Open Season (12 page)

“Makes me wonder why you’re not doing what I do for a living.”

“Well, I am, aren’t I?” She laughed. “Actually, the truth is I see every homicide in this state, year after year. That only comes to about twenty or so on the average—about what New York racks up in a day—but it still makes me the resident expert. I’ve seen a lot more than you have—in that area at least.”

“Okay. All this leaves one final question—a pretty big one. Do you still have the samples?”

She let out a conspiratorial laugh. “You’re a lucky man. I always keep my own slides, but usually the samples get dumped after two years. This time I held on to them, including the fetus.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know—intuition.”

“You’re right—lucky me.” I stood up. “This has been a big help, really. By the way, since you can’t do those tests you told me about, who can?”

She quickly scribbled a name on a sheet of paper and handed it to me. “Bob Kees, University of West Haven—that’s just outside New Haven. All this is his specialty. Whenever I get stumped, I call on him. So does everyone else, I might add, so any work out of there will take time—but it’ll be worth it.”

“How does he handle his fees?”

She looked at me quizzically. “Why?”

“My captain’s the only one who knows I’m on this. If vouchers start appearing with Harris’s name all over them, I’ll be up the proverbial creek.”

“Politics?”

“You got it.”

“Don’t worry about it. In situations like this, Bob usually waives his fee, and I’ll make sure he does this time.”

“How about getting the stuff to him?”

“No problem there either. It all fits into a small picnic cooler, and I can get the state police to act as couriers if time is a problem. They’ll go from door to door, within the state at least, and you can take it from there. I can code it so no one knows what’s inside. Your only problem should be letting me know when to start things rolling. In the meantime, I’ll gather it all together in one spot so as not to slow things up when the time comes.”

She got up and shook my hand. “Happy hunting.”

“I have to admit, when we met I never dreamed it would end this way.”

“You’re a hard man to say no to.”

This time, the tape on the door was intact. Still, I checked the rooms and closets—and phones—to see if I could sense anyone having come by. At the end of my search I gave an obligatory glance down into the street. The Plymouth was back, just visible by the street lamp’s blurred light.

“You son of a bitch,” I muttered, and headed for the door.

It was still snowing, though just barely at last, and the ground was covered by a good ten to twelve inches. I stepped onto the unshoveled sidewalk and walked rapidly north, away from High Street and the Plymouth. I heard the muffled sound of a car door slamming—whoever this clown was, discretion wasn’t his strength. At the first left, a narrow, cluttered back street that twisted steeply up to join Chestnut Hill, I climbed as quickly as I could, fighting to keep my footing. At the point where the street curves left, I stopped and ducked behind a parked van.

I waited a full minute and a half, hearing all the while my follower’s labored progress up the slippery hill. Obviously he didn’t have the proper footwear because several times he resorted to pulling himself along on parked cars, garbage bins, and the occasional spindly sapling. I began to wonder why he was even bothering; had I been anything short of an elephant riding a wheelchair, I would have been long gone. But he was nothing if not persistent; by the time he finally reached the van, he was breathing hard and quietly swearing nonstop.

I stood very still, resting against the back of the van, facing the street, where my pursuer had gone for firmer footing. As he came abreast of the rear bumper, I swung my leg out with full force and caught him across both shins. His feet flew out from under him and he landed face first in the street with a dull thump.

I stepped on the nape of his neck and pushed my gun barrel into his ear. “Put your hands behind your back.” Both snowy hands appeared. I snapped my handcuffs onto them. “Roll over.”

He did as he was told. I looked at him in the dim light; his face was covered with soft powdery snow which he was trying to blink from his eyes. His nose was bleeding. “What’s your name?”

“Robert Smith.”

“Nice try.”

“Really—I’m a private investigator. I have a license inside my coat. Top left.”

I opened the coat, found a wallet with the license, along with a revolver clipped to his belt. Robert Smith came from Burlington. “You want to tell me what’s going on?”

“I was hired to follow you.” He was sniffing the blood up his nose and trying not to choke.

“I don’t want to play question-and-answer here. Tell me what I want to know.”

“Can I get up? It’s cold.”

“Of course it’s cold—it’s January. Talk to me.”

“I was hired to follow you at night. Once you get to your office every morning, I’m supposed to let you go. I’m told by phone when and where to pick you up each night.”

“How?”

“This guy rented an answering service—he leaves messages for me, I leave messages for him.”

“How do you get paid?”

“By mail—cash.”

“This guy has no name, of course.”

“Mr. Jones.”

“Cute—Smith and Jones. How did he contact you first?”

“He called my office in Burlington.”

“What did he sound like?”

“Average. No accent. Not a high voice or a low one—nothing unusual.”

“Did you bug my place?”

“No.”

I rapped him on the forehead with my knuckles. He let out a cry of surprise and pain. “I didn’t, goddamn it. I didn’t even know it was bugged. I just followed you and gave my reports—that’s all.”

I jerked him to his feet by the collar. “All right. Come with me.”

“Where are we going?”

“To make a phone call.”

I dragged him down to the public phone booth outside Dunkin’ Donuts and made him call the answering service. He left a message that he’d seen me put a suitcase in the trunk of my car, as if preparing for an early morning departure. Did Mr. Jones want him to follow me if I left town, or would somebody else take over? It wasn’t much, I’ll admit, but I felt I had to put Smith to some use before I let him go.

We stood by that phone for forty-five minutes, feeling the cold creep up our bodies like freezing water in a bathtub. I was better dressed for it than Smith, but even I was starting to hurt. I had decided on a public phone on the off chance that someone else might be watching the apartment, but I was beginning to think that frostbite might be too high a price for discretion.

When the phone finally rang, Smith could barely hold the receiver. “This is Bob Smith,” he chattered. He listened for a moment and hung up. “I’ll be damned.”

“What did he say?”

“He left a message. I’m fired and we’re both supposed to get out of the cold. Thanks a lot.”

I handed him his gun and wallet and walked away without saying a word.

· · ·

I was asleep in bed. That much I knew for sure—I remembered turning the electric blanket on high to thaw the chill out of my bones. But I was also having a dream unlike any I’d ever had before. It was a sound dream, with no pictures, and just one voice.

The voice was just as Bob Smith had described it: not high, not low—average. It didn’t have a detectable accent, either, which made me think of somebody else’s description of it—John Woll’s. I’d been scornful then—as if all bad guys had accents—but now I thought maybe there was something to that. Maybe the man was a foreigner faking a nonaccent, or an actor pretending to be a foreigner faking a nonaccent. All of a sudden, I became convinced that the solution to this whole thing lay in the absence of the accent. Of course… that was it; it had been in front of my eyes all along. Or at least my ears.

My ears, in fact, were beginning to hurt. It was the voice, of course, yelling. I opened my eyes.

Black against black; it was hard to see, and it was all spinning slightly. I could make out a head, or something like a head, with pale holes where the eyes normally were. And there was an enormous white hand near the head, moving quickly back and forth, making slapping sounds to which I was keeping rhythm with my head. In fact, the head with the pale eyes wasn’t moving—my head was. And the hand was slapping me. That was it; I was almost sure. But I didn’t feel anything.

The voice stopped and things suddenly tilted. I felt my bed shift under me and slide away, leaving me to thump on the floor. The softly lit ceiling moved before my eyes. I saw the top of my bedroom door go past, then my living room ceiling. It was almost like being dragged along the floor, except I couldn’t feel the floor.

Abruptly, it got colder. I saw the ceiling of the landing outside my apartment door. Somebody grabbed my collar and propped me up against a wall; there was that head again in front of my eyes, looking just like an animated ski mask.

“Can you hear me, Joe?”

I noticed the eye holes of the mask had pretty red stitching all around them—nice touch.

“Nod if you hear me.”

I could do that, if that’s all he wanted. Things bobbed in front of me a couple of times, and I felt slightly nauseous. Had I nodded?

“Good.”

All right. I guess I had.

“Look at me.”

I’ve been doing that. I even complimented your mask.

“They tried to gas you, Joe. They tried to kill you. It would have looked like an accident or something. Do you understand?”

Sure, I guess.

“Do you?”

He wanted another nod, but that hadn’t felt too good. I grunted.

“Is that a yes or a no?”

Oh, for Christ’s sake. I nodded again and swallowed hard.

“They want you dead, but they don’t want it to look like murder. They don’t want to draw attention to the Harris murder. The Harris murder is the key, Joe; you’re right about that. Stop chasing down blind alleys. We’ve brought them out into the open, you and me, so keep the heat on.”

He shook me violently—that felt just great. “But remember: they’ll try to make something normal turn against you, like your stove or your car, to make it look accidental. Remember that. Do you understand?”

I tried to grunt again. This time he bought it. In fact, he disappeared. I went back to sleep.

I woke up at dawn, shivering in the cold, wondering if I’d just collapsed at the foot of the public phone. I was still on the landing, dressed only in my pajamas, bathed in the dim red, blue, and yellow hue from the stained glass window over the stairwell. My neck ached from being propped up against the wall, but when I tried to move, the pain brought tears to my eyes.

Slowly, a living monument to mind over matter, I got to my feet and opened the apartment door. A freezing draft of air made me gasp and lurch toward the open windows. I slammed them shut, cringing at the noise. Then I locked and chained the door, relit the stove’s pilot lights, and got back in bed.

As the blanket brought some feeling back to my body, I went over what had happened, and for the first time since Korea, the taste of real fear rose in my throat.

AS SOON AS I THAWED OUT
and could stand without falling on my face, I swallowed half a bottle of aspirin and dialed the office.

“You sound like death warmed over,” was Murphy’s cheery greeting. “Where the hell are you?”

“At home. Did you get any reaction to that bug?”

“Not yet. How was Woodstock?”

“I’ll tell you later. You haven’t sent anyone back to where Kimberly Harris was murdered, have you?”

“Why would I?”

“Talk to the manager again, whatever residents date back that far; you know, whatever.”

“That’s your hot potato. I’ve got people all over town digging into every nook and cranny on the Reitz-Phillips thing. I’m not about to touch Harris too.”

“Okay. I’ll be in in an hour or so.”

I left the apartment and headed north on the Putney Road to the Huntington Arms. It was a medium-sized rental complex of twenty units, forming a U on three sides of a too short, too shallow, empty swimming pool. The open end of the U was blocked by a ten-foot-high brick privacy fence.

It looked like all its clones across America: two stories, an outdoor balcony running around the inside of the U on the second floor, rhythmically intercepted by metal staircases leading down, a tunnel-like entrance from the parking lot to the inner court. It was flat-roofed, red-bricked and generally looked like a motel, albeit a fairly good one. I knocked on the manager’s door, the first left off the entranceway, and showed him my badge. “Are you Mr. Boyers?” My voice rattled around my head like a billiard ball.

He was a short, skinny man with glasses—the high-school nerd grown old. “What’s up?”

“Is your name Boyers?”

“Yes.” He seemed embarrassed by the fact. “So you were the manager when Kimberly Harris was killed.” His mouth opened and shut a couple of times in astonishment.

Whatever subtlety I’d used on others when mentioning the Harris case had been literally beaten out of me by now. All I wanted from this bird was some answers.

“Kimberly Harris?”

“You do remember the name.”

“My God… Of course.”

“Tell me about it.”

“But that was years ago. I mean, they caught the guy.”

“I’m aware of that. I’m cleaning up some paperwork.”

“Paperwork? I thought you people were all working on that shooting.”

“Most of us are. I will be too once you’ve helped me out a little here.”

“This really is a little crazy, you know? What’s left to be said?”

“Humor me, okay?”

He looked at me oddly, bobbed his head, and disappeared for a moment. He came back out pulling on an overcoat. It was bitterly cold, about ten degrees. The sky was pale blue and utterly cloudless, giving the white world around us the look of a dazzling, gigantic wedding cake. The brilliance burned straight to the back of my skull and made me feel slightly woozy.

“I can’t believe my story isn’t already in your files ten times over.”