Lone Wolf #12: Phoenix Inferno (12 page)

Wulff made his first real reconnoiter of the estate within three hours of his check-in at the furnished room. Loaded up only with light gear, a belt, a couple of hand grenades, a.357 magnum, and a small-bore rifle, as well as the dependable.45, Wulff took the Fleetwood into the canyons surrounding the estate again and found that the police cars had disappeared from the access road, that there seemed to be no police cars in the vicinity at all. If the first pass of Carlin’s property had indicated furious activity on behalf of enforcement, the second showed none at all … which probably meant that nothing had changed objectively, merely that at upper levels it had been decided that enough of a show of involvement had been made and that patrols could be safely withdrawn. Whatever had happened had happened; events, from the police standpoint, were not to be dealt with but merely reacted to, their levels of reality manipulated in a way that would best protect the interests of the department. That was cynical, perhaps, but it was pretty much the way the situation was.

The access road was a tight, winding little creation nearly obliterated by hanging trees and foliage, which came sprouting off from the sides obscuring it. All carefully calculated of course. Carlin had wanted his privacy. Wulff shrugged, put the car into low gear, and went up the road carefully. If there were patrol cars on site, if there were sentries of any sort at the property, then he was now in severe trouble; he would have a problem to solve … but you could not worry about such things. You took the situation as it developed, opening before you one step at a time. To think too deeply was to risk the negation of all action. He was pretty sure that the man he wanted to kill was no longer there but that did not excuse him from the obligation of checking it out first hand.

Wulff went up the road, the engine groaning and threatening to overheat, the ordnance bouncing away in the back. At the top there was a sharp fork right, and he had to maneuver the big car to make it, coming halfway onto that second road before he lost rear adhesion, backing then for a better angle, coming in slowly, and here the road was barely one car wide; the going was really perilous. Hunched over the wheel, concentrating on that road, Wulff really did not see the house until it sprung up at him, three vaulting stories around another curve in the road, just a little bit of vegetation and open space around it, the house using most of the available space provided on the plot … there was a gothic feeling to Carlin’s home, it might have been a castle surrounded by a moat, a castle in which dreadful things occurred. Of course, that was probably exactly the case … but it was a strange thing to see in Phoenix.

Abandoned. There was no one here at all. No car parked, no indication of movement on the property. They had simply closed it up and gone away. Whoever had been in the house was there no more; whoever had been assigned to do surveillance had been pulled away. Idling the engine, Wulff crept up closer, leaned the nose of the car against the bleak bronze gate that had sealed off the property. Carlin had believed in security, all right.

Wulff knew that he should go. There was nothing more to be done here; he had come on a cold trail. Dead or alive, probably alive and in flight, Carlin had abandoned his estate, and a man like this did not abandon a place of this sort lightly; it could only mean that he had no intention of ever returning. Wulff was merely setting himself up with the authorities by staying here. If on some casual sweep, some routine check, a patrol car should find him here, it was going to be very difficult, very bad. Of course, he could probably explain his presence here, but the Phoenix police would not want to listen. They would have him in jail on other counts. While local police could hardly be said to be enthusiastic about chasing down all-points bulletins, they would not mind taking a little painless credit.

He thought of throwing a few grenades into the estate, just for spite, just for satisfaction, but there was no point to that either. What would it serve? It would only bring the cops in on the trail again and would hardly inconvenience Carlin. Carlin was never going to come back here again.

Wulff shook his head in disgust, put the car into reverse and started to back it slowly down the access road. Then, in a corner of the rear view mirror he saw the car coming up fast behind him, a big, black Fleetwood much newer than his own, making the trail with that kind of proficiency that showed either great skill or familiarity with the terrain. The car was coming up behind him, swallowing up the road on both sides, no way to get past it, no way to move.

Wulff put the car into park, shut off the engine, took out the.357 magnum and waited for the car to come up behind him. There was simply nothing else to do.

As Dick had expected, the cops booked him in downtown. Whether or not they were going to go for formal arraignment, they had more than a few questions to ask him. For a while, at least, it was a very bad situation.

They told him that he was the logical suspect; it looked like murder one for sure. All they wanted to know was where the hell was Carlin? Had Dick murdered him first and dumped the body into a separate place, or had he panicked after the first two murders, waited for Carlin to show up, shot him and hidden the body for the same reason, to make it look like a crime of passion? Dick said that they didn’t have that quite straight. He had merely found the bodies. He had no idea where Carlin was. As a matter of fact, he suspected that Carlin had done it himself and had set Dick up for the discovery. Dick was innocent. He hadn’t had a thing to do with it except to report the crimes, which was more than a lot of people in his position would have; most of them would have turned tail and run, making things only worse for them in the long run, to be sure.

The cops weren’t having much of that. The cops were extremely unhappy. With Dick in hand and with a confession they could wrap this one up quickly, get an arraignment and close the case. They had two corpses and reasonable suspicion, and as long as Carlin didn’t show up for a good long time, which was highly likely, they had a terrific case. That was the way the cops wanted to play it, of course. They were looking for a closed case, not an open one, and the involvement of Carlin made it very unpleasant. Carlin had been a rich man and a great problem to the Phoenix police. He could be even more of a problem unless they could close up the case.

Carlin was running drugs. The police were pretty sure of this, but on the other hand it was not the kind of thing that was easy to prove and they did not have the muscle to even get started. If there had been federal help in the case they might have been more energetic, but the feds weren’t interested in the Southwest at all; in fact the feds weren’t interested in anything except Operation Intercept, which had been an incredible if backhanded bonus for the drug industry. That had left the Phoenix cops on their own, and they did not know what to do, even though all the indications were there on the record if they had wanted to research it. The best thing to do was to leave Carlin completely alone and hope that he got involved in a drug war or something, one of those upheavals in the industry that were fairly common and that redistributed power by eliminating some of it, consolidating the rest. But Carlin had an amazing survival capacity. He also lived quietly, and nothing much appeared to happen for so long that the murders looked good to headquarters. If they could only get a confession they could have the case cold. Without a confession it would be awkward, though. Dick was right;

he really had no motive after working for Carlin for five years, and he certainly would not have phoned in the report himself. The cops had to admit that. Even they could see this logic.

“Listen here,” the interrogating lieutenant said to Dick in the back room, a rather plush room, actually—all greens and blues and little streaks of padding on the walls into which he hit his fist occasionally. Originally the headquarters building probably was supposed to be a mental asylum, but they had run out of funding and given it to the cops, which was just about where they ranked in the schedule of American priorities; lower than lunatics but just a shade above schoolkids who otherwise might have had a building in greens and blues. “You’re just making it hard for yourself. Now this is a crime of passion, we can say that you were interrupted in the act of fornication with Carlin’s mistress with whom you had been having an affair for some time and you lost your head and killed her and the other because you got panicky and were afraid that Carlin would kill you. Then in a state of insanity you waited for him to return and you shot him too, disposing of the body in a different place so that it would superficially appear that he had committed the crimes. You were still insane, you were not functioning in your right mind. Then you thought you could defer suspicion by reporting the murders yourself, but you were completely insane from the moment you were surprised in flagrante delicto and that explains everything,” the lieutenant said. He sighed, scratched his head, walked nearer Dick. “Now you’re insane and you can’t say that your employer was exactly the most desirable element in the community, right? I figure you could be institutionalized; they would decide that you needed help rather than punishment, and in just five to ten years, even a little bit less with these wonderful modern scientific practices, they could probably cure you completely and get you back into the world. Maybe you’d have a little bit of difficulty in getting a job or with your social life, with the murder rap hanging over you, I mean, but then again we’re living in progressive times and everyone will know that you were insane when you did it and besides that you’ve been cured now. You aren’t the same person.” The lieutenant rubbed his palms together slowly, looked at them with a surprised, distracted expression as if their color or shape had been somehow changed before he had last considered them and said, “Why don’t you make a little statement?”

“I have no statement to make.”

“I can get a stenographer in and you can spill your guts out. We won’t change a word of it; we’ll let you go over and make corrections, as a matter of fact, if there’s anything you don’t like in it. All we really want is the basic stuff—times, identities, methods, like that.” The lieutenant gave a long sigh, shrugged, leaned against a wall. “Don’t be stubborn,” he said, “everybody knew that Carlin was into running smack. He wasn’t what you’d call the most desirable kind of person.”

Dick had been sitting in a wooden upright chair, his back cramped against it for more hours than he could recall, his reflexes reduced to a series of messengers for pain. Nevertheless, he thought, he would hold his position. Past a certain point there was nothing they could do to you. He believed that; he had read accounts by people who had been tortured in wartime saying that if you removed the spirit from the flesh, if you backed your mind away from what was happening to you, called your body the enemy and refused to connect what was done to the flesh with your own identity, you could survive torture indefinitely. And this could not even be considered physical torture, just a kind of pressure under interrogation, which was at the most superficial level of harassment. If he held out they would get tired and go away eventually, or they would find another suspect or they would simply, in shame, release him and leave the case open. He had to believe that; it was that belief that would get him through. He hadn’t done it. They could not make him say that he had done what was impossible. “No,” he said, “no.”

The lieutenant sighed again. “No what?”

“I discovered the bodies,” Dick said. “When I came to work I found the two of them there.”

“You’ve said that already.”

“It’s the truth.”

“If you didn’t kill those people, then,” the lieutenant said, sounding almost reasonable, “if you didn’t kill them, who did?”

“Carlin.”

“Carlin? That makes you an accessory both before and after the fact.”

“No it doesn’t.”

“You were working for a murderer.”

“I reported the crimes as soon as I saw them.”

“Premeditation would have made you involved.”

“He never told me anything,” Dick said stubbornly. “I only worked for him. He was not the kind of guy who would tell an employee anything.”

“You worked for him for five years and he told you nothing?”

“Nothing,” Dick said.

“What was his motive?”

“I don’t know anything about motive. I tell you, I didn’t know him very well.”

The lieutenant walked toward him and said, “You’re making this very difficult, you understand. You’re making it far more difficult than it has any reason to be.”

“I didn’t do it.”

“You could sign a confession and it would go much easier on you. He was not a desirable man; we all agree on that. We could let you cop a third-degree plea. Maybe he was trying to kill
you
, that almost lets in self-defense and the other stuff could have been done in a hot rage.”

“I didn’t do it,” Dick said. Spirit from the flesh, body from the motives. If you gave them nothing they couldn’t touch you. He had to believe that. He had to hold onto it. “I know he wasn’t a very desirable man but I didn’t do it. He did it.”

“Where is he?”

“He killed them and ran off.”

“If he was into drug trade you were an accessory on that, too.”

“I didn’t know anything about it. I just was a houseman and answered the phone.”

“Make a jury believe that.”

“Make them believe I committed a murder that I didn’t.”

The lieutenant turned, his body seemed to move through levels of discovered fatigue to a new and sudden acceptance, his aspect seemed suddenly diminished. He shook his head, ran a hand through his hair. “All right,” he said, finally, looking away from Dick, the angles of his features ruined by exhaustion and what might have been something even subtler and more terrible, the utter collapse of any belief in himself years ago, now fully accomplished, the end of the spirit, the end of the line. “All right, so you’re stubborn. So maybe you really did discover the bodies and you didn’t do it. Still, we don’t have any trace of him and we’ve got ourselves a hell of a time getting him if he did do it. Does that make any sense?”

“Yes,” Dick said, “yes, if he did it.”

“Yeah,” the lieutenant said bitterly, “but then on the other hand, it’s much easier to try and pin it on you. You were there, you discovered and reported, you had some kind of a motive, it’s a little tricky, but we can find some motive business for you, and we can take care of you while you’re here. What’s the point in trying to pin it on him?”

“He did it.”

“Orders are orders,” the lieutenant said. He went to the door, rolling in the exaggeratedly careful walk of the drunk or the very tired. “We always do what we’re told. That’s the key to everything, following orders. That’s how they wanted it; that’s how I tried. But I agree with you. I think you’re innocent.”

Dick stood, moved the chair back with his calves. “Thank you,” he said.

“That doesn’t fucking mean that you can go. You just stay there. You stay put. If I can’t do it maybe someone else can. Conclusion has nothing to do with interrogation.”

Dick stood in position and said, “That stinks. There’s no justice in that if you’re going to operate like that.”

The lieutenant said, “What the fuck does it have to do with justice?” But he had the decency to say it bitterly as he opened the door and closed the door and somewhere in the middle of that action he was gone.