Whispers (37 page)

"You're just like everyone else I've ever trusted," she said, her voice cracking.

"I want to help you."

"Bullshit."

"Hilary, don't turn away from me."

"You're the one who turned away first."

"I care about you."

"Then show it!"

"I'm here, aren't I? What more proof do you need?"

"Believe me," she said. "That's the best proof."

He saw that she was profoundly insecure, and he supposed she was that way because she had had very bad experiences with people she had loved and trusted. Indeed, she must have been brutally betrayed and hurt, for no ordinary disappointment would have made her as sensitive as she was now. Still suffering from those old emotional wounds, she now demanded fanatical trust and loyalty. The moment he showed doubts about her story, she began to withdraw from him, even though he wasn't impugning her veracity. But, dammit, he knew it wasn't healthy to play along with her delusion; the best thing he could do for her was gently coax her back to reality.

"Frye was here tonight," she insisted. "Frye and nobody else. But I won't tell the police that."

"Good," he said, relieved.

"Because I'm not going to call the police."

"What?"

Without explaining, she turned away from him and walked out of the kitchen.

As he followed her through the wrecked dining room, Tony said, "You have to report this."

"I don't have to do anything."

"Your insurance company won't pay if you haven't filed a police report."

"I'll worry about that later," she said, leaving the dining room, entering the living room.

He trailed her as she weaved through the debris in the front room, heading toward the stairs. "You're forgetting something," he said.

"What's that?"

"I'm a detective."

"So?"

"So now that I'm aware of this situation, it's my duty to report it."

"So report it."

"Part of the report will be a statement from you."

"You can't force me to cooperate. I won't."

As they reached the foot of the stairs, he grabbed her by the arm. "Wait a minute. Please wait."

She turned and faced him. Her fear had been driven out by anger. "Let go of me."

"Where are you going?"

"Upstairs."

"What are you going to do?"

"Pack a suitcase and go to a hotel."

"You can stay at my place," he said.

"You don't want a crazy woman like me staying overnight," she said sarcastically.

"Hilary, don't be this way."

"I might go berserk and kill you in your sleep."

"I don't think you're crazy."

"Oh, that's right. You think I'm just confused. Maybe a little dotty. But not dangerous."

"I'm only trying to help you."

"You've got a funny way of doing it."

"You can't live in a hotel forever."

"I'll come home once he's been caught."

"But if you don't make a formal complaint, no one's even going to be looking for him."

"I'll be looking for him."

"You?"

"Me."

Now Tony was angry. "What game are you going to play--Hilary Thomas, Girl Detective?"

"I might hire private investigators."

"Oh, really?" he asked scornfully, aware that he might alienate her further with this approach, but too frustrated to be patient any longer.

"Really," she said. "Private investigators."

"Who? Philip Marlowe? Jim Rockford? Sam Spade?"

"You can be a sarcastic son of a bitch."

"You're forcing me to be. Maybe sarcasm will snap you out of this."

"My agent happens to know a first-rate firm of private detectives."

"I tell you, this isn't their kind of work."

"They'll do anything they're paid to do."

"Not anything."

"They'll do this."

"It's a job for the LAPD."

"The police will only waste their time looking for known burglars, known rapists, known--"

"That's a very good, standard, effective investigative technique," Tony said.

"But it won't work this time."

"Why? Because the assailant was an ambulatory dead man?"

"That's right."

"So you think maybe the police should spend their time looking for known dead rapists and burglars?"

The look she gave him was a withering mixture of anger and disgust.

"The way to break this case," she said, "is to find out how Bruno Frye could have been stone-cold dead last week--and alive tonight."

"Will you listen to yourself, for God's sake?"

He was concerned for her. This stubborn irrationality frightened him.

"I know what I said," she told him. "And I also know what I saw. And it wasn't just that I saw Bruno Frye in this house a little while ago. I heard him, too. He had that distinct, unmistakable, guttural voice. It was him. No one else. I saw him, and I heard him threatening to cut off my head and stuff my mouth full of garlic, as if he thought I was some sort of vampire or something."

Vampire.

That word jolted Tony because it made such a startling and incredible connection with several things that had been found last Thursday in Bruno Frye's gray Dodge van, strange items about which Hilary couldn't possibly know anything, items that Tony had forgotten until this morning. A chill swept through him.

"Garlic?" he asked. "Vampires? Hilary, what are you talking about?"

She pulled out of his grasp and hurried up the stairs.

He ran after her. "What's this about vampires?"

Climbing the steps, refusing to look at Tony or answer his questions, Hilary said, "Isn't this some swell story I've got to tell? I was assaulted by a walking dead man who thought I was a vampire. Oh, wow! Now you're absolutely positive that I've lost my mind. Call the little white chuckle wagon! Get this poor lady into a straitjacket before she hurts herself! Put her in a nice padded room real quick! Lock the door and throw away the key!"

In the second-floor hallway, a few feet from the top of the stairs, as Hilary was heading toward a bedroom door, Tony caught up with her. He grabbed her arm again.

"Let go, dammit!"

"Tell me what he said."

"I'm going to a hotel, and then I'm going to work this thing out on my own."

"I want to know every word he said."

"There's nothing you can do to stop me," she told him. "Now let me go."

He shouted in order to get through to her. "I have to know what he said about vampires, dammit!"

Her eyes met his. Apparently she recognized the fear and confusion in him, for she stopped trying to pull away. "What's so damned important?"

"The vampire thing."

"Why?"

"Frye apparently was obsessed with the occult."

"How do you know that?"

"We found some things in that van of his."

"What things?"

"I don't remember all of it. A deck of tarot cards, a Ouija board, more than a dozen crucifixes--"

"I didn't see anything about that in the newspapers."

"We didn't make a formal press release out of it," Tony said. "Besides, by the time we searched the van and inventoried its contents and were prepared to consider a release, all of the papers had published their first-day stories, and the reporters had filed their follow-ups. The case just didn't have enough juice to warrant squeezing third-day coverage out of it. But let me tell you what else was in that van. Little linen bags of garlic taped above all the doors. Two wooden stakes with very sharp points. Half a dozen books about vampires and zombies and other varieties of the so-called 'living dead.'"

Hilary shuddered. "He told me he was going to cut out my heart and pound a stake through it."

"Jesus."

"He was going to cut out my eyes, too, so I wouldn't be able to find my way back from hell. That's how he put it. Those were his words. He was afraid that I was going to return from the dead after he killed me. He was raving like a lunatic. But then again, he returned from the grave, didn't he?" She laughed harshly, without a note of humor, but with a trace of hysteria. "He was going to cut off my hands, so I couldn't feel my way back."

Tony felt sick when he thought of how close that man had come to fulfilling those threats.

"It was him," Hilary said. "You see? It was Frye."

"Could it have been make-up?"

"What?"

"Could it have been someone made-up to look like Frye?"

"Why would anyone do that?"

"I don't know."

"What would he have to gain?"

"I don't know."

"You accused me of grabbing at straws. Well, this isn't even a straw you're grabbing at. It's just a mirage. It's nothing."

"But could it have been another man in make-up?" Tony persisted.

"Impossible. There isn't any make-up that convincing at close range. And the body was the same as Frye's. The same height and weight. The same bone structure. The same muscles."

"But if it was someone in make-up, imitating Frye's voice--"

"That would make it easy for you," she said coldly. "A clever impersonation, no matter how bizarre and unexplainable, is easier to accept than my story about a dead man walking. But you mentioned his voice, and that's another hole in your theory. No one could mimic that voice. Oh, an excellent impressionist might get the low pitch and the phrasing and the accent just right, but he wouldn't be able to recreate that awful rasping, crackling quality. You could only talk like that if you had an abnormal larynx or screwed-up vocal cords. Frye was born with a malformed voice box. Or he suffered a serious throat injury when he was a child. Maybe both. Anyway, that was Bruno Frye who spoke to me tonight, not a clever imitation. I'd bet every cent I have on it."

Tony could see that she was still angry, but he was no longer so sure that she was hysterical or even mildly confused. Her dark eyes were sharply focused. She spoke in clipped and precise sentences. She looked like a woman in complete control of herself.

"But Frye is dead," Tony said weakly.

"He was here."

"How could he have been?"

"As I said, that's what I intend to find out."

Tony had walked into a strange room, a room of the mind, which was constructed of impossibilities. He half-remembered something from a Sherlock Holmes story. Holmes had expressed the view to Watson that, in detection, once you had eliminated all the possibilities except one, that which was left, no matter how unlikely or absurd, must be the truth.

Was the impossible possible?

Could a dead man walk?

He thought of the inexplicable tie between the threats the assailant had made and the items found in Bruno Frye's van. He thought of Sherlock Holmes, and finally he said, "All right."

"All right what?" she asked.

"All right, maybe it was Frye."

"It was."

"Somehow ... some way ... God knows how ... but maybe he did survive the stabbing. It seems utterly impossible, but I guess I've got to consider it."

"How wonderfully open-minded of you," she said. Her feathers were still ruffled. She was not going to forgive him easily.

She pulled away from him again and entered the master bedroom.

He followed her.

He felt slightly numb. Sherlock Holmes hadn't said anything about the effects of living with the disturbing thought that nothing was impossible.

She got a suitcase out of the closet, put it on the bed, and started filling it with clothes.

Tony went to the bedside phone and picked up the receiver. "Line's dead. He must have cut the wires outside. We'll have to use a neighbor's phone to report this."

"I'm not reporting it."

"Don't worry," he said. "All that's changed. I'll support your story now."

"It's too late for that," she said sharply.

"What do you mean?"

She didn't answer. She took a blouse off a hanger with such a sudden tug that the hanger clattered to the closet floor.

He said, "You're not still planning to hide out in a hotel and hire private investigators."

"Oh, yes. That's exactly what I'm planning to do," she said, folding the blouse.

"But I've said I believe you."

"And I said it's too late for that. Too late to make any difference."

"Why are you being so difficult?"

Hilary didn't respond. She placed the folded blouse in the suitcase and returned to the closet for other pieces of clothing.

"Listen," Tony said, "all I did was express a few quite reasonable doubts. The same doubts that anyone would have in a situation like this. In fact, the same doubts that you would have expressed if I'd been the one who'd said he'd seen a dead man walking. If our roles were reversed, I'd expect you to be skeptical. I wouldn't be furious with you. Why are you so damned touchy?"

She came back from the closet with two more blouses and started to fold one of them. She wouldn't look at Tony. "I trusted you ... with everything," she said.

"I haven't violated any trust."

"You're like everyone else."

"What happened at my apartment earlier--wasn't that kind of special?"

She didn't answer him.

"Are you going to tell me that what you felt tonight--not just with your body, but with your heart, your mind--are you going to tell me that was no different from what you feel with every man?"

Hilary tried to freeze him out. She kept her eyes on her work, put the second blouse in the suitcase, began to fold the third. Her hands were trembling.

"Well, it was special for me," Tony said, determined to thaw her. "It was perfect. Better than I ever thought it could he. Not just the sex. The being together. The sharing. You got inside me like no woman ever has before. You took away a piece of me when you left my place last night, a piece of my soul, a piece of my heart, a piece of something vital. For the rest of my life, I'm not going to feel like a whole man except when I'm with you. So if you think I'm going to just let you walk away, you're in for a big surprise. I'll put up one hell of a fight to hold on to you, lady."

She had stopped folding the blouse. She was just standing with it in her hands, staring down at it.

Nothing in his entire life had seemed half so important as knowing what she was thinking at that moment.