Over coffee, Beatrice asked, “Have you been a detective very long, Mr. Loesser?”
He had flushed over the praise, and now he said very gravely, “I’m not really a detective. I’m more an authority on old buildings.” And that was the truth, he added silently. He probably knew more about old abandoned hotels in the United States than any other living person.
“Isn’t there a television around here somewhere?” Charlie asked. “I think Grayling’s made the big time with the news.”
Beatrice remembered where it was and John went with her to get it from one of the bedrooms. They all watched the news at ten. As Charlie had said, the sleepy little town had made the big time.
“How do you account for those happenings?” a pert young woman asked a bearded man. Beatrice and Byron had groaned together when he was introduced.
“Mass hysteria, more likely than not. It has happened again and again through the ages, you see. One adolescent girl faints and sets off a pattern of fainting, that sort of thing. As soon as the focus swings away from the people caught up in a movement such as that, the occurrences stop. A year later no one wants to talk about it. Ashamed, you know; they feel foolish and can’t account for their own behavior.”
Byron switched channels twice. Grayling took thirty seconds on one newscast, an entire minute on another, and was not mentioned at all on a third.
In their room later, Constance asked Charlie, “Can we trust John Loesser to stay put?”
He grinned and held up car keys. “I picked his pocket. There was another key in a magnetic contraption under the fender. I found it too.”
“That poor man,” she said then with great compassion.
He nodded. “You know the best thing about this damn cold house?”
“What?”
“Bed. A warm bed, cold room, hot woman.”
She groaned and bit his neck.
Late the next morning Constance hung up the telephone and went searching for Charlie. He and John Loesser were going over every case step by step. John knew about all of them that Charlie knew, and several others. Constance watched them from the doorway to the den for several seconds as she thought out her plan. Better to drive to Las Vegas and fly to Los Angeles, or just drive the two hundred miles and be done with it?
“Charlie,” she said then, “you remember Jan Chulsky?”
He looked blank. “Nope.”
“Of course you do. She came to our wedding. We exchange cards and even talk now and then,
at least several times over the years. We went to school together.”
A patient expression settled on his face as he waited.
“She’s treated some of those people up in the state hospital, and she’ll be in Los Angeles for the next few days. She commutes.”
Charlie nodded and turned to say to John, “Now we’ll see the old boy network swing into operation.”
“The question is,” Constance said, ignoring the comment, “do I want to drive to Las Vegas and fly, or just drive over. I’d have to land at the L.A. airport. Ugh. I’ll drive.”
“And this is known as thinking on your feet,” Charlie added to John. “Want me to tag along?” he asked Constance.
This time she looked blank. “What for?”
He followed her to the bedroom where she packed enough for overnight. “Jan’s going to have the records printed out for me by the time I get there. And I’ll spend the night in her apartment and drive back tomorrow. I’ll call and tell you when. Oh, her number.” She made a note of it for him. “And you’ll keep away from that place, won’t you?”
He embraced and kissed her. “There’s no place on earth I want to visit less than Old West at this particular time. Be careful out on the desert.”
Charlie and John continued to compile data until shortly after four, when Charlie stretched and yawned. Strange how empty the house felt, he thought for the third or fourth time. As soon as Constance was gone, a house felt like a simple building; when she was inside with him, her presence seemed to fill it. He was aware of her at all times then, moving about the kitchen, in her study, in the bedroom, out digging or planting in the garden—even that counted. But this house felt bleak and empty and cold. The coldest damn house he’d ever spent any real time in. It leaked air at every joint, every window, around the doors. Must be a bitch in the summer when the air leaking in would be superheated.
John leaned his head forward into his hands, propped up on the table. “We have to tell the police,” he said dully, surprising himself with the realization.
“Yeah. I’m afraid so.” So far they had amassed information that said forty-two people had died; an unknown number was in various mental institutions around the country; and a further unknown number was suffering the aftereffects of the attacks. Twelve people had vanished. And, as Constance had warned early on, they just knew about the ones who made it into the records. How many more were being treated privately? Unanswerable.
“Okay,” John said. He was benumbed by the totality of the figures. He had managed not to think about the victims. That had not been his job, he had decided long ago; there was nothing he could do about any of them. His job was to track down the devil and burn it out when he found it. And it wasn’t working. It just appeared somewhere else and started over again.
“They’ll arrest me,” he said, and found he did not care. That never had been a real consideration. Freedom had meant only that he could find it again and burn it again, and try to make it up to Elinor and Gary, the two people he had loved beyond expression, the two people he had failed.
“What for?” Charlie asked, and they both thought of Constance asking just that, with just that inflection a few hours ago, when he had asked if she wanted him to go with her. Charlie grinned. “They say that people who live together begin to look alike after a while. Not us, no sir. We just talk alike. But it’s a valid question. You’re a respectable independent public insurance adjuster, dragged into this because I needed your expertise since you’ve been following these arson fires for the past several years. It’ll fly.”
“There hasn’t been any arson here.”
“Right. I made the connection between the fires and the cases of people losing their marbles, unprovable at this point, but worth investigating. I called on you to help.” He shrugged. “And besides, do you give a shit if they believe me? What can they do, thumbscrews?” He grinned again, this time enjoying the thought. “Sore Thumb will have a fit when he finds out I’ve blabbed his little secret.”
Charlie had to leave a message for the sheriff again. He called back within a few minutes. “It’s out of my hands, Charlie,” Sheriff Maschi said with evident relief. “The governor turned the whole damn mess over to the state police. They’re sending in their team first thing in the morning.”
“That won’t quite do,” Charlie said. “It’s bigger than the state police, I’m afraid.”
There was a long pause, then the sheriff said, “You at the house still? Might drop in for a sandwich, cup of coffee, something.”
“Bourbon?”
“Sounds good to me. Five minutes.”
“What the hell,” he said in less than five minutes when Charlie put a glass of bourbon, hardly touched by ice or water, into his hand. “It’s after five, and I ain’t got any duties to speak of right now.”
Charlie introduced John Loesser, the insurance adjuster, and the sheriff didn’t ask him a single question. He leaned back on the couch in the den, put his feet on the coffee table laden with papers, and savored his drink.
Charlie straddled one of the wooden chairs, just as relaxed as the sheriff, and started to talk. Only John couldn’t be still. He moved around the room, touching this, straightening that, studying the map on the wall, and finally interrupted. “I’m going to make something to eat. You want some dinner, Sheriff?”
The old man nodded, keeping his steady gaze on Charlie, his face as unreadable as a piece of the desert. Beatrice and Byron arrived home; Beatrice went out to help John; Byron joined Charlie and the sheriff. Every day he and Beatrice looked more exhausted, more helpless.
Charlie did not reveal John Loesser’s identity, or that he had set the arson fires; he told the rest of it. When he finished, the sheriff handed him his empty glass. Charlie got up and refilled it, refilled his own, and waited.
“You know it don’t make a bit of sense,” the sheriff said finally. “Why didn’t you tell me yesterday?”
“Tell what? Like you said, it don’t make a bit of sense.”
“And there ain’t been no fire here, neither. What brought you to this place if you’re investigating fires?”
Charlie shrugged. “It’s exactly like Orick,
except for the fire. And Camden, and Longview,
and Moscow, Idaho, and all the others, except for the fire. Guess I thought that would come, too.”
“I called him about Old West,” Byron said tiredly. He looked ten years older than he had appeared in San Francisco in October. “We were up at Orick at the same time; I knew he was looking into something that might have a bearing on my work. So I called him.”
Sheriff Maschi was frowning at nothing in particular now. “Dick Delgado is taking charge,” he said finally. “Young, forty maybe, ambitious. Lorrimer, the owner of Old West and the new hotel, is upset. He wants this all straightened out right now, wants his men back on the job over there, wants any shadow removed, superstitions put to rest, wants his grand opening. So he puts a bug in the governor’s ear and the governor brings in the state investigators and they tell me to herd my cattle and let them get on with the business of clearing up a non-mystery. Suits me. Four months I’ll have my thirty years, and I’ll be sixty-five. Both together. Four months. Hate to think I could blow it, and I know damn well that if I tangle with Dick Delgado, I blow it real good. They want that attraction to open for the Christmas trade, you know. Jesus Christ, Charlie, I wish you’d stayed home.”
“So do I, Logan,” Charlie said softly.
The sheriff looked at his drink and set it down. He got to his feet and went to the wall map. He reached up and pointed to the wall above it. “Up there’s Death Valley. And over here is the Devil’s Playground.” He touched the map in an area only a dozen miles or so from Grayling. “Devil’s Playground,” he repeated. “Only seems to me the devil ain’t playing games. Seems he’s playing for keeps.”
“Sheriff,” Byron asked then, “if you can accept this, why don’t you think this other man will? Delgado? We can tell him exactly what Charlie’s told you.”
Sheriff Maschi waved his hand, as if waving away gnats. “Not what Charlie told me so much as what I saw for myself. I saw those men go crazy. Dick Delgado ain’t seen anything like that yet. He’ll have to see it for himself. And I figure he will tomorrow. He will.”
“What do you mean?” Charlie asked, but he already knew the answer.
“He’s getting a crew together in the morning, and they aim to go in there and prove there ain’t nothing in there and never has been. First thing in the morning.”
Chapter
13
“Sheriff,” John Loesser
said, “they won’t listen to you. That captain won’t believe he can’t just walk in and take charge and put an end to it. That’s what they always think. Would it help if you could get some outsiders to tell them what happened in other places? I mean cops, even army officers.”
“You got names like that?” Sheriff Maschi regarded him with more interest than he had shown before.
“I’ll give you some names,” John said, and sat down on the couch, started to write. His hand was shaking so much his script looked like that of an old man.
Charlie watched him also for a moment. John’s scar was vivid, his face pale; a line of sweat was on his upper lip. “Our resident expert,” he said to the sheriff in a light tone. “He’s been watching this thing happen for several years.” The sheriff made a noncommittal sound.
There were five names on the list John handed over after a minute or two. Names and towns, no phone numbers. “They shouldn’t be too hard to reach. The towns are pretty small, like Grayling.”
The first name was Foster Lee Murphy. John remembered him quite well. He had marched eight men into a plantation mansion that had been turned into an inn and finally abandoned altogether. He remembered the live oak trees shrouded with pale Spanish moss, the wraithlike fog that drifted head high and was warm. He never had felt warm fog before that night. He had watched from behind an oak tree that spread its arms out over a hundred feet, arms as thick as an average tree trunk, also warm. Earth, trees, fog, all warm that night. It had been a noisy night, with insects, a whippoorwill, tree frogs in full voice. And then the shooting. Screams. Foster Lee Murphy had taken eight men in; six ran and stumbled out. At three in the morning of the next day, John had gone in.
He had heard nothing of what the sheriff said on the telephone, but when Maschi hung up, his face was bleak. “Noxious swamp gas,” he said. “Murphy says the official report lists toxic fumes from an upwelling of swamp gas as the cause of the illness there.” He put his finger on the next name. “Luke Hanrahan.”
The hotel had been on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. One man had walked over the edge; one had vanished. John had watched from across the river the fumbling attempts to find the evil by surrounding it first and advancing in a solid line. A great tugboat pushing a long river train of cargo had saved the men. John had felt precisely when it turned off, when it turned on again after everyone had left, but first one man had walked off the bluff; one had gone into the hotel and had not returned, ever.
Maschi said without inflection, “One guy
went AWOL; one tripped and fell off a cliff while
under the influence of alcohol. Case closed.” He tried one more name, and this time was told that a few men on an investigation of drug dealers had got hold of and tried some bad dope.
Silently John went to him and took the piece of paper from his hands, tore it in half, and let the pieces fall to the floor. “Forget it,” he said. He walked from the room.
Sheriff Maschi made a few more calls, an FBI
agent he knew in the area, a captain in the state investigation office, others. Tomorrow, they all said; they would look into the matter tomorrow. He put in a call to Delgado; it would be returned, the answering sergeant said. He put in a call to the lieutenant governor; that one also would be returned. He tried to call the local representative in Congress and got an answering machine. Finally he walked away from the telephone, his face expressionless.
“You mean no one will listen?” Beatrice asked incredulously. “That’s insane!”
“Not really,” Sheriff Maschi said. “It’s the chain of command. Probably the lines are hot with calls going in for Delgado. And probably he’s telling them all there’s nothing to be worried about, the sheriffs a senile fool who got kicked off a case and is expressing his discontent.”
In spite of the distractions, John had prepared another superb dinner. He was incapable of cooking anything but excellent food. He ate very little of it, and no one talked during dinner except for comments on the meal. Shortly after that Sheriff Maschi took Charlie’s arm and they went back to the den.
“I’ll be watching in the morning,” the sheriff said. “Want a ride?”
“To where?”
The sheriff went to the map and put his finger on a spot. “I figure about here, about a mile away, safe distance, I’d say.”
“No road,” Charlie murmured, looking at the spot.
The sheriff snorted. “People’s been traveling that desert a good many years without worrying overmuch about roads. Around seven?”
Charlie nodded and soon after that the sheriff left. Charlie returned to the map and studied the terrain carefully. He was startled by John’s voice at his side.
“Forty-two dead. How many more tomorrow morning? I’m going in, Charlie. Tonight.”
Beatrice and Byron were at the kitchen table talking in low voices. Charlie glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes before nine. The supermarket closed at nine.
“Let’s take a walk,” he said.
John couldn’t do it alone, he was thinking as they walked in the clear, cold air. That was the problem, the only problem. Men were staked out on the road leading into Old West, and that meant he would have to go cross-country, and that meant not alone. The sheriff might be able to do it, but not John Loesser, not Charlie, at least not at night. He visualized some of the crevices he had steered around carefully, some of the boulders that had almost upended the Land Rover, and that was in broad daylight. And the Land Rover was high; it could clear rocks that John’s car would not clear. The sheriff’s deputy had come to collect all of Mike’s belongings, including his car; they would have to use John’s Malibu. Charlie grinned bleakly at the thought. This was what he had set out to do: find the son of a bitch and his black Malibu. And he had. He had.
In the grocery he bought a quart of orange juice in a waxed carton, a box of cereal, a package of waxed paper, a gallon jug of milk, and a package of candles. There were six twelve inch tapers in the box. John watched, mystified. He had expected them to buy lighter fluid, or kerosene, or something flammable.
“It’s a multipart problem,” Charlie said as they walked back to the house. “We can’t get closer than half a mile, maybe more like a mile, with the car. And the men staked out will be looking down there from time to time. As soon as they see a blaze, they’ll be down there, and they will have trucks or cars. Two, three minutes at the most, not enough time to get out before they get in. You’ve had a clear shot at it before, but not this time. So we prepare our little time bombs and get the hell out before there’s a blaze to see. If we do it right, the building will go up like a torch, no problem there, and we’ll be well away from it.”
“You can’t go in there, Charlie. Not half a mile, not even a mile. My God, you should know that by now.”
“I don’t intend to,” Charlie agreed. “I stay with the car, with the motor running, the getaway car, as we call it in the trade.”
At the house Charlie paused to gaze at the moon rising over the rocky hills. It was large, not quite full. Good news and bad news, he thought. They would be more visible in moonlight, but without it he doubted they could find their way in at all. He had counted on the moon, and at the same time knew it could add shadows and distort sage, turn it into lurking monsters or boulders. Well, he thought, you do what you can. No more, no less. He turned to enter the house. “I know why I’m doing this,” John said then in a low voice. “But why are you? You could sit back like the sheriff and just let it happen.”
Charlie shrugged. “Damned if I know,” he said lightly. “Keep thinking we need time, need real plans, need deliberation. We don’t need to charge in and hope for the best. We’re buying time, that’s all.” But it was more than that. He thought of the snappily dressed young woman he had glimpsed in the motel lobby, and her cameraman; thought of the bright young men in the state police force, the other reporters in the area, the innocent, ignorant bystanders. All hell would break loose, he knew, if they didn’t do this tonight. Delgado and his men, armed men, going mad, others rushing in for the story, the thrill—all going mad. He thought of Maria Eglin, standing like a stony-faced doll, mad. And Polly, who had witnessed the madness at first hand, and might not be good for anything for a long time because of it. He shrugged again. “You play cards? Got any cards?” John shook his head, and it was just as well.
Actually Charlie had his own deck of cards that he always traveled with. He did not offer to play with anyone, but started laying out solitaire. He lost and gathered them up, shuffled, and started over. Beatrice and John talked in the den. Byron read through reports until nearly eleven and went to bed. Beatrice went to bed soon after that. Without looking up from his cards, Charlie said, “Why don’t you rest? I’ll call you.”
John hesitated, then went to his room and lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling. He knew he would not sleep. He never slept before he faced the devil again.
Charlie dealt the cards over and over for the next hour, then he put them away and retrieved his bag of groceries, which he had left on the porch. He retrieved John’s can of gasoline from the side of the house and took it in. He poured the milk out in the sink, rinsed the jug and set it to drain. He started to pour out the juice, but filled two glasses first, and emptied the rest. As he worked, he sipped the orange juice. He emptied the cereal into the garbage, prodded it down out of sight and covered it with crumpled newspaper. Then he got out the candles and measured one against the cereal box, trimmed it to size, and put it down, and repeated this with the juice carton, cutting a second candle to fit inside with about an inch and a half to spare. He trimmed the wick ends of the candles to expose nearly an inch, and dropped all the shavings and the extra pieces into the cereal box. He pushed the waxed paper lining down the sides of the box, and began to tear more waxed paper from the supply he had bought. He crumpled each piece and pushed it down in the box until the mass was several inches high; then he worked one of the candles down through it so that it was upright, supported by the paper nest he had made. He added more paper until the box was two thirds filled. He cut through the juice carton, making a hinged lid, and wiped out the interior, and then made a second paper nest for a second candle. He surveyed them both and nodded. He closed the carton and the cereal box and put them both on the table; they looked perfect, he decided. Now he went to the bedroom and looked at the Indian blanket on the bed, but found he did not want to destroy that. It was too beautiful. He removed it and took the second blanket instead, an old brown one that looked like Army issue. He started back to the den, paused at the bathroom and added two towels to his bundle, and continued. John came from his room and followed him silently. Charlie put his finger to his lips and took his supplies to the den, returned to the kitchen and got the bottle of salad oil and took it back to the den. He closed the door this time. Moving without haste he spread the blanket on the floor, laid the two towels on it, and then sprinkled them with the oil. It pooled and puddled, as he had known it would. He left it to soak in and went out to pour gasoline into the gallon milk jug. Finally he cut a strip from the edge of the blanket, put it aside, and then began to assemble his package. He folded the blanket in at both sides to cover the towels, then folded the entire package lengthwise and put the jug of gasoline and the cereal box and orange juice carton in a row on it. He wrapped them all neatly, used the strip he had cut to bind the whole thing, and had enough left over to form two loops. He stood up, lifted the bundle, and slipped his arms through the loops; it looked like an ungainly bedroll. It was ten after one.
At the same time Constance lifted her foot from the accelerator with a jerk. Automatically she glanced at the rearview mirror. She had hit eighty-five again, she realized, clutching the steering wheel in a death grip. She did the arithmetic again; she was about ninety miles from Grayling, eighty miles of which was Interstate 15 and the remaining ten miles state road. Less than two hours. And Charlie was probably asleep, sprawled on the bed, his arm flung out on her side, as if searching in his sleep for her.
At eleven she had realized that she would not sleep in her friend Jan’s apartment that night. For several minutes she had resisted her impulse to leave, had got a drink of milk, nibbled on a cracker and cheese, settled down once more to read through the various reports Jan had gathered for her. Finally she had tossed her few things back in the overnight bag and left, taking the papers with her. Nothing had come with the feeling, only the intense need to go back, to make certain Charlie was all right. Go back, go back. It had come down to just that: Go back!
The first hundred miles had taken more than two hours. She had had to find a gas station, fill up, get out of the Los Angeles traffic, head north in the maze of freeways. The next ninety miles would take an hour and a half at the most, closer to an hour. On both sides of the interstate the land had yielded to desert, wrapped in the surreal light of the oversized moon. The landscape was grotesque with elaborate shadows that seemed to have nothing to do with the objects that cast them. The land was silver and black under the luminous sky, and on the highway eyes appeared behind her, came close enough to blind her, then turned into glaring devil eyes that dwindled and disappeared. Monstrous trucks with thousands of red eyes rushed on her, swerved, vanished, and the roar existed in her ears without the substance. Her car shuddered.
At two Charlie and John left the house quietly. Charlie drove the Malibu. He had memorized the map, knew exactly where he had to leave the state road, head out across the desert. He did not hum under his breath, although if John had not been with him, he would have.
They drove southwest, skirting a rocky hill north of the road. Charlie slowed at four and six tenths miles, and turned off the highway shortly after that. They would follow the base of the hill to its northern extremity, then turn and zigzag up a slope until they were on the ridge overlooking Old West. On a road map it would seem a snap, but the topographical map had shown the route to be treacherous and deceptive. Old rivers had gouged the land here; there was a dry lake bed, with areas of quicksand remaining where the poison alkaline waters had gathered below the surface, trapped by hardpan, or an impenetrable rock ledge. The rocky hills had been shaken by earthquakes more times than history could record. Rocks had slipped and slid, piled up precariously only to be dislodged days or even minutes after the cartographers had gone, changing the topography, sometimes beyond recognition.