Whispers. Part 14

"His detective is brain-damaged."

"I have a hunch this Frank Howard might have a very good record," she said.

"Then the way they rate their people is a disgrace. Their standards are either very low or all screwed up."

"You might have a pretty hard time convincing the chief of that."

"I can be very persuasive, my lamb."

"But even if he owes you a favor, how can he reopen the case without new evidence? He may be the chief, but he has to follow the rules, too."

"Look, he can at least talk to the sheriff up there in Napa County."

"And Sheriff Laurenski will give the chief the same story he was putting out last night. He'll say Frye was at home baking cookies or something."

"Then the sheriff's an incompetent fool who took the word of someone on Frye's household staff. Or he's a liar. Or maybe he's even in on this with Frye somehow."

"You go to the chief with that theory," she said, "and he'll have both of us tested for paranoid schizophrenia."

"If I can't squeeze some action out of the cops," Wally said, "then I'll hire a good PI team."

"Private investigators?"

"I know just the agency. They're good. Considerably better than most cops. They'll pry open Frye's life and find all the little secrets in it. They'll come up with the kind of evidence that'll get the case reopened."

"Isn't that expensive?"

"I'll split the cost with you," he said.

"Oh, no."

"Oh, yes."

"That's generous of you, but--"

"It's not generous of me at all. You're an extremely valuable property, my lamb. I own a percentage of you, so anything I pay to a PI team is just insurance. I only want to protect my interests."

"That's baloney, and you know it," she said. "You are generous, Wally. But don't hire anyone just yet. The other detective that I told you about, Lieutenant Clemenza, said he'd stop around later this afternoon to see if I remembered anything more. He still sort of believes me, but he's confused because Laurenski shot a big hole in my story. I think Clemenza would use just about any excuse he could find to get the case reopened. Let's wait until I've seen him. Then if the situation still looks bleak, we'll hire your PI."

"Well ... all right," Wally said reluctantly. "But in the meantime, I'm going to tell them to send a man over to your place for protection."

"Wally, I don't need a bodyguard."

"Like h.e.l.l you don't."

"I was perfectly safe all night, and I--"

"Listen, kid, I'm sending someone over. That's final. There won't be any arguing with Uncle Wally. If you won't let them inside, he'll just stand by your front door like a palace guard."

"Really, I--"

"Sooner or later," Wally said gently, "you're going to have to face the fact that you can't get through life alone, entirely on your own steam. No one does. No one, kid. Now and then everyone has to accept a little help. You should have called me last night."

"I didn't want to disturb you."

"For G.o.d's sake, you wouldn't have disturbed me! I'm your friend. In fact, you disturbed me a whole lot more by not disturbing me last night. Kid, it's all right to be strong and independent and self-reliant. But when you carry it too far, when you isolate yourself like this, it's a slap in the face to everybody who cares about you. Now, will you let the guard in when he arrives?"

She sighed. "Okay."

"Good. He'll be there within an hour. And you'll call me as soon as you've talked to Clemenza?"

"I will."

"Promise."

"I promise."

"Did you sleep last night?"

"Surprisingly, yes."

"If you didn't get enough sleep," he said, "take a nap this afternoon."

Hilary laughed. "You'd make a wonderful Jewish mother."

"Maybe I'll bring over a big pot of chicken soup this evening. Good-bye, dear."

"Good-bye, Wally. Thanks for calling."

When she hung up the receiver, she glanced at the highboy that stood in front of the door. After the uneventful night, the barricade looked foolish. Wally was right: the best way to handle this was to hire around-the-clock bodyguards and then put a first-rate team of private investigators on Frye's trail. Her original plan for dealing with the problem was ludicrous. She simply could not board up the windows and play Battle of the Alamo with Frye.

She got out of bed, put on her silk robe, and went to the highboy. She took the drawers out and put them aside. When the tall chest was light enough to be moved, she dragged it away from the door, back to the indentation in the carpet that marked where it had rested until last night. She replaced the drawers.

She went to the nightstand, picked up the knife, and smiled ruefully as she realized how naive she had been. Hand-to-hand combat with Bruno Frye? Knife-fighting with a maniac? How could she have thought that she would have any chance whatsoever in such an uneven contest? Frye was many times stronger than she was. She had been fortunate last night when she had managed to get away from him. Luckily, she'd had the pistol. But if she tried fencing with him, he would cut her to ribbons.

Intending to return the knife to the kitchen, wanting to be dressed for the day by the time the bodyguard arrived, she went to the bedroom door, unlocked it, opened it, stepped into the hallway, and screamed as Bruno Frye grabbed her and slammed her up against the wall. The back of her head hit the plaster with a sharp crack, and she struggled to remain above a wave of darkness that washed in behind her eyes. He clutched her throat with his right hand, pinned her in place. With his left hand, he tore open the front of her robe and squeezed her bare b.r.e.a.s.t.s, leering at her, calling her a b.i.t.c.h and a s.l.u.t.

He must have been listening when she talked to Wally, must have heard that the police had taken away her pistol, for he had absolutely no fear of her. She hadn't mentioned the knife to Wally, and Frye was not prepared for it. She rammed the four-inch blade into his flat hard-muscled belly. For a few seconds, he seemed unaware of it; he slid his hand down from her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, tried to thrust a couple of fingers into her v.a.g.i.n.a. As she jerked the knife out of him, he was stricken by pain. His eyes went wide, and he let out a high-pitched yelp. Hilary stuck the blade into him again, piercing him high and toward the side this time, just under the ribs. His face was suddenly as white and greasy looking as lard. He howled, let go of her, stumbled backwards until he collided with the other wall and knocked an oil painting to the floor.

A violent spasmodic s.h.i.+ver of revulsion snapped through Hilary as she realized what she had done. But she did not drop the knife, and she was fully prepared to stab him again if he attacked her.

Bruno Frye looked down at himself in astonishment. The blade had sunk deep. A thin stream of blood oozed from him, rapidly staining his sweater and pants.

Hilary did not wait for his expression of amazement to metamorphose into agony and anger. She turned and hurried into the guest room, threw the door shut and locked it. For half a minute she listened to Frye's soft groans and curses and clumsy movements, wondering if he had sufficient strength left to smash through the door. She thought she heard him lumbering down the hall toward the stairs, but she couldn't be sure. She ran to the telephone. With bloodless and palsied hands, she picked up the receiver and dialed the operator. She asked for the police.

The b.i.t.c.h! The rotten b.i.t.c.h!

Frye slipped one hand under the yellow sweater and gripped the lower of the two wounds, the gut puncture, for that was the one doing the most bleeding. He squeezed the lips of the cut together as best he could, trying to stop the life from flowing out of him. He felt the warm blood soaking through the st.i.tching of the gloves, onto his fingers.

He was suffering very little pain. A dull burning in his stomach. An electric tingle along his left side. A mild rhythmic twinge timed to his heartbeat. That was the extent of it.

Nevertheless, he knew that he had been badly hurt and was getting worse by the second. He was pathetically weak. His great strength had gushed out of him suddenly and completely.

Holding his belly with one hand, clutching the bannister with the other, he descended to the first floor on steps as treacherous as those in a carnival funhouse; they seemed to tip and pitch and roll. By the time he reached the bottom, he was streaming sweat.

Outside, the sun stung his eyes. It was brighter than he had ever seen it, a monstrous sun that filled the sky and beat mercilessly upon him. He felt as if it were s.h.i.+ning through his eyes and starting tiny fires on the surface of his brain.

Bending over his wounds, cursing, he shuffled south along the sidewalk until he came to the smoke-gray van. He pulled himself up into the driver's seat, drew the door shut as if it weighed ten thousand pounds.

He drove with one hand to Wils.h.i.+re Boulevard, turned right, went to Sepulveda, made a left, looking for a public telephone that offered a lot of privacy. Every b.u.mp in the road was like a blow to his solar plexus. At times, the automobiles around him appeared to stretch and flex and balloon, as if they were constructed of a magical elastic metal, and he had to concentrate to force them back into more familiar shapes.

Blood continued to trickle out of him no matter how tightly he pressed on the wound. The burning in his stomach grew worse. The rhythmic twinge became a sharp pinch. But the catastrophic pain that he knew was coming had not yet arrived.

He drove an interminable distance on Sepulveda before he finally located a pay phone that suited his needs. It was in a back corner of a supermarket parking lot, eighty or a hundred yards from the store.

He parked the van at an angle, screening the phone from everyone at the market and from motorists pa.s.sing on Sepulveda. It was not a booth, just one of those plastic windscreens that were supposed to provide excellent sound-proofing but which had no effect at all on background noise; but at least it appeared to be in service, and it was private enough. A high cement block fence rose behind it, separating the supermarket property from the fringes of a housing tract. On the right, a cl.u.s.ter of shrubs and two small palms s.h.i.+elded the phone from the side street leading off Sepulveda. No one was likely to see him well enough to realize he was hurt; he didn't want anyone nosing around.

He slid across the seat to the pa.s.senger's side and got out that door. When he looked down at the thick red muck oozing between the fingers that were clamped over the worse wound, he felt dizzy, and he looked quickly away. He only had to take three steps to reach the phone, but each of them seemed like a mile.

He could not remember his telephone credit card number, which had been as familiar to him as his birthdate, so he called collect to Napa Valley.

The operator rang it six times.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"I have a collect call for anyone from Bruno Frye. Will you accept the charges?"

"Go ahead, operator."

There was a soft click as she went off the line.

"I'm hurt real bad. I think ... I'm dying," Frye told the man in Napa County.

"Oh, Jesus, no. No!"

"I'll have to ... call an ambulance," Frye said. "And they ... everyone will know the truth."

They spoke for a minute, both of them frightened and confused.

Suddenly, Frye felt something loosen inside him. Like a spring popping. And a bag of water bursting. He screamed in pain.

The man in Napa County cried out in sympathy, as if he felt the same pain.

"Got to ... get an ambulance," Frye said.

He hung up.

Blood had run all the way down his pants to his shoes, and now it was dribbling onto the pavement.

He lifted the receiver off the hook and put it down on the metal shelf beside the phone box. He picked up a dime from the same shelf, on which he had put his pocket change, but his fingers weren't working properly; he dropped it and looked down stupidly as it rolled across the macadam. Found another dime. Held this one as tightly as he could. He lifted the dime as if it were a lead disc as big as an automobile tire, finally put it in the proper slot. He tried to dial 0. He didn't even have enough energy to perform that small ch.o.r.e. His muscle-packed arms, his big shoulders, his gigantic chest, his powerful back, his hard rippled belly, and his ma.s.sive thighs all failed him. He couldn't make the call, and he couldn't even stand up any longer. He fell, rolled over once, and lay face-down on the macadam.

He couldn't move.

He couldn't see. He was blind.

It was a very black darkness.

He was scared.

He tried to tell himself that he would come back from the dead as Katherine had done. I'll come back and get her, he thought. I'll come back. But he really didn't believe it.

As he lay there getting increasingly light-headed, he had a surprisingly lucid moment when he wondered if he had been all wrong about Katherine coming back from the dead. Had it been his imagination? Had he just been killing women who resembled her? Innocent women? Was he mad?

A new explosion of pain blew those thoughts away and forced him to consider the smothering darkness in which he lay.

He felt things moving on him.

Things crawling on him.

Things crawling on his arms and legs.

Things crawling on his face.

He tried to scream. Couldn't.

He heard the whispers.

No!

His bowels loosened.

The whispers swelled into a raging sibilant chorus and, like a great dark river, swept him away.

Thursday morning, Tony Clemenza and Frank Howard located Jilly Jenkins, an old friend of Bobby "Angel" Valdez. Jilly had seen the baby-faced rapist and killer in July, but not since. At that time, Bobby had just quit a job at Vee Vee Gee Laundry on Olympic Boulevard. That was all Jilly knew.

Vee Vee Gee was a large one-story stucco building dating from the early fifties, when an entire Los Angeles school of benighted architects first thought of crossing ersatz Spanish texture and form with utilitarian factory design. Tony had never been able to understand how even the most insensitive architect could see beauty in such a grotesque crossbreed. The orange-red tile roof was studded with dozens of firebrick chimneys and corrugated metal vents; steam rose from about half of those outlets. The windows were framed with heavy timbers, dark and rustic, as if this were the casa of some great and rich terrateniente; but the ugly factory-window gla.s.s was webbed with wire. There were loading docks where the verandas should have been. The walls were straight, the corners sharp, the overall shape boxlike--quite the opposite of the graceful arches and rounded edges of genuine Spanish construction. The place was like an aging wh.o.r.e wearing more refined clothes than was her custom, trying desperately to pa.s.s for a lady.

"Why did they do it?" Tony asked as he got out of the unmarked police sedan and closed the door.

"Do what?" Frank asked.

"Why did they put up so many of these offensive places? What was the point of it?"

Frank blinked. "What's so offensive?"