Silencer (33 page)

Kelloway showed her his identification, which relaxed her up to a point. She introduced herself as the next-door neighbour, Mrs Christian, spelled as in Jesus, she explained solemnly. ‘Something wrong with Bernie?' she asked.

‘She usually sleep this late?' Kelloway asked.

‘She's normally up at the crack.'

‘You happen to see her today?'

Mrs Christian shook her head.

Kelloway said, ‘Her car's in the garage and she's not answering the doorbell.'

‘Maybe she's sick,' said the woman. She fell silent a moment, making a worried sucking sound on her grey dentures. ‘You need to go in and have a look, I got a key. Bernie likes me to keep an eye on the place if she goes away. I water her plants. Keep an eye out.'

‘If it's no problem,' Kelloway said.

‘Always help the police. Rule of mine.' The woman dug a cumbersome clutch of keys from her pocket. She separated one from the bunch and handed it to Kelloway. He turned the key in the lock and stepped inside the house. Amanda and Wom followed, but Mrs Christian, looking wary, lingered on the threshold.

The house had a moody silence. Amanda stood at the bottom of the stairs while Kelloway and Wom explored the ground-floor rooms. Her eye was drawn up to the shadows at the top of the stairs. Hot air was trapped in the house.

‘Nothing,' Kelloway said.

Wom was already climbing the stairs, Kelloway followed. Amanda came behind, thinking of the room with the closed curtains.

Kelloway went inside the bedroom. The bedsheets were drawn back and the pillows indented, but Mrs Vialli wasn't there. He opened the curtains and the room burst into brightness. Amanda blinked and stepped back out into the hallway where Wom was already opening another door leading into a room that had obviously been Benny Vialli's once upon a time. Sports posters on the walls, Magic Johnson frozen in mid-flight above a hoop, a couple of dated rock posters, Madonna clutching her groin, a shot of The Rolling Stones before they became raddled capitalists.

Amanda wandered away from Benny's old room. Across the landing the door of the bathroom was open a couple of inches. Damson tiles, peach-coloured towels on a rack, a mirrored medicine cabinet that reflected a small area of the room's interior. Amanda moved towards this door and stopped. She saw something reflected in the mirror. A shower rail at a bad angle, a shower curtain twisted. Kelloway appeared at her back. He moved past her and stepped inside. Wom, directly behind him, blocked Amanda's view.

‘Eureka,' Kelloway said.

Amanda shifted her position slightly, glanced over Wom's shoulder and saw how the shower rail had broken free from the wall at one end and the curtain was crumpled. A length of rope had been twisted round the rail and Bernadette Vialli lay in the centre of this tangle with a noose round her neck and an overturned chair a few feet away.

Amanda pushed past Wom into the bathroom. Kelloway, stretching out an arm, tried to hold her back, but she was already past him and kneeling over Bernadette Vialli, whose mouth was open, tongue swollen. Her robe was damp and her big silly slippers had slipped off her white feet to the floor.

Amanda looked at the nylon rope, the knot, the way it had cut into the dead woman's throat, the angry purple abrasions created by the tension of the noose. Kelloway, leaning forward, touched Amanda's shoulder and said something about how she shouldn't be looking at this. But Amanda ignored him, her attention fixed on the woman's open eyes, the whites bloodshot and a smear of cream that had adhered somehow to her eyelids and the darkness in the pupils. She found herself wondering if it was true that the eyes retained an image of the last thing a dead person had seen, or if that was just nonsense, a fantasy, and what did it matter anyway? Something about the cream bothered her.

‘She got up on the chair and kicked it over,' Kelloway said. ‘I guess the rail held out long enough for her to choke.'

‘I don't buy that,' Amanda said.

‘Let me guess. You think she was murdered and then strung up,' Kelloway said.

‘That's exactly what I think.'

‘By the mysterious Dansk.'

‘Or one of his minions.'

‘There's no sign of forced entry,' Wom said. ‘No broken windows, smashed locks, anything like that.'

‘So she opened the door to somebody she knew,' Amanda said, and finally looked away from Bernadette Vialli. She thought, A crushed plastic shower curtain with the tiny label ‘Kaeskoo Products, Seoul' wasn't much of a shroud.

Kelloway asked, ‘You're saying she knew her killer? How come?'

Amanda rose. ‘I don't know how come.'

Kelloway was quiet a moment.

She thought of Dansk, the way he'd tracked her. He must have watched Drumm come to this house, and the idea of a conversation between the cop and Mrs Vialli worried him to the point where he'd ordered the deaths of Willie and Bernadette. Let's just close this situation down, he might have thought. Let's nip this in the heart of the bud.

Amanda stepped out of the bathroom. She felt unwell, giddy. Kelloway followed her. Wom remained behind, notebook in one small hand, a scribe of death.

‘No way was it suicide,' she said.

‘Convince me,' Kelloway said.

‘She's got some traces of moisturizing cream round her eyes. You think she slaps cream on her face before she hangs herself?'

‘You're talking a trace, that's all. Maybe she started to apply the stuff then changed her mind. What the hell. I've seen suicides in tuxedos. You'll have to do better.'

She struggled against her dislike for this cop. But she had to accept the fact she needed him, she was dog-tired of going it alone, and he had behind him a large law-enforcement organization whose help she wanted. His scepticism, his abrasive manner, she'd tolerate these until it became impossible.

She stopped halfway down the stairs. A uniformed cop appeared in the hallway. It was Sergeant Thomas Gannon, whom she'd last seen during the fruitless search for Isabel in the desert. He touched his little moustache, nodded at her, then looked directly past her at Kelloway.

‘I went to the Hideaway Knolls,' Gannon said. ‘The only guy vaguely resembling the description Miss Scholes gave checked out this morning. He'd registered under the name of John J. Coleman.'

Kelloway looked at Amanda. ‘Dansk checks out of his hotel, now this other character checks out. These people have quite a knack for timely disappearances, don't they?'

Amanda had a stifling sensation. She was caught up in filaments that, no matter how hard she tried to claw them from her skin, still clung to her. People check out, from hotels, from life.

Gannon said, ‘I also have a message for you, Chief. Somebody from Justice will meet you at five in your office.'

‘Quick response,' Kelloway said.

‘Apparently this guy happened to be in LA and your enquiry was forwarded to him and he caught the first plane,' Gannon said.

‘Lucked out,' Kelloway said.

Lucked out, Amanda thought. Mrs Vialli hadn't lucked out.

She reached the foot of the stairs and strolled past Gannon into the harrowing sunlight. She lit a cigarette and sucked smoke inside her lungs and wondered where Dansk was, what crevice of this city concealed him, what step he was planning next.

62

Eddie McTell and Bruno Pasquale sat in the big drab empty lounge of the Sidewinder Motel, a room that had the ambience of a charity clinic run by an indigent religious order excommunicated long ago.

McTell said, ‘I've had it to the scrotum with crummy joints like this. Gimme Tijuana. Lead me to a bordello. Slamming tequila with some hot-blooded little chickadee sitting in my lap. ‘Way to fucking go.'

‘I never been in Mexico,' said Pasquale.

‘I'll take you there one day, Bruno. Who needs shit places like this? The pits. Christ.'

Pasquale leaned back in his chair. He had a cinematic notion of Mexico, musicians with guitars strolling under fancy wrought-iron balconies. ‘I hear they got cock-fights down there. I never seen one.'

‘It's all blood and feathers and flying guts. You'd enjoy it.'

Pasquale was quiet for a time. ‘I'm still thinking about this guy Loeb I met. He showed me some heavy ID, I mean,
impressive
. He's like up there. Way up. He knows everything going on, Eddie. You name it, all the work we done for Dansk, he knows about it. And it goes back a ways. I'm not just talking about recent stuff. And we're supposed to keep him posted on the moves Dansk orders, except Dansk ain't to know.'

‘What I think it is, he's checking up on Tony Birthmark,' McTell said. ‘Like a performance evaluation, something. How Dansk is handling the job. Maybe Loeb's got some doubts, which wouldn't blow me outta my chair with astonishment.'

‘I don't like going behind anybody's back, Eddie.'

‘If this Loeb's the big chief, you forget any doubts you might have.'

Pasquale said, ‘He gave me his phone number, and we're supposed to call and keep him informed.'

‘I don't have a problem with that,' McTell said. ‘Dansk's head is wired all the wrong way.' He tapped the side of his skull with a fingertip. ‘You ask me, the Birthmark Boy's got a fixation type thing about this broad. The way he talks about her, he gets this buzzing in his voice. Sometimes I think he's a death junkie and he wants to take a walk on the dark side, see how guys like you and me live. Only he hasn't admitted it to himself and now this woman comes along and stirs his juices and suddenly he's out of the closet and trigger-happy. It's like he's got a hard-on for her, swear to God.'

Pasquale played with a paper napkin, folding it, tearing it here and there, then spreading it open so it looked like a line of chorus girls. ‘I didn't like the hit and run shtick,' he said.

‘A cop into the bargain,' McTell said.

Pasquale said, ‘A target's just a target. I don't have any hang-ups who I work on. It was that dumb-fuck little German car in broad daylight.'

‘You mentioned this hit to Loeb?'

‘No. You think I oughta?'

‘Loeb wants the skinny, you give it to him, man.'

‘So I tell Loeb, you're saying.'

McTell sipped his lager and nodded. Pasquale placed a beer coaster on the edge of the table, smacked it with his hand and watched it rise in the air. He snatched it on the way down like a frisbee. ‘I don't feel good about going behind Dansk's back.'

McTell shrugged. ‘Me, I wouldn't think twice about talking to Loeb. Fact, you want to give me his number, I'll call him myself, because I got more than a few comments to make about Dansk.'

Pasquale plucked a slip of paper from his wallet and put it down on the table. ‘Here.'

‘You wanna go first?' McTell asked.

‘After you, Eddie.'

‘That's me,' said McTell. ‘Always the guy that breaks the ice at parties.'

63

In the back of Kelloway's car Amanda thought about Willie Drumm and Bernadette Vialli. She pictured those little war monuments you saw sometimes in the leafy squares of backwater towns, the names of men and women who'd died in far-away wars for what was commonly referred to as democracy and liberty. No such rhetoric attached to the deaths of Willie and Bernadette Vialli. They'd been killed for reasons that had nothing to do with patriotism or honour or whatever pumped-up nonsense words were carved into granite to cover the fact of human sacrifice and blood-letting.

They'd been killed because of Dansk, because of Dansk's business, which clearly wasn't limited to Sanchez alone. Because if that were the case, Bernadette Vialli would still be alive in her split-level suburban home.

Something else, she thought.

Willie had speculated about a personal motive, but she wasn't buying this. It was more than that, but it was just beyond her reach, whatever it was, something she couldn't focus on. She wished she had Willie to talk it through with her. She wished for a resurrection.

She turned her face and looked from the window. Outside the car the city was a blend of glass and brick. Between the buildings were forlorn blue shadows. Wom was driving, Kelloway sat in the passenger seat, his body turned towards Amanda.

Kelloway said, ‘You mentioned Mrs Vialli had a birthday card from her son, also a tape. We couldn't find either.'

Amanda said nothing. She looked at the windows of tall buildings. She imagined the sniper again, a telescopic lens attached to his high-powered rifle, a bullet slamming into her skull. Welcome back to happy hour for paranoids, when uneasy feelings were two for the price of one and the bartender had Dansk's face. She stared at the unusually deep cleft in the back of Kelloway's neck.

‘Willie talked with Lew Bascombe about Dansk,' she said. ‘That's an avenue you should be exploring.'

‘You don't mind if we do this my way, do you?' Kelloway said.

‘Bascombe was supposed to do some checking and get back to Willie –'

‘My way,' Kelloway said. ‘I mean that.'

Amanda lapsed into silence. Why not go direct to Bascombe now? Why not squeeze him hard? She wondered if there was any future in talking to Kelloway. He seemed to hear only what he wanted.

She looked at the digital dashboard clock. Four thirty-two. Somebody was coming from Justice at five, somebody who'd answer questions and allay the fears and suspicions. Yes indeed.

Wom parked the car in the lot of the Police building. Amanda stepped out into the volcanic afternoon. She didn't want to enter the monolithic beige-coloured building. She didn't want to see this somebody from Justice who'd have a plausible multi-layered story and a nice white shirt and the speech patterns of a real-estate salesman.

She followed Kelloway and Sonny Wom into the cool interior. ‘I'll check on John,' she said.

‘Sure.' Kelloway led her along a corridor to a tiny room. He opened the door. Rhees lay on a narrow cot. She entered the room alone and approached the bed. Rhees was drowsy from painkillers.