Silencer (32 page)

‘What kind of plans?'

‘I can't read his mind, I doubt if anyone can do that. I only know his plans are lethal, whatever they are, and I'm feeling vulnerable because he's out there somewhere.'

Kelloway's phone rang. He picked it up, listened, then he rose. He said to Wom, ‘Back in a second, Sonny,' and went out of the room.

Amanda heard the door close. She looked at Wom and said, ‘I bet he stuffs dollar bills into collection boxes for religious missions in Patagonia. I bet he's active in the Big Brothers organization.'

Sonny Wom said, ‘He's not a happy man today. None of us are.'

‘Is he ever happy?' she asked.

Wom didn't answer. Kelloway came back into the room, carrying a piece of paper he spread on the desk. His skull shone like a hazelnut. ‘What kind of car do you drive?'

‘Car? A VW.'

He read something scrawled on the back of the paper. ‘Registration number 4KL580?'

Rhees said, ‘That's the number all right. Why?'

‘Colour red?' Kelloway asked.

‘Where is all this leading?' Amanda asked.

‘It was your car that ran down Willie.'

‘My car?'

‘We found it abandoned a couple of miles from Metrocenter. Front seriously dented, blood on the windshield, plus a strip torn from the sleeve of Willie's jacket stuck to a broken front light.'

Her own car. Willie's torn jacket. She couldn't think around this. ‘I left that car last night outside a convenience market on Lincoln,' she said.

‘By left, you mean you just walked away from it?'

‘Somebody was tailing me. I decided to skip.'

‘Who was tailing you?'

‘One of Dansk's people,' she said.

‘Naturally,' Kelloway said.

‘So I dumped the car.'

Kelloway said, ‘And somebody came along later and drove it away. And somebody sent Willie a message, using your name. And Willie walked into a trap.'

‘Not somebody. Dansk.' How many ways could she tell Kelloway the same thing?

Kelloway tossed the sheet of paper aside. ‘A suspicious person could look at all these things and interpret them in a dark way, Miss Scholes. A message you say you never sent. The fact your car was used in a hit and run. Somebody could add these things up and you'd come out looking murky.'

Rhees said, ‘Crap, Kelloway. Are you accusing Amanda of something?'

Kelloway said, ‘I'm just looking at the angles.'

‘With some offensive results,' Rhees said. He sounded angry, even in his pain. Amanda rose and stood directly behind him, laying her hands on his shoulders. She felt heat rise from his body.

‘I
saw
that goddam letter,' Rhees said.

‘Did I say I disbelieved you?'

Amanda stepped in front of Kelloway's desk. Calm was the important thing. An air of reason. ‘Don't you see what's going on, Kelloway? Dansk is stirring the pond, he's making the waters muddy. He leaves a message for Willie in my name, he uses my car, it's all diversionary stuff designed to confuse.'

‘It's confusing all right. I grant you that.'

‘He knows how to hide and he knows how to manipulate. Look, I don't have any motive for fabricating this story. I don't have anything to gain from making up fictions.'

Kelloway shrugged. ‘I never accused you of making up fictions. Did I, Sonny? Did you hear me accuse Miss Scholes of that?'

Wom said, ‘No, I missed out on that.'

Amanda smiled thinly. ‘The pair of you are missing out on quite a few things, not least the fact that I was very close to Willie Drumm, and it hurts like fuck to think about what happened to him.'

‘You're grieving,' Kelloway said.

‘Goddam right I'm grieving.'

Kelloway tapped the surface of his desk. His tanned hand was bony. He looked at Sonny Wom and said, ‘This lady won a few cases in her time. She came in for some courtroom glory. Sent some real bad guys away. She didn't do it all by herself, of course. No, we did all the shit work, built good solid cases for her. I don't think she ever once went into court on wobbly roller-skates. And the press she got. Jesus, you wouldn't believe it. Like a movie star. Cher or Michelle or somebody.'

Amanda asked, ‘What am I hearing, Kelloway?'

Kelloway continued to address Wom. ‘She had these profiles in the newspapers, Sonny. Magazines. How sharp she was. What a legal brain. Strange thing is, I never saw much mention of the back-room staff, the guys that lit the stage for her. The scriptwriters, the researchers, the little guys. She hogged it.'

Amanda stared at Kelloway.
The penny drops
. ‘Oh Christ. How long have you been breast-feeding this grudge?'

‘Grudge? What grudge?'

Exasperated, Amanda said, ‘OK, I confess. You handed me cases on a shiny silver platter. Some of them were perfect, beyond perfect. Is that what you want me to say?'

Kelloway said, ‘I'm not asking you to say anything, Miss Scholes.'

‘Because you didn't get your share of the spotlight, you want to make life awkward for me,' she said.

‘Awkward?' Kelloway feigned surprise. ‘My department has always been the soul of co-operation, Miss Scholes. You'd agree with that?'

‘Wholeheartedly,' she said.

‘You'd also agree my people always walked the last few yards for you. Always.'

‘More,' she said. She considered Kelloway's ego and what a delicate thing it had to be. Female prosecutor gets headlines and stories, macho Chief Kelloway gets none. So this was the source of his attitude: he was crying out for attention and he wasn't getting what he wanted and he was stamping his feet with a petulance that had been festering inside him for a long time, a resentment out of control. If you added to this the rancour he still hauled around because she'd refused to prosecute the Hood case, you got a guy who was a twisted bundle of bitterness.

‘And now you need my help,' he said.

‘Yeah, I need your help.'

Kelloway got up from his chair. ‘Get one thing straight, Miss Scholes. The only important factor for me in all this is Willie Drumm. I'll have a man visit the Hideaway Knolls and check out the guy you claim pilfered the letter, so we'll need a description from you. I'll get in touch with Justice and see if we can arrange a meeting with somebody who knows about the Witness Protection Program, and we'll sit down together and look at this thing closely.'

Somebody who knows about the Witness Protection Program, she thought. The phrase created disturbances inside her. How could Kelloway know this somebody was trustworthy? And when it came to the question of trust, how did she know she could put any in Kelloway, riddled as he was with pettiness?

‘As a bonus, we'll also talk to Mrs Vialli who's so worried about her kid. You see how co-operative we are.'

She said, ‘I want you to understand one thing. I didn't write those goddam interviews. I didn't go out looking for publicity, and I still think the Hood case was too damn weak to take into court.'

‘I don't actually give a shit who wrote them any more than I give a shit about Hood,' Kelloway said, and adjusted his belt buckle. ‘I'm a mean-spirited bastard and I just got what I wanted.'

He smiled at her fiercely, an expression of satisfaction and voracious spite. She heard the whirr of feathers, wings ruffling then settling back in place. Lay an egg, Kelloway. Lay it so it chafes your ass.

60

Dansk checked into a hotel five miles from downtown. The place was a dump but he didn't plan on staying. It was a base, nothing more, a place to freshen up. The porter who touted for Dansk's case wore grubby black shoes and a tacky brocade vest with a grease-stained pocket.

Dansk chilled the bag-man with a stare, and got his room key. He went to the pay phones and opened a Phoenix directory. He found what he wanted and scribbled the information down inside his notebook.

He went up to his room. Stuffy. He opened the bedroom window just as his cellular phone rang.

Pasquale said, ‘It went off OK.' He had a sullen distance in his voice.

‘Go to a place called the Sidewinder on McDowell. You'll meet McTell. I'll be in touch.' Dansk cut the connection and looked out the window. Something was smouldering in the distance, a garbage dump, maybe garden trash. A stack of thin white smoke rose into the sun, like a pope had just been elected.

This would be a great room if you were thinking of suicide: long drop. Jumpers heaving themselves over the ledge, air whining in their ears as they fell, maybe even changing their minds halfway down, when it was too late to reverse the polarity of the situation.

Like it was too late for Amanda.

Amanda, Amanda. You got a guy that loves you. A guy you love. Life should've been more precious to you, but you took a wrong turning.

He picked up the telephone and dialled a number.

‘Phoenix Police Department,' a man said.

‘Put me through to Lieutenant Drumm,' Dansk said.

‘He isn't in the office at the moment.'

I bet. ‘When do you expect him?'

‘It's hard to say.' This guy was following the official line: no death announcement at the moment. Keep a lid on it. ‘Maybe somebody else could help you,' he said. ‘I'll connect you.'

A woman came on the line and introduced herself as Sergeant Friedman. She sounded dispirited.

Dansk imposed a little authoritative weight into his voice. ‘This is Morgan Scholes. Amanda Scholes is my daughter. She left a message on my answering machine, something about how she was going to see Lieutenant Drumm, something about Rhees being hurt and hospitalized. Is she around? Can I talk to her?'

‘You just missed her, Mr Scholes.'

‘Father and daughter, we're like ships in the night. You any idea where she went?'

Betty Friedman was quiet a moment. ‘She left the building with Chief Kelloway and Lieutenant Wom.'

‘She say where she was going?'

‘All I know is they went to interview somebody.'

‘What hospital is Rhees in?'

‘He's here in the building at the moment. A physician gave him a painkilling injection, knocked him out.'

‘This world,' Dansk said. ‘What the hell's it coming to when vandals can just go inside somebody's home?' He made a clucking noise of irritation and bewilderment. An older man's sound of bafflement at the condition of today's society.

‘You wanna leave a message you called? If I see her I'll pass it along.'

‘Don't bother. She'll be in touch with me soon, I'm sure.'

So, they were going through the motions, interviewing somebody. He guessed Mrs Vialli. Who else? Running a check on her.
Some flowers on her birthday and a card she feels isn't kosher
. Loeb's fuck-up, he thought. Correspondence was Loeb's department, but he'd failed to keep track of nuances and quirks and simple stuff like accurate birth dates. Ma. Mom.

And Rhees was drugged and dozing inside the police building. He'd wake soon enough and he'd have to come out, and Amanda would be pushing him in the wheelchair, very touching, lovers looking out for one another. Be my valentine.

He remembered he'd received a valentine once in his life. Aged twelve, a giant red rose and the words, ‘You Are My Secret Love.' Unsigned. He'd wondered about the sender, hoping it was Louise Andersen who wore her yellow hair in Nordic braids and dressed in pretty frocks, who'd been the inspiration behind his first masturbation when he'd sat on the john with his underwear round his ankles and thought of what lay under her frock and her panties, and he'd jerked off and nothing was the same ever again. That feeling, that hot eruption, the discovery that you had fluids inside you never even knew about.

But when he'd looked at the handwriting on the envelope he'd recognized it as his mother's. A valentine from his own goddam mother.

He took the Ruger from his case and studied it. The exactitude of the architecture was impressive. You could lose yourself in the interior of the weapon, like you were something very tiny strolling a vast tubular passageway and the cartridges were the size of nuclear warheads.

He stuck the gun in his waistband at the base of his spine. His jacket concealed it neatly. He thought, Life can be good, Anthony. Life doesn't have to be pity valentines from your own mother.

He looked at himself in the full-length mirror.

Babyface Dansk.

He was ready now.

61

Bernadette Vialli wasn't answering her doorbell. Her maroon Toyota was parked in the garage and Kelloway was trying to open the door that led from garage to house, but it was locked.

Sonny Wom, who'd disappeared round the side of the house to peer through the windows, returned and said, ‘I can't see anyone inside, and the back door's locked. Place feels empty.'

Amanda smelled the hot air of the garage, motor oil and a scent of paint-stripper. She moved outside and stood under a sumac tree and looked at the upper windows of the house, where curtains were drawn across what might have been Mrs Vialli's bedroom. One-thirty in the afternoon, curtains still shut. Maybe she popped sleeping-pills and slept through the sound of her phone ringing and straight into the early afternoon.

Kelloway emerged from the gloom. The temperature was well above a hundred. ‘We'll give this one last try.' He laid a fingertip on the bell and left it there. You could hear the constant maddening chimes indoors.

Amanda gazed again at the curtains, thin and floral-patterned. She imagined light passing through the flimsy material and into the room. She moved out of the shade a moment but withdrew as soon as she felt the full force of the sun. The world was burning up. This climate lashed and punished you.

A scrawny woman dressed in Bermudas and a baggy silk blouse appeared on the edge of Mrs Vialli's lawn. Her mouth was set in a suspicious pucker. ‘Is there a problem here?' she asked.