Murder Most Merry (29 page)

“Don’t worry about money now,” Loren said, and went down the inner hall to the second bedroom that was fixed up as his study, closing the door behind him. He had to check his address book for the number of Val’s house, the lovely house nestled on the side of a mountain forty miles from the capital’s center, the house she had built as therapy after her husband had died. God, had it been that long since he’d called her? He wondered what had made their relationship taper off, his choice or hers or just the natural drifting of two people who cared deeply for each other but were hundreds of miles apart. He hoped she wouldn’t mind his calling in the middle of the night. He hoped very much that she’d be alone.

On the fourth ring she answered, her voice heavy with sleep and bewilderment and a touch of anger.

“Hi, Val, it’s me... Yes, much too long. I’ve missed you too. Want to make up for lost time?” He told her about his involvement in the airport murder which she’d heard reported on the evening’s TV newscasts, and about the riddle of the intended target which Donna Greene had dropped in his lap. “So if you haven’t any other plans for the holidays, why not spend Christmas here? Check her story, be her bodyguard if she needs one, help her start functioning again. Take her to the police with me if you believe she’s right.” He knew better than to hold out the prospect of a substantial fee. That wasn’t the way Val operated.

“You’ve got yourself a guest,” she said. “You know, I was going to invite you up to my place for Christmas but—well, I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

“I’d have come,” he told her softly. If she had invited him he wouldn’t have been at the airport this afternoon, and maybe Frank Wilt would be alive and able to tell who had hired him, and maybe Donna Greene would be dead. Chance.

I’ll have to get someone to run the office and I’ll need an hour to pack. No way I can get a plane reservation this time of year, so I’ll drive. See you around, oh, say eight in the morning if I don’t get stuck in the snow.”

“I hope you like quiche for breakfast.” Loren said.

*   *   *

A soft rapping on the front door jerked him out of a doze on the blue couch. Sullen gray light filling the living room told him it was morning. His watch on the end table read 7:14. “Yes?” he called in the door’s direction.

“Me.” He recognized Val’s voice, undid the deadbolt and the chain lock. The second she was inside with her suitcase he kissed her. It was their first kiss in months and they both made it last. Then they just looked at each other. Val’s cheeks were red from the cold and her eyes showed the strain of a long drive through snow-haunted darkness. She was beautiful as ever.

“I missed you,” he whispered. “Mrs. Greene’s asleep in the bedroom.”

They talked quietly in the kitchen while they grated some cheddar, cut a strip of pepper and an onion and ham slices into bits, beat two eggs in cream and melted butter, poured the ingredients into a ready-made pie crust, seasoned them with salt and nutmeg, and popped the quiche into the oven. Loren reported on the murder and Donna’s story as the aroma of hot melted cheese filled the kitchen.

“The first step isn’t hard to figure,” Val said, cutting the quiche into thirds as Loren poured orange juice and coffee. “She’ll have to look at pictures of Wilt and tell us if he was her Monday-night burglar. If she identifies him we’ll know she was the target at the airport.”

“But if she can’t identify him,” Loren pointed out, “it’s not conclusive the other way. Maybe two guys were after her, maybe she didn’t get a good look at the burglar... We do make a delicious quiche, partner.”

“And I’m glad we saved a third of it for our client,” Val said, “because the minute she gets up I’m borrowing your bed. I can’t take sleepless nights the way I used to.”

They left Val asleep and drove downtown through the snow in Loren’s VW and entered the office of the homicide detail a little after eleven. Lieutenant Krauzer was in his cubicle, and from his rumpled red-eyed look he’d been working through the night. He was a balding soft-spoken overweight man in his fifties who never seemed to react to anything but. like a human sponge, absorbed whatever came before him.

The lieutenant listened to Loren’s story and to Donna Greene’s, then picked up his phone handset, and twirled the dial. “Gene, you still have the Wilt photos? Yeah, bring them in, please.”

“We’ve learned a bunch about Frank Wilt since you hung it up last night. Professor,” Krauzer said. “He spent most of his time in bars, one joint in particular that’s owned by a guy with mob connections. That could explain how he was hired for the hit if the target was John Graham, but it doesn’t explain why. Damn it, the mob just doesn’t pay washed-up vets to waste a top man on their hit list.

“Your story reads better on that score, Mrs. Greene. An amateur hires Wilt for a private killing. He messes it up at your house last week and runs. He follows you to the airport yesterday, tries again, and messes it up again, because the guy next to you in line happened to have a name that sounds a little like yours, turned faster than you did. and took the bullets meant for you. But, ma’am, you just can’t ask me to believe that there’s a plot to wipe out your family, because there’s no way on earth the freak accident that killed your husband and daughter could have been anything but—”

A knock sounded on the cubicle door and a woman entered. Loren recognized her as Sergeant Holt from last night. She placed a sheaf of photos on Krauzer’s desk and left after the lieutenant thanked her. Loren handed the pictures to Donna and watched her face as she squinted and studied the shots with intense deliberation. In the outer office phones were ringing constantly, voices rising and falling, doors slamming, and in the street Loren heard the wail of sirens. Violent crime seemed to thrive on holidays.

There was a hunted look in Donna Greene’s eyes when she handed the photos back to Krauzer. “I can’t tell.” she said in almost a whisper. “I think the burglar was taller but with that stocking mask he wore and in the dark I couldn’t see his face well enough to be sure. Oh, I’m sorry!” She began to cry again and Loren reached out for her. Krauzer lifted the phone and a minute later Sergeant Holt came back in, put her arm around the other woman, and led her away.

Leaving Loren alone with Krauzer and free to ask the lieutenant for a large

favor.

The Homicide specialist kept shaking his head sadly. “I can’t spare the personnel to put a twenty-four-hour watch on her. Professor. Not short-handed the way we are around Christmas. Not without more proof she’s really in danger. I like the lady, I think she was totally honest with us, and I know she’s scared half to death, but—”

“But she’s paranoid?” Loren broke in. “Like all the dissidents in the Sixties and Seventies who thought the government was persecuting them? Look, suppose she’s right the way they were right?”

“Then you’ve got Val Tremaine to protect her,” Krauzer said, “and we both know they don’t come better.” He gave Loren a bleak but knowing smile. “Go on, get out of here with your harem, and have a merry Christmas. Call me if something should happen.”

If something should happen...

He decided to let Val sleep at the apartment and take Donna shopping so that he and his unexpected guests could have some sort of Christmas. After weaving through downtown streets in a crazy-quilt pattern to throw off any possible followers, he swung the VW onto the Interstate and drove out to the tri-leveled Cherrywood Mall. On the day before Christmas there was more safety among the crowds of frantic last-minute shoppers than behind fortress walls.

The excursion seemed to take Donna out of herself, erase some of the hunted look from her eyes. It was after four and their arms were full of brightly wrapped packages when they slipped into a dark quiet bar on the mall’s third level.

“Feeling better?” Loren asked as they sipped Alexanders.

“Much.” She smiled hesitantly in the dimness. “Mr. Mensing. these are the happiest few hours I’ve had since, well, since last year. I can never repay you. You’ve even made me begin to feel different about everything that’s happened to me.”

“Different how?”

“I’ve decided it wasn’t just blind chance that I didn’t go in the car with Chuck and Cindy that day and that the man next to me was shot and not me. I think I’m meant to live awhile yet. And. oh. God. there’s so much I’ve got to do after the holidays to put my life back in order. The house is a hopeless mess and the tires on my car are getting bald and I need a new will—Chuck and I had mutual wills, we each left everything to the other—and, you know, I may start dating again.” She looked into her glass and then into Loren’s eyes. “You’re, ah, not available, right?”

“I’m honestly not sure,” Loren said. “Val and I have been out of touch for months and we’ve been sort of preoccupied since she got in this morning.” He paused, blinked behind his glasses, bewildered as he habitually was by the thought that any young woman could find a bear-bodied, unaggressive, overly learned intellectual in his late thirties even slightly desirable. “But look. However that turns out, I’m your friend. Val and I both are.”

“To friendship,” she said as they touched glasses. “To a new life.”

It was the strangest Christmas Eve he’d ever spent. To an outsider it would have seemed that an exotic fantasy had become real—a man and two lovely women, a high-rise well stocked with food and drink. As night fell and with it fresh snow, Loren made a bowl of hot mulled wine and played the new recording of the Dvorak Piano Quintet No. 5 that he’d bought as his Christmas present to himself. Later he turned on the radio to an FM station and they listened to traditional carols as he gave Val and Donna the gifts he’d purchased at Cherrywood. Their squeals of delight warmed him more than the wine.

Part of him felt relaxed and at peace and part of him stayed alert like an animal in fear of predators. But as midnight approached he found it harder and harder to believe there was danger. Not with the snow outside turning to ice as it fell, not behind the deadbolt and chain lock in a haven twenty stories high.

A little after 12:30 they exchanged good-night kisses and Loren surrendered his bedroom to the women. When they’d closed the door behind them he made a last ritual concession to security by tugging the massive blue couch over against the front door before arranging its cushions on the living-room rug in a makeshift bed.

He was fitting a spare sheet over the couch cushions when Val came back, her blonde hair falling soft and loose over the shoulders of the floor-length caftan he’d given her for Christmas. She smiled and helped him smooth the sheets. “Now you’ll sleep better,” she said. “I feel like a toad kicking you out of your bed on Christmas Eve.”

“Can’t be helped. Donna’s asleep?”

“Out like a light. You were right to serve decaffeinated coffee.” She sat on a sheet-draped cushion. “And thanks to that nap I had before the sergeant dropped by, I’m not tired in the least—”

“Sergeant?” Loren asked. He was suddenly alert.

Her face dropped slightly. “Oh, rats, I wasn’t supposed to tell you. Lieutenant Krauzer sent a man over this afternoon just in case Donna was in danger. He came while you were shopping, showed me his ID, looked this place over, and set up a stakeout in 20-B, the vacant apartment across the hall. He said not to tell you and Donna so you’d act natural and not scare any suspects away. But it’s good to know Sergeant Holt is standing guard.”

Loren leaped to his feet. “Sergeant
who?
” he shouted.

“Gene Holt, Lieutenant Krauzer’s assistant. He’s been in 20-B since midafternoon. The couple that lives there is in Florida—”

“Describe him.” Loren’s face was white, and wet fear crawled down his spine.

“A tall man in his middle thirties, thin face, cleft chin. He wears glasses and blinks a lot as if his eyes were weak.”

In that moment Loren saw the shape of the nightmare. “That’s it,” he muttered. and stood there frozen with understanding. He could hear clocks ticking, the night stirrings of the building, the plock-plock of icy snow falling on the outdoor furniture on his balcony. Every sound was magnified now, transformed into menace.

Val shook his shoulders, fear twisting her own face. “Loren, what in God’s name is the matter?”

“Sergeant Gene Holt.” Loren told her, “is a woman. And now I know who Weak Eyes is too.”

“He had a badge and identification!” she protested.

“And if you know the right document forger you can have stuff like that made to order while you wait.” He pushed her aside, headed for the phone on a stand in the corner. “I’m calling Krauzer and getting some real cops here.”

The phone exploded into sound before he’d crossed the room and he jumped as if shot. A second ring, a third. He picked it up as if it were a cobra, forced it to his ear. Silence. Then a voice, smooth, low, calm. “Unfortunately. Professor, I can’t let you call for reinforcements,” it said.

Loren slammed the phone down, held it in its cradle for a count of ten, then lifted the handset. He didn’t hear a dial tone. He punched the hook furiously. Still no dial tone. He whirled to Val. “Him.” he whispered. “He must have planted a bug here while he was pretending to check the place out for security. He heard every word we said all evening and was just waiting for all of us to go to bed. We can’t phone outside—he’s tying up the line by keeping the phone in 20-B off the hook.”

“We can phone for help from one of the other apartments on this floor!”