Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 02 (13 page)

Cynthia grasped her temples with both palms and pressed hard. Her eyes bulged. “I’m the grand prize,” she wailed. “For me he’ll risk the whole Venus deal.

“Oh, Miss V. God, I laughed at her like I think she’s crazy, which breaks my heart, Tom—she loves me dearly, but I can’t let on or she’s liable to botch things. Miss V’s too tender to…” Gripping both cheeks with her fingernails, she screeched, “I killed her. I killed her.…” Her voice kept fading. By the fifth repetition, it got so low that Hickey couldn’t hear over the waves. Finally she clasped her hands on her belly, pushed as though helping herself breathe, and found her voice again.

“It was still dark when we set out for the mountain in the long black car. We started climbing at sunrise, each of us with a canteen and a bedroll hanging off our backs—in case I didn’t receive any message the first day, there’s a mountaineer’s hut where we could stay the night. I carried the pistol in my bedroll. Pravinshandra had all his stuff in an army pack. Fruit, matches, a can of Sterno, his potion,” she snarled at Hickey as though pinning him, or every man, with the blame. “He led the way. I could’ve killed him before we got ten feet. You see what a coward I am?” She leaped up and paced in a sharp circle around the rock, peering frantically in all directions as though just discovering that she was lost, then lunged toward Hickey, threw herself at his feet, and gazed up beseechingly. He touched her hair. She spat between his shoes. Finally she turned and crawled back to her rock, straightened Hickey’s coat, sat as before, and docilely resumed her story.

“We hiked a million miles through knee-deep snow—I had to wear army boots, imagine—to the low station. We left Miss V there. As I tromped off behind Pravinshandra, to march the last mile, Miss V saw me watching her over my shoulder, waiting for her sign. She pointed to herself, then motioned up the trail, meaning she’d follow and protect me, oh God save us, she loved me so.

“A hundred yards ahead, we walked into the cloud that always shrouds the damned mountain. It’s thick as drool and icy. My brain had started to freeze and my legs felt like splinters. I kept trying to rest, but
he
wouldn’t allow it. At first he tried to beguile me with cow eyes and that gushy voice, like Martino’s. When I snubbed him, he started nagging like Cinderella’s stepmother. God, he despised me, the way brutes always do, since I’ve got them overpowered. By the middle station I was three or four steps from death by exhaustion, but I had worked out my final plan. I’d send him ahead to the high station, then rest until I spotted Miss V, on her way up to watch over me, then I’d take off, motioning her to follow but keeping ahead, a hundred yards at least, so she wouldn’t get in my way. At the high station I’d sneak up and blast him. Once it was done, Miss V would thank me and say a prayer for me and help drag the body a little farther up the mountain. The higher up, the better to stash a corpse, the more crevasses and ghastly cliffs with craggy rocks and snowdrifts.”

Cynthia fell silent and stared blankly at Hickey. Her face had turned so pale that even through the fog the scratches she’d made with her fingernails stood out like bloody welts. For a minute or two she sat motionless.

“Then what?” Hickey asked.

She muttered something he couldn’t make out over the waves.

“Louder.”

“He fucked me!”

Hickey watched the girl walk her index and second fingers up and down her forehead. “You mean…”

“I mean he fucked me!” she screamed. “He took out his goddamned Sterno. He made me cider. I was freezing to death, wasn’t I? I gulped it down. Who wouldn’t? Then I got woozy. The next thing I know, I’d gotten fucked and there was a needle welt in my arm.”

“Whew,” Hickey said, and shook his head to clear it. But Cynthia must’ve thought he was calling her a liar.

“Don’t I know if I got fucked?” she howled. “With blood in my panties and a stench like—he lubed me with some kind of stinking goo. You still don’t believe me, look! Get your jollies out of this.”

She sprang up, flung the hem of her dress high like a Tijuana hooker showing her wares, and caught it between her teeth. She grappled with her girdle and panties until she had them on the sand. Then she slapped the side of her butt, yelped, and pointed to the same spot. In the wedge of the dimple was a piece of raw skin the size of a silver dollar, surrounded by stitches. Hickey had to bend close to make it out in the foggy dark.

“You’ve seen enough,” she hissed, and let the dress fall.

“A tattoo?”

“No! Jesus! A brand, like a cow,” she wailed. “The
Nezah
Tree of Life. I had the vile thing cut off!” A second later she gazed around and finally started gathering her underclothes, the soggy handbag, the orchid that had garnished her hair.

“Let’s get you someplace warm,” Hickey said.

She allowed him to wrap the coat around her shoulders, and she walked steadily against him when he took her by the arm. To get out of the inlet and reach the trail, since the tide had risen, they had to wade through icy knee-high surf, which startled her into violent, teeth-clacking shivers, as if the dunking were a baptism that transformed her from a fierce, murderous woman to a deathly sick little girl with her pride smashed. Now she looked admissible to heaven—pallid, her jaw and forehead wrinkled with fear, eyes fluttering.

Hickey wrapped her in his arm, guided her along the trail. In the Chevy she drew her knees up, leaned her cheek on them, and turned her face toward the passenger door. Hickey smoothed his coat over her back and shoulders, switched the heater on, and adjusted the wind-wing to defrost the windshield. The girl made a few little peeps, like a woeful bird; besides those and the chattering of her teeth, she offered no sounds, even when Hickey started musing out loud.

“Miss Vidal must’ve caught him in the act, huh? I guess he whacked her, heaved her into a snowfield. Might’ve even climbed up above and kicked loose an avalanche.”

“Sure,” the girl whispered.

Maybe they could get Pravinshandra fried for killing Emma Vidal, Hickey thought. If he convinced Cynthia of that, maybe she’d nix the murder. He tried to imagine a jury believing all this lunacy. The only chance would be if they could get a few of those pregnant women to testify about their own trips to Holy Mountain. Except Hickey didn’t for a second believe that the master had gotten away with raping one of them after another. In an hour, after he’d disposed of the girl and unraveled his mind, he wasn’t apt to believe a tenth of her story.

“Talk a little more,” he coaxed. “What’d he say when you came to? How’d he try to cover up?”

“Blamed it on the Aryan masters,” she muttered. “Look, he knocked me out with the dope. Later he claims everybody gets knocked out by the masters. You have to reach zero consciousness of this plane before you can perceive the next higher one. If you don’t get knocked out, he says, he knows the message you bring is a lie. But whoever gets knocked out, she’s got a message to bring him, even if she doesn’t remember,
and
she’s become a novice adept. That’s why he brands you, to commemorate, to seal your destiny. He does it while you’re knocked out so it won’t hurt.” Her voice reaching high with amazement, she exclaimed, “And the nitwits believe him. At first I half believed him, while he stood over me an hour or more, begging to hear what profound morsel the masters had granted me. Besides, you expect me to think right after I’d got knocked out and fucked and suffered the death of Miss V? It took me three days to figure what happened, with every chance him grilling me about the message. I damn near made up a story just so he’d leave me alone.” She threw herself back against the seat, her face constricted as if there were no windshield and they were speeding into a gale, and shouted, “How do you know what’s a dream and what isn’t?”

He reached his arm across the backrest, and she fell into it, let him draw her close, laid her cheek on his shoulder. “Evidence, that’s how you know,” she said softly. “Did I tell you about the blood and goo?”

“Yeah. You told me.”

“Evidence,” she murmured.

“On the mountain, after you came to, you try to kill him?”

“He took my gun,” she groaned. “It was in my bedroll. He’d already hitched it onto his pack. All the way down he kept me ahead of him, and I was weeping so—it was all I could do to stagger along, worrying where Miss V could’ve gone. He only said she’d vanished—nothing about an avalanche until we’d got to Black Forest and Venus and the Bitch held me down while he shot me full of poison. A sedative, he called it. They could’ve killed me. You know why they didn’t? The Bitch wouldn’t because
he
had her believing I was going to spill the secrets I’d gotten told on the mountain. And he wouldn’t kill me because he hopes to fuck me again.” For a moment she quit shivering and cackled, as if realizing that the master wouldn’t be fucking anybody. Katoulis would fix that.

“Two days he kept stabbing me with the needle. I couldn’t get to my bedroll. They hardly left me alone until the service for Miss V. When I woke up, nobody was guarding me. I got the pistol. My right leg wouldn’t move; still I dragged myself across the compound, before Saint Ophelia came to help me. I couldn’t see her—I could hardly see the ground—but I felt her hand on my shoulder, like before. Miraculously my legs got strong as Tarzan’s. I marched into the chapel and ran at the altar, aiming the gun between his eyes. ‘Here’s your message!’ I yelled. I didn’t hit
anybody
,” she wailed, and fell to weeping, with spasms crossing her shoulders and deep, eerie moans.

As a cop and musician, Hickey’d known his share of loonies. To make any sense of their tales, he’d finally deduced, you had to remember that part was always true, another part delusion. A tough job, because often the craziest stuff was true and the reasonable things were delusion.

Luckily he didn’t have to pass judgment. What he needed to know was if she’d already paid Katoulis. Not a chance she’d confess if he asked her straight out.

Two miles along Rosecrans past the marine and naval bases, up Barnett Avenue, Hickey used his free hand to rub her back and shoulders. While he waited for an opening to cross the Coast Highway, he bent and pecked a kiss on her shoulder. “It’s okay, babe. Pravinshandra’s a goner,” he promised. “First we go with the law. If they don’t fix him, I will.”

“Too late,” she whispered. “Too late. We’re all dead, all dead. Dead.”

Meaning Donny was paid and on his mission, Hickey knew, but hoping against the obvious, he asked, “You still need the two grand?”

Though he couldn’t see her head wag, he felt it, and it sparked a shudder that began at the base of his cowlick and zinged down to his tailbone. It was one of those moments when the news comes, clear and strong, that the muck you’ve just stepped into might be quicksand.

The girl was still shivering. He patted her head. “Hey, I’m with you. A guy like that, you do what you’ve got to.”

“Thanks, Tom,” she murmured. “You’re okay.”

He’d count on Cynthia’s stupendous pride convincing her she had him collared, that he wouldn’t go after Katoulis or snitch to the law, that a man to whom she’d bared her soul would remain her slave eternally.

As they turned onto her street, she braced herself up in the seat. “Give me a minute to powder my nose, then we’ll go to Rudy’s. I want to sing.”

“Some trooper,” Hickey said, and pulled to the curb in front of the boardinghouse. Cynthia had gotten her strength back. She didn’t need help up the steps to the porch where Dolores Ganguish, in a daisy housecoat, met them at the door, her face shining from a dousing of Pond’s cream. “
Madre de Dios
,” the woman gasped. “What this man did to you?” She clutched Cynthia’s arm and tugged her out of harm’s way, wedging herself between the girl and Hickey.

“It’s okay, Mama,” Cynthia cooed; she wrenched herself free and headed for the stairs, while Mrs. Ganguish rotated to glower at one of them and then the other. Hickey fished his brain for a story to keep the woman from pestering Cynthia but got no bites. Anyway, the girl was plenty able to tell stories of her own. He flashed Mrs. Ganguish a disarming smile and asked if she had a phone he could use in private. Warily she led him to the phone in the downstairs hallway, on the way to the kitchen. She turned back toward the parlor, casting a glance over her shoulder every step or two.

From up the stairs came tiptoeing footsteps and girlish whispers. Hickey dialed Leo’s number, got an answer on the second ring.

“You rested?”

“Naw. Give me till February,” Leo grumbled.

“I need you to meet me at Rudy’s, quick as you can get there.”

“For a nightcap only, I trust.”

“Need you to watch the girl for a day or two,” Hickey said quietly.

“Speak up, will you?”

“Nope.”

Chapter Sixteen

Hickey left the girl at Rudy’s, having charged Leo to keep her away from any silver limos. He left his Chevy in the lot behind Rudy’s, hustled the four blocks to his and Leo’s office. Amid the litter on his desk was the itinerary for Venus and the master, which he’d gotten from Katherine at the Black Forest.

Tonight they were due to arrive in Denver. Tomorrow evening they’d lecture. Hickey made a few calls, learned that commercial flights to Denver left at 6:50 every morning. Tomorrow’s was booked full, as was every other flight through January 5. No Katoulis or any other Greek name appeared on tomorrow’s boarding list.

Hickey phoned Rudy’s, asked Phil if Castillo’d come in yet. Phil said no. Hickey asked him to page an army colonel named Creaser, a regular, who by this time of night was merry enough so he might’ve loaned out an airplane if anybody’d asked. All Hickey sought was a lift to Denver. Creaser told him the fellow to call, said to drop his name. Ten minutes later Hickey was booked on a military hop to Lowry Army Air Force Base, departing at 2:30
A.M.

He stuffed the change of clothes he kept at the office into an overnight bag, along with shaving gear, Cynthia’s ledgers, and two guns, a Browning .45 automatic revolver and a Smith & Wesson .38. Finally, at 11:25—with hands sweating like those of a fat guy drinking beer at noon, in August, in the Sahara—he called Madeline.

If she answered, he didn’t know whether he’d bawl her out or sigh and murmur how he loved her. After seven rings Elizabeth picked up the phone and yawned into it. “’Lo?”

“Sorry to wake you, babe.”

“Hi, dad.”

“Your mom ever come home?”

“No, I guess she’s still at the club.” She yawned again. “Why don’t you call her there?”

Swell, Hickey thought. If he caught her there, fearing she was with Castillo, he probably couldn’t smother his anger any longer. He’d snarl the wrong words, and she’d snap. He’d yell. Then she’d march back to Castillo with another excuse to ignore her conscience, if she still had one. If all she’d done with Castillo so far was flirt and pal around, now, in spite, she’d lead him to the honeymoon suite. Or so Hickey would imagine and fret over, squandering his concentration, while he took off after Donny Katoulis, a mission about as safe as trying to infiltrate the Gestapo.

“Babe,” he said, “I’m going somewhere, probably won’t be able to call until late tomorrow night.” If ever, he mused. “When I get back, this job’s gonna be over. Ask your mom to make reservations at the Cedar Cove Lodge in Arrowhead. See if she can get one of the cabins with a fireplace, two bedrooms, no phone. Tell her…” His throat felt clogged with a thick, steamy vapor, on account of the thought that had gripped him—he might be speaking his last words to his daughter, giving his last message to Madeline.

“Dad? You there?”

“Sure. Tell her I see what went wrong.” It was a lie but an honorable one.

“Went wrong with what?”

“Aw, you know, don’t you? We used to be happier, didn’t we?”

“Sure, before you had to work every night. We miss you, Daddy, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well, that’s almost over. Because I love you and her more than all the rest of everybody, combined.”

“Aw, Daddy,” Elizabeth yawned. He let her go.

Ten minutes he stared at the first line in the next page of Cynthia’s book and brooded. What if, right this minute, Madeline were sitting by the sea-view window listening to Paul exclaim her beauty more over one drink than Hickey’d done in years? What if, this instant, she were deciding to leave him and all that could persuade her to hold off a few days was hearing his promise in person? To leave without seeing her might amount to strike three.

He grabbed up his suitcase, doused the lights, hustled out, and downstairs. As he jogged up the sidewalk toward Rudy’s, his suitcase bowled over a sailor who’d staggered into his right-of-way. It was one of those trips when happenings seem to warn you to run back home. The block before Rudy’s, the catch on his suitcase sprang. His shaving kit and Cynthia’s ledgers flew out and skidded a couple yards, then got stomped by a troop of giddy salesgirls returning to their lodgings at the YWCA. When he reached his car, the trunk key wouldn’t turn. He slung the suitcase onto the front passenger’s seat, sped sans headlights out of the lot and straight down A Street past the courthouse and the visiting team’s side of Lane Field, across the Santa Fe tracks and onto Pacific Coast Highway.

The four miles before he turned on Garnet then started up Mount Soledad, he drove crouched forward like a jockey, squinting into the dark and chewing on the pipe he would’ve lit except that he was too agitated to bother. There’d been a wreck on the highway next to Milly’s. A truck backing out must’ve whacked a lights-out Buick. The cops and ambulance had already arrived. Hickey drove by, made a left on Garnet. He turned right on Ingraham, spinning tires on the gravel, and started up the dirt road that wound around the coastal side of Mount Soledad. He flicked on his headlights. The odds of getting stalled by a cop on rich folk’s turf were slight, as long as you drove a respectable car. When they didn’t know what bigshot or bigshot’s kid they might offend, most cops chose tolerance.

Hickey sped along, gazing down at the moon-white foamy waves, glancing in his mirror at the two dark bays and beyond them at the harbor full of warships. Above them the sky was flecked with lights. He spotted a squadron of fighter planes—probably headed toward some carrier to replace the ones blown to splinters last week in the China Sea—lifting off from North Island where, in a couple hours, he’d depart to wage a battle, maybe the decisive one, in his private war.

Madeline wanted to live on Soledad, where the houses were as big as mausoleums, with sprawling lawns surrounding the tennis courts. It was some people’s idea of a sanctuary, built for those who chose to watch all the commotion down below from a safe distance. Hickey remembered a story of an uncle in Kansas who’d bought atop the tallest hill in his county and started bragging. Soon enough, the mayor, a banker, and some other chumps came bidding for it. Hickey’s uncle turned a 1,000 percent profit.

Soledad didn’t charm Hickey. It reminded him of Beverly Hills. Sure, the mansions were elegant, the company refined, the garden parties catered, the wall hangings chosen by tasteful designers. But why up here, where you viewed so much of the damned, stormy world? Doesn’t it keep them awake nights? Hickey wondered.

The pinkish crescent moon seemed to bounce off the cliffs beyond La Jolla Shores where the Del Mar Club sprawled like the headquarters of some military dictator in the tropics. Hickey coasted down the mountain, making wishes. That he wouldn’t find Castillo with Madeline, but Madeline would be there alone, so he could promise to give up investigating and watch the spark in her eyes.

He skidded up to the gate. In one motion he jumped out, tossed the valet his keys, and said, “Guest of Ada Litton.” She was a La Jolla socialite who’d lavished Hickey and family with privileges ever since he’d rescued her son from the clutches of a showgirl by taking him for a ride to a tavern where they caught her playing two-timer.

The Chinese guard saluted, and Hickey strode up the path between the front garden and tennis courts seven through ten. He rounded the fish pond and one of the fountains, then cut into a garden trail lined with a dozen varieties of stubby palms and shrubs that looked like peacocks, with bird of paradise plants, and ferns on trellises around the fish pond. A piano melody cut through the whoosh and boom of the surf. He stepped out of the garden a few yards from the window of the cocktail lounge overlooking a mile-long sandy beach that dead-ended at the sheer cliffs that rose to meet Camp Callan.

Madeline wasn’t sitting at the window. She was on a stool, leaning on the teakwood bar, her shoulders bare, the fox stole Hickey’d bought her to celebrate the opening of Rudy’s draped across her lap. Smoking one of her Pall Malls, she cocked her head just enough to turn the smoke she blew away from Paul Castillo’s face.

Hickey shuffled on the path along the building to the steps of the dining porch that led off the lounge. Nobody drank or smooched on the porch tonight, on account of the chill. He flopped into a wicker chair and sat awhile, letting his stomach grow accustomed to a new feeling, as though he’d just swallowed a cannonball. Finally heaving himself up, he crossed the porch, opened the French door, and entered a part of the lounge hidden from Madeline’s view by an oak hutch. A curly-haired Mexican waiter he knew grinned sheepishly and waved him in. Hickey wagged his head and motioned the guy over, then put a finger to his lips. The waiter trudged that way, arms to his sides, his chin down so far that the bald dome faced forward.

“Aren’t we chums, Paco?” Hickey said low. “I mean if your girl was drinking with some stooge at Rudy’s, I’d give you a call.”

“I been watching,” Paco whispered. “They don’ kiss or holding hands or nothing.”

“Ask her to step out on the porch, huh?”

Hickey turned to the French door, walked out, and stood facing the sea, paralyzed as he listened to the door swish open and the footsteps approach him. By the time he felt her near, his plan was to open his arms and draw her into them, kiss her until—and long after—he felt her anger dissolve, and give her his promise.

He hadn’t heard Castillo’s footsteps behind Madeline’s. The second he turned and saw the man’s head peering over Madeline’s shoulder, a primitive groan issued out of him. His teeth had clamped together so tightly that he could hardly push sound through, yet his chin quivered, vibrating his words. “You didn’t need to bring him out here.”

“I didn’t
bring
him.” Her drawl was the one that always arrived after three or four drinks. She was chewing her upper lip. The stole hung over her right shoulder and one of the breasts that her red gown, Hickey knew, left exposed to within an eyelash of the areola.

He flung his gaze at Castillo, crucified the man with his eyes. “You wanta disappear, partner?”

“Maybe not.” The Cuban’s nose and bared teeth hung directly over Madeline’s shoulder, the flip of her hair tickling his chin.

“No, see,” Hickey rasped, “you figuring you oughta be out here while I’m talking with my wife—it’s a bad sign.”

“You gonna make a scene, Tom?” Madeline hissed. “Why the hell come tailing me—tired of your songbird already?”

Fiercely, she wrapped the stole around her shoulders, grabbed its ends in her fists, and tugged them down to her sides. On her chest hung the sapphire Hickey’d bought her last year at Bullock’s Westwood, the one she’d fitted with a chain that would place it exactly at the cleft between her breasts as they dived beneath the scarlet gown.

“You wanta get rid of him, or do I?” Hickey snarled.

With a dispirited chuckle followed by a sigh, Madeline turned toward the door, leaving Castillo in the open holding the burgundy purse Madeline had bought four summers past in San Francisco. If the Cuban had followed her, maybe Hickey would’ve written a note, gotten Paco to deliver his promise to become first a husband, second a father, third a businessman, fourth nothing. But Castillo had to get the last word, play Lancelot, chase off Hickey’s remnant of sense.

A crowd had gathered at the window and French door. Pale old fellows in dinner jackets; a couple drowsy females with sculptured hair and face powder deeper than a mortician would dare to apply; a trio of draft-age tennis bums whom a critical eye might’ve guessed Uncle Sam had booted out of his army when they flirted with him. None seemed willing to step beyond the glass. They’d rather stand back and pass judgment. Probably thinking that whoever allowed a Latin into their club was the first to blame.

“You got problems with me,” Castillo droned, his voice a key lower than real, “you talk to me. How about that?”

“Yeah,” Hickey muttered. “Good idea. Listen to this.”

With an uppercut that started at his hip pocket, Hickey knocked Castillo onto his toes, from where the Cuban backpedaled a few feet before he tripped and collapsed onto a Mexican strawberry pot beside the French door. He fell forward onto his hands and knees. Hickey followed and set to kick the man if he tried to rise, but the Cuban held still like a boxer waiting for the eight count, until Hickey couldn’t wait anymore. He was like a grenade with the pin loosed. He let fly a kick over Castillo’s back. It shattered the strawberry pot, spraying Castillo and the French door with loam.

The Cuban had dropped to crawl position, and Hickey’d retreated to the center of the porch, when the first ashtray streaked past his ear. The second one nicked him in the shoulder, just as he caught sight of Madeline standing beside the French door.

“That’s it, Tom,” she screamed. Her arm whipped up and forward. The corner of a silver-and-rhinestone cigarette case, the one Elizabeth had given her last Christmas, stabbed Hickey in the chest.

He would’ve grabbed Madeline and carried her out of there, except that she’d fled inside. He’d have to chase her all over the club, and by then the police would be swarming. Either in the air or his mind, he could already hear the sirens. Days it might take him to talk his way free, after disturbing the peace of the Bigshot Club. So he wheeled and charged straight up the walk toward the Chinese valet, who dodged as though from a fearsome tackler, and tossed Hickey the Chevy keys.