Better Than This (34 page)

And then it came to me, and the irony actually made me smile. I thought I needed a friend, but sometimes friendship isn’t called for, it’s something else entirely. Understanding was what I needed, and there was only one person who would understand what I planned to do. I picked up the phone and punched in a number.

“Hello?” a sleep-filled voice asked after I let the phone ring a dozen times.

“Alice, it’s Nick,” I said. “I need your help.”

Alice listened to what I had to say without interrupting. I imagined her sitting up in bed on the boat, suddenly wide awake. When I had finished there was a long pause which lasted perhaps four or five seconds. All kinds of possibilities probably occurred to her, including that this was some kind of joke, or even a bad dream, but finally she understood that it was real and that I was serious. I let her work it through in her own time, though five seconds is a very long time when you’ve just asked somebody to help you move a dead body. In the end she only asked me one question.

“Are you sure he’s dead?” Though she was clearly shaken, there was a certain cool logic to the way her mind worked which I wasn’t sure what to make of but it was reassuring to think she wouldn’t become hysterical before the job was finished.

“I think so,” I said

“I’ll be there as quickly as I can.”

“Come to the side door, and park off the street. And, Alice?”

“Yes?”

“Thanks.”

I hung up. My mind was working normally again, and I started to consider what had to be done. I pondered the question Alice had asked and I figured the first thing was to check that Dexter was really dead. As I went back out onto the walkway I remembered the awful sounds I’d heard as his skull struck the steps and how still he’d been when he hit the next landing. There seemed little doubt that he couldn’t have survived. But when I looked down at where his body should have been, he was gone.

My heart almost stopped. The thing that struck me was that though he was obviously alive he had to be in a bad way. And

I had left him there without summoning help. He must have come around and known that.

I ran down the steps and looked both ways along the landing. I expected him to be close by, lying where he’d collapsed after managing to crawl a few feet. But there was no sign of him. In both directions the metal walkway vanished into the shadows. Panic and fear rose in my chest. It was quiet, and suddenly spooky. I turned around, struck by the sudden notion that Dexter was behind me, one outstretched bloody hand groping towards me. There was nothing there, but my foot slid in something wet and when I looked down I saw the dark sticky pool I was standing in. And then I saw the smear where Dexter had dragged himself away and then another smear on the handrail where he must have raised himself to his feet. I started following the footprints he’d made after stepping in his own blood. The prints became fainter, but there were smudges on the handrail where he must have staggered along, clutching for support. My horror was tinged with amazement that he could walk. He had been making for the next flight of steps down to the ground floor. I started to run. My steps clattered loudly.

At the top of the stairs I paused. Below me I heard a thump and then a groan and I peered into the gloom. I saw him then, on his knees at the bottom. He must have heard me coming and in his haste to get away he’d fallen again. Even as I watched he started shuffling across the floor on his hands and knees. I took the steps two at a time. He really was in a bad way. When I hit the floor he collapsed on his belly and pushed himself up with one arm to roll over. I froze as I reached him and bent over.

“Get away from me,” he said. The way it actually sounded was more like gegh ayee. The words were clogged in his throat and blood leaked from the side of his mouth.

I was horrified by his appearance. One entire side of his head was caked with wet blood and his skull seemed oddly flattened. Something sharp and hard appeared to move of its own volition beneath a patch of matted hair, as if something was trying to escape from inside his head. His face was smeared with gore but though he looked and sounded terrible it was his expression that hit me most. This was no longer the Dexter I’d always reviled. The smarmy, oily, ruthless bastard. It wasn’t the man who’d sat in my office half an hour ago telling me I was a loser and I should be glad he was running things because I would be sure to screw it up, who looked at me with undisguised contempt. This was a damaged, terrified, pathetic and gruesome parody of what he’d been. He tried to inch away from me which was obviously and pathetically futile.

“Don’t move,” I said.

“Geaghyrumph.”

I had no idea what he was saying. His words were completely unintelligible. I didn’t know somebody could leak so much blood and still be alive. I pressed his shoulders to the ground.

“Stay still. You shouldn’t move.”

His eyes practically bugged out of his skull and he tried to raise one feeble hand against my chest. I could feel the other somewhere underneath me flapping around like a stranded fish. I was partly lying over him, trying to stop him from moving around and hurting himself any more.

“Sshh,” I said ridiculously, attempting to sound soothing. “You shouldn’t try to talk.”

“Eeaaaagh.”

I shifted more of my weight over him and cradled his head against my chest. I thought he might stay still that way. His hand still flapped around underneath me, the other scrabbling weakly against my chest.

“It’ll be all right. Help’s coming.”

I thought he might feel better if I told him that. I couldn’t see his face any more. As I held him I tried not to think about the sponginess beneath my fingers.

“You had a fall. Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. Few days in hospital. Good as new.”

His hand flickered. He twitched and struggled weakly. I held him tighter until he stopped moving altogether.

I sat with him in the semi-darkness for a few minutes. There was a lot of blood on the floor, and more on the steps and up on the landing which I had to clean up. Eventually I let Dexter go and laid him back down. For some reason I expected him to look peaceful, that’s how dead people are often described, but Dexter looked anything but peaceful. Aside from the gore his eyes bugged and his expression was contorted in terror.

I took off my shoes and socks so I didn’t make any more bloody footprints and then I went to the washroom and cleaned the soles of my shoes. The water from the tap ran clear into the basin, then briefly red before turning a brownish hue. When it was clear again I dried my shoes with a paper towel and put them back on, then I took off my shirt which was covered with blood and pieces of tissue and hair and I rinsed that out too. My jeans were stained around the thighs, but relatively dry so I figured it was safe to leave them on and dispose of them later. I went to the cleaning supplies room and filled a mop bucket with hot soapy water, then I went back out to where Dexter lay and turned on the lights. I started working as fast as I could, beginning on the stairs and working upwards. The last thing I wanted was some security guard stopping to see who had turned the lights on. I didn’t look at Dexter, though now and then I caught sight of him in the periphery of my vision as I turned to wring out the mop. Working quickly but not hastily, I scrutinized each step and every inch of the handrail before I moved on. I knew that I couldn’t hope to erase every microscopic trace of blood, and that if the building was subjected to a proper forensic examination in the near future I was finished. But I was relying on that never happening. So long as I removed all the visible evidence there was no reason for anyone to suspect Dexter had ever been there. I planned to get rid of him a long way from there.

Most of the blood was at the bottom of both flights of stairs, along with footprints and smears on the walkway where Dexter had originally fallen. Cleaning up didn’t take too long and by the time I did a final check the lights had been on for only twenty minutes. There was still the body and the blood around it to deal with, but I decided to wait for Alice to arrive until I tackled that part. In the meantime I turned out the main lights again, emptied the bucket and filled it with fresh water. Then I sat down to wait and think.

Less than five minutes later I heard a knock at the door and when I went over I heard Alice speak in a low urgent voice.

“Nick? Are you there?”

I opened the door to let her in and after taking a quick look around outside I closed it behind her. We looked at each other.

“You’re all wet,” she observed.

“I had to do some cleaning up.”

She peered beyond me at the dark shape lying on the floor, and then she took a visible breath as we went over. Belatedly I wished that I’d covered Dexter’s head with something so that she didn’t have to see the worst of the damage, but it was too late for that. When she looked at him her gaze was pulled inexorably to his face and she blanched. I reached out a steadying hand.

“You okay?” She had gone very pale and I was worried she would faint. After a while she managed to nod.

She looked at the steps and her eye travelled up to the walkway and along to the second flight of steps that led to the second landing. “I thought you said he fell outside your office.”

“He did.”

She took a moment to absorb that, and then she looked back at me and didn’t ask any more questions.

“I’ve cleaned everywhere except here. I’ll do that when we’ve moved him,” I said. I’d used the few minutes’ time I had to think before Alice had arrived to formulate a plan. I explained that I’d bring Dexter’s car around to the door from the street and we’d put him in the trunk and drive along the coast and dump him over a cliff into the ocean.

“We have to hurry, we don’t have a lot of time.”

Alice started to say something, then stopped. I think she was having trouble taking it all in. Her mind couldn’t keep up with it. Her mouth kind of hung open as if she was in a state of mild shock which I could understand. I’d already been through that stage and now I was running on nervous energy. I couldn’t pause or allow myself to think too hard about what I was doing. I gripped her arm.

“I need to know you’re not going to give out on me, Alice.”

She swallowed, then nodded.

“Good, let’s get to it.” I looked at Dexter, then bent down and went through his pockets until I found his keys.

It took forty minutes to get the body in the car and clean up the rest of the blood. I made sure the bucket was rinsed and the mop and cloth I’d used too, and did a final check before I reset the building alarm and locked the outside door. First we took both my car and Alice’s and parked hers a couple of blocks away, then we went back to fetch Dexter’s Mercedes. It was almost four in the morning by the time we headed for Daly City and then onto Highway One through Pacifica and beyond to the coast. I drove Dexter’s car, and Alice followed in mine. We drove into the hills past Point San Pedro, where the road cuts through carved out rock and twists and turns treacherously as it dips and rises. I knew a spot where in the winter when it rains heavily the hill turns into a muddy slide blocking the road and tumbling down to the ocean. It was the perfect place for what I had in mind and wasn’t too far, which was important because in less than an hour it would begin to get light and I still had to get home before Sally woke.

I drove carefully and Alice kept close behind all the way. Thankfully we didn’t even see another car, which wasn’t unusual at that time of night. Eventually I slowed because I knew we were getting close. I had the window down and I could hear the surge and restless growl of the ocean as it slapped at the rocks far below. The headlights picked out an approaching bend and as I came through it there was a pull over on my left and just before my lights dipped as the road fell away they picked out the shape of an old World War Two battlement. I put on my indicator and pulled over, and Alice followed me.

“Turn out your lights,” I said when I went over. She killed the engine too, and suddenly we were pitched in blackness. The noise of the ocean was louder now.

“Where are we?” Alice said.

“It’s called Devil’s Slide.” I motioned for her to follow me. We crossed the road and walked over the soft earth to the edge of the cliff. “Don’t get too close,” I warned. The edge was crumbling and unsafe. Down below the ocean surged restlessly. I could just about make out the pale foam, and faint streaking on the rocks picked out by the pale moonlight which struggled to penetrate thin cloud.

“Pelicans nest down there,” I said, seeing Alice looking at the streaks. “This cliff is maybe two hundred feet straight down. There are rocks at the bottom, but the water off them is quite deep.”

We looked back towards Dexter’s car. I was tense now. I wanted this over with. All the way there I’d thought about a hundred different things that could go wrong. That we be seen was the most obvious, but even if we weren’t questions were going to be asked when Dexter’s car was found. Like what he was doing there, how he came to drive off the cliff, and once an autopsy was carried out and the car examined properly it wouldn’t take the authorities long to figure out that there was a lot that didn’t add up. Such as why there were blood traces in the trunk and no doubt there would be dozens of postmortem details that didn’t sit with Dexter having decided to drive over a cliff for no good reason. I had read my share of Patricia Cornwell novels. But there was no time to come up with a better plan. I was relying on the hope that nobody had any reason to tie me to Dexter’s death no matter how suspicious it appeared, and with any luck the ocean and the fall would do a good job of obliterating, or at least clouding, much of the evidence anyway. Plus if I got home in time I had the best possible alibi inasmuch as I was home in bed all night with my wife.

Alice too had been thinking and she looked worried. I was getting concerned about the time.

“We put Dexter behind the wheel and send the car over the edge,” I said. “By the time he’s found nobody is going to know what happened. Okay?”

Alice nodded. I checked back along the road. It was dark but that didn’t mean a car couldn’t come along at any moment.