Hire a Hangman (17 page)

During the time Hastings had been speaking, Bell had remained motionless, eyes fixed on the floor, the incarnation of despair. With an effort, Hastings dropped his voice to an authoritative, uncompromising note as he said, “Did you teach your wife to shoot, Mr. Bell?”

No response.

“Mr. Bell.” Hastings moved forward in his chair, spoke sternly: “Answer the question.”

Finally, Bell shook his head. “No.” His voice was a whisper. “No. I’ve already told you, I never—” His voice died.

“Someone taught her. Who?”

Bell shook his head. Letting his exasperation show, his body still angled forward, a confrontation, Hastings drew a long, deep breath. “Why do you think she was killed, Mr. Bell? Who do you think killed her?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Was it the same person who taught her to shoot a Llama semiautomatic pistol?”

“I—” Bell raised his eyes, haunted eyes, shadowed by a vision of endless pain. “I—I can’t tell you, Lieutenant. There’s—there’s nothing I can tell you. Nothing more.”

After a long, inscrutable moment, studying the other man, Hastings finally nodded, rose to his feet, and crossed the room. Walking carefully around the plastic sheeting, he opened the front door, stepped out on the tiny porch, and beckoned to Canelli, who pointed inquiringly to Dolores. When Hastings nodded, Canelli and Dolores left Canelli’s cruiser and came up the front steps. With the three of them standing crowded together on the porch, Hastings was about to instruct Dolores when he sensed movement behind him. Turning, he saw Bell standing in the interior hallway, with the plastic sheeting between them. Hastings turned to Dolores, nodding covertly. She nodded in return—

Then she shook her head.

4:15
PM

“What’s a house like that sell for, anyhow?” Dolores pointed to the three-story house with its carefully tended hedges and the Japanese maples growing in a small front garden. “A million dollars, maybe?”

“More,” Canelli said. “San Francisco real estate—” In wonderment, he shook his head. “It’s out of sight.”

“Earthquakes, taxes, drugs—nothing keeps it down, they say.”

“It’s space,” Canelli said. “There’s no more space. San Francisco’s like New York—Manhattan, anyhow. A friend of mine went to real-estate school, and that’s what they told him. There’s the harbor. That’s how it started, with the harbor. But then San Francisco’s so small—just a peninsula, like Manhattan’s an island, you know. So that’s why all the lots in San Francisco are so small. Ninety-five percent of them, the residential lots, anyhow, they’re only twenty-five feet wide. So that’s why property values keep going up.” He spread his hands. “It’s supply and demand. Everyone wants to be here, and there’s no more land. So real estate goes up.”

“You lived here all your life, it sounds like.”

Canelli turned to face her. She kept her eyes forward, staring moodily through the cruiser’s windshield at Fiona Hanchett’s million-dollar town house with its view of San Francisco Bay. “Why do you say that?” he asked.

She shrugged. “You just talk like you were born here—just a feeling.”

“Well, you’re right. I was born out in the Sunset. In fact, Lieutenant Hastings and me, we grew up not so far from each other. Except that he’s older.”

“Lieutenant Hastings …” Thoughtfully she touched the tip of a small pink tongue to her upper lip. Still staring straight ahead, her eyes narrowed slightly, she said, “He’s a—” She hesitated. “He’s a formidable man, I think.”

“Formidable?” Canelli smiled. “That’s not the word I’d pick, I don’t think.”

She shrugged. “Everybody’s different, sees things different. But Hastings—he’s one of those big, quiet men. Get on the wrong side of him, you’d have a problem.”

“Well …” Judiciously, Canelli nodded. “Well, that’s certainly so, come to think about it.”

“My mother lived with a man who reminded me of Hastings. God, he was tough, that one. Didn’t say much—never, you know, threw his weight around. But get him mad …” Remembering, she shook her head. “Get him mad, watch out.”

“Where’d you grow up?”

“Mexico City.” Saying it, her voice dropped, her eyes hardened, her mouth tightened.

“How was it? Pretty tough?”

She glanced at him. It was a brief look, plainly touched with the half-concealed hostility the underclass reserves for its masters. “Yeah,” she answered, once more staring straight ahead. “Yeah, pretty tough.” Her voice was bitter.

“Your mother was—what—divorced?”

She laughed—a brief, harsh laugh. “My mother was never married. She had five kids. All by different men. She—”

Across the street, a latticed gate beside the house swung open to reveal Hastings and a younger, slimmer man: John Hanchett, dressed in jeans and a loose-hanging shirt. His face was drawn and pale, his dark hair in disarray, his eyes haggard—or haunted.

Canelli waited until the two men came closer, then spoke to the woman beside him. “Well, what do you think?”

Frowning, she was studying John Hanchett as Hastings maneuvered him to stand immediately in front of the cruiser, his face profiled.

“I …” She hesitated. Then, annoyed, she shook her head, gestured impatiently. “This is hard, like this. I mean, sit him on a goddamn bar stool, put a stocking cap on him, dark glasses, lights down low …” She shrugged. “Who knows?”

“Yeah. Well …” Canelli caught Hastings’s eye and moved his head to signify that Dolores had seen enough—and not enough. As Hastings nodded in response and turned away, Canelli said heavily, “Yeah, I know what you mean. If these guys were actually suspects—if they were in custody—we could put them in a lineup with caps and glasses all around, whatever. This way”—he shook his head—“it’s a goddamn crap shoot.”

“Jesus.” She looked at him, an expression that might be equal parts of amusement and puzzlement. “Jesus, no wonder there’re so many crooks running around, the way you guys operate.”

4:45
PM

She filled the wineglass, eyed the bottle. Almost half gone. Already, almost half gone. Was this the first sign of weakness, the first suggestion of guilt, therefore, of vulnerability? Should she return the bottle to the cupboard—conceal the evidence?

Evidence?

Evidence of what?

Concealed from whom? Why?

Only a few days ago the calculations would have been meaningless, a muddled jumble of mere mumblings, scraps from the subconscious, fragments of coherence, shards of a life left over from the time before Monday night.

Monday night, and last night: two mute, mangled corpses.

No, not mangled.

Punctured, not mangled: tiny holes, surgical holes.

Would Brice have approved?

In those last moments, would Brice have appreciated the intricacy of her plan? Would he have approved its precision, admired its two-plus-two logic?

Nothing plus nothing equaled nothing. Logic.

She took the wine into the living room, placed the glass on the coffee table, sat on the sofa. Solemnly, she stared into the amber depths of the wine.

Was it possible to conjure up his thoughts as he felt life slipping away? Was it necessary that she try?

In the question, the answer was self-evident: yes, it was necessary that she try. It was essential that she try.

Two instruments—two imperfect instruments, he and Teresa Bell. One instrument flawed by insanity, one flawed by—

By what?

Did she know? Really know?

This question—this dilemma—must now be addressed. Urgently addressed.

First, she knew, the police looked for motive. Just as she, too, must now decide on his motive. His real motive, not his pretended motive.

His motive—and her motive.

How had it begun? Surely that was the essential starting point: that tiny seed, germinating so slowly, beginning to grow, first in her subconscious, inexorably spreading its tendrils until, finally, it penetrated her consciousness: the vision of Brice Hanchett, dead.

It could have begun with a look: no words, just one of Brice’s looks, eloquent with a calm, calculated contempt.

One moment she’d been able to tolerate that contemptuous look from him; the next moment she hadn’t. It was as if she’d stepped through an invisible wall. On one side, she’d accepted her humiliation, the ruin he’d left behind, herself contemptuous of herself.

On the other side, the far side of the invisible wall, she’d known that he must die. If she were to live—survive—then he must die. It was a simple equation, cause and effect. One of them would die.

And if she survived—accepted the risk, and prevailed—then she would prosper. Risk must be rewarded; he’d taught her that.

And so the thought had surfaced; the unthinkable had become real.

She’d never thought of it as murder. Execution, yes. Retribution, yes. Punishment, certainly. Sometimes she thought of a balance scale, the scales of justice, good on one side, evil on the other. Overload one side, and the beam tilts. Verdict rendered. Sentence pronounced.

So she’d begun to make her plans. Beginning with Teresa Bell, fatally flawed, that demented woman who’d known she must die.

Beginning with Teresa Bell—

And ending where?

7:15
PM

“But what’s the big
deal?”
Across the dinner table, Billy’s voice rose an aggrieved half-octave—and cracked into a twelve-year-old’s falsetto. Exasperated by his younger brother’s protestations, Dan elaborately raised his eyes, then concentrated on his plateful of fettuccine and white clam sauce.

At the head of the table, Ann calmly chewed her own fettuccine, swallowed, sipped her tea. Then she said, “The big deal, Billy, is there isn’t a hundred dollars in the budget to buy you a pair of Air-Flex running shoes. Especially since the shoes you’ve got are perfectly—”

In the hallway, the telephone warbled.

“I’ll get it.” Hastings wiped his mouth, put down his napkin, gulped his tea, and left the dining room as, behind him, Billy’s voice rose another half-octave, while Ann’s voice, replying, dropped an ominous half-octave. If the call was for him, Hastings decided, even if it was an aluminum-siding salesman, he would prolong the conversation until the sounds of combat from the dining room subsided.

“You’re probably right in the middle of dinner.” It was Friedman’s voice.

“It’s okay.” Untangling the cord as he went, Hastings carried the phone into the living room. He sat on the sofa, took the TV wand from the coffee table, and began running through the channels, volume off. “What’s doing?”

“I just had a thought.”

“A thought?”

“A theory on the Hanchett-Bell thing.”

“Okay …” On the TV screen, wearing a trench coat and a slouch hat, Robert Mitchum was holding an automatic on a woman wearing a low-cut evening gown. The woman’s breasts were superb. Mitchum looked incredibly young. The gun was a Colt .45 automatic.

“I think,” Friedman said, “that Teresa Bell was set up as a hit person.”

“Hmm …”

Behind Mitchum, a door was slowly, ominously opening.

“What’s that mean? ‘Hmm.’ What’s that?”

“It means I’m thinking.”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense. Let’s say, for instance, that Carla Pfiefer’s husband—what’s his name?”

“Jason Pfiefer.”

“Right. Jason. Let’s say he’s insanely jealous of his wife and Hanchett. He decides to kill Hanchett. But he’s too smart to do the job himself. He’s too smart, and he’s got too much to lose. Let’s say he knows about Teresa Bell—which he would, since he works at BMC. He figures he can put a bug in her ear, tip her over the edge, get her to kill Hanchett out of vengeance. He’ll even give her the game plan. It figures, when you think about it. After all, who better than Pfiefer, the proud, insanely jealous husband, to know that Hanchett would be with his estranged wife at a particular time and place? He probably had PIs spying on them.

“But, of course, he’s got to supply a gun—a gun that can’t be traced to either him or Teresa. So he contacts Dolores. He gets one gun for Teresa—and one gun for himself, just in case. Maybe he figured he might have to kill Teresa before she talked to the police and incriminated him. Which, in fact, probably would’ve happened if Teresa hadn’t been dead when we got there last night. You said so yourself. You figured she’d talk her head off, if her husband wasn’t there to shut her up.”

“It’s a good theory. All we need now is proof.”

“True. How’s Dolores Chavez working out?”

“I doubt that she’ll be much help.”

“Has she seen Pfiefer?”

“No. She’s seen Bell and John Hanchett.”

“And?”

“Either she isn’t willing to cooperate or she’s getting confused. I can’t decide which.”

“What we need,” Friedman said, “is sufficient grounds to bring one of these guys in for a lineup, put a blue stocking cap and dark glasses on him.”

“And a mustache.”

“Right.”

“Speaking of a mustache,” Hastings said, “Pfiefer wears a beard. If he had the beard before Dolores sold the two guns, that eliminates Pfiefer.”

“But if, on the other hand, he grew the beard after Dolores sold the gun,” Friedman countered quickly, “then the ball is in his court.”

“It’s easy enough to check.”

“Are you going to do anything on the case tonight?”

“I want to talk to Paula Gregg, Hanchett’s stepdaughter.”

“The one he’s supposed to have molested when she was young?”

“The one who hates him, apparently. Still.”

“I wonder whether she and John Hanchett could have cooked this up,” Friedman mused.

“I wonder whether John and his mother—Fiona Hanchett—could’ve done it. They both hated Hanchett. And John’ll undoubtedly profit, get an inheritance.”

“What about Barbara Hanchett? Not only was she the wronged wife, the classic motive, but she’ll certainly profit, too. Which reminds me, Hanchett’s will has probably been submitted for probate by now. It’ll be interesting to see who gets what from the estate.”

“What about Barbara and Clayton Vance?” Hastings said. “According to Fiona Hanchett, they’re lovers. So suppose they decided they’d get rid of Hanchett, get Barbara’s slice of the inheritance, and live happily ever after.”

“Another classic motive,” Friedman answered, adding judiciously, “I like it. Lust and greed.” Hastings could imagine him nodding elaborately. “Good. Very good.”