Red Light (10 page)

"But."

"But
I enjoyed her company."

"Enjoyed
it."

"I enjoyed it a
lot.
I...
I
craved
it. What
she looked like and how she moved and how she talked and what she said. What
she smelled like. I wanted to be there. In the same room with her. She made me
feel like doing all the things I wanted to do with you. But I had those feelings
completely, one hundred percent under control."

"Did
you, Mike?"

"Absolutely.
And you're a fool if you don't believe that."

"You
kill her?"

He tilted heavily
around the couch, stumbled, caught her arm and threw her across the room. She knocked
into the wall but kept her balance, hands thwacking backward against the pine.

"Yeah," he
said. "I bought a silencer. I had dinner with her then iced her. Arrest
me."

She
glanced again toward the telephone table and he saw her do it.

"You
know I'm kidding," he said. "Right?"

"I'll
think about it. I'm going to go now."

His
voice was rising now, panic and shame and who knew what else.

"Merci, I'm
really awful damned sorry for what I just did. That isn't me. You know that
isn't me. You know, right? You know?"

"I
know. Stay where you are."

She
stared at him as she walked across the room to the front door.

Mike stayed, planted
where he was, like he was surprised, like he just now realized what he'd done.
There were big tears running down his red face and his mouth was turned down
like a Greek mask.

"I'm so fucking
sorry, Merci. I love you so much. Don't go. Don't you go away, too.”

She trotted to the
car because to run was to admit fear. She got the keys in one hand and rode the
butt of her H&K with the other. She looked into the backseat before getting
in. Then she hit the door lock and started up the big V-8. She saw Mike appear
in the doorway, then a fan of dirt falling in the rearview as the Impala dug
its rear tires and roared off the lot.

She stopped at a market in
Orange to get a sandwich and the day's papers. Her hands were still trembling
as she slid the quarters in machines. Her heart was beating fast and flighty
inside and it felt like it wasn't in gear. A bad taste in her mouth. A bum
asked her for money and she wanted to pistol-whip him.

She called
headquarters for Zamorra, she had to talk to him, but he was still at the
hospital.

She got back in the
car, drove to the far corner of a near-empty parking lot and cried. She gave
herself exactly one minute, shed her tears, then tamped them down with a deep,
shuddering breath.

Sneaking bastard, she
thought. He doesn't have the balls to kill anybody.

And now she had a
murder confession from him. A drunken, sarcastic one, but a murder confession
just the same. You could use something like that to obtain a warrant for
search. You could use something like that as evidence in a court of law.

Or you could just
assume it was spoken in anger, meant to convey its opposite.

She knew he hadn't
killed Aubrey Whittaker, though he'd probably done just about everything else
to her.

Merci got out of the
car, walked around it a few times, got back ii. She dug out her appointment
book and checked the rest of the day. In spite of the fact that her lover had
probably betrayed her with a prostitute, then confessed the murder to her, she
did have some good things to look forward to.

Such as a two o'clock
appointment to see psychiatrist Dr. Sid Botts—whose name she'd triangulated
from Aubrey Whitt address book, the calendar and a little common sense—the
second last person to see Aubrey Whittaker alive.

And a three-thirty
with Newport Maranatha Church Christian Singles leader Reverend Lance Spartas,
one of the two johns who'd come up positive on the federal firearms check. He
owned a Smith ,45-caliber automatic, purchased ninety days ago.

And a five o'clock
with Bob del Viggio, builder of housing tracts, political donor, client of
Aubrey Whittaker.

Plus a turkey-on-rye
still untouched on the seat.

Get it together,
woman.

She called the
hospital but Zamorra had just left.

Aubrey Whittaker's
murder made it to the front page of the local section in the
Times, Register
and
Journal.
So far, none of the reporters had found out anything she
hadn't. All three described Aubrey as a "professional escort."
Nobody mentioned Epicure Services.

She
folded up the papers and tossed them in the backseat and looked out the
windshield to the blackening sky.

B
otts was a round, disheveled man with a wispy
Freudian goatee rosy cheeks. His reading glasses hung from a cord around his
neck. His white shirt looked neither clean nor pressed, and his corduroy jacket
was drawn tight around the stomach but rose unsatisfied from his shoulders. His
handshake was warm. Merci felt an impulse to find the nearest couch, plop down,
spill it all about Mike McNally

The building was in
Santa Ana, the other end of town from headquarters. Merci stepped from the
receptionist-free waiting room in the consultation room: a couch and armchair,
a desk with a banker's lamp on it, four shelves filled with books, two more
lamps and two windows with blinds drawn against the dark day.

"I read the
paper today," he said. "I was very saddened. Even though you had told
me about her when you called."

"Thanks
for meeting."

Botts sat behind his
desk and Merci chose the couch. He watched her take out the blue notebook.
"Like I said on the phone, I can't betray Aubrey's privacy here. I can
only talk in very general terms about her. But if I can help you find who did
it, then I'm willing. It seems the humane thing to do."

"I'll level with
you, Doctor. Aubrey Whittaker was a prostitute. I assume you know that."

"Yes."

"We
don't have a suspect yet. I've got a copy of her little book, plenty of names
and dates. Too many. Just the existence of that book could provide motive for
murder. I need to narrow down, zero in."

"What
do you want to know?"

"If
she was seeing someone. Someone outside the trade."

Botts cleared his
throat, then spoke gently. "Yes, she was. She never told me his name or
occupation. But she'd met someone recently—approximately one month ago—and she
seemed to have hopes for a relationship with him. She was rather . . . excited
about him. She said they met at church. I don't know which one. She was always
attending new ones, hoping to find one she really liked. That was Aubrey, in
microcosm, very much looking for something she could be happy with. Trying
different things, like the wigs she wore. All of them blond,
interestingly."

Merci couldn't decide
if this was interesting or not. She made a note:
all blond for Botts, but
closet had other colors.

"What
was wrong with the other churches?"

"Too shallow.
Too personal. Too prying. Too social and not religious enough. Aubrey wanted a
God that was fair, but stern. She wanted to be punished, then saved. She
thought she deserved both."

Merci considered the
contradictions in Aubrey Whittaker: sell the body and search the soul; God of
forgiveness and God of wrath.

"What
else, about the church guy?"

Botts leaned onto his
elbows. His jacket rode higher. "Tall. Strong. Handsome. Polite. Honest.
Unmarried. She said he was unlike any man she'd ever met."

"Where
does he live?"

"She
never said."

"A
member of the church?"

"That
is very possible."

Merci
thought. "Was she in love with him?"

"I
think so, yes."

"Was
she afraid for her life?"

"No. I do not
believe she thought she was in any kind of mortal danger."

"How
did you diagnose her?"

Botts
cleared his throat again. "Depression."

"What
did you prescribe?"

"Nothing. We
talked about medications, the plusses and minuses. She chose not to take that
course."

"Was
that the right decision?"

"I believe so.
After our first hour, I told her she had very deep unresolved emotions toward
her father. She laughed at the obviousness of this. I did not. I won't go into
that history with you. But I will say there was good reason for her feelings.
She was obviously not psychotic or delusional. I sensed in her tendencies
toward grandeur and perhaps paranoia, tendencies toward depression. She was
self-flagellating, self-critical. It was clear to me that large areas of
feeling were left unexpressed and unexamined. Anger, specifically. She had
closed off things, in self-protection. But, in my opinion, for her age, she was
seeing, self-aware and mentally vigorous. I didn't think she needed medication.
She needed
meditation.
Time to think things through. And a new job,
preferably in a different part of the world. Anywhere but here or in Oregon,
which was where she grew up. Portland."

Merci thought. In her
notebook she wrote:
Oregon to Botts, to Mike.

"What
was she like, Doctor? In lay terms?"

He smiled.
"Irreverent. Alert. Caustic at times. Self-deprecating. Self-critical.
Quick to laugh, quick to castigate. She was very sentimental about certain
things. Horses—although she'd only ridden a few times. Good men—even though
she'd never met one, until this new fellow. It was apparent to me that she took great stock in an ideal
world, one from which she felt excluded. She reserved her most punishing and
negative feelings for men in general, and for herself."

"What
did Aubrey Whittaker think of herself?"

Botts sighed.
"Mostly she detested herself, Sergeant. At other times, there was
pity."

Merci thought about
this. About the way a life can get bent a little and later the bend takes you
around in circles. Like the steering linkage on your car. Trouble was, you got
going fast enough and the bend would take you right off the road and into a
truck. A truck with a silencer

"She
ever talk about her boss?"

"Never."

"Goren
Moladan?"

"No."

"She was working
outside the agency, from what I can tell. That can be fatal, in the wrong
circumstances."

"It seems today
like everything can be. Driving on the freeway, answering the door."

Merci often took
statements like that as professional affronts, but she let this one go.
"Dr. Botts, was she paying for these sessions herself?"

"Yes."

"Last question
for now, Doctor. In the time you treated her, how many men did she have real
hopes for? Like this last one, this guy she supposedly met at church?"

Botts shook his head slowly, with visible
sadness. "Just him."

• • •

Lance Spartas, assistant
pastor of Newport Maranatha Church, had insisted on meeting Merci away from his
work. She smelled a guilty conscience in this, easy enough when you find a
guy's credit-card number in a prostitute's black book.

He was tall,
dark-haired and handsome, with a smile that looked like he had just been caught
at something and knew you'd forgive him. Thirtyish. Sharp clothes, big watch,
snappy haircut. A squirrel, she thought, the kind of guy she'd like to dunk in
a toilet.

They sat in the bar
of a pricey little steak house on Coast Highway. A wall-to-wall aquarium behind
the bar looked otherworldly to her: bright spirits easing through rock and
bubbles. The bar was almost empty.

"Thanks
for meeting off-campus," said Spartas. He sounded anxious.

"I
understand."

"I really didn't
know her well. She only came to the chapel once that I know of. She came to my
group, Christian Singles, after worship. This was, oh, six, eight weeks ago. I
never saw her after that."

Guilty conscience,
Merci thought again: eager to help, eager to please, eager to lie.

The barmaid came by
and gave Spartas a smile. She called him Lance. He called her Sherry. He asked
how she was and when she was going to come to worship with them.

"Saturday nights
are a killer," Sherry said, jamming a stack of bills into a plastic holder
atop a round tray. She got a soft drink for Spartas, a cup of coffee for Merci,
then swung into the lounge, tray up, and shoes squeaking.

"Ever
go to Aubrey's place?"

"Well,
no. I have no idea where she lived."

"Ever
see her off-campus?"

He shook his head but
said nothing, lips tightened around his straw. He glanced at her, then looked
at the aquarium.