JP Beaumont 11 - Failure To Appear (v5.0) (32 page)

“Please, Marjorie,” Gordon Fraymore said haltingly, and with far more gentleness than I would have thought possible. “Please don’t make me do this.”

She stopped, turned around, and looked at him then. There was a moment—a vivid, electric, breathtaking moment—when everything I didn’t understand suddenly whirred into focus like a scene in the viewfinder on one of those new electronic cameras. It happened when I finally allowed my senses to make the obvious connections—to see the abject way Gordon Fraymore was looking at her. When I let myself hear the heartbreak and desperate pleading in his voice.

Marjorie Connors and Gordon Fraymore were lovers.

And in that moment, when I realized the truth, I finally understood why Fraymore had dragged me along to the hospital, why he had issued me the bullet-proof vest.

For several seconds, no one moved. We all three stood there, frozen in place like life-sized pieces of art in public places. Marjorie’s right hand never left her pocket. She kept her gaze focused on Fraymore’s face, but she seemed impervious to the look of stark entreaty that was written there.

“I’m leaving now, Gordon,” she said firmly, the way a mother speaks to a recalcitrant child. “We all have to do what we have to do. If you want to stop me, you’ll have to shoot.”

With that, she climbed into the Suburban, shut and locked the door behind her, and started the engine. She jammed the gearshift into reverse and peeled out of the parking place, then she sent the truck barreling forward. Fraymore and I were left standing in a shower of gravel and a cloud of dust.

For another moment, Gordon Fraymore still didn’t move. Ashen-faced, he stared after the fleeing truck, then slowly he let out his breath.

He sighed. “We’d better go get her and bring her back,” he said grimly.

Several blocks away a fanfare of pealing trumpets from the Elizabethan announced the beginning of the outdoor show. Onstage there would be plenty of action and fighting. Fake blood would flow during well-choreographed swordplay, but no one would die. After the performance, all the players—the ones who survived the plot as well as those who didn’t—would appear onstage for curtain calls and much-deserved applause.

Down here in the church parking lot, real lives were on the line. None of us would be using fake bullets. Ours were all too real. When the action was over, there was a better-than-even chance that one or more of us would be either badly hurt or dead. But we weren’t worthy of pealing trumpets. And when the action was over, I doubted we’d be rewarded with a round of applause, either. It didn’t seem fair.

“Why’d you let her go, for God’s sake?” I demanded as we headed for the Montego. “Why didn’t you try to stop her?”

Gordon Fraymore shook his head. “You saw it. She had a gun. I couldn’t risk it, not here on the street in the middle of town. It’s too dangerous. Someone else might get hurt.”

That may sound like a lame excuse, but he was right. When you’re confronted by that kind of situation, the safety of innocent bystanders takes precedence over every other consideration.

Back in the car, we tore across the parking lot toward the street, only to see Marjorie Connors’ Suburban a good three blocks away, speeding south. Without benefit of either lights or siren, hot pursuit was out of the question.

After checking oncoming traffic, Fraymore turned carefully onto the street and followed the Suburban at a speed that gave little hope of our ever catching up. We were in the detective’s lovingly maintained Montego. He drove the aging Mercury as if it were made of spun glass that would shatter at the slightest jar. Had we been in Fraymore’s city-owned Lumina, it would have been a different story. Cop cars are disposable items, meant to be rode hard and put up wet.

While Fraymore drove, there was nothing for me to do but worry. “How dangerous is she?” I asked.

Fraymore didn’t answer right away. “Three people are dead so far,” he returned gloomily. “You tell me.”

CHAPTER
20

R
iding in the car with Fraymore was an emotional nightmare. I knew exactly what he was thinking, what he was feeling, because I had walked in his shoes once. Dreading what was to come, I was scared witless, not just for me but for all of us. The situation was every bit as dangerous as walking into a house filled with highly volatile liquid-propane gas.

We followed Marjorie south and out of town, across the freeway, and past the turnoff to the charred remains of Live Oak Farm. She was speeding, but not as much as I would have expected. Even without hot pursuit, we maintained some visual contact.

“Are you going to stop and call for backup?” I asked as we passed what I knew to be both the last gas station and the last telephone booth on the outskirts of town.

“You
are
my backup,” Gordon Fraymore responded.

I do ask stupid questions.

Outside the car, dusk was fast approaching. Fraymore flipped on the headlights. We swept out through rolling pastureland, around the end of what was evidently a small lake, then up a steep grade laced with switchback curves, and into the mountains, a lower spur of the Cascade Range. Neither the Suburban nor the Montego were particularly good at cornering on the steep, winding road. When Marjorie Connors increased her pace, Fraymore didn’t, despite the fact that she was pulling well ahead of us. At times the Suburban’s taillights disappeared completely in the deepening twilight.

“We’re going to lose her,” I warned.

Fraymore shook his head. “No. I think I know where she’s going.”

After that we rode for almost half an hour in absolute silence while paved road gave way to loose gravel. I don’t know what Fraymore was thinking, but I was remembering the horror of finding Anne Corley at Snoqualmie Falls and quailing from what was to come with every atom of my being.

Beyond the fringe of oak trees and well into ponderosa pine, Fraymore turned left onto a dirt road that meandered off into the forest. By then it really was dark. A thick layer of pine needles littered the meagerly lit road before us. There were no visible tracks, no way to tell whether or not another vehicle had come this way for months on end, but Gordon Fraymore pushed on. In the reflected glow of the dashboard, his broad face was a study in grim determination and total despair.

To my credit, I didn’t try to tell him everything was going to be all right. This was no time for sugar-coated platitudes. We both knew imminent disaster awaited us around each and every fast-approaching curve.

A half-mile or so later, Fraymore turned off yet again, this time onto a nearly invisible track barely wide enough to accommodate the width of his Montego. By then I found myself hoping he was wrong—that he didn’t know Marjorie Connors nearly as well as he thought he did. With any kind of luck, we’d end up stuck out in these thick woods. It would fall to someone else to bring Marjorie Connors down—someone who, unlike Gordon Fraymore, didn’t care so damn much.

But then, through a canyon of towering trees, the high beam of the Mercury’s headlights bounced off the reflectors on the back of Marjorie’s parked Suburban. Without thinking, I reached for my automatic and shifted it into a jacket pocket to make it more readily accessible.

Fraymore noticed. “Remember,” he cautioned. “First we talk.”

What else could he say? After all, he loved the woman.

“We already tried it your way. She drove off and left us. She’s crazy, Gordon. The death toll already stands at three. You said so yourself. We can’t let it go any higher.”

Fraymore said nothing more, but I followed his lead and left the automatic in my pocket. When he shut off the engine, I felt naked and vulnerable, sitting there waiting for my eyes to adjust to the lack of light.

“There’s a cabin off to the right on the other side of the Suburban,” he told me, “about ten yards up a little path. Right around the truck there’s a picnic table. My guess is that’s where we’ll find her. You go right; I’ll go left.”

“Any idea what she’s carrying?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Too bad,” I said.

As I crawled out of the car and eased myself onto the ground, I couldn’t help wondering why it is women never tell men the really important things about them—the life-and-death things. A woman lets you know how she likes her steaks, what she takes in her coffee, and whether or not she despises fingernail polish, but who needs to know that?

Gordon Fraymore may have known from the outset exactly where Marjorie Connors might go, but he didn’t have the foggiest idea what kind of gun she might use to kill him. Or whether or not she would. Damn Marjorie Connors anyway!

I was halfway around the Suburban and wondering when I’d come face-to-face with a barking Sunshine, when I heard a sharp crack. I froze and held my breath, but it was only the crackle of dried twigs catching fire. Despite what I’d been through earlier that day at Live Oak Farm, the sound of a burning campfire was far more comforting than I would have thought possible. With the noise from the fire helping to conceal the sound of my approach, I edged around the front bumper to where I could see Marjorie toss an armload of wood onto a recently kindled fire laid in an outdoor river-rock fireplace.

The flickering light allowed me to locate Sunshine lying curled up nearby. She was close enough to the flames to take instant advantage of their spreading warmth. No doubt the higher elevation and much cooler temperatures were tough on the frail old dog’s aged bones. I suspected Marjorie had started the fire more out of concern for Sunshine than to warm herself. Her regard for the dog was at once touching and revolting. How could she worry so about an ancient, worthless animal and yet show so little consideration for human life?

Finished stoking the fire, Marjorie retreated to the neighboring picnic table just as Gordon Fraymore emerged into the light from a pool of shadows. “Hello, Marjorie,” he said softly.

She showed no surprise. “Hello, Gordy,” she returned. “It’s all right. I’m not going to shoot you.”

“I’m not going to shoot” should join “Go ahead and shoot me” on the list of most overused famous last words, but Gordon Fraymore took them at face value. He stepped nearer the table. A pebble rattled under his foot, and Sunshine raised her head.

“It’s okay, girl,” Marjorie crooned reassuringly. “It’s only Gordy.”

Sunshine thumped her tail in a brief welcoming tattoo. Then, seemingly unconcerned, she wearily put her chin back down on her paws and closed her eyes while Fraymore edged even closer. I could see that his own gun was still holstered, the damn fool.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Waiting for you. Having a drink. Care to join me?”

“No, thanks. What’s in the glass?”

A tall plastic glass sat on the wooden table in front of her. Next to it stood a bottle. “Gin,” she answered.

“You don’t drink,” he observed.

“I do sometimes.”

Their voices were so subdued and dispassionate, that I wondered if I had made up the other part, if I had only imagined the charge of passion arc between them, but when Fraymore asked the next question, his voice cracked with pent-up emotion.

“Why’d you do it, Marge?” he asked brokenly. “Why?”

“I was getting even,” she answered with a shrug. “Guy threw me out. Once he saw her, he thought I was fat and ugly and old. You can fix fat, but there’s not much you can do about old and ugly, is there. Guy dumped me on the garbage heap like an old shoe—and for a slut like that!”

“God in heaven! You didn’t have to kill them.”

Marjorie paused long enough to pour more gin into the glass. “Didn’t I?” she returned scornfully. “If I didn’t, who would? You must know what they were by now, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“It still wasn’t up to you,” Fraymore insisted doggedly. “Sooner or later, the law catches up with people like that.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” she replied. “The statute of limitations ran out on most of Daphne’s criminal activity long ago, and although you may not be willing to do it yourself, there’s no law against ditching a worn-out wife.”

Fraymore’s massive shoulders drooped. “Why didn’t you tell me what you knew? If you found out, it couldn’t have been that much of a secret.”

Marjorie picked up the glass and took a long pull on it. “Oh, it was a secret all right. They really covered their tracks. I found out because I made it my business to find out, because I made it my life’s work. It took a long time. It took a lot longer to find the girl.”

“What girl? Tanya Dunseth?” I asked. Speaking, I moved into the circle of light. I wanted Marjorie to know there were two of us—that she wouldn’t be able to talk her way around Gordon Fraymore and get off scot-free. She dismissed me with barely a glance.

“As soon as I found Tanya, I knew she was a gold mine.”

“As in blackmail?”

Marjorie regarded me over the rim of her glass. “That too,” she allowed, “but also as bait. With Guy’s theater connections, it was easy to get them down here when I wanted to.”

“What about Tanya? Was she in on it?”

Marjorie smiled. “The only thing Tanya did was become an actress. Many of them do, you know.”

“Do what?” I asked.

“Become actresses,” she answered. “Incest victims become actresses so they can turn themselves into someone else, so they can live some other life. They often go a little crazy, too,” she added with a laugh. “Tanya’s crazy as a bed bug. You probably picked up on that.”

For the first time, I noticed a slight slurring in her words, but I chalked that up to the gin. She was hitting the water-glass-sized tumbler pretty hard. In the course of that few minutes of conversation, she had drained it once and was filling it yet again. Once the alcohol hit home, I knew we’d have a roaring drunk on our hands. Subduring her and dragging her back to Ashland in Fraymore’s ill-equipped Montego would be a real chore. I wasn’t looking forward to it.

While she poured more gin, I saw a reflection on the table where firelight glinted off the pearl-handled revolver that lay on the table within inches of her glass. Armed and dangerous is bad enough. Armed and drunk is doubly so.