Fever City (16 page)

Hastings sipped his scotch on the rocks; looked around. Everyone was leaving, his solitude magnified by the empty tables in the mocking mirrors. Ever since the War, his existence had been dominated by death. Avoiding it, then delivering it on command. Everyone in the city will suffer the same fate. Nobody is spared. Yet they all turn their faces from the inevitability. The Grave or the Flame. Too impossible to imagine. Too gruesome to accept.

Everyone except for Hastings. Not after all that had happened. Not after all he had seen. All he had done; was about to do. One of the telephone booths was free. His fingers found the numbers in the dark, the dial a wheel of fortune. His destiny awaited an answer to his spin of fate. There was the click of response. ‘ . . . Mrs. Bannister?'

There was a protracted, shocked pause. Then her voice rose with amazement. And recognition. ‘You . . . ?'

‘We need to talk.'

‘Not on the phone . . . ' She had already told him two things. Her phone was bugged. And she'd been waiting for this call. It had been three years but the voice still thrilled him: a delicious surge of pleasure pitted with the promise of pain. Her scent. Her intimate taste. The quicksand of desire and despair. ‘Meet me.'

‘Where?'

‘Our old place . . . '

Why LA? he wondered. Was she planning on skipping town? ‘When?'

‘Fifteen minutes.'

It took a moment for Hastings to understand she meant the New York Roosevelt. Her surveillance must be total. ‘Make it twenty.' She hung up. A long, breathless pause. Then the faint snapping signal of eavesdropping. Hastings cradled the phone and thought about who was behind the tapping. It had to be Hoover. But why Mrs. Bannister? His ex-boss's soon-to-be ex-wife. Like him, a one-time suspect in a kidnapping.

He remembered the rule: the hardest fall is always for the wrong person.

Susan had been the right person. Hastings had married Susan straight off the train coming back from the war. He thought he could put the Pacific behind him by walking down an aisle with his high-school sweetheart. Hastings found out a week after the wedding that Susan was eight weeks pregnant with her uncle's child when a rock smashed through the window.

Through her sobs, Susan managed to tell him the whole story in the course of that night. The abuse had started when she was just a girl. First it was her teacher: Hasting's own stepfather. Then the preacher, long gone. Then the mayor. And then her uncle, who ran the gas station on the interstate. She wasn't the only one. Sons and daughters were traumatized.

Shame and culpability turned the husbands violent. The men were short-tempered and cruel with their wives—who were judged wanting compared to what the husbands had been violating night after night: hurting and damaging children just for a fast shudder of pleasure. The men kept their secret the way men always do: with liquor, brutality and sullen silence; the women struggled with the burden of their knowledge and their hatred of their husbands. Many pretended they didn't know, choosing ignorance over despair. Some beat their daughters. Others ignored them. One or two defended them; tried to even save them. Susan's mother didn't care. Her own ordeal had seen to that: the town was already second generation; socially entrenched, like church on Sundays and the Labor Day picnic.

Susan had been passed around amongst the Elders but now she had a husband who loved her. Even after she told him. A husband who promised to save her. A husband who said it wasn't her fault. The pendulum swing was too far and too fast for Susan. She had been blamed from the very beginning. Because of Eve. Because of the weaker sex: provocative and shameless. The men were blameless. It was always her fault. She, the temptress. A Jezebel.

A woman.

Hastings's four years overseas had introduced him to war and death and despair but had spared him the abusive savagery of his hometown's complicit cruelty; its sanctimonious denial, its vicious easy formula: victim as predator.

Those missing years were about to catch up with him.

He found her in the river. Dead, along with the unborn child he would have raised. He had wanted to take her away from the past and out west to the future, to Dallas, or further, to California. To follow the sun to a place where no one knew them or their past. But her sunset couldn't wait.

There was no funeral. The church would not allow it. Suicide was the public reason. Fornicator was the private one. The men folk had no control over their throbbing pricks and rancid minds. She made them do it. She deserved everything she got. And they gave her plenty. No one came to the burial, not even her mother. Hastings dug the grave himself. Then he went back to the hovel they had rented; that he had been prepared to call a home.

The following night it was a new moon. A perfect Kill Night in the Pacific. When the tormenting mud and underbrush transformed into the hush of silence and cover. A sorrowful rain made the leaves of the sweetgums bow their stars to earth. Hastings went out and stalked the Elders of the town armed with his
navaja sevillana
, won off a deserter from Franco's Guardia Civil in a poker game in Manila in 1945.

Before he killed Susan's tormentors, he forced them all to write suicide notes with the promise of fast dispatch and the physical evidence of noncooperation: the wrinkled member of Susan's uncle. The trembling, self-pitying confessions were testaments less to guilt and shame at the horror their lust had wrought than to disbelief that their arrogant and enduring immunity was coming to a premature end.

The police found the bodies of twelve leading citizens, including the sheriff and the judge, the following morning. The Adelsberg Suicides made the town notorious, and remain to this day America's most startling sequence of spontaneous, simultaneous suicides. The county coroner knew that one man might be able to open his throat with a razor, but twelve on the same night? It was obviously murder, but the motive as outlined in all the confessions was so unsettling that the coroner rubber-stamped them all as self-homicides. The truth was too ghastly. And too close for comfort. The coroner had been missed by Hastings and became Adelsberg's Ishmael.

Case closed.

Hastings watched the families of the twelve men burying their dead one by one in unhallowed ground, in earth that had been made sacred to him by Susan's presence. He waited in their old home, but nobody came. Either they didn't figure it was him, or they knew and were too afraid to go after him, like the Shogun's soldiers with the wounded Ronin.

After three days of silence he disappeared, heading west like he had promised Susan.

Dallas. Phoenix.

Los Angeles.

He found menial jobs. He slept in dives. He was back in the foxholes of the Pacific—not living, just surviving.

More than a decade passed. It seemed to him like an eternity.

Then one night in LA everything changed.

His life.

Betty's.

The entire country's. The Bannister case saw to that.

Hastings stepped out into the Manhattan night, the rain perfect camouflage for his tears.

G
reta Simmons, the nanny who was the last known person to have seen Ronnie Bannister before his disappearance, doesn't look too distraught. At least, not on behalf of the kid. She does seem a little concerned about her own professional prospects however.

It was her bad luck that she was on deck when the good ship Babysitting hit a reef. The captain always goes down with the boat. She's already out of a job whether they find the kid or not. It's only natural she's looking more worried for herself than for the kid. After all, she let him out of her sight. Even though the kid was tucked safely in bed; even though she did her rounds when she was supposed to, even though it was a roster that chose her that day, she's to blame. Always will be. This case will follow Greta Simmons for the rest of her life. Her obituary will read: ‘the nanny who lost the Bannister kid'.

But none of that is what's really bothering me. The question—and it's a big one—is whether Greta Simmons was in on the kidnapping.

‘Let's run through that last hour again . . . '

Greta sighs, like I'm an encyclopaedia salesman who won't take no for an answer. ‘Listen, I told the police everything. There's nothing else to add—'

‘Let me be the judge of that, will you?'

She gives me the kind of look people would love to give a cop but never dare. But with a private dick—that's another matter. A PI is a man with a tarnished badge, a crooked rep and a pocketful of flashbulbs. Someone you don't have to pretend to respect. ‘I want a lawyer.'

Greta's a tough one all right. Violent father. Abusive partner. Neglectful boyfriend. Philandering husband. Selfish son. Greta's tough enough to have had to deal with them all.

‘I want an answer. Why did you leave the kid alone all that time . . . ?'

‘I didn't.' She straightens in her chair, her lower lip curled in anger. ‘I put him to bed, switched off the light and closed the door, like I always do. I checked on him again. Twenty minutes before I went out . . . '

Him. Not Ronnie. Not the poor, dear baby. Him. I've seen more emotion in strangers coming out of Del Mar Racetrack, talking about a horse they hadn't bet on falling as it went into the straight.

‘Only twenty minutes, huh?' Greta had originally told Schiller she'd looked in on the kid just ten minutes before she went out. Now she's telling me she checked in on the kid twenty minutes before. Lying is bad, we're taught that it gets us into trouble. But exaggeration is a different matter. Everyone does it. It doesn't make you feel bad about yourself. On the contrary, I can tell from the self-righteous stance Greta adopts, leaning in towards me ready to argue the point, that in her mind she believes it herself. It can't have been more than twenty minutes, forty minutes, an hour. ‘Only you didn't check on him twenty minutes before you left, did you, Greta? You took a powder and left him on his own for nearly two hours.'

‘That's a lie.' She wraps a silk scarf around her neck, preparing to go. I can't tell if it's wishful thinking or sheer audacity. ‘Talk to my lawyer.'

‘What are you trying to hide, Miss Simmons?'

‘I've done nothing wrong.'

‘You lost a child under your care.'

‘Ronnie was in bed. My duties were completed for the day.'

I have a hunch there was only one way to ever truly complete your duties in the Bannister Estate, and that would be to hammer in the last nail in the Old Man's coffin. ‘But you checked in on him later, you said so yourself. Why?'

‘Habit . . . ' She sees the look in my eyes, pulling back with annoyance. ‘I'm a reliable person.'

‘You may deny it, Greta, but you were still responsible for the boy, even when he was asleep.' She tries to answer but can't, overwhelmed by indignation. ‘No one is accusing you of neglect . . . Not yet.'

She masters her emotion, her voice low. ‘What are you suggesting?'

‘You were the last person to see Ronnie Bannister in this house.'

‘I'm not saying anything until I see my lawyer.'

‘A lawyer's not going to get you out of this fix, young lady. You put the kid to bed, left the window open, locked the door and made a call.'

‘That's a lie!'

‘There are witnesses.'

‘Who?'

Aha. Always play the hunch. ‘Doesn't matter who, what matters is they saw you on the phone.'

‘You're lying.' She turns to Schiller. ‘Who saw me?'

Now we're getting somewhere. There's a change in her eyes, like the fulcrum on a set of scales. An adjustment; not in her favour. Someone saw her with a phone in her hand. Only no one did; at least not that I'm aware of. I'm running on intuition, on gut instincts; I'm running just like a cop. I feed her a name. ‘Morris.' She raises her face in pleased defiance, like a defence attorney crossing towards the witness stand, getting ready for demolition. Morris is not going to hold up under cross-examination. Time to call in a surprise witness. ‘And Hastings.'

I score. She takes a step back, her eyes opening. Fear. Lots of it. Right there on her face. ‘Level with me, Greta, or you'll be spending tonight behind bars . . . Maybe the first of many.'

Wrong call. Fear gives way to defiance. ‘Lay off.' She slaps me. Hard. ‘You're no cop.'

‘But I am . . . ' Schiller to the rescue, coming in just like he always does, when the action's nearly over. He pulls out his cuffs, grabs one of her wrists. Those cuffs were made for Mickey Cohen's goons, not for a slim nanny who speaks with a lilting voice. No matter how tight Schiller clamps them, Greta's slender hands are going to slide free. But the notion of restraint, arrest, incarceration does the job, reducing her to tears.

Another victory to abusive men.

‘Talk to us, Greta, and we'll see you get off. That's right, isn't it, Captain?'

‘Sure,' Schiller drawls solicitously, slowly putting the handcuffs away. ‘We'll talk to the DA.'

‘We'll tell him you were coerced. That you were a cooperative witness. Hell, you might even be in line for a piece of that reward money . . . '

The silence of the room buzzes all around us, throbbing with the insult of having eavesdropped on what was just said. Greta straightens, throwing her shoulders back and lifting her chin. There is a pause as she looks past us. Schiller and I exchange looks. She's taking the bait. She's ours.

And in that instant of smartass male complicity, she rushes between us, her scarf trailing behind her, touching my face with a caress both intimate and defiant.

She jumps.

There is the shock and shattering racket of glass as she goes through the window, then the wind is inside the room, ripping and probing on the tail of the curtains as they billow madly around us.