The Door to December (17 page)

Laura stayed at Melanie's side, one hand on the girl's shoulder, ready to grab her and run if it came to that.
     Earl Benton leaned close to the radio and seemed mesmerized by the magically spinning knob and the floating red station selector that whipped back and forth across the lighted dial.
     Abruptly the red dot stopped, but only for a moment, only long enough to let a deejay speak one word—
     '... something's ...'
     —and then spun across the dial and stopped again at another frequency. Again it only dipped into the announcer's patter for a single word—
     '... coming ...'
     —then zipped farther along the glowing green band, paused once more, this time plucking one word out of the middle of a song—
     '... something's ...'
     —then spun away to a new station, popped into the middle of an advertisement—
     '... coming ...'
     —and swept on down the band again.
     Laura suddenly realized there was an intelligent purpose to the pauses of the frequency selector.
     We're being sent a message, she thought.
     Something's coming
.
     But a message from whom? From where?
     Earl looked at her, and the astonishment on his face made it clear that the same questions were in his mind.
     She wanted to move, run, get out of here. She could not lift her feet. Her bones had locked at every joint. Her muscles had petrified.
     The red dot stopped moving for no more than a second, perhaps only a fraction of a second. This time Laura recognized the tune from which the word was plucked. The Beatles were singing. Before the red dot continued on its way, the single word that came from the radio's speaker was also the title of the song: 'Something ...'
     The selector glided farther along the green-lit band, paused for an instant: '... is ...'
     It slipped off that station, sped to another: '... coming ...'
     The air was frigid, but that wasn't the only reason Laura was shivering.
     
Something
...
is
...
coming
...
     Those three words were not merely a message. They were a warning.

Without opening it, Mondale had turned away from the door that connected the late Joseph Scaldone's office to the sales room at the Sign of the Pentagram. He faced Dan again, and both his anger and indignation had given way to a more fundamental emotion. Now his face was carved and his eyes were colored by pure hatred.
     Dan had mentioned Cindy Lakey for the first time in more than thirteen years. This was the dirty secret that they shared, the ever-spreading malignancy at the core of their relationship. Now, having brought it into the open, Dan was exhilarated by the prospect of forcing Mondale to face up to the consequences of his actions at long last.
     In a low, intense voice, the captain said, 'I didn't kill Cindy Lakey, damn it!'
     'You allowed it to happen when you could have prevented it.'
     'I'm not God,' Mondale said bitterly.
     'You're a cop. You have responsibilities.'
     'You smug bastard.'
     'You're sworn to protect the public.'
     'Yeah? Really? Well, the fuckin' public never cries over a dead cop,' Mondale said, still speaking softly in spite of his ferocity, guarding this conversation from the ears of those in the nearby shop.
     'You've also got a duty to stand up for a buddy, to protect your partner's backside.'
     'You sound like some half-baked little Boy Scout,' Mondale said scornfully. '
Esprit de corps.
One for all and all for one. Crap! When it gets down to the nitty-gritty, it's always every man for himself, and you know it.'
     Already, Dan wished he had never mentioned Cindy Lakey's name. The exhilaration that had lifted him a moment ago was gone. In fact, his spirits sank lower than they had been. He felt bone weary. He had intended to make Mondale face up to his responsibilities after all these years, but it was too late. It had always been too late, because Mondale had never been the kind of man who could admit weakness or error. He always slipped out from under his mistakes or found a way to make others pay his penance for him. His record was clean, spotless, and probably would always remain spotless, not just in the eyes of most others but in his own eyes as well. He couldn't even admit his weaknesses and errors to himself. Ross Mondale was incapable of guilt or self-reproach. Right now, standing before Dan, he clearly felt no responsibility or remorse for what had happened to Cindy Lakey; the only emotion boiling through him now was irrational hatred directed at his ex-partner.
     Mondale said, 'If anyone was responsible for the death of that girl, it was her own mother.'
     Dan didn't want to continue the battle. He was as weary as a centenarian who had danced away his birthday night.
     Mondale said, 'Crucify her goddamned mother, not me.'
     Dan said nothing.
     Mondale said, 'Her mother was the one who dated Felix Dunbar in the first place.'
     Staring at the captain as if he were a pile of some noxious and not-quite-identifiable substance found on a city sidewalk, Dan said, 'Are you actually telling me Fran Lakey should have known Dunbar was unstable?'
     'Hell, yes.'
     'He was a nice guy, by all accounts.'
     'Blew her fuckin' head off, didn't he?' Mondale said.
     'Owned his own business. Well dressed. No criminal record. A steady churchgoer. By all appearances, he was a regular upstanding citizen.'
     'Upstanding citizens don't blow people's heads off. Fran Lakey was dating a loser, a creep, a real screwball. From what I heard later, she dated a lot of guys, and most of them were losers. She put her daughter's life in danger, not me.'
     Dan watched Mondale the way he might have watched a particularly ugly insect crawl across a dinner table. 'Are you saying she should have been able to see the future? Was she supposed to know that her boyfriend would go off his rocker when she finally broke up with him? Was she supposed to know he would come to her house with a gun and try to kill her and her daughter just because she wouldn't go to a movie with him? If she could see the future that well, Ross, she'd have put every psychic and palm reader and crystal-ball gazer out of business. She'd have been famous.'
     'She put her daughter's life in danger,' Mondale insisted.
     Dan leaned forward, hunching over the desk, lowering his voice further. 'If she could've seen into the future, she would have known it wouldn't help to call the cops that night. She'd have known you'd be one of the officers answering the call, and she'd have known you'd choke up, and—'
     'I didn't choke up,' Mondale said. He took a step toward the desk, but as a threatening gesture it was ineffective.

'Something's
...
coming
...'
     Fascinated, Earl watched the radio.
     Laura looked at the door that opened onto the patio and the rear lawn. It was locked. So were the windows. The blinds were drawn. If something did come, where would it come from? And what would it be, for God's sake,
what would it be?
     The radio said: 'Watch ...' Then: 'Out ...'
     Laura fixated on the open door to the dining room. Whatever was coming might already be in the house. Maybe it would come from the living room, through the dining room ...
     The frequency selector stopped again, and a deejay's voice boomed through the speaker. It was swift patter with no purpose but to fill a few seconds of dead air between tunes, yet for Laura it had an unintended ominous quality: 'Better beware out there, my rock-'n'-roll munchkins, better beware, 'cause it's a strange world, a mean and cold world, with things that go bump in the night, and all you got to protect you is your Cousin Frankie, that's me, so if you don't keep that dial where it is, if you change stations now, you better beware, better be on the lookout for the gnarly old goblins who live under the bed, the ones who fear nothing but the voice of Uncle Frankie. Better look out!'
     Earl put one hand on top of the radio, and Laura half expected a mouth to open in the plastic and bite off his fingers.
     'Cold,' he said as the tuning knob moved toward another station.
     Laura shook Melanie. 'Honey, come on, get up.'
     The girl didn't stir.
     One clear word burst from the radio as the tuning knob stopped again in the middle of a news report: '... murder ...'

Dan wished that he could magically transport himself out of the dreary spook-shop office and into Saul's Delicatessen, where he could order a huge Reuben sandwich and drink a few bottles of Beck's Dark. If he couldn't have Saul's, he'd settle for Jack-in-the-Box. If he couldn't have Jack-in-the-Box, then he'd rather be at home, washing the dirty dishes that he had left in the kitchen. Anywhere but in a confrontation with Ross Mondale. Dredging up the past was pointless and depressing.
     But it was too late to stop now. They had to go through the whole Lakey killing again, pick at it as if it were a scab, peel and pick and pluck at it to see if the wound was healed underneath. And of course that was a waste of time and emotional resources, for both of them knew already that it wasn't healed and never would be.
     Dan said, 'After Dunbar shot me there on the front lawn of the Lakey house—'
     'I suppose that was my fault too,' Mondale said.
     'No,' Dan said. 'I shouldn't have tried to rush him. I didn't think he'd use the gun, and I was wrong. But after he shot me, Ross, he was stunned for a moment, stupefied by what he'd done, and he was vulnerable.'
     'Bullshit. He was as vulnerable as a runaway Sherman tank. He was a maniac, a flat-out lunatic, and he had the biggest goddamned pistol—'
     'A thirty-two,' Dan corrected. 'There're bigger guns. Every cop comes up against bigger guns than that, all the time. And he was vulnerable for a moment, plenty long enough for you to take the son of a bitch.'
     'You know one thing I always hated about you, Haldane?'
     Ignoring him, Dan said, 'But you ran.'
     'I always hated that wide, wide streak of self-righteousness.'
     'If he'd wanted to, Dunbar could have put another slug in me. No one to stop him after you ran off behind the house.'
     'As if you never made a mistake in your goddamned life.'
     They were both almost whispering now.
     'But instead he walked away from me—'
     'As if
you
were never afraid.'
     '—and he shot the lock off the front door—'
     'You want to play the hero, go ahead. You and Audie Murphy. You and Jesus Christ.'
     '—and he went inside and pistol-whipped Fran Lakey—'
     'I hate your guts.'
     '—and then made her watch—'
     'You make me sick.'
     '—while he killed the one person in the world she really loved,' Dan said.
     He was being relentless now because there was no way to stop until it had all been said. He wished he had never begun, wished he'd left it buried, but now that he had started, he had to finish. Because he was like the Ancient Mariner in that old poem. Because he had to purge himself of an unrelenting nightmare. Because he was
driven
to follow it to the end. Because if he stopped in the middle, the unsaid part would be as bitter as a big wad of vomit in his throat, unheaved, wedged there, and he'd choke on it. Because — and here it was, here was the truth of it, no easy euphemisms this time — after all these years, his own soul was still shackled to a ball of guilt that had been weighing him down since the death of the Lakey child, and maybe if he finally talked about it with Ross Mondale, he might find a key that would release him from that iron ball, those chains.

The radio was at full volume again, and each word exploded like one round of a cannonade.
     '... blood ...'
     '... coming ...'
     '... run ...'
     More urgently than she had spoken before, afraid of what might be coming, wanting Melanie to be on her feet and ready to flee, Laura said, 'Honey, get up, come on.'
     From the radio: '... hide ...'
     And: '... it ...'
     And: '... coming ...'
     The volume grew louder.
     '... it ...'
     Jarring, ear-splitting: '... loose ...'
     Earl put his hand on the volume knob.
     '... it ...'
     At once, Earl jerked his hand off the knob as if he had taken an electric shock. He looked at Laura, horrified. He vigorously wiped his hand on his shirt. It hadn't been an electric shock that had sizzled through him; instead, he had felt something weird when he touched the knob, something disgusting, repulsive.
     The radio said: '... death ...'

Mondale's hatred was a dark and vast swamp into which he could retreat when the uncomfortable truth about Cindy Lakey rose to haunt him. As the truth drew nearer and pressed upon him more insistently, he withdrew farther into his all-encompassing black hatred and hid there amid the snakes and bugs and muck of his psyche.
     He continued to glare at Dan, to loom threateningly over the desk, but there was no danger that his hatred would propel him to action. He would not throw a single punch. He didn't need or want to relieve his hatred by striking out at Dan. Instead, he needed to nurture that hatred, for it helped him to hide from responsibility. It was a veil between him and the truth, and the heavier the veil, the better for him.
     That was how Mondale's mind worked. Dan knew him well, knew how he thought.
     But, though Ross might try to hide from it, the truth was that Felix Dunbar had shot Dan — and Mondale had been too scared to return the fire. The truth was that Dunbar then went inside the Lakey house, pistol-whipped Fran Lakey, and shot eight-year-old Cindy Lakey three times while Ross Mondale was God-knew-where, doing God-knew-what. And the truth was that wounded and bleeding badly, Dan had retrieved his own gun, crawled into the Lakey house, and killed Felix Dunbar before Dunbar could blow off Fran Lakey's head too. All the while, Ross Mondale was maybe puking in the shrubbery or losing control of his bladder or sprawled flat on the rear lawn and striving hard to look like a natural feature of the landscape. He had come back when it was all over, sweat-damp and slug-white, shaky, reeking of the sour smell of cowardice.
     Now, still behind Joseph Scaldone's desk, Dan said, 'You try forcing me off this case or you try keeping me out of the action, and I'll tell the whole rotten story about the Lakey shootings, the truth, to anyone who'll listen, and that'll be the end of your dazzling career.'
     With a smugness that would have been infuriating if it hadn't been so boringly predictable, Mondale said, 'If you were going to tell anyone, you'd have told them years ago.'
     'That must be a comforting thought,' Dan said, 'but it's wrong. I covered for you then because you were my partner, and I figured everyone has a right to screw up once. But I've lived to regret the way I handled it, and if you give me a good excuse, I'd enjoy setting the record straight.'
     'It all happened a long time ago,' Mondale said.
     'You think no one cares about dereliction of duty just because it happened thirteen years ago?'
     'No one'll believe you. They'll think it's sour grapes. I've moved up, made friends.'
     'Yeah. And they're the kind of friends who'd sell their mothers for lunch money.'
     'You've always been a loner. A wiseass. No matter what you think of them, I have people who'll rally around me.'
     'With a lynching rope.'
     'Power makes people loyal, Haldane, even if they'd rather not be. Nobody'll believe any crap you care to throw at me. Not a rotten wiseass like you. Not a chance.'
     'Ted Gearvy will believe me,' Dan said, and if he had spoken any more quietly, he would have been inaudible. Yet, in spite of his quiet delivery, he might as well have swung a hammer at Mondale instead of those five words. The captain looked stricken.
     Gearvy, ten years their senior, was a veteran patrolman and had been Mondale's partner during his probationary rookie year. He had seen Mondale make a few mistakes — although nothing as serious as what happened at the Lakey house later, when Dan had replaced Gearvy as Mondale's partner. Just disquieting errors of judgment. A too-meager sense of responsibility. Gearvy had thought he detected cowardice in Ross too, but had covered up for him, just as Dan would do in times to come. Gearvy was a big, gruff, easygoing guy, three-quarters Irish, with too much sympathy for rookies. He had not given Mondale high ratings in his rookie year; the Irishman was good-natured and sympathetic but not irresponsible. But he didn't give Mondale really bad ratings, either, because he was too softhearted for that.
     A few months after the Lakey incident, when Dan was back at work with a new partner, Ted Gearvy had come around, quietly feeling Dan out, dropping hints, worried that he had made a serious mistake in covering up for Ross. Eventually, they had swapped information and discovered they had both been misguidedly shielding Mondale. They realized his misconduct was not just a rare or even a some-time thing. But by then it had seemed too late to come forth with the truth. In the eyes of the department brass, Gearvy's and Dan's failure — even temporary failure — to report Mondale's dereliction of duty would be nearly as bad as that dereliction itself. Gearvy and Dan would have found themselves standing in the dock beside Mondale. They weren't prepared to damage or perhaps even destroy their own careers.
     Besides, by then Mondale had wheedled an assignment to the Community Relations Division; he was no longer working on the street. Gearvy and Dan figured Ross would do well in community relations and would never return to a regular beat, in which case he would never again be in a position to hold someone else's life in his hands. It seemed best — and safest — to leave well enough alone.
     Neither of them imagined that Mondale would one day be a serious contender for the chief's office. Maybe they would have taken action if they could have foreseen the future. Their failure to act was the thing that both of them most regretted in all their years of service.
     Clearly, Mondale had not known that Gearvy and Dan had compared notes. Their consultation was a nasty shock to him.