A Grave Talent (28 page)

"Good evening, Ms. Cameron," he said coolly. "Sorry to bother you. We're trying to find some information on one of your neighbors, and wonder if you might be able to help us?"

"Certainly. Come in." She stood back and waved them into a room so utterly ordinary it might have come from a catalog of motel furniture, onto which had been strewn a solid layer of books, covering every flat surface--heavy books with dark leather bindings and titles in gold, gothic letters, in a number of languages. She gathered a few together to clear the second pair of the quartet of metal and vinyl chairs at the Formica table, then stacked the tomes onto the table and sat looking over them. She was not a short woman but looked small beneath the hair, within the robe, and behind the books.

"I'm afraid I won't be able to help much," she said. She had a sweet, low voice, and not so much an accent as a careful precision and rhythm to her speech. "We've only been here since January, and I'm so rarely home, I haven't had a chance to get to know my neighbors."

A voice came from the sofa, accompanied by one foot waving in the air. Hawkin had all but forgotten the younger generation of this incredible race of genius-goddesses.

"My mother was recently appointed to the chair of medieval German literature at the university," said the voice, and then volunteered, "I am going to practice criminal law." Hawkin blanched at the thought of such a defense lawyer and hoped he would be retired before she came on the scene. Her head appeared over the back of the chintz. "Which neighbor?"

"Mr. Tony Andrews, in number thirty-four." He dragged his attention back to the mother. "He's been missing for some days, and his family is beginning to worry."

The daughter snorted derisively.

"So they sent two high-ranking officers out to look for a missing person?"

"Jules," her mother began.

"Oh Mother, the police don't do things that way, and besides, I've seen them both on the news. They're working on that case of the little girls and the artist."

The mother turned a look on Hawkin that made him feel like a student who had been caught in a bit of plagiarism.

"Is this true?" she asked.

"We do work on more than one case at once, sometimes," Hawkin said, trying for sternness, but it sounded weak even to his own ears. He pulled himself together. "Mr. Andrews. Do you know him?"

"No, I don't think--"

"Yes, Mother, we met him last month, don't you remember? The day you were giving a paper in San Francisco and couldn't get the car started."

"Oh, yes, him. I had forgotten his name. Nice man."

"He was not," said Jules sternly.

"Well, I thought--"

"Pardon me, miss," interrupted Trujillo. "Why did you think he was not nice?"

For a moment the child was at an obviously uncharacteristic loss for words. She quickly mustered her forces, but her answer was given with a chin raised in half-defiant embarrassment.

"I don't have a reason, not really. Nothing concrete, I mean. It was simply an impression. I did not like the way he looked at my mother. It was," she paused to choose a word. "It was speculative, without the earthy immediacy with which most men react to her."

(Earthy immediacy? thought Hawkin, uncomfortably aware of the earthiness of his own first reaction to the woman. Where does this kid come from?)

"Jules!" her mother scolded. "You sound like a bad romance novel."

"I thought it was a good phrase," her daughter protested.

"It is inappropriate."

"But accurate." Accuracy was obviously the ultimate consideration in Jules Cameron's life and, judging by the capitulation of her mother, it was a family trait.

"Was that the only reason?" Hawkin interjected, before the conversation deteriorated into semantics. "The way he looked at your mother?"

"I also found his physical appearance, his untrimmed beard and dirty hands, didn't go with the clothes he was wearing. They seemed almost to belong to a different man entirely, although they fit him well. He helped us with the car," she concluded, as if to a panel of jurors, "but he was not a nice man."

"I see," said Hawkin, trying to. He spoke halfway between the two women. (Women?) "Did he say anything to you, about where he was going, friends, anything like that?" To his relief the mother picked up the story.

"He saw I was having trouble with the car. Jules and I were looking into the motor trying to find a loose wire or something obvious when he walked by and saw us. He rummaged around for a few minutes--"

"It was the alternator lead, as I told her," Jules put in.

"--although I said he mustn't get his suit dirty. He said not to worry, he was a mechanic and it would only take a minute, and it did--he got it going right away."

"He told you he was a mechanic?" asked Hawkin.

"That's what he said. I offered to pay him, but he laughed, a nice laugh--"

"It wasn't," growled the sofa.

"--and said I should keep my money and buy my little girl a doll."

(Ah.)

"Can you believe it?" exclaimed the insulted party. "Can anyone be so sexist and archaic in this day and age?"

Trujillo was looking from fond mother to indignant daughter with a stunned expression, his mouth gaping slightly.

"Did you see how he left? His car?" Hawkin asked.

"No. Did you, Jules?"

"Yes. There was a man waiting for him on the street, in a red Grand Prix. I remember thinking the name of the car was funny because he so obviously considered himself a big prize."

"Beg your pardon, Miss?" said Trujillo, who was trying to write all this down. She looked at him pityingly.

"Grand Prix. A pun?" She sighed. "Grand Prix is French for 'big prize'."

"Oh. Right."

"It must've been his car, too, because the other man moved over into the passenger seat to let him drive."

"I don't suppose you noticed the license plate number," said Hawkin, knowing that if she had, she'd have given it to them right off.

She looked abashed. "I knew you would ask me that. No, I didn't. All I remember is that it wasn't personalized--I did look for that, I remember--and that it was fairly new."

"Was that the only time you saw him?"

"Yes," said Jules.

"No," said her mother, and looked at her daughter apologetically. "I saw him a couple of weeks ago. It must have been a Tuesday night, because I was coming in from my late class. He was just going out as I came in, so I said hello and thanked him again. He said he was glad to help. That was all."

"Which Tuesday was this?"

"Not last week. The week before, a couple of days before the storm."

The day after Samantha Donaldson was killed. Hawkin stared for a long minute at a book spine with a title he couldn't begin to pronounce, and thought. And thought. When he finally looked up the woman was looking amused.

"Sorry," he said.

"I do it all the time." She smiled, and his middle-aged heart turned over, and he wanted to stay seated at this horrid plastic table forever.

"What was he wearing?" It was nearly a random question.

"Something old, blue jeans and a dark jacket over a work shirt of some kind. Plaid, I think. Red plaid. It looked better on him than the suit did. More appropriate."

"How did he seem to you?"

"Cheerful. Excited, almost. He looked tired as well, though."

"Do you think he killed that little girl?" breathed Jules, looking curious and doubtful and more than a bit scared. Hawkin turned from her to her mother, who just looked scared. He took out his card and wrote a number on it.

"Ms. Cameron, if you, or your daughter, see the man Andrews at any time, do not allow yourself to be alone with him, and call this number as soon as you can. He may no longer have a beard." He showed them the drawings. "I would also appreciate it if you would not talk with your friends or neighbors about this conversation, not for a few days. It could jeopardize the investigation and put people in danger." He fixed Jules with a hard eye, and she put her chin up.

"I don't gossip," she said with dignity.

"I didn't think you would," he said, and stood up to go. At the door he stopped and looked down at the child and thought of poor, confused Amy up on Tyler's Road.

"So you want to go into law?" he asked.

"It's one option," she agreed.

"Would you like to see a trial some day, meet the judge, talk to the lawyers?"

"I would, very much." From the gleam in her eye he might have been offering Disneyland.

"When this case is over, if I can work a free day, we'll see what we can do."

Trujillo stared at him as if he were crazy; Jules looked at him as if he were God; Jules's mother looked him over as if he were a distinct possibility.

In the elevator Trujillo watched the numbers change with great concentration, and they had stepped out of the box and onto the ground floor before he could no longer contain himself.

"Did you really have to ask the kid to go to court with you? I mean, God, the mother, and it's probably the only way to get to her, through the kid, but still. Can you imagine her cross-examining you?" The thought was one to give him nightmares, obviously.

"I thought she was cute."

Trujillo looked incredulous. "Cute like a cobra, you mean."

"Not so bad. And look at it this way, I may convert her to aiming for the D.A.'s office. We could use a few of those on our side, don't you think?"

Trujillo just shook his head and muttered something under his breath. It sounded like "earthy immediacy."

Hawkin let him conduct the last three interviews of the evening, which were short, uninformative, and extraordinarily dull.

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Thursday involved sending people out to trudge through every garage, gas station, and body shop in that part of San Jose, with no luck. Friday they widened their search, with little hope, but within the hour one of the San Jose men found the garage. Hawkin and Trujillo were there in twenty minutes.

It was a big, sprawling work shed filled with men and cars and noise. The owner, Dan Whittier, was a giant with a huge belly and no hips, whose greasy black trousers threatened to descend with every step. He recognized "Tony Andrews" from the drawing, a guy who came in occasionally to help when they were rushed. First met him about a year ago, at a bar. Yes, it might have been the Golden Grill; he went in there sometimes. No, he didn't think anyone introduced them, just got to talking. No, he hadn't seen him for a couple of weeks. Yes, he'd tried to reach him, left a message on the answering machine like usual, but he never showed up. It had happened before; no problem, the work got done eventually. The number? Yeah, it was here, next to the phone.

It was the number of the apartment.

Trujillo asked a few more questions until it was obvious that to this man, Tony was a nice guy, an adequate mechanic who helped out occasionally in exchange for being able to use the facilities during off hours to work on his own cars. Offhand, nobody could remember any of his cars except in the vaguest of terms--a pickup, a red Grand Prix, a couple of old Dodges--but no paperwork had been kept on any of them.

Frustrated, they left, and looked back, and then came the little break that was to earn Trujillo his promotion. Among the many cars, trucks, and vans sitting inside the chain-link fence of the storage yard were two U.S. Government mail-delivery vehicles, the boxy white ones used for streetside delivery. Trujillo walked around the unmarked car to the driver's side and then paused and looked thoughtfully back over the car roof toward the storage yard.

"Have you ever noticed," he said slowly, "how people don't remember seeing things like mail vans? They're nearly invisible."

Hawkin stared at him, then stared at the two innocent white delivery trucks, and was one step ahead of him when they went back through Dan Whittier's door.

Dan Whittier was surprised and a bit annoyed at seeing them again, and followed them back into his office. Yes, they had Post Office vehicles here from time to time. Not regularly, just when the government's regular mechanics were swamped. Oh, yes, those they kept close records of. What dates were they interested in? Trujillo gave him the three dates. The first one would be from last year's books, Whittier told them, which weren't here now, but the second and third dates were very clear: yes, there was a mail van in during both those times, had come in two working days before in both cases, and yes, Andrews had worked on them, and yes, Andrews had taken them out for road tests, and come to think of it the last time, yes, he had been gone a long time, four or five hours, something wrong with the fuses, and yes, Trujillo was welcome to the license numbers if it would allow Dan to get back to his cars.

Several telephone calls later a police team laid claim to the two vehicles. The one that had been into the shop back in January had since been thoroughly cleaned; the one that had been in on the day Samantha Donaldson had disappeared had not been and gave forth several very nice latent prints of Andrew Lewis, from places one would not normally expect an engine mechanic to lay his hand, places where a man might brace himself, say, when lifting an awkward weight from the back. More materially there were several hairs, which proved later to make as close to a match with hairs from Samantha Donaldson's head as modern forensic science could judge, and finally a small snag of blue knitting wool that was microscopically identical to the remainder of the ball in the knitting basket of Samantha's grandmother.

The postal van, the apartment, the Lewis/Dodson/Andrews tie, the rough partial print on Samantha's neck--Hawkin had a case that was air-tight.

All he lacked was Lewis himself.

Lee's dinner that Friday was the closest she ever came to failure, and it first amazed and then amused Kate to see Lee bothered out of all proportion. Kate didn't show her feelings, though, and dutifully protested as the tight-lipped cook scraped the fallen souffle into the garbage and reassured her that carrot soup, chewy multigrain rolls, a cold marinated vegetable salad, and raspberry-walnut torte were quite enough to keep them from starvation. Normally Lee would have shrugged and served the souffle flat, but it seemed as if the uneasy peace between Lee and Al Hawkin allowed for no sign of weakness.

However, several glasses of an excellent Pinot Noir smoothed things over, and by the end of the meal even Lee had relaxed. She shooed them off to the fireplace with a tray of coffee while she did a preliminary cleanup, and Kate put some sticks together and produced a merry blaze that added to the
gemutlichkeit
.

Hawkin sat with Vaun at opposite ends of the long linen-covered sofa and propped his feet up on a stool with the attitude of a man resting from a heavy burden. He perched his cup and saucer on his stomach and closed his eyes. Vaun pulled one leg up under her and considered him, head tipped to one side. Kate drank her coffee and wondered what the artist's eyes were seeing, the effects of late hours and human ugliness that his job had carved into his face, the bone sheathed in muscle, the skull beneath the skin. She looked from him to her, and abruptly, disconcertingly, she knew that Vaun was looking at this man Hawkin not as an artist, but as a woman, with interest. The thought so surprised her that she put her cup down with a rattle and broke the tableau. Hawkin opened his eyes and looked at her, and she had the uncomfortable feeling that he had followed her thoughts, impossible as it might be. Vaun uncurled to lean forward and fill her cup from the carafe on the table, and paused to look questioningly at Hawkin, who held out his cup to her. She poured, looked the same question at Kate, who shook her head, and they all settled back as Lee came in and took the chair between Vaun and Kate.

Twenty minutes of light conversation followed, Hawkin's entertaining story of a rock star and his current and equally famous lady friend who found themselves tumbling out the front door of the poshest hotel in town, stark naked and screaming obscenities to the amusement of passersby and the horror of the management. Hawkin told a good story. Even Vaun laughed and showed a faint flush of color in her cheeks, though whether it was from the wine or from Hawkin's story, or from his presence, Kate could not be sure.

As the laughter of his audience faded, before there could be any anticipation of what he was going to say, Hawkin put down his cup and turned to Vaun.

"It's decision time," he said, and before they could tense up, continued, "let me go over what we've got, first," and he told them of the week's findings. Kate had heard it before and had passed on abridged versions, but Hawkin laid it out in a clear series of interrelated steps, ending with Dan Whittier's garage. He waited for a moment to let it all settle in and then sat forward, elbows on knees, and studied his palms and interlinked fingers as he continued.

"When we made this plan for a publicized outing, we had almost nothing on Lewis, and the purpose of drawing him to Vaun was as much to incriminate him as it was actually to lay hands on him. That situation has changed. It will take several days for the full lab results, but I think that mail truck will provide enough evidence to nail him.

"How, then, do we take him? He could be in Mexico, but I don't think so. I think he's in the Bay Area. If we took the place apart, plastered the newspapers and the notice boards with the drawings, we'd probably find him. I'd like to do it that way. There's a very good chance we'd have him in two or three days."

"And the other chance?" Vaun smiled, but he was not looking at her.

"The other chance is that we miss him or that he's already out of the area and will go to ground when he hears there's a manhunt out for him. Which leaves you in an extremely difficult position." Now he looked at her, with a sad, lopsided smile. Kate had told him that Vaun intended to paint no more, and it had hurt him, she knew him well enough now to see, although he had said nothing. "You could probably afford to hire a bodyguard, but I don't imagine you'd care for that much, not for any length of time."

"No."

"Now, I wouldn't normally ask someone else's advice on this kind of thing, but in this case I need your cooperation, and I want to know how you feel about it. Do we continue with the idea of a trap, or do we drop it and hunt him down?"

Vaun did not hesitate.

"I would like to go on with it."

"Somehow I thought you would." He grinned at her, then became brisk. "Right, tomorrow you three go out and wander around, pose for a couple of pictures and answer some questions from our pet reporter, come back here in the afternoon. Meanwhile, Trujillo or one of his people will bring that gorgeous car of yours up from Tyler's and leave it down the street with its cover on. Sunday there's a nice article and photograph of Vaun, and in the article two pointer arrows for Lewis to follow: first, that you're staying in the Russian Hill area with a couple of friends, and second, that you'll be meeting with reporters at an unspecified place on Tuesday morning. That will give Lewis two options, either to wander around the neighborhood with several hundred others, all of whom hope to catch a glimpse of you, until he recognizes the shape of your car, or to call the paper to find out where you'll be meeting with the reporters on Tuesday morning. We'll set up a trace on any such call, and if we don't get lucky, we'll wait for him to show his head Tuesday morning. If none of the three brings him to us, on Wednesday we'll go after him. What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," said Vaun, "it sounds fine. It's just... it's so difficult to tie all this together with Andy."

"He's a bastard, Vaun," said Hawkin in a hard voice. "He's a monster inside a man's body, a creature who thinks nothing of strangling cats and dogs and little girls and sending other people to prison and into madness, so long as he has his revenge."

"Oh, God, I know, I know. You have to stop him--
we
have to stop him. You have to remember, though, he was my first lover, and to a part of me he'll always be that. For heaven's sake, Al, don't look so worried. I won't go all sentimental on you. I'll do what needs doing."

"Are you sure? It's not too late to back out."

"I am sure."

He studied her face for some hint of the future, and sighed.

"All right. I just need a word from you to get the machinery moving. Where do you want to go tomorrow?"

Lee cleared her throat. "There's a lovely show of Postimpressionists at the Legion of Honor, if you haven't seen it," she suggested. "Or some gorgeous Tibetan sculptures at--"

Vaun set her cup down with a crack and stood up, thrust her hands into her pockets, moved over to stand at the gap in the curtain and peer with one eye out at the city spilling down at her feet.

"I couldn't do that," she said lightly. "I could never look a Cezanne in the face again if I performed this farce in his presence. No, some place that can't be spoiled." She turned to face them, an odd expression around her gaunt eyes and mouth, an expression that in another, less invariably serious face might have been read as deadpan humor. She met Hawkin's eyes and jerked her head slightly to indicate the curtain behind her.

"I think, if you don't mind, I would like to go to Alcatraz."