ross,” he called.

Silence.

“Come out here, or I’m going back to Las Piernas. We’ll talk another time.”

He heard the porch creak behind him and whirled.

A man in a gold lamé cape and a full set of purple-sequined tails stood on the other end of the porch. He took off his glimmering top hat and bowed.

“Want to see me pull a rabbit out of my hat?” he asked.

“No. Drop the hat and hold your hands—” He sensed a movement behind him but did not quite turn in time to ward off the blow to the back of his head.

He blacked out for a moment, not feeling the fall to the porch until he hit it with his face. His gun clattered away from him, but he could smell powder. Had he fired it? Hit the magician? No, one of the men pinning him to the porch was wearing purple and gold. Dizzy, half-stunned, he struggled beneath them, but they held him down. Soon his hands were tied behind his back.

“You didn’t hit him hard enough!” the magician said.

“It won’t matter.”

He felt fear, cold and real, clearing his head.

“He almost shot me!” the magician complained. “What if someone heard it?”

“Get his gun, goddammit,” the other said. The cape lifted.

He struggled again, felt the jab of a needle in his neck.

“Keep wiggling around,” the voice said, “and it will only work faster.”

He was hauled roughly to his feet and shoved into the house.

Ross was inside, cowering in a corner.

“Oh, God!” he wailed when he saw Frank. “You two are fuckin’ nuts! He’s a cop!”

“Shut up,” the magician said.

Ross started crying but said nothing more.

The pain from his head was not so bad now, but he could feel his own blood, warm and wet on his neck and back, could taste it in his mouth. He was dizzy, but it wasn’t so bad to be dizzy, he thought.

“How much time?” the voice behind him asked.

The magician pulled out a pocket watch. “Any minute now,” he said, and looked toward the tracks.

A train. Even through the fog that was settling on his mind, he thought of the train. He started to move toward the door. He was yanked back, hard.

He heard the train. These sons of bitches were going to kill him, he thought hazily. Well, screw them. They weren’t going to put him down without a fight.

He stumbled forward, pulling his captor off balance, then rolled the young man over his back. A surprised young man, he noted, grinning at him as he lay on the floor.

“Stop it!” the magician yelled, waving the gun.

Frank kicked at the man on the floor but missed him completely. He tried again and lost his own balance, crashing into a lamp and coffee table and God knew what else before the man who had been on the floor was grabbing him again. Frank struggled, but he was growing clumsier now.

“Follow the plan!” the captor yelled. “Kill him!”

Frank fell to his knees, too dizzy, too sleepy, to stand. The magician looked lost.

The captor let him fall to the floor. He marched over to the magician and took the gun.

Frank heard the shot — loud, louder than the train.

Just like falling asleep, he thought. He felt cold. He allowed himself to wish she were holding him. He imagined her arms around him and wondered if she would ever forgive him for getting himself killed.

M
ARK
B
AKER DIDN’T SEE ME
at my desk when he came into the newsroom. He made a beeline into John’s office. I’m not sure if it was my chickeny side or my rebellious nature at work, but in either case I wasn’t willing to contribute to the story on my husband’s disappearance — so I staged one of my own. I slipped out of the newsroom and made my way downstairs.

Cassidy wasn’t in the lobby, and I didn’t see him among the cops who were still huddled around Frank’s car. I looked across the lot and saw him leaning against my Karmann Ghia.

“I’m going home,” I told him when I reached the car.

“See you there,” he said, an announcement I was less than happy about, but I was in no mood to argue. I got into my car as he watched. I rolled down the window.

“Cassidy?”

“Hmm.”

“Should I wait here? This is where they left the message for me. Does that mean they’ll call here?”

“I’ve thought about that. I don’t think they’ll have any trouble finding you.”

“But our home phone number is unlisted….”

“I’ll bet you thought your bank account number was private, too.”

“Oh.” I looked over at the Volvo.

“You okay to drive?” he asked. “I’ll take you home if you’d like.”

I shook my head. “No, thanks. I’ll make it.”

“Sure,” he said, and sauntered off toward his sedan.

As I drove home I thought of the other information I had gathered on Hocus. The murder of the animal shelter officer had generated a hue and cry for their arrests, but Hocus received less criticism over its next set of targets.

The
Express
received an anonymous call, a male voice saying that Hocus was going to clean up a few neighborhoods. Within a twenty-four-hour period, four houses exploded, killing twenty-one people — a total that was not finalized for several days, because it’s hard to count bodies when they’re in pieces the size of stew meat. Fifteen of them were at one address, a party cut short.

Normally this kind of terrorism would have resulted in outrage, but this time Hocus actually gained some supporters. It seemed a long list of neighbor complaints had been filed about each of the doomed houses — complaints about drug dealing, noise, and the constant stream of unsavory visitors in and out at all hours. In general, the neighbors of the victims figured that Hocus had done them a favor. If they had any objections, they were only to the occasional peripheral damage done by the explosions — broken windows, pictures falling from walls. Asked about the loss of human life, one man had shrugged and said, “Pest control.”

The police, for all their problems with the dealers, weren’t so happy with Hocus’s solution. Frank had been assigned to what became known as “the party house,” the site with the highest body count. He wasn’t in good shape when he got home from that one. Sometime after playing with Deke and Dunk, a long run on the beach, and a Macallan on the rocks, he started talking about it. “Going to take a team of forensic anthropologists to figure out how many people were in there, let alone who they were. I’d bet money we end up with half a dozen John and Jane Does. Explosives guys say it was C-4, something in the living room, where most of the people were. Some of the bodies in the outer rooms weren’t so badly damaged. There was one that reminded me—” He halted, shook his head. “Just a young girl, high school age. The others were all in their twenties.”

My curiosity had been piqued, but I didn’t question him. Frank is, on the whole, a quiet man. I get him to lose his temper now and then, but this wasn’t one of those situations. It had taken him a while to work up to talking about that day at all, and experience had taught me that what he needed in these times was a listener, not an interrogator. I set aside any impulse to hound him for information.

Later, when the paper ran a photo of the young girl — a soft, gauzy shot from her high school yearbook — I thought I knew why this girl’s death bothered him more than others. I had seen the high school graduation photo of his sister, Cassie; if you had dyed her hair blond and updated her makeup, she would have, in many ways, resembled the victim. Cassie was alive and well and married with kids; the woman at the party house might never have made much of her life, but she had been denied the opportunity to try.

While other detectives interviewed the neighbors, Frank and Pete sought the victims’ friends and fellow addicts. Fear made some of the small-time dealers a little more talkative. “Any strangers looking to make a buy this past week?” Frank and Pete would ask. “Anyone new come around here trying to score?” They were able to get help in identifying a couple of John Does who had been killed in the party house, but not much more.

I learned details of some of these interviews from dramatic presentations offered free of charge by one of the most natural mimics I know: Pete Baird. Pete loves to gather a small audience and tell stories, gesturing and taking on the parts of all the players. More than once, Rachel and I heard the day’s events replayed in this way.

The tenant of record at the party house was a man known as Early — he got his nickname for his ability to score new smoking materials before his competitors, which might have accounted for the number of people at his house on the day it exploded. Early’s pals provided a lot of material for Pete’s act. Frank served as an instant reviewer. If Pete got it wrong, Frank would grumble or silently shake his head. (“Oh, so you come up here and tell it, then,” Pete would say, an offer Frank was too smart to take.) If it was fairly accurate, Frank would smile or laugh. A good way to relieve some of the day’s tensions.

After studying the rubble that had once been Early’s home, the county’s bomb experts were able to determine that the plastic explosives used to demolish the house had probably been packed into a television set. That knowledge, and a discussion Frank had with a space cowboy by the name of Fawkes, led to the first real break in the case.

I recalled Pete’s portrayal of that interview:

“So picture this guy. Tall, pale dude, but he hunches his shoulders. Has long, stringy brown hair, parts it in the middle. Pointy beard with a mustard stain in it.” That Pete is clean shaven, short, olive-skinned, and bald made no impact on our ability to visualize Fawkes.

“Skinny guy,” Pete went on. “Wearin’ a black T-shirt and jeans that smell like he’s got toadstools growin’ in his underwear.”

Frank shook his head.

“You couldn’t smell that guy? You must have a cold,” Pete said. “Irene, reach over an’ feel his forehead. Running a fever?… No? Hmm. Well, okay, so the jeans don’t smell that bad. Bad, but not that bad.”

Frank didn’t object. The play proceeded. When Pete delivered Frank’s lines, his back was straight, his voice low. When he became Fawkes he rocked a little as he spoke, curling imaginary hair along a pair of fingers, gazing off into space. He began with Fawkes.

“ ‘It’s weird, man, I don’t know about all those other people who were at Early’s party, that’s bad. But Early, whoa — I think it was Early’s karma, because of the TV set he stole from my relatives.’

“ ‘What relatives?’ Frank asks him.

“ ‘Well, you know, Early, like, uh, stole it. Early was always stealing stuff. He ripped me off, man. Stole my backpack.’