Hocus (38 page)

There were no windows, but the room was brightly lit. A panel of electronic equipment had been installed on one wall, including a phone, four small television monitors, and what seemed to be videotaping equipment. None of the monitors were on. For all this modern equipment, the building itself appeared to be old.

How much time had passed? Was he still in Las Piernas? In California? In the U.S.?

He turned to see that Bret had picked up a deck of cards, was idly shuffling, bridging, fanning, and moving them through his fingers with a dexterity that Frank found fascinating. Watching Bret distracted him from his fears, allowed him to relax a little more.

“You’re very talented,” he said as Bret completed a particularly complex series of flourishes.

Bret shrugged. “An amateur, really.”

“I’d like to see you perform magic someday.”

For the first time in all the time Frank had watched him practice these tricks, Bret dropped a card. The young man bent to pick it up, then set the deck on a small table. “That would have been nice — letting you see what I’ve learned,” he said. “Perhaps I’ll show you how a few of the tricks are done. We won’t have an opportunity for more than that, I’m afraid.”

“Why not?” Frank said.

“You already know,” Bret said patiently, without any sign of irritation. “I’ll be dead. We’ve been over this before.”

“What’s the rush? You can always die later,” Frank said. “That’s something any of us can do — all of us will do.”

Bret picked up the cards again but held them still in his hands. “Not the way we will.”

“You don’t really want to die, do you? This has to do with Samuel.”

“Do you know the story ‘The Outcasts of Poker Flat,’ by Bret Harte?” he asked, shuffling, fanning, then extending the pack to Frank — an invitation to participate in a trick. “I’m named for him, you know.”

Frank shook his head, tried to hide his frustration. Every time he approached this topic, Bret changed the subject.

But Bret didn’t tell the tale, as Frank thought he might. Instead he folded the deck again and said,“Samuel is damaged. So am I, even if it’s not so readily apparent to you. We aren’t whole, Frank. We don’t fit in.”

“No one fits in, Bret. Not completely. Not the way you imagine it. No one.”

“You do.”

Frank laughed. “When you took me from Riverside — at Ross’s house?”

Bret flinched at the memory but nodded.

“That morning, I had a huge argument with my wife — part of a fight that had been going on for a couple of days — my mother wasn’t speaking to me, and I was happy to get out of the office, where I was being shunned after you planted that story in the paper—”

“What story?” Bret interrupted.

“About the arrests of Lang and Colson.”

“That wasn’t us.”

“But the details of the arrests—”

“No,” Bret said again. “We didn’t have anything to do with that story.”

Frank stared at him in disbelief, then quickly realized Bret had no reason to lie to him.

“What’s wrong?” Bret asked, setting down the cards.

“If you didn’t leak anything to the paper, then someone in my department did.”

“And everyone else assumed it was you?”

“Not everyone,” Frank admitted, “but I was definitely getting the cold shoulder.”

“You were betrayed,” Bret said.

“I don’t know if I’d put it like that — it’s not that serious,” Frank said, but Bret was lost in his own thoughts.

Frank heard a beeping sound. Bret moved to the keypad, entered some numbers. The door at the top of the stairs opened. Samuel walked in, dressed in dark, damp clothing, carrying a bundle. The bundle was wrapped up in what appeared to be a yellow slicker. “LPFD” was stenciled on the slicker in large red letters. Samuel was covered with soot.

“What’s he doing up?” he asked, looking at Frank.

“Where’s Faye?” Bret asked.

Samuel laughed. “She had to go to a barbecue.”

Bret was silent, his mouth drawn tight in a line of disapproval.

“She was dead before I started the fires,” Samuel said.

Still Bret said nothing.

“She said she was willing to die with us, remember?”

“But she didn’t, did she?” Bret said in a low voice.

“I almost didn’t get out of there,” Samuel said, but no one gave him any sympathy. Sulking, he walked over to the keypad, punched in some numbers, and said, “You forgot to rearm it.”

Bret shrugged, made a show of closing up the trunk Frank had been in.

Samuel turned to Frank, pointed at him. “You cause trouble,” he said, stabbing the air with his blackened index finger as he said each word. He turned and walked into the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind him.

Frank began pacing again, thinking not of Samuel’s tantrum, nor lamenting the dead woman, but trying to recall the pattern of movement of Samuel’s hand on the alarm keypad. He drew close to the keypad, glanced at it furtively. He memorized the numbers with black smudges on them, thought again of Samuel’s sooty hand moving — upper right, lower left, lower right, middle, upper left.

Maybe, he thought, I
will
cause trouble.

“I’
M GOING FOR A WALK
,” I said to Henry Freeman as we finished breakfast the next morning. Bea, who had been completely exhausted when we had arrived home a few hours earlier, was still asleep.

“But if Hocus calls—” Hank protested.

“Tell them I went for a walk.”

He handed me a lightweight cellular phone. “Take this, please.”

It might come in handy, I thought, and thanked him for it. I put it into the back pocket of my jeans.

“Where are you walking?” he asked.

“I’ll be down at the beach. I’m taking the dogs.”

It wasn’t a lie — I did what I told him I would do. I took the dogs for a walk on the beach. Dunk — Frank’s dog — wouldn’t allow Deke or me to lag behind or rove ahead but kept shepherding us into a close pack. Several times the dogs looked back at the stairs that led up to our street. Watching for Frank.

The ocean air was good for me, as was my time alone with the dogs. I mentally sorted through the last few days, all that had happened, all I had seen and heard and felt.

Over breakfast that morning I had asked Hank Freeman for ownership information on the warehouse, knowing the police would have not only that, but any architectural drawings they could lay their hands on. Hank told me the building had been purchased by a company four years ago, a business police had just this morning traced back to Francine Neukirk. The late Mrs. Neukirk, Hank said, had owned most of the buildings on that side of the block. They were sold to her as a unit — the warehouse, it turned out, had once been connected to two other buildings, both now vacant. Basement passageways that building plans had shown to be sealed off had been reopened.

I had asked Hank if anyone had been in the passageways that night.

“Only firefighters and SWAT,” he said. “We were all over the place. Even if the taker had tried to leave that way, he would have been seen by one of us.”

Hank also told me that outside of the recent construction work on the soundproof room — which had been completed about six months ago — none of the few neighboring business owners had seen anyone entering the building.

As I approached the house when we returned, I went to our backyard gate and let the dogs in through it, but I didn’t follow them, much to Dunk’s consternation. I took my keys, got in the car, and drove off.

I wasn’t around the corner before the cell phone rang. I answered it by saying, “Leave me alone, Hank.”

“I’m responsible for you,” he said.

“No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re responsible for Frank. I’m not under arrest, am I?”

“Of course not, but—”

“See you later, then. Please apologize to Bea for me when she wakes up.” I was at a stop sign. I hung up, studied the phone, found the power switch, and turned it off. I took the long way to the newspaper. It was about nine-thirty when I pulled into the parking lot. I walked past the space where Frank’s car had been left just a few days before, ignored the sudden queasiness those memories brought on, and entered the building.

Avoiding anyone associated with the newsroom, I quickly ducked into the downstairs office of classified advertising. Following Hocus’s instructions, I paid for an ad in the personals section that read “John Oakhurst, come home.”

Geoffrey, the day shift security guard, had never failed to do me any kindness he could manage, and he kept his record at one hundred percent when I asked him if all the pool cars were spoken for. He didn’t answer yes or no, just handed me a set of keys and said, “Drive carefully.”

“Thanks,” I said, and started to leave. I stopped at the front doors and turned back. I handed him the cellular phone and said, “When the Las Piernas Police Department comes looking for me, please give them their phone.”

He laughed his wheezy laugh and said, “Sure.”

I parked the pool car several blocks away from the burned-out warehouse, not even driving past it, although the temptation was great. But I knew there would still be some activity there, investigators sifting through the rubble, so I avoided it. Frank isn’t there, I told myself. Prayed to God it was true.

I got out of the car and started walking. The night before, as we had stayed penned in our enclosure, I had thought about this neighborhood. Now, walking through it, I was fairly certain that Hocus was still nearby.

Whether or not they had been seen entering it, Hocus had been in the warehouse. I was betting they hadn’t moved far. First, Frank wouldn’t be easy to move. If he were awake, he might escape. That meant he was probably still doped up on morphine, all the more likely if they were sticking to their plan of increasing his dosages.

As I had told Bredloe, I didn’t think the arrival of the police at the warehouse had been a surprise — they had been beckoned there. Only two people were in the warehouse when the fire was set; Faye Taft was very likely the “prone” person in the warehouse. So Frank had been moved and had had to be watched by Samuel or Bret.

Bret, most likely, I decided. Faye was Samuel’s girlfriend. I couldn’t be sure it was Samuel who stayed there to make sure she burned up with the building, but there was something in the way he had spoken of her that made me believe he was capable of it. And I remembered Regina Szal telling me that Bret had passed out at the sight of blood. Bret, I had decided, made an unlikely killer.

Samuel had to have left on foot. Any escape in a vehicle would have been impossible. Either he disguised himself as an official — a firefighter or SWAT team member — or he had left by some concealed exit.

When I was about a block north and two blocks east of the warehouse, I slowed down, started paying more attention to the neighborhood. I walked past a shoe repair shop with a faded cardboard sign in the window that said “We closed Mondays.” There was a comic book store next to it. I glanced in, saw five or six customers, all who seemed to be men in their thirties. I kept walking.

When I reached the row of shops directly behind the warehouse, I began to get the distinct impression that someone was following me. Paranoia required no effort on my part at this point, so I ducked into a small café. All the tables were covered with plastic-coated, red-and-white-checkered tablecloths. There were dusty plastic vases with dusty plastic flowers in them. I sat at a table in the back, only to glance down and notice that a large fly was in final repose on one of the red checkers.

“We don’t open for lunch for another hour,” a voice called from the back.

“I’m in luck, then,” I said under my breath, then stood up and walked toward the voice. A large, rough-faced man in a dirty apron filled up most of a narrow hallway. His arms were covered with tattoos. He was lighting a cigarette.

I looked back toward the street, just in time to see Reed Collins peer in through the window. After seeing nothing but empty tables, he walked on.

“You want something, lady?” Mr. Culinary Arts asked.

“Could I use your rest room?”

“Look, we’re closed.”

I reached into my jeans and pulled out a buck. “Could I use your rest room?” I asked again.

He looked skeptical. “A lousy buck?”

“Even pay toilets used to only cost a nickel,” I said.

He took a long drag on the cigarette. “So did a candy bar. Stop or you’ll make me cry.”

After glancing back at the window, I pulled out a second dollar. He snatched the bills from my fingers and said, “Make yourself at home.”

The bathroom was past the kitchen, and judging from the sweltering heat in the tiny room, the ovens were on the other side of one wall. I flipped on the light switch, which also turned on a fan that sounded like a tank battalion crossing a metal bridge but did nothing to cool the room. The switch also apparently signaled an air freshener dispenser to have multiple orgasms — it found its release again and again. The toilet and sink were rust stained, the floor was sticky, and toilet paper seemed to be on a BYO roll basis.

Thank God I didn’t have to go.

Trying not to touch
anything,
I waited. I started wondering if I was going to end up with some disease late in life, an illness that would be traced back to overexposure to that air freshener. The scent must have been named “Yes, Bears Do.”

When I couldn’t take it any longer, I stepped out.

“He turned right at the corner,” the cook said.

“Who?”

He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. “The cop you’re avoiding. Plainclothes guy.”

“He came in here?”

“No. Like I said, went around the corner to the right.”

“How could you tell he was a cop?” I asked.

“Folsom, class of 1989. Fully rehabilitated, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “What makes you so sure I’m avoiding a cop?”

He started laughing and pulled the two dollars back out of his pocket. He handed them to me and said, “Sister, you earned it,” as he walked back into the kitchen.

As I started toward the front door, I heard him say, “Hey!”