CHAPTER 68
CORKY REGRETTED WHAT HE HAD DONE TO Mick Sachatone?s face. A good friend deserved to be executed in a more dignified manner.
Because the Glock hadn?t been fitted with a sound suppressor, he had needed to make the first shot count. Maybe none of the nearest neighbors were home, and maybe if they were home, the rush of the rain would mask a single gunshot well enough to avoid piquing their interest. But a full barrage had been out of the question.
In Malibu, Corky had not wanted to suppress the fine voice of the pistol. The bang of each shot, punctuating the brittle chorus of the shattered porcelain figurines, had rattled Jack Trotter.
Although he had a silencer with him, the extended barrel did not permit the Glock to seat perfectly in his holster. Nor did the extra few inches allow for as smooth a draw as Corky preferred.
Besides, if poor Mick had seen the bolstered Glock fitted with a sound suppressor, he might have been uneasy in spite of Corky?s nonchalance.
After holstering the pistol, Corky pulled on his black leather coat and withdrew a pair of latex surgical gloves from one pocket. He needed to avoid leaving fingerprints, of course, but in this shrine to [449] the sinful hand, he was less concerned about the evidence that he might leave behind than about what he might pick up.
Elsewhere, shelving for videos overlaid windows, making a cave of the house, but in the work rooms, the dreary face of the fading day pressed against rain-dappled glass. Corky closed the drapes.
He needed time to search the house for Mick?s well-hidden cash reserves, which were most likely significant, as well as time to disconnect the computers and load them in the Land Rover to ensure that any information they contained about him would not fall into hostile hands. He would wrap the body in a tarp and haul it out of here, and then clean up the blood.
To avoid a homicide investigation that might, in spite of all his caution, lead back to him, Corky intended to make Mick disappear.
He could have instead saturated the place with gasoline and torched it to eliminate all evidence, as he had done at the narrow house of Brittina Dowd. The thousands of videocassettes would burn with intense heat, casting off great clouds of toxic smoke sufficient to foil firefighters. No clues would remain in the smoldering slag.
Yet he was loath to destroy the Sachatone archives of mindless lust, for this place was as great a monument to chaos as any that Corky had ever seen. This malignant mass sent forth vibrations with the power to spread dissolution and disorder as surely as a pile of plutonium issues deadly radiation against which, in time, no living thing can stand.
The search for Mick?s cash, the dismantling of his computers, and the removal of the pajamaed corpse would have to wait, however, until Aelfric Manheim had been snatched from the cozy lap of fame and imprisoned in the room currently occupied by Stinky Cheese Man. Corky would return here in twenty-four hours.
Meanwhile, he switched off the computers and the other active machines in the work rooms. Then he went through the house, top to bottom, to be sure that no electrical appliance would be left on that might overheat and start a small blaze, bringing the fire [450] department to these rooms before the trove of money had been located and while the corpse still waited to be discovered.
In the living room again, Corky stood for a minute, watching the four-screen erotic contortions of the incomparable Janelle, before bringing darkness to the wall of writhing flesh. He wondered if Jack Trotter had taken advantage of her astonishing flexibility to fold her into a half-size grave and save himself some digging.
With Mick now gone, both the Romeo and Juliet of porn were dead. Sad.
Corky would have preferred not to kill Mick, but poor Mick had signed his own death warrant when he?d sold out Trotter. In a fever of jealousy, sick for revenge, he had revealed to Corky the numerous fake identities that he had over the years created for Trotter. If he would betray any client, he might have one day betrayed Corky, too.
Destroying the social order is lonely work.
Corky stepped onto the front porch and locked the door with Mick?s key, which he had taken from a pegboard in the kitchen.
The chill of the day had deepened.
For all the rinsing and wringing that it had undergone, the washrag sky was a dirtier gray than it had been this morning, and its light cast neither beam nor faintest shadow.
So much had happened since he had risen to face the day. But the best was yet to come.
CHAPTER 69
IN THE KITCHEN, CONFERRING WITH MR. Hachette regarding dinner, Ethan found the chef barely communicative and stiff with anger that he flatly refused to explain. He would only say, ?My statement on the matter is in the mail, Inspector Truman.? He would not describe the ?matter? to which he referred. ?It is in the mail, my passionate statement. I reject to be lowered into a brawl like a common cook. I am chef, and I announce my contempt like a gentleman by modern pen, not to your face but to your back.?
Hachette?s English was less fractured when he wasn?t angry or agitated, but you seldom had an opportunity to hear his more fluent speech.
In only ten months, Ethan had learned never to press the chef about any issue related to the kitchen. The quality of his food did justify his insistence on being given the latitude of a temperamental artist. His storms came and went, but they left no damage in their wake.
Responding to Mr. Hachette with a shrug, Ethan went in search of Fric.
Mrs. McBee disliked whole-house paging on the intercom. She considered it an offense against the stately atmosphere of the great [452] house, an affront to the family, and a distraction to the staff. ?We are not at work in an office building or a discount warehouse,? she had explained.
Senior staff members carried personal pagers on which they could be summoned from anywhere on the sprawling estate. Squawking at them through the intercom system was seldom necessary.
If you needed to track down a junior staff member or if your position included the authority to seek out a member of the family at your discretion-which among the household staff was true only of Mrs. McBee, Mr. McBee, and Ethan-then you must proceed on the intercom one room at a time. You began with the three places where you most expected to find the wanted individual.
As five o?clock approached, only a minimal staff remained on duty to be distracted, all of them scheduled to leave within minutes. Fric was the sole member of the Manheim family in residence. The McBees were in Santa Barbara. Nevertheless, Ethan felt obliged to follow standard procedures in respect of tradition, in deference to Mrs. McBee, and in the conviction that if he paged Fric in all rooms at once, the dear lady in Santa Barbara would instantly know what had transpired and would have her brief holiday diminished by unnecessary distress.
Using the intercom feature on one of the kitchen phones, Ethan first tried Fric?s rooms on the third floor. He sought the boy next in the train room-?Are you there, Fric? This is Mr. Truman?-in the theater, and then in the library. He received no reply.
Although Fric had never been sulky and certainly never rude, he might for whatever reason be choosing not to respond to the intercom even though he heard it.
Ethan elected to walk the house top to bottom, primarily to find the boy, but also to assure himself that, in general, all was as it should be.
He began on the third floor. He didn?t visit every room, but at least opened doors to peer into most chambers, and repeatedly called the child?s name.
[453] The door to Fric?s suite stood open. After twice announcing himself and receiving no answer, Ethan decided that, this evening, security concerns took precedence over household etiquette and family privacy. He walked Fric?s rooms but found neither the boy nor anything amiss.
Returning through the east wing to the north hall, heading toward the main stairs, Ethan stopped three times to turn, to listen, halted by a crawling on the back of his neck, by a feeling that all was not as right as it appeared to be.
Quiet. Stillness.
Holding his breath, he heard only his heart.
Tuning out that inner rhythm, he could hear nothing real, only absurdities that he imagined: stealthy movement in the antique mirror above a nearby sideboard; a faint voice like that on the telephone the previous night, but fainter than before, crying out to him not from a third-floor room but from the far side of a blind turn on the highway to eternity.
The mirror revealed no reflection but his own, no blurred form, no boyhood friend.
When he began to breathe again, the distant voice that existed only in his imagination ceased to be heard even there.
He descended the main stairs to the second floor, where he found Fric in the library.
Reading a book, the boy sat in an armchair that he had moved from its intended position. The back of it was tight against the Christmas tree.
When Ethan opened the door and entered, Fric gave a start, which he tried to conceal by pretending that he had merely been adjusting his position in the armchair. Stark fear had widened his eyes and clenched his jaws for an instant, until he realized that Ethan was only Ethan.
?Hello, Fric. You okay? I paged you here on the intercom a few minutes ago.?
[454] ?Didn?t hear it, ummm, no, not the intercom,? said the boy, lying so ineptly that had he been hooked up to a polygraph, the machine might have exploded.
?You moved the chair.?
?Chair? Ummm, no, I found it like this, here like, you know, just like this.?
Ethan perched on the edge of another armchair. ?Is something wrong, Fric??
?Wrong?? the boy asked, as though the meaning of that word eluded him.
?Is there something you?d like to tell me? Are you worried about something? Because you don?t seem like yourself.?
The kid looked away from Ethan, to the book. He closed the book and lowered it to his lap.
As a cop, Ethan had long ago learned patience.
Making eye contact again, Fric leaned forward in his chair. He seemed about to whisper conspiratorially but hesitated and straightened up. Whatever he?d been about to reveal, he let slide. He shrugged. ?I don?t know. Maybe I?m tense ?cause my dad?s coming home Thursday.?
?That?s a good thing, isn?t it??
?Sure. But it?s pretty tense, too.?
?Why tense??
?Well, he?ll have some of his buddies with him, you know. He always does.?
?You don?t care for his friends??
?They?re okay. They?re all golfers and sports fanatics. Dad likes to talk golf and football and stuff. It?s how he unwinds. His buddies and him, they?re like a club.?
A club in which you?re not and never will be a member, Ethan thought, surprised by a sympathy that tightened his throat.
He wanted to give the boy a hug, take him to a movie, out to a [455] movie, not downstairs to the mini-Pantages here in Palazzo Rospo, but to some ordinary multiplex crawling with kids and their families, where the air was saturated with the fragrance of popcorn and with the greasiness of canola oil tricked up to smell half like butter, where you had to check the theater seat for gum and candy before sitting down, where during the funny parts of the movie, you could hear not just your own laugh but that of a crowd.
?And there?ll be a girl with him,? Fric continued. ?There always is. He broke up with the last one before Florida. I don?t know who the new one is. Maybe she?ll be nice. Sometimes they are. But she?s new, and I?ll have to get to know her, which isn?t easy.?
They were in dangerous territory for conversation between a family member and one of the staff. In commiseration, Ethan could say nothing that revealed his true judgment of Charming Manheim as a father, or that suggested the movie star?s priorities were not in proper order.
?Fric, whoever your dad?s new girl is, getting to know her will be easy because she?ll like you. Everyone likes you, Fric,? he added, knowing that to this sweet and profoundly unassuming boy, these words would be a revelation and most likely disbelieved.
Fric sat with his mouth open, as though Ethan had just declared himself to be a monkey passing for human. A blush rose to his cheeks, and he looked down at the book in his lap, disconcerted.
Movement drew Ethan?s eye from the boy to the tree behind him. The dangling ornaments stirred: angels turning, angels nodding, angels dancing.
The air in the library was as still as the books on the shelves. If there had been a low-intensity earthquake sufficient to affect the ornaments, it had been too subtle to catch Ethan?s attention.
The movement of the angels subsided, as though they had been set in motion by a short-lived draft created by some passing presence.
A strange expectation overcame Ethan, a sense that a door of [456] understanding might be about to open in his heart. He realized that he was holding his breath and that the fine hairs on the backs of his hands had risen as if to a baton of static electricity.
?Mr. Hachette,? said Fric.
The angels settled and the pregnant moment passed without the manifestation of anything.
?Excuse me?? Ethan asked.
?Mr. Hachette doesn?t like me,? Fric said, by way of refuting the suggestion that he might be more highly regarded than he thought.
Ethan smiled. ?Well, I?m not sure that Mr. Hachette likes anyone terribly much. But he?s a fine chef, isn?t he??
?So is Hannibal Lecter.?