Silencer (26 page)

Sweat stuck Dansk's shirt to his flesh.

He thought, She's past the point of no return. She's a long way past that.

He pictured her moving somewhere in the night. (Shoeless. Why shoeless?) He pictured her in bed, waiting for the hour to roll around when she'd visit Rhees in hospital. And then what? She'd sit beside him, feeling bad. She'd reproach herself. And what next?

He lay back and closed his eyes. He smelled the hamburger again, the stone-cold French fries. He looked at the overturned table, the scattered food, little globs of mustard and ketchup on the carpet. Messy, Amanda.

He lifted the phone and called McTell.

McTell said, ‘I picked him up when he was leaving his office.'

‘And?'

‘OK. He drives to the suburbs, somewhere, north Phoenix, I dunno exactly. The streets look all the same to me round here.'

‘Then what?'

‘He parks outside a house surrounded by all these palm trees and yuck plants, yucca, whatever they're called –'

‘Skip the garden tour.'

‘He goes inside, stays a half-hour.'

‘Whose house?'

‘The name on the mailbox was Bascombe.'

Dansk was quiet for a time. ‘Where is he now?'

‘OK. He left Bascombe, stopped in a diner for some apple pie, cream, the works –'

‘The point, McTell.'

‘He's in another suburb, looks exactly like the last one. He's parked outside a house.'

‘You got the name of the occupant?'

‘I'm waiting to check the mailbox. You don't just walk up to it, Anthony: there's neighbours, a guy walking dogs –'

‘Call me back when you know.'

Dansk hung up. He took Isabel Sanchez's letter from his pocket and stared at the scribbled words. He struck a match, applied it to the sheets and dropped them into an ashtray. He stirred the ashes with a fingertip, imagining they were the cremated remains of some tiny creature sacrificed, and then he opened his case and removed a bunch of faxes. He set these on fire too. Flame purified.

His phone rang. McTell said, ‘Check this out. The name on the box is Vialli.'

Dansk said, ‘Stay right where you are, McTell. Don't move an inch. I mean that.' He got up and started gathering his clothes together. He swept all his toiletries inside a leather bag and closed it. The sound of the zip closing reminded him of flesh tearing, of a sharp instrument slicing a vein.

He thought, This Is Your Life, Amanda Scholes.

The beginning of the end of it.

48

Drumm rang the doorbell, waited, shifted his weight a little. His leg ached from an old wound inflicted on him during the course of a liquor store hold-up when he'd been a rookie. He remembered the shock of the bullet ripping through his flesh and exiting along with tissue and blood and a chunk of bone. The ache was more pronounced at times of stress, such as now. He attributed the stabbing pain to his meeting with Bascombe. Talk about pulling teeth. Lew Bascombe was a dentist's nightmare.

A porch light came on and he blinked.

A woman's voice from inside: ‘Who's there?'

‘Police,' Drumm said. Even pleasant suburbs had become shotgun territory, he thought. People lived with guns in nightstands, guns in closets. Villains roamed the streets. Look at Rhees.

‘Police?'

‘I have ID,' Drumm said.

The door opened an inch. There was a chain between door and jamb. Drumm held out his ID card. The woman peered at it. ‘This is kinda late to be calling,' she said.

‘I apologize,' Drumm said.

‘You better come inside,' she said. ‘You know, I think I remember you. You were at the trial of Benny's uncles. Right?'

‘Right.' Drumm stepped into the hallway. There was an overload of floral arrangements on various surfaces. The woman led him into a sitting-room suggestive of a funeral parlour, more flowery arrays, mountains of lilacs and lilies, stacks of greenery in baskets.

‘Sit, sit down, Lieutenant.'

Drumm lowered himself into a plump easy chair. The leg stabbed. Bernadette Vialli wore a blue robe. She had thick little fingers. The lenses of her glasses were grey-tinted, matching the colour of her short permed hair. She was a small woman and her feet barely touched the carpet when she sat in an armchair facing Drumm.

Family photographs hung on almost every available wall space, interrupted by a couple of paint-by-numbers water-colours. Drumm saw Benny Vialli in some of the photographs. Benny as a kid, Benny as a teenager. He had protruding ears and a cheerful smile.

‘I'm here on Amanda Scholes's behalf,' Drumm said. ‘You called her, I understand.'

‘Yeah. A few days ago.'

‘She asked me to follow up,' Drumm said.

‘It's real nice of you to come in her place, except now I wish I hadn't called her. It's a waste of your time.'

‘You must have had some reason when you phoned her.'

‘I'm a mother. Worry about this, worry about that, then you're out of control before you know it and imagining all kinds of things.'

‘I don't have any children, Mrs Vialli,' Drumm said. ‘My wife died a few years back. We just never got round to kids.'

‘I'm sorry,' she said. She took off her glasses. There were red ridges on either side of her nose.

Drumm thought about his little downtown apartment and the pantry loaded with Campbell's soup, individual servings in small cans. Jeanette, God rest her, had been some kind of cook. But that was past. He didn't dwell on her absence except when he had a can-opener in his hand and was wondering whether to choose the cream of asparagus or the cream of mushroom even though they tasted exactly the same: of corn-starch.

‘Kids are a joy. Also a heartbreak.' Mrs Vialli rose and adjusted flowers, gathering bright clumps of petals between her hands. She did this for a while as if she had in mind some ideal arrangement she couldn't actualize. ‘I got to thinking about Benny, that's what happened.'

‘What about Benny?' he asked.

‘It's just so … it's nothing.'

‘I'd still like to hear.'

Mrs Vialli gave up on the flowers. ‘Benny and me, we were real close, until his uncles hired him down to Tucson. With relatives like those guys you wish you could pick and choose your family. I hope they goddam rot in jail. They had Benny going like, yeah, a yo-yo. Drive this guy, drive that, deliver this package, deliver that. I don't believe he ever thought he was doing anything illegal. I'm his mother, and I love him more than anyone in the world, but he's always had this kinda lost thing about him. Day he was born, I took one look at his face and I thought, This world's gonna be a rocky ride for you, darling.'

Drumm heard the sadness in the woman's voice and it touched him. Mrs Vialli opened a cabinet and took out a small cassette deck. ‘The battery's probably weak on this.'

She pressed PLAY. Initially there was hissing. The voice that eventually issued from the cassette sounded as if it had travelled from an abandoned space probe.

‘Ma, it's Benny. I wish you was
(inaudible)
got
(inaudible)
two but
(inaudible)
I'm doing
(inaudible)
these guys are
(inaudible)
they say I can't call you
(Insert another seventy-five cents please)
Ma, I'm outta time, I'll call again real soon.'

The tape stopped dead.

Mrs Vialli said, ‘That was two days after he went away. I've listened to it fifty times at least. I try to imagine where he was phoning from, what kind of place, what he was wearing, was he getting the right food, you know? He never did call back.'

Drumm thought the room felt like a box wrapped in Cellophane. One of the paintings on the wall depicted a harbour and a small anchored sailboat and gulls that were no more than a haphazard series of Vs.

I'll call again real soon
. And he never had.

‘My hobby,' Mrs Vialli said. ‘Water-colours.'

‘Very nice,' Drumm said. His thoughts drifted to Bascombe's hobby, the balsa-wood Messerschmitts and Spitfires he built in a workshop that smelled of glue and chemicals. He was some kind of World War Two airplane buff and he laboured in grim patient silence. His tiny models hung from nylon strings tacked to the ceiling.
I don't like being interrupted in my own home
, Bascombe had said.
Make an appointment at my office
.

Mrs Vialli said, ‘Benny's gone, and my husband passed away eight years ago. I miss the boy. It's a hole in my heart.'

‘I'm sure it is,' Drumm said.

Mrs Vialli said, ‘You got time to look at something?' She moved to a writing-bureau and opened it, and from a small drawer took out a white envelope. She handed it to Drumm.

‘Go ahead, open it.'

Drumm took the message card from the envelope. It had a red heart on the front and the words ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY BELOVED MOTHER'.

Mrs Vialli said, ‘The card was attached to a buncha roses. There's a message inside. Read it if you like.'

Drumm flipped open the card and read the message, written in featureless block capitals with a ball-point pen. ‘Dear Mom, I miss you very much, love, your son.'

‘One quick phone message and flowers and that card in more than six months, nothing else,' Mrs Vialli said. She sat down and frowned. ‘It's not much. I know, the Program protects him, I know the rules, but it's still not much. And there's something about the birthday card worries me.'

‘What?'

‘You have a kid, he's like this book you can always read, you just know how he behaves. And one big problem I have with this card is …' She paused and looked at Drumm. ‘I know this is gonna seem very small to you and maybe you'll leave here thinking I'm a little crazy, but I'll tell you anyway. You heard the tape, he called me Ma. You read the card. How does it begin? Dear Mom, that's how. Dear Mom.'

‘And?'

‘When he was a very young kid, just starting to talk, he always called his grandmother Mom. Poor little guy couldn't get his mouth around the word grandma, I guess. Anyway, it was always Mom. I kept telling him life was gonna get confusing for everybody if he went round referring to his grandmother as Mom, so he called me Ma.'

‘Always?'

‘He'd come home from school and say what's that cooking in Ma Vialli's kitchen. What's that good smell, Ma. You change Ma to Mom, why it's like somebody who's called you Jack all your life suddenly deciding to call you John. Where's the sense of it?'

Mrs Vialli was right, it
was
a small thing, it was microscopic. But Drumm wasn't inclined to dismiss small things, because he understood from years of experience that they sometimes had significance way beyond their size. A fibre from a rug, a single pubic hair, a speck of dust, stuff like that had sent some people to jail, others to death row. You never overlooked small. He had a bad feeling, only it wasn't his leg this time, it was closer to indigestion, an eruption in his intestines, gassy heat round his heart.
I can't talk about the Program
, Bascombe had said.

This is serious, Lew. This is a homicide investigation and I'll be damned if you stand in my way
.

‘So if he calls me Ma every day of his life, how come all of a sudden it's Mom?'

‘I don't know'

‘It crossed my mind …' Mrs Vialli let her sentence die.

‘You can tell me.'

‘OK. Maybe somebody else sent the flowers. Somebody made it up and sent it to me. And the question I keep coming back to is real simple: Why? If Benny didn't send them why not? Which is why I called Amanda Scholes.'

‘Amanda resigned,' he said. Officially, he thought, but her heart had never quit.

‘Resigned? Oh.'

Drumm nodded.

‘Maybe
you
can help me then, Lieutenant. I'd like to see Benny, even for a couple of minutes, and if that's impractical, then maybe just to hear his voice on the phone, or a letter at the very least. I don't even need to know where he is, nothing like that.'

Drumm said, ‘Have you written to the Program?'

‘I've begun letters I don't know how many times. Then I thought of Amanda. She was the prosecutor in the case, she must have connections. It's depressing when you don't know about your own son. Probably I'm making a mountain outta nothing, but it would be a relief just to know that.'

Drumm rubbed his leg. Goddam switch-blade of pain. He rose from his chair.
Tell me about this guy Dansk, Lew
.

He said, ‘I'll look into it, Mrs Vialli. I promise.'

Her glasses reflected lamplight. ‘Listen. You want some coffee? Maybe a slice of pie? I'm forgetting my manners.'

Drumm thanked her, but said no. He stepped into the hallway, and a weariness descended on him. Ma, Mom. What's in a name? Maybe a whole lot. Maybe everything. Flip the coin, maybe nothing.

He turned to Mrs Vialli, who'd followed him along the hallway. ‘Leave this with me. I'll be in touch.'

He stepped out of the house. Mrs Vialli called good night to him. He heard her shut the door and slip the chain back in place. He wandered down the path to the sidewalk. As he opened the door of his car, he sniffed the night air, which had the smell of week-old fish covered with fat blue flies.

49

McTell dislikes the creepy-crawly hush of the suburbs. He prefers downtown life and crowded streets and honky-tonks and pussy joints. He'd rather be in New Orleans or Chicago than this place. Better still, give him Tijuana, where it's lawless and anything goes.

He sits in his car for a while, surrounded by the big silence of it all, and sees the cop drive away.

Minutes later, McTell gets out and strolls half a block through the warm dark. He pulls on a pair of leather gloves as he moves. They make his hands sweat.

He pauses. Looks around. Sidewalks empty. Keeps going. Busy night doing Dansk's work. Yessir, Anthony. Yessir, Mr Birthmark.