Whispers (19 page)

"So I won't be here much longer," she said. "I'll be moving on soon. Any time now, you know. I feel lots of good things coming. Like really good vibrations, you know?"

Her situation was ineffably sad, and Tony could think of nothing to say that would make a difference to her. "Uh ... well ... I sure wish you all the luck in the world," he said stupidly. He edged past her, through the door.

The gleam of vitality vanished from her eyes, and she was suddenly desperately posing again, shoulders back, chest out. But her face was still weary and drawn. Her belly was still straining at the waistband of her shorts. And her hips were still too big for girlish games. "Hey," she said, "if you're ever in the mood for some wine and, you know, a little conversation...."

"Thank you," he said.

"I mean, feel free to stop by when you're not, you know, on duty."

"I might do that," he lied. Then, because he felt he had sounded insincere and didn't want to leave her without anything, he said, "You've got pretty legs."

That was true, but she didn't know how to accept a compliment, gracefully. She grinned and put her hands on her breasts and said, "It's usually my boobs that get all the attention."

"Well... I'll be seeing you," he said, turning away from her and heading toward the car.

After a few steps, he glanced back and saw that she was standing in the open door, head cocked to one side, far away from him and Las Palmeras Apartments, listening to those faint whispering voices that were trying to explain the meaning of her life.

As Tony got into the car, Frank said, "I thought she got her claws into you. I was about ready to call up a SWAT team to rescue you."

Tony didn't laugh. "It's sad."

"What?"

"Lana Haverby."

"You kidding me?"

"The whole situation."

"She's just a dumb broad," Frank said. "But what did you think about Bobby buying the Jag?"

"If he hasn't been robbing banks, there's only one way he could get hold of that kind of cash."

"Dope," Frank said.

"Cocaine, grass, maybe PCP."

"It gives us a whole new place to start looking for the little bastard," Frank said. "We can go out on the street and start putting some muscle on the known dealers, guys who've taken falls for selling junk. Make it hot for them, and if they've got a lot to lose and they know where Bobby is, they'll give him to us on a silver platter."

"Meanwhile," Tony said, "I'd better call in."

He wanted a DMV check on a black Jaguar registered to Juan Masquezza. If they could get a license number for the hot sheet, then looking for Bobby's wheels would be part of every uniformed officer's daily duties.

That didn't mean they would find him right away. In any other city, if a man was wanted as badly as Bobby was wanted, he would not be able to live in the open for a long time. He would be spotted or tracked down in a few weeks at most. But Los Angeles was not like other cities; at least in terms of land area, it was bigger than any other urban center in the nation. L.A. was spread over nearly five hundred square miles. It covered half again as much land as all the boroughs of New York City, ten times more than all of Boston, and almost half as much as the state of Rhode Island. Counting the illegal aliens, which the Census Bureau did not do, the population of the entire metropolitan area was approaching nine million. In this vast maze of streets, alleyways, freeways, hills, and canyons, a clever fugitive could live in the open for many months, going about his business as boldly and unconcernedly as any ordinary citizen.

Tony switched on the radio, which they had left off all morning, called Communications, and asked for the DMV check on Juan Mazquezza and his Jaguar.

The woman handling their frequency had a soft appealing voice. After she took Tony's requests, she informed him that a call had been out for him and Frank the past two hours. It was now 11:45. The Hilary Thomas case was open again, and they were needed at her Westwood house, where other officers had answered a call at 9:30.

Racking the microphone, Tony looked at Frank and said, "I knew it! Dammit, I knew she wasn't lying about the whole thing."

"Don't preen your feathers yet," Frank said disagreeably. "Whatever this new development is, she's probably making it up like she made up all the rest of it."

"You never give up, do you?"

"Not when I know I'm right."

A few minutes later, they pulled up in front of the Thomas house. The circular driveway was filled with two press cars, a station wagon for the police laboratory, and a black-and-white.

As they got out of their car and started across the lawn, a uniformed officer came out of the house and walked toward them. Tony knew him; his name was Warren Prewitt. They met him halfway to the front door.

"You guys answered this call last night?" Prewitt asked.

"That's right," Frank said.

"What is it, do you work twenty-four hours a day?"

"Twenty-six," Frank said.

Tony said, "How's the woman?"

"Shaken up," Prewitt said.

"Not hurt?"

"Some bruises on her throat."

"Serious?"

"No."

"What happened?" Frank said.

Prewitt capsulized the story that Hilary Thomas had told him earlier.

"Any proof that she's telling the truth?" Frank asked.

"I heard how you feel about this case," Prewitt said. "But there is proof."

"Like what?" Frank asked.

"He got into the house last night through a study window. A very smart job it was, too. He taped up the glass so she wouldn't hear it breaking."

"She could have done that herself," Frank said.

"Broken her own window'?" Prewitt asked.

"Yeah. Why not?" Frank said.

"Well," Prewitt said, "she wasn't the one who bled all the hell over the place."

"How much blood?" Tony asked.

"Not a whole lot, but not a whole little," Prewitt said. "There's some on the hall floor, a big bloody handprint on the wall up there, drops of blood on the stairs, another smeared print on the downstairs foyer wall, and traces of blood on the doorknob."

"Human blood?" Frank asked.

Prewitt blinked at him. "Huh?"

"I'm wondering if it's a fake, a hoax."

"Oh, for Christ's sake!" Tony said.

"The boys from the lab didn't get here till about forty-five minutes ago," Prewitt said. "They haven't said anything yet. But I'm sure it's human blood. Besides, three of the neighbors saw the man running away."

"Ahhh," Tony said softly.

Frank scowled at the lawn at his feet, as if he were trying to wither the grass.

"He left the house all doubled up," Prewitt said. "He was holding his stomach and shuffling kind of hunched over, which fits in with Miss Thomas's statement that she stabbed him twice in the midsection."

"Where'd he go?" Tony asked.

"We have a witness who saw him climb into a gray Dodge van two blocks south of here. He drove away."

"Got a license number?"

"No," Prewitt said. "But the word's out. There's a want on the van."

Frank Howard looked up. "You know, maybe this attack isn't related to the story she fed us last night. Maybe she cried wolf last night--and then this morning she really was attacked."

"Doesn't that strike you as just a bit too coincidental?" Tony asked exasperatedly.

"Besides, it must be related," Prewitt said. "She swears it was the same man."

Frank met Tony's stare and said, "But it can't be Bruno Frye. You know what Sheriff Laurenski said."

"I never insisted it was Frye." Tony said. "Last night, I figured she was attacked by someone who resembled Frye."

"She insisted--"

"Yeah, but she was scared and hysterical," Tony said. "She wasn't thinking clearly, and she mistook the look-alike for the real thing. It's understandable."

"And you tell me I'm building a case on coincidences," Frank said disgustedly.

At that moment Officer Gurney, Prewitt's partner, came out of the house and called to him! "Hey, they found him. The man she stabbed!"

Tony, Frank, and Prewitt hurried to the front door.

"HQ just phoned," Gurney said. "A couple of kids on skateboards found him about twenty-five minutes ago."

"Where?"

"Way the hell down on Sepulveda. In some supermarket parking lot. He was lying on the ground beside his van."

"Dead?"

"As a doornail."

"Did he have any ID?" Tony asked.

"Yeah," Gurney said. "It's just like the lady told us. He's Bruno Frye."

***

Cold.

Air conditioning thrummed in the walls. Rivers of icy air gushed from two vents near the ceiling.

Hilary was wearing a sea-green autumn dress, not of a light summery fabric, but not heavy enough to ward off a chill. She hugged herself and shivered.

Lieutenant Howard stood at her left side, still looking somewhat embarrassed. Lieutenant Clemenza was on her right. The room didn't feel like part of a morgue. It was more like a cabin in a spaceship. She could easily imagine that the bone-freezing cold of deep space lay just beyond the gray walls. The steady humming of the air conditioning could be the distant roar of rocket engines. They were standing in front of a window that looked into another room, but she would have preferred to see endless blackness and far-away stars beyond the thick glass. She almost wished she were on a long inter-galactic voyage instead of in a morgue, waiting to identify a man she had killed.

I killed him, she thought.

Those words, ringing in her mind, seemed to make her even colder than she had been a second ago.

She glanced at her watch.

3:18.

"It'll be over in a minute," Lieutenant Clemenza said reassuringly.

Even as Clemenza spoke, a morgue attendant brought a wheeled litter into the room on the other side of the window. He positioned it squarely in front of the glass. A body lay on the cart, hidden by a sheet. The attendant pulled the shroud off the dead man's face, halfway down his chest, then stepped out of the way.

Hilary looked at the corpse and felt dizzy.

Her mouth went dry.

Frye's face was white and still, but she had the insane feeling that at any moment he would turn his head toward her and open his eyes.

"Is it him?" Lieutenant Clemenza asked.

"It's Bruno Frye," she said weakly.

"But is it the man who broke into your house and attacked you?" Lieutenant Howard asked.

"Not this stupid routine again," she said. "Please."

"No, no," Clemenza said, "Lieutenant Howard doesn't doubt your story any more, Miss Thomas. You see, we already know that man is Bruno Frye. We've established that much from the ID he was carrying. What we need to hear from you is that he was the man who attacked you, the man you stabbed."

The dead mouth was unexpressive now, neither frowning nor smiling, but she could remember the evil grin into which it had curved.

"That's him," she said. "I'm positive. I've been positive all along. I'll have nightmares for a long time."

Lieutenant Howard nodded to the morgue attendant beyond the window, and the man covered the corpse.

Another absurd but chilling thought struck her: What if it sits up on the cart and throws the sheet off?

"We'll take you home now," Clemenza said.

She walked out of the room ahead of them, miserable because she had killed a man--but thoroughly relieved and even delighted that he was dead.

***

They took her home in the unmarked police sedan. Frank drove, and Tony sat up front. Hilary Thomas sat in the back, shoulders drawn up a bit, arms crossed, as if she was cold on such a warm late-September day.

Tony kept finding excuses to turn around and speak to her. He didn't want to take his eyes off her. She was so lovely that he made him feel as he sometimes did in a great museum, when he stood before a particularly exquisite painting done by one of the old masters.

She responded to him, even gave him a couple of smiles, but she wasn't in the mood for light conversation. She was wrapped up in her own thoughts, mostly staring out the side window, mostly silent.

When they pulled into the circular driveway at her place and stopped in front of the door, Frank Howard turned to her and said, "Miss Thomas ... I ... well ... I owe you an apology."

Tony was not startled by the admission, but he was somewhat surprised by the sincere note of contrition in Frank's voice and the supplicatory expression on his face; meekness and humility were not exactly Frank's strongest suits.

Hilary Thomas also seemed surprised. "Oh ... well ... I suppose you were only doing your job."

"No," Frank said. "That's the problem. I wasn't doing my job. At least I wasn't doing it well."

"It's over now," she said.

"But will you accept my apologies?"

"Well ... of course," she said uncomfortably.

"I feel very bad about the way I treated you."

"Frye won't be bothering me any more," she said. "So I guess that's all that really matters."

Tony got out of the car and opened her door. She could not get out by herself because the rear doors of the sedan had no inside handles, a deterrent to escape-minded prisoners. Besides, he wanted to accompany her to the house.

"You may have to testify at a coroner's inquest," he said as they approached the house.

"Why? When I stabbed him, Frye was in my place, against my wishes. He was threatening my life."

"Oh, there's no doubt it's a simple case of self-defense," Tony said quickly. "If you have to appear at an inquest, it'll just be a formality. There's no chance in the world that any sort of charges will be brought or anything like that."

She unlocked the front door, opened it, turned to him, smiled radiantly. "Thank you for believing in me last night, even after what the Napa County Sheriff said."

"We'll be checking into him," Tony said. "He's got some explaining to do. If you're interested, I'll let you know what his excuse is."

"I am curious," she said.

"Okay. I'll let you know."

"Thank you."

"It's no bother."

She stepped into the house.

He didn't move.