Graveyard Plots (5 page)

Arbagast got up then and went to the closet and took the City Telephone Directory from a shelf there. Then he dressed slowly and shaved and went downstairs to his car. He drove across town to the address he had found in the telephone book and parked across the street. He sat there, looking over at the white frame house where Philip Colineaux lived.

It was a nice house, well kept, freshly painted. A flagstone walk led through a garden alive in color, and there was a high green hedge bordering the right side of the property, near the garage.

Arbagast sat staring across the street. Eight o'clock came, and then nine. No one ventured out. Colineaux wasn't going to work today. Not today.

Arbagast returned to the small furnished room. He made some coffee and fried two eggs, and then he took the gun from the closet and broke it down and oiled and cleaned it. He put shells in the chambers, spinning the cylinder, and, when he was satisfied, put on the safety and slipped it into the pocket of his overcoat.

That night, just after dark, he drove to Philip Colineaux's house and parked across the street, as he had done that morning. He sat there in the darkness until ten o'clock. There were lights in the front room, but the windows were curtained and he could not see inside. No one came out.

The following morning, Arbagast was there again at dawn. He waited until almost noon. There was no sign of activity from inside the house.

At dusk he set up his vigil once more. Shortly past nine, the porch light came on above the door. Arbagast sat up in the seat, his hand touching the gun in his coat pocket.

A man came out onto the porch, standing in the light. There was a woman behind him, in the doorway.
Going out to get some air
, Arbagast thought
. He's been in there two days. But he won't drive.

The woman shut the door after a moment, and the man stood alone on the porch. He was short, past forty, dressed in slacks and a light windbreaker; hatless. Even at the distance across the street, Arbagast could see that his features were nondescript; it was not the face you would expect to see on a killer.

The man came down the steps and began to walk along the flagstone walk toward the street. Arbagast got out of the car, his
fingers clenching on the gun in his pocket, and walked quickly across the deserted street. The man stopped in the shadows of the green hedge as he approached, frowning slightly.

Arbagast said, "Colineaux? Philip Colineaux?"

"Yes?" the man said.

"My name is Walter Arbagast."

The name did not immediately mean anything to Colineaux.

"Yes?" he said again.

Arbagast took the gun from his pocket. Colineaux made a half-step backward, his eyes bulging. "My God, what—?"

"Come with me, please," Arbagast said.

"With you?" Colineaux said blankly.

"That's my car across the street."

Colineaux shook his head, not comprehending. "Who are you?" he said. "What is it you want?"

"My name is Walter Arbagast. Surely you remember the name, Colineaux."

"No, I . . ."

"Rosa Arbagast was my wife."

Understanding, complete and instant, flooded Colineaux's eyes.

His mouth opened as if to speak, but no words came forth. His face paled. Spittle flecked his lips.

"Yes," Arbagast said. "That's right. The woman you murdered."

"Murdered?" Colineaux said. "No! No, listen, it was an accident! It was dark. She was wearing dark clothes. I was thinking about something else, and I didn't see her. She came out of nowhere. Oh, God, it was an accident!"

"You ran her down," Arbagast said. "You ran her down and then left her to die in the street."

The right side of Colineaux's face began to spasm convulsively. His eyes were black, terrified. "I was frightened!" he moaned. "I panicked! Can't you understand how it was?"

"I understand you murdered my wife," Arbagast said without rancor, without emotion.

"What . . . what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to kill you," Arbagast said simply. "I'm going to run you down with my car. The same way you ran my wife down."

"You're mad! You're insane!"

"Yes," Arbagast said. "Perhaps I am."

Colineaux began to sag. It was as if the bones in his body had suddenly liquefied. His mouth opened and a soundless scream bubbled from his throat.

Arbagast pressed the gun against his stomach. "Don't make a sound," he said. "If you do, I'll kill you right here in front of your house, where you stand."

Colineaux seemed about to crumble. Arbagast took his arm and led him across the street. He opened the rear door to the car. "Get inside and lie flat on the seat. Put your hands behind you."

Colineaux was like a child in his fear. Mutely, he obeyed. Arbagast shut the door and got into the front seat. He took the roll of adhesive tape from the glove compartment and began to tape Colineaux's hands and ankles. When he had finished, he put a strip of tape across his mouth.

"If you rise up in the seat," Arbagast said, "I'll stop the car and shoot you in the back of the head. Do you understand?"

There was a strangled whimper from the man in the back seat. Arbagast nodded. He started the car and drove away.

"We're going out to the Western Avenue Extension," he said aloud, for Colineaux to hear. "There's a side road there, leading up to the reservoir. Nobody uses it much anymore."

The quiet suburban street sang beneath the wheels of the car, and that was the only reply.

"Do you know the stretch just before you reach the reservoir?" Arbagast asked. "It's walled by bluffs on two sides. There's no way you can get off the road there."

The night was deep and black and still.

"I'm going to untie you and let you out there," Arbagast said. "I'm going to give you a chance, Colineaux. You can run for your life. That's more of a chance than you gave Rosa."

The street sang faster, faster

Arbagast turned his head slightly, looking into the rear seat. "Do you hear me, Colineaux? Do you—"

He did not see the woman until it was almost too late.

The street had been empty, dark. Then, as if by some strange necromancy, she was there, directly in front of him, a shadowy blur with a grotesque white face that seemed to rush at him, hurtling through the night as he stood still, an empyreal vision captured in the yellow glare of his headlights.

Arbagast swung the wheel in terror, his foot crashing down on the brake, just as that monstrous white face seemed about to strike him head on. The car went into a vicious skid, the quiet, still night exploding into the scream of rubber against pavement. One of the wheels went up over the curb, and the rear end scraped the base of a giant eucalyptus tree that grew there, and then the car settled, and died, on the street. The black night was once again silent.

Arbagast threw open the door, leaning out. The woman stood in the middle of the street behind him, an obscure statue. Then she began to walk, moving unsteadily, coming up the street toward him, and he could see her clearly, see her white face shining in the darkness.

It was Rosa's face.

A strangled cry tore from Arbagast's throat. He slammed the door, his hand twisting the ignition key. The starter whirred, whirred, and then caught, and he fought the lever into gear, his hands trembling violently on the wheel, his heart plunging in his chest. He got the car turned, straightened, and then he was pulling away, and the woman, the apparition, grew smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror until she became a speck that was swallowed, digested, by the night.

Oh, my God!
Arbagast thought.
Oh, my God in Heaven!

He drove three blocks and turned to the right, pulling in at the curb on a poorly lighted street. He shut off the engine, the headlights.

Turning on the seat, he reached into the back and pulled Colineaux to a sitting position. His trembling hands tore the tape from Colineaux's mouth.

"What happened back there?" Colineaux gasped, his voice mirroring the fear on his face. "What happened?"

Arbagast was unable to answer. He leaned down and unwound the tape from Colineaux's legs, from his hands. He forced words to come then. "Get out," he said. "Get out now."

Colineaux sat there, immobile. He did not understand. He could not believe.

"Get out," Arbagast said again, and wrenched open the rear door. Colineaux moved. His body came alive, and he scuttled across the
seat, hands clawing, pushing himself outside. He hesitated there for a second, looking back at Arbagast, and then he began to run. Arbagast watched him running off, spindle-legged, down the darkened street. After a long moment, he started the car again and drove away in the opposite direction.

Slowly, carefully, keeping well within the legal speed limit, his eyes fixed on the retreating concrete no longer singing beneath his headlights, he drove back to his small furnished room.

He was drunk in bed when the police came.

A
t 11:23 P.M. on Saturday, the twenty-sixth of April, a small man wearing rimless glasses and a dark gray business suit walked into the detective squad room in San Francisco's Hall of Justice and confessed to the murders of three Bay Area housewives whose bodies had been found that afternoon and evening.

Inspector Glenn Rauxton, who first spoke to the small man, thought he might be a crank. Every major homicide in any large city draws its share of oddballs and mental cases, individuals who confess to crimes in order to attain public recognition in otherwise unsubstantial lives; or because of some secret desire for punishment; or for any number of reasons that can be found in the casebooks of police psychiatrists. But it wasn't up to Rauxton to make a decision either way. He left the small man in the company of his partner, Dan Tobias, and went in to talk to his immediate superior, Lieutenant Jack Sheffield.

"We've got a guy outside who says he's the killer of those three women today, Jack," Rauxton said. "Maybe a crank, maybe not."

Sheffield turned away from the portable typewriter at the side of his desk; he had been making out a report for the chief's office. "He come in of his own volition?"

Rauxton nodded. "Not three minutes ago."

"What's his name?"

"He says it's Andrew Franzen."

"And his story?"

"So far, just that he killed them," Rauxton said. "I didn't press him. He seems pretty calm about the whole thing."

"Well, run his name through the weirdo file, and then put him in one of the interrogation cubicles," Sheffield said. "I'll look through the reports again before we question him."

"You want me to get a stenographer?"

"It would probably be a good idea."

"Right," Rauxton said, and went out.

Sheffield rubbed his face wearily. He was a lean, sinewy man in his late forties, with thick graying hair and a falconic nose. He had dark brown eyes that had seen most everything there was to see, and been appalled by a good deal of it; they were tired, sad eyes. He wore a plain blue suit, and his shirt was open at the throat. The tie he had worn to work when his tour started at 4:00 P.M., which had been given to him by his wife and consisted of interlocking, psychedelic-colored concentric circles, was out of sight in the bottom drawer of his desk.

He picked up the folder with the preliminary information on the three slayings and opened it. Most of it was sketchy telephone communications from the involved police forces in the Bay Area, a precursory report from the local lab, a copy of the police telex that he had sent out statewide as a matter of course following the discovery of the first body, and that had later alerted the other authorities in whose areas the two subsequent corpses had been found. There was also an Inspector's Report on that first and only death in San Francisco, filled out and signed by Rauxton. The last piece of information had come in less than a half hour earlier, and he knew the facts of the case by memory, but Sheffield was a meticulous cop and he liked to have all the details fixed in his mind.

The first body was of a woman named Janet Flanders, who had been discovered by a neighbor at 4:15 that afternoon in her small duplex on 39th Avenue, near Golden Gate Park. She had been killed by several blows about the head with an as yet unidentified blunt instrument.

The second body, of one Viola Gordon, had also been found by a neighbor—shortly before 5:00 P.M. —in her neat, white frame cottage in South San Francisco. Cause of death: several blows about the head with an unidentified blunt instrument.

The third body, Elaine Dunhill, had been discovered at 6:37 P.M. by a casual acquaintance who had stopped by to return a borrowed book. Mrs. Dunhill lived in a modest cabin-style home clinging to the wooded hillside above Sausalito Harbor, just north of San Francisco. She, too, had died as a result of several blows about the head with an unidentified blunt instrument.

There were no witnesses, or apparent clues, in any of the killings. They would have, on the surface, appeared to be unrelated if it had not been for the fact that each of the three women had died on the same day, and in the same manner. But there were other cohesive factors as well—factors that, taken in conjunction with the surface similarities, undeniably linked the murders.