Winter Tides (42 page)

“Sure it’s possible. It’s not only possible, it’s easy. What’s probably not possible is to nail Edmund for it, even if you think he’s got some kind of motive. And from what you tell me, Edmund’s down in Mexico. And also there were no witnesses to this quitclaim scam except this notary, and he’s not talking?”

“Not only is he not talking, his office is locked up. I’ve driven past there three times since the phone call. It looks like he took a vacation the same time Edmund did.”

“You’re racking up zeroes, Dave.”

“Okay, wait. There
was
one other guy. An old man who impersonated the Earl down at the notary’s office and apparently signed at least one of the deeds. He lives on the street. I see him around town sometimes.”

“And how do you know about him?”

“He came around to the Earl’s in order to get some money out of Edmund. His name’s Red Mayhew.”

“What’s he look like? Maybe I’ve seen him around, too.”

“He looked something like the Earl—close enough to resemble the picture on the Earl’s driver’s license photo, anyway. That’s why Edmund picked him up, I guess. He had a beard, walked with a stoop, drank a lot. He was always dressed in the same coat—an old yellow tweed jacket with torn-up leather patches on the elbows.”

“Yellow tweed with patches?”

“Faded, but yellow.”

“How about the rest?”

“Khaki leisure suit. Vinyl and nylon tennis shoes like you’d buy at the supermarket. One of them was broken open at the toe.”

“Wide belt with an oval cowboy buckle, silver plated?”

“That’s the guy,” Dave said.

“Uh-huh. Dave, get in the car and come on down here. Bring your friend. What’s her name again?”

“Anne,” Dave said. “Anne Morris.”

“Bring Anne Morris. I don’t think we’re going to see Edmund Dalton for a while. I think maybe he left for Mexico for a good reason.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

“The old man with the yellow coat was found dead on the bluffs down near Scotchman’s Cove a few days ago. I.D.-ing him has been a little bit difficult, because whoever killed him cut his head off.”

I
T WAS MID-AFTERNOON WHEN
E
DMUND LOCKED THE HOTEL
door and drove into downtown Huntington Beach in the rental car. He knew every street and alley in the city, but something still felt off, so he cruised the neighborhood for a few minutes, thinking things through, then parked a block away and left the car door unlocked. He entered the condo complex from what was essentially the back side, cutting through the patio of a condo that had been empty for a month. When he was certain there was nobody around, he stepped out onto the narrow, shrubbery-crowded walk. He left the gate to the patio slightly ajar, strolling down the winding path past identical condos. Other paths branched away on either side, and he took one to the right, and then another to the left, which brought him out to the asphalt driveway behind his garage. One of his neighbors was washing a car, and the man saw him before he could reverse course up the path again.

He didn’t really know the man except to wave at, and once he had loaned him the theatre section of the newspaper on a Friday evening. He had the aggravating habit of wanting to be neighborly, but Edmund had killed that by refusing to play along. The neighbor had doggedly stuck to the ritual of waving, though, and so Edmund waved at the man now. He grinned back, looked away, looked at Edmund again, and then patiently turned off the water spigot and put the hose down, even though his car was still half covered with suds. “Telephone!” he shouted at Edmund, and made the thumb-and-pinkie-finger phone gesture at the side of his face, and then hurried toward his open garden gate.

Edmund hadn’t heard any telephone, and his neighbor’s response was unusual, especially the double take. What the hell had that meant? He stood for a moment, thinking about cutting this short and getting out, but then he moved forward again, hurrying across the driveway to his own back fence, taking the key to the lock out of his pocket and unlocking the gate. If something was happening, he had to know what it was, and he had to know now. Driving back to the Mt. Pleasant wouldn’t solve any mysteries. He looked behind him at the now-empty driveway and then slipped through the gate, not quite closing it after him. Right inside the patio were a pair of tree ferns that nearly blocked the stepping-stone path, and he stood for a moment sheltered by the broad leaves of the fern, his feet in shadow, trying to see through the sliding glass door past the gap in the curtains. There was no apparent movement within, no noise. He waited another moment and then slipped toward the kitchen door along the stucco wall of the bedroom.

After waiting for another moment to listen, he unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped inside. Until he knew the house was untouched he was taking it slowly and quietly, and now he moved through the kitchen until he could look out through the dining area into the living room. It was then that he smelled cigarettes—not smoke, but the odor of someone who had smoke on his clothes. He stepped backward, onto the linoleum floor of the kitchen, at the same moment that he heard someone walking in the bedroom, and right then a man appeared in the bedroom door, sorting through photos—a cop in a suit. There was a simultaneous noise at the front door—the sound of someone turning the knob, people on the porch.

Edmund turned back through the kitchen at the same time that the man in the doorway looked up. He heard a grunt of surprise, but he was already out through the back door and into the garden, pulling the door shut after him, then out through the gate, the sound of running footsteps following. He heard someone yell as he ran across the driveway and up the path beyond, catching a quick glimpse of his neighbor, who stood stupidly by his half-washed car, craning his neck. The neighbor shouted a warning now, pointing and gesturing like a fool, and Edmund ducked left,
down a path that led deeper into the condominium complex, then right again and then immediately left, heading due north toward the pool and clubhouse. On impulse he angled right at the first opportunity, slowing down now. He took a chance and stopped to listen. Miraculously, there was no sound of footsteps, no pursuit. He hurried on, coming to another driveway, where he stopped again, not crossing it until he was sure it was safe.

They had no idea what kind of car he was driving, and that was good. But if they saw him climb into the rental, he was done for; he’d have to ditch the car and try to get out of Huntington Beach on foot, maybe head toward Central Park.

He saw ahead of him the empty condo that he’d used to enter the complex, and he slowed down, anxious not to attract attention now. He walked toward it, catching his breath, hearing close by the sound of running feet again. One person? Two? He couldn’t tell how many, and with the interwoven tiny paths, it was impossible to tell just where they were. He sprinted forward again, and right then he heard another shout. They’d seen him!

He looked back, surprised as hell to see his neighbor tearing toward him, carrying an aluminum baseball bat. There ahead of him was the unlocked gate, the street twenty feet beyond. He ran for it, pushing the gate open, stepping through, and stopping cold. He shifted his weight, pressing himself against the stucco wall, controlling his breathing, his focus. The gate swung open hard, and his neighbor flew through it, and Edmund swung his entire body around in a roundhouse kick to the man’s stomach, connecting solidly. He heard a gasping choke as the neighbor’s momentum spun him over, and the man sprawled forward onto his knees, fighting for breath and clutching his stomach, the baseball bat clattering away across the stepping stones and into the pea gravel of the weedy little garden. Instantly Edmund lunged for the bat, picked it up and swung it around, cracking the man on the side of the head and knocking him over sideways. He threw the bat away and pulled the front gate shut, suppressed the desire to kick his neighbor again as he lay there, and ran on instead, pushing
open the street gate and shutting it behind him, looking up and down the sidewalk for cops. There were none. He ran up the block toward the parked car, not giving a damn if he was drawing attention from the locals now. It didn’t matter any more.

He yanked the door open and climbed in, fired the car up, and swung a casual U-turn, heading toward Goldenwest Street, where he could lose himself in evening commuter traffic. He listened for pursuit, for the sound of police sirens. Two squad cars sped past him, heading back toward town, but he didn’t give them a second glance. His creep neighbor! It was the irrepressible neighborly type who would betray you first, the dirty bastard! Unlike the cop, the neighbor had known the complex, and that had been his downfall. He had gotten clever, and his cleverness had cost him a fractured skull and, with any luck, a ruptured spleen.

It had felt good to coldcock him with the bat! Yes, sir. Edmund could use a couple more hits of that! He laughed out loud at the pun. Goddamn! That was better than almost anything he’d ever felt in his life, that egg-crushing smash when the bat had connected, the solid power of it running up into his hands and arms. And the roundhouse kick! That was solid—double the impact with the man moving forward like that. He screamed twice, for two long six-counts, to rid his system of the adrenaline rush that had fueled the chase.

So he had intuited the danger correctly after all. He had been sensitive to it. That would teach him not to question himself. That was the absolute death of an artist, when he started to question himself. He swung out into the evening traffic of Goldenwest Street, thinking about this, about how absolutely right things went when he trusted to instinct, when he followed his vision….

He suddenly saw something clearly. He saw that there was nothing waiting for him back at the hotel. Things were moving.
He
was moving. He himself had put the wheels into relentless motion when he had met Anne Morris, and those wheels had ground a few people in their cogs, people who’d had no idea that when they stepped into the world
of Edmund Dalton, their lives would be irrevocably changed. And it wasn’t over. That was as true as any of the rest of it. He had been working at something really big, really complex, and he was near the end of it. Very near the end of it. But he couldn’t leave the picture unfinished—not out of fear, he couldn’t.

Then he saw something that he hadn’t understood clearly before—a way of looking at things, an angle that brought unclear things into focus. Anne, he knew suddenly, was a split personality in an authentic sense of the word. Anne the Day Girl simply didn’t know about Anne the Night Girl. She had forgotten that part of her, hidden it away, wrapped it in paper and stuffed it into cardboard boxes. She hadn’t been putting him off when he had approached the subject of the Night Girl that day on the sidewalk; she had simply repressed it. Surely on some very deep level she understood—that level where the fire burned, the fire in the dark woods. But it was a level that she could no longer access, not without help.

He turned right on Yorktown, heading east again, slipped his copy of
Melodies of the Masters
into the cassette player, and settled down to let the music sweep away the clank and clatter of the hectic afternoon.

“I
’VE GOT SOME STUFF FOR YOU,”
H
OOVER SAID WITHOUT
any introduction when Dave answered the phone in his house.

“Good stuff?”

“Well, I don’t know if it’s all that good. Depends what you mean by good. Where’s Anne?”

“She’s staying with her friend just like we planned, although we only got out of the Earl’s about an hour ago. She was going to run a couple of errands around town and then drive down there. I’m just about to head in that direction myself. Why?”

“Because Edmund’s back in town. He headed for his condo and ran into a little surprise there.”

“But they didn’t get him,” Dave said. Through the front window he could see the front porch ferns swaying in the late afternoon onshore breeze.

“No, they didn’t get him. Apparently he talked to a neighbor on his way in, and he knew something was up. Anyway, he’s out there somewhere. If you’ve got any ideas where he might go … ?”

“Not one. Edmund and I don’t run in the same circles. I think we can assume that he doesn’t have any friends—not like you and I would define friends.”

“Well, if I were him, I’d be long gone by now, maybe back to Mexico. His Mercedes is in the garage, so we’ve got no idea what he’s driving. Anyway, I thought you and Anne should know. How’s Casey, by the way?”

“They drilled a hole in his head to bleed off the fluid. They tell me he’ll be okay.”

“You want to hear the rest?”

“Is the rest the good news or the bad news?”

“You be the judge. The D.A.’s agreed to grant you and Anne immunity from prosecution because of your cooperation in the case.”

“Okay, that’s good, I guess.”

“It’s real good. You don’t want a breaking and entering charge brought against you by anyone, even Edmund. I wish to hell I didn’t have to say anything about you two tossing his office, but I didn’t have any choice. It was bound to come out. You were the one who thought it was a good idea to call the police and rat yourself out.”

“I know that. Don’t worry about it. You did what you had to do.”

“Here’s what we did, just to catch you up. From what you said, we had no evidence that there was anything in Edmund’s office at the Earl’s to interest homicide, so we couldn’t ask for a warrant.”

“Wait a minute. I was at the Earl’s when they opened up Edmund’s office.
Somebody
had a warrant.”

“Vice got the warrant. That’s because of the porno stuff you reported seeing. That’s what we used. Considering Edmund’s habits and what you told us, we asked vice to ask the judge for the warrant, and they got it.”

“This kind of thing doesn’t take six weeks?”

“More like six hours, actually. Edmund’s starting to look like a major-league creep, so there’s
lots
of cooperation. We took another look at the bluffs out at Scotchman’s Cove and found what appear to be tripod indentations in the dirt. It’s possible that Edmund filmed the whole thing when he mutilated the old man. Anyway, when vice looked through his office at the Earl’s, they found some fairly nasty black-and-white photos. You didn’t come across these?”