Tropical Depression (25 page)

And that led back to the same place. Only a high-ranking cop could leave the kind of trail that Roscoe could find. The only high-ranking cop who had left any kind of footprint at all here was Doyle. That left me at the same dead end.

I got dressed slowly and went down to the coffee shop. I tried to find a safe choice on the menu while I turned the Doyle problem over in my mind.

Because my mind was churning furiously, I ordered blueberry pancakes. They were terrible, with a strong taste of lard and pesticide.

I ate them anyway, and maybe they were to blame for what I decided to do. After watching so many killers laugh their way out of hard time with defenses like eating junk food and watching TV, maybe it’s only fair to say it was the pancakes, Your Honor. They clouded my judgment.

More than that, though, it was probably a combination of frustrations. The son of a bitch was a cop, and he was getting away with something he shouldn’t, and that made me mad.

When I had been a cop I hadn’t felt this kind of anger at anybody I busted. They were playing their parts, I was playing mine. There’s a funny kind of understanding between cops and crooks. They both stick to an odd set of rules.

But Doyle wasn’t playing by those rules. He was trying to play both sides. I wanted him to pay for that. So I decided to do something against all the rules, too.

After breakfast I drove over to Hancock Park and pulled up in front of Doyle’s gigantic Tudor-style house.

If there were no loose ends sticking out for me to pull on, maybe I could snag some of my own. I wanted to hammer at Doyle’s smug sense of safety, push him off balance, make him do something he shouldn’t. And then, of course, hope I survived to nail him on it.

I looked at the house. I didn’t know if he was at his office or at home. But I could find out.

I parked the car well down the block, under a large oak tree that shielded my spot from Doyle’s house. I got out, crossed the street, and approached his house.

There was no sign that anyone was there. The garage, attached to the house and off to one side, was closed. I moved into the neighboring yard and approached Doyle’s house from the side.

It was a nice house, nicer than anything I’d ever seen this close. Nobody I knew had ever lived in a house that nice. I pushed through a hedge and got closer. I tried to move quietly, carefully, the way Uncle Sugar had taught me to move through jungles. This wasn’t much of a jungle. Aside from the hedge there was almost no cover, except for the big oak tree with the tree house in it.

I slipped over to the tree and stood with my cheek against it, watching the house. There was still no sign of life in the house.

I thought about what to do next. While I thought there was a rustle and a soft thud behind me.

I turned fast, but the guy behind me was faster. He had his gun in my face before I was more than halfway around. It was a Glock 9mm with a silencer, the twin of Phillip Moss’s piece.

And this guy was almost Phillip Moss’s twin. He was large and looked fit. He had thinning light brown hair and wore a camouflage suit instead of a Hawaiian shirt.

I put my hands up. “Neighborhood Watch?” I asked him.

He gave me a nasty smirk. “Tree patrol.” He jerked his head up at the treehouse above us. “We thought you might be coming. Thanks for making it easy.”

“Don’t mention it.”

He took a half-step back, very careful, and waved the gun toward the front door of the house. “Move along.”

I moved. He marched me across a manicured front lawn and right up the four steps to the door.

“Knock,” he said.

There was a massive door knocker shaped like an eagle’s head. I could lift it without a winch, but just barely. I let it crash down, listening for distant thunder or the scream of terrified horses. All I heard was a huge echo ringing through the house.

After a few moments the door swung open.

I was ready for a lot of things. Sudden violence, certainly. Surprise, fear, hate, no question. I was ready for a picture I had of who Doyle was and what he had done and might do.

I was not ready for Doyle.

Warren Francis Doyle filled the doorway. He didn’t do it with his size, although he was a big man, maybe six-two, and broad across the back and shoulders, with short reddish hair. He was wearing a tank top and a pair of sweat pants. A light sheen of sweat covered his skin. He looked very fit, very strong, and completely in charge of everything in sight. If he told the trees to bow I would expect them to obey.

There was something in the way he stood, something in his eyes, some special quality that just seemed to come out of his pores. It made you want to drop to one knee and put a knuckle to your forehead. Doyle filled the doorway with his presence.

Presence: It’s a word for romance novels. It’s a quality so rare and undefinable, most people have never really seen it. If you haven’t, all anyone can tell you about it is, you had to be there.

I was there. I’d had a lot of things I was going to say. Doyle’s presence took them all away from me. So did his action.

If he’d pulled a gun I would have been ready. Instead, with a pause so slight I couldn’t be sure it was there at all, he looked at me, nodded twice and said, “Good. You’re here. Come on in.” And he held the door wide, nodding to the guy with the gun, who turned and headed back for the treehouse.

I stepped into Doyle’s house. I was thinking about the old rhyme, the spider and the fly, trying to remember how it ended for the fly. I didn’t think it was a happy ending.

The door opened into a wide marble hall, white and cool, accented with soft grays and a few pieces of oak furniture. Doyle closed the door and led me toward the back of the house. He didn’t say anything more, and didn’t seem to mind turning his back on me. His confidence was so overwhelming I started to take it for granted, too. Of course I couldn’t hurt him; why shouldn’t he turn his back on me?

I followed Doyle to a large room at the back of the house. It had a highly polished wooden floor and a high ceiling with a row of skylights. A mirror stretched along one wall.

The room was filled with the most complete home gym I have ever seen. I once paid seven hundred bucks a year to belong to a gym that had a lot less.

There was a complete set of Nautilus machines along one end of the room. Something about them looked wrong. It took me a minute to figure it out: they were all specially modified so that the maximum weight on each machine was more than double what you might see in a health club.

I stared at the machines, the racks of free weights, the heavy punching bag and speed bag, the narrow wooden door that must lead into a sauna.

“I was working out,” Doyle said behind me, and I jerked around to face him again. I didn’t have the confidence in his good intentions that he seemed to have in mine. The fact that I’d turned my back on him was just one more instance of his presence; I’d forgotten he was dangerous. I wouldn’t forget again—I hoped.

He seemed to know what I was thinking. He smiled, tilting his head just a little. “You don’t mind if I continue, do you?”

The truth was, his personality was so powerful I would have had a hard time objecting if he had wanted to eat babies. “I don’t mind,” I said.

“Good,” he said, and stepped over to a large free weight bar on the floor by the mirror. I tried to add up the plates on the bar and guessed it weighed around two hundred fifty pounds.

Doyle squatted beside the bar, placing his hands on the grips. He grunted slightly and stood, raising the bar to a position just under his chin. “I think you’ll find this game has been rigged against you,” he said. There was a merry twinkle in his eye. I caught myself smiling and nodding without knowing it.

I was about to say something back when he lifted the weights straight over his head and began to do military presses. A very strong man could do ten at that weight with a lot of effort. Doyle, with no effort at all, began to move the weight up and down in a smooth and quick motion. He was at fourteen reps before I recovered enough to stop gaping.

“What do you mean?” I asked him. The smooth up-and-down of that impossibly heavy bar did not even slow. I couldn’t have taken my eyes away if my life depended on it.

“I mean,” he said with no strain in his voice, “that you’re swimming with sharks, and you’re going to be eaten.” He flashed his teeth at me over the bar, and then smoothly raised it again. “There’s no way you’re ever going to get anything out of this. You should go home.”

“Can
I go home?” I asked him.

The teeth again. “Of course you can. What’s stopping you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “If we leave out honor and duty and all the other funny words, how about you?”

He gave a small chuckle. The weight went up and down. “Why would I stop you? More important,
how
would I stop you?”

“I bet you’d think of something,” I said. Up, down—he had to be near fifty reps.

“I’m a sworn officer of the law,” he said. “I can’t imagine what you think I might do.”

“Only what you’ve already done,” I said.

He paused, holding the weight halfway up, his arms bent. It was hurting my arms just to see him do it, but there was not the slightest trace of a quiver or tremor. If he was trying to impress me, it was working. “What have I already done?” he asked me with amusement in his voice.

“I think you killed Hector McAuley. Then when his father started sniffing too close to your trail, I think you killed him, too.”

He nodded. “What’ve you got?” he said, and it startled me to hear him say it like that, the way one cop would say it to another.

“The brummel hook on the rooftop,” I said. “It’s something you would know about, you might have one. It’s pretty unusual.”

“But not unique.”

“No.”

His eyes were twinkling merrily again. It’s a terrible, strange word,
merry,
but it’s the only one that fit. This was a happy person, doing what he loved, bringing good cheer. “And what did I do with the brummel hook? Use it to rig a line? Run over from the roof of the bank, shoot Hector McAuley, and then run back up the line again?”

“Yeah,” I said, fighting the stupid feeling he was trying to create. “That’s about right.”

Doyle gave a happy little chuckle. “Okay. What else? What about the weapon?”

I hesitated, and he laughed aloud. “You don’t have the weapon? You don’t even know what it was yet?”

“A two-fifty-seven,” I said. “Hunting rifle.”

He nodded. “Probably a Webley, because that’s what I own, isn’t it? A two-fifty-seven Webley hunting rifle. A brummel hook. That’s it? That’s all you have?”

It suddenly didn’t sound like much. Maybe it wasn’t, but what I couldn’t tell him, couldn’t call evidence at all, was a lot simpler.

I
knew.
I had known since I came into this house that Doyle had killed the McAuleys, knew it without the smallest doubt. And he knew I knew it, and that suited him just fine.

“That’s about it,” I said.

Doyle laughed. “What do they call you—Bill? William? Surely not Willy?” He laughed again. He looked like somebody’s portrait of a Greek god at the peak of his power.

“Billy,” I said.

“Well, Billy. I know from your record you’re smart, too smart to risk a libel suit and a possible jail sentence by saying things like that in public. That’s why you came here to see me, right?”

“Right,” I said. I was still fighting down the good warm feeling I got when he called me smart.

“And you’re thinking to yourself that if you confront me with it, just blurt it out like that, maybe I’ll get flustered enough to do something foolish, right?”

I didn’t answer. He made it sound like a stupid idea. Maybe I should have taken the warning from the blueberry pancakes.

Doyle dropped the weights. They made a tremendous crashing sound. I sucked in my breath and took an involuntary step backwards. He took a step closer. If lightning had started to come out of his eyes it would not have surprised me.

“Well, what would you like me to do? Confess? Go with you to Parker Center and turn myself in? Did you think the power of your moral righteousness would knock me off my feet and sweep me into a jail cell?”

He took a step closer. I realized I was holding my breath.

“Or did you think I might lose it altogether and attack you? And then you could subdue me and take me in?”

Another step. I couldn’t even move my eyes away from his.

His voice dropped. There was something very intimate in his voice as he said, “Would you like to try to subdue me, Billy?” His hand lashed out, faster than anything I had ever seen before, and slapped my face. My head rocked around to the right and I felt a quick spurt of blood along my back teeth. “You’re welcome to try.

The hand came again. I was ready and ducked. It still caught me—just the tips of his fingers, but it felt like it took off a yard of skin.

“Good,” he said. “You’re very fast.” And he swung again. There was a merry little smile on his face and his eyes were sparkling. He looked like he was telling a favorite niece about the Easter Bunny. His hand smacked my face, just the tips of the fingers, and I was already getting punchy.

Smack.
“Wonderful,” he said.
Smack.
“You have superb reflexes.”
Smack.

I was anticipating, and moving as fast as I had ever moved, and he was tagging me. It was like playing one of those hand-slapping games with a kid; the adult is simply moving on a different and much faster plane. So you make encouraging noises so the kid will keep trying, not grow discouraged about life in general. But no matter what you may be saying, the kid doesn’t have a chance.

Neither did I. But Doyle was making the same encouraging noises, smiling his bright, cheerful, encouraging smile, and continuing to rip off the sides of my face.

Smack.
“It’s not really fair, is it?”
Smack.
“I don’t know what it is.”
Smack.
“I was just born this way.”
Smack-smack smack,
a double with a backhand. “Stronger, faster, better than everyone else.”
Smack smack.
A trickle of blood started above my eye.