Shadowfires (54 page)

Julio glanced at Reese and said, “What do you think?”

Reese had to look away from Teddy in order to breathe and speak. With a funny little wheeze, he said, “Sounds right.”

Pacing again, flamingo-pink silk swirling around her knees, Teddy said, “I
know
it’s right. Ben’s in that project with Whitney Gavis, and Whitney is maybe the only man on earth Ben really, fully trusts.”

“Who’s this Gavis?” Julio asked.

“They were in Vietnam together,” she said. “They’re tight. As tight as brothers. Tighter, maybe. You know, Ben’s a real nice guy, one of the best, and anyone’ll tell you so. He’s gentle, open, so darn honest and honorable that some people just plain don’t believe him for a while, until they’ve gotten to know him better. But it’s funny . . . in a way . . . he holds almost everybody at arm’s length, never quite reveals himself completely. Except, I think, with Whit Gavis. It’s as if things happened to him in the war that made him forever different from other people, that made it impossible for him to be truly close to anyone except those who went through the same thing he went through and came out with their minds in one piece. Like Whit.”

“Is he close in the same way with Mrs. Leben?” Julio asked.

“Yes, I think so. I think he loves her,” Teddy said, “which makes her about the luckiest woman I know.”

Reese sensed jealousy in Teddy’s voice, and his heart felt as if it broke loose and plummeted down through his chest.

Apparently Julio heard the same note, for he said, “Forgive me, Teddy, but I’m a cop, and I’m curious by nature, and you sounded as if you wouldn’t mind if he’d fallen for you.”

She blinked in surprise, then laughed. “Me and Ben? No, no. For one thing, I’m taller than he is, and in heels I positively tower over him. Besides, he’s a homebody— a quiet, peaceful man who reads old mystery novels and collects trains. No, Ben’s a great guy, but I’m far too flamboyant for him, and he’s too low-key for me.”

Reese’s heart stopped plummeting.

Teddy said, “Oh, I’m just jealous of Rachael because she’s found herself a good man, and I haven’t. When you’re my size, you know from the start that men aren’t going to flock to you—except basketball players, and I hate jocks. Then, when you get to be thirty-two, you can’t help feeling a bit sour every time you see someone catch a good one, can’t help it even when you’re happy for them.”

Reese’s heart
soared
.

After Julio had asked a few more questions about the motel in Las Vegas and had ascertained its location, he and Reese got up, and Teddy accompanied them to the door. Step by step, Reese wracked his mind for an approach, an opening line. As Julio opened the door, Reese looked back at Teddy and said, “Uh, excuse me, Miss Bertlesman, but I’m a cop, and asking questions is my business, you know, and I was wondering if you’re . . .” He didn’t know where to go with it. “ . . . if you’re maybe . . . uh . . . seeing anyone particular.” Listening to himself, Reese was amazed and dismayed that Julio could sound so smooth while he, trying to imitate his partner’s cool manner, could sound so rough and obvious.

Smiling up at him, she said, “Does this have bearing on the case you’re investigating?”

“Well . . . I just thought . . . I mean . . . I wouldn’t want you mentioning this conversation to anyone. I mean, it’s not just that we could get in trouble with our captain . . . but if you mentioned the motel to anyone, you might jeopardize Mr. Shadway and Mrs. Leben and . . . well . . .”

He wanted to shoot himself, put an end to this humiliation.

She said, “I’m not seeing anyone special, not anyone I’d share secrets with.”

Reese cleared his throat. “Well, uh, that’s good. All right.”

He started to turn toward the door, where Julio was giving him a strange look, and Teddy said, “You are a big one, aren’t you?”

Reese faced her again. “Excuse me?”

“You’re quite a big guy. Too bad there aren’t more your size. A girl like me would almost seem petite to you.”

What does she mean by that? he wondered. Anything? Just polite conversation? Is she giving me an opening? If it’s an opening, how should I respond to it?

“It would be nice to be thought of as petite,” she said.

He tried to speak. Could not.

He felt stupid, awkward, and shy as he’d been at sixteen.

Suddenly he
could
speak, but he blurted out the question as he might have done as a boy of sixteen: “Miss-Bertlesman-would-you-go-out-with-me-sometime?”

She smiled and said, “Yes.”

“You would?”

“Yes.”

“Saturday night? Dinner? Seven o’clock?”

“Sounds nice.”

He stared at her, amazed. “Really?”

She laughed. “Really.”

A minute later, in the car, Reese said, “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“I never realized you were such a smooth operator,” Julio said kiddingly, affectionately.

Blushing, Reese said, “By God, life’s funny, isn’t it? You never know when it might take a whole new turn.”

“Slow down,” Julio said, starting the engine and driving away from the curb. “It’s just a date.”

“Yeah. Probably. But . . . I got a feeling it might turn out to be more than just that.”

“A smooth operator
and
a romantic fool,” Julio said as he steered the car down out of the Heights, toward Newport Avenue.

After some thought, Reese said, “You know what Eric Leben forgot? He was so obsessed with living forever, he forgot to enjoy the life he had. Life may be short, but there’s a lot to be said for it. Leben was so busy planning for eternity, he forgot to enjoy the moment.”

“Listen,” Julio said, “if romance is going to make a philosopher out of you, I may have to get a new partner.”

For a few minutes Reese was silent, submerged in memories of well-tanned legs and flamingo-pink silk. When he surfaced again, he realized that Julio was not driving aimlessly. “Where we going?”

“John Wayne Airport.”

“Vegas?”

“Is that okay with you?” Julio asked.

“Seems like the only thing we can do.”

“Have to pay for tickets out of our own pockets.”

“I know.”

“You want to stay here, that’s all right.”

“I’m in,” Reese said.

“I can handle it alone.”

“I’m in.”

“Might get dangerous from here on, and you have Esther to think about,” Julio said.

My little Esther and now maybe Theodora “Teddy” Bertlesman, Reese thought. And when you find someone to care about—when you
dare
to care—that’s when life gets cruel; that’s when they’re taken from you; that’s when you lose it all. A premonition of death made him shiver.

Nevertheless, he said, “I’m in. Didn’t you hear me say I’m in? For God’s sake, Julio, I’m
in
.”

Following the storm across the desert, Ben Shadway reached Baker, California, gateway to Death Valley, at 6:20.

The wind was blowing much harder than it had been back toward Barstow. The driven rain snapped against the windshield with a sound like thousands of impacting bullets. Service-station, restaurant, and motel signs were swinging on their mountings, trying to tear loose and fly away. A stop sign twitched violently back and forth, caught in turbulent currents of air, and seemed about to screw itself out of the ground. At a Shell station, two attendants in yellow rain slickers moved with their heads bowed and shoulders hunched; the tails of their glistening vinyl coats flapped against their legs and whipped out behind them. A score of bristly tumbleweeds, some four or five feet in diameter, bounced-rolled-sailed across tiny Baker’s only east-west street, swept in from the desolate landscape to the south.

Ben tried to call Whitney Gavis from a pay phone inside a small convenience store. He couldn’t get through to Vegas. Three times, he listened to a recorded message to the effect that service had been temporarily interrupted. Wind moaned and shrieked against the store’s plate-glass windows, and rain drummed furiously on the roof—which was all the explanation he required for AT&T’s troubles.

He was scared. He had been badly worried ever since finding the ax propped against the refrigerator in the kitchen of Eric’s mountain cabin. But now his fear was escalating by the moment because he began to feel that
everything
was going wrong for him, that luck had turned entirely against him. The encounter with Sharp, the disastrous change in the weather, his inability to reach Whit Gavis when the phones had been working, now the trouble with the lines to Vegas, made it seem as if the universe was, indeed, not accidental but was a machine with dark and frightful purpose, and that the gods in charge of it were conspiring to make certain he would never again see Rachael alive.

In spite of his fear, frustration, and eagerness to hit the road again, he paused long enough to grab a few things to eat in the car. He’d had nothing since breakfast in Palm Springs, and he was famished.

The clerk behind the counter—a blue-jeaned, middle-aged woman with sun-bleached hair, her brown skin toughened by too many years on the desert—sold him three candy bars, a few bags of peanuts, and a six-pack of Pepsi. When Ben asked her about the phones, she said, “I hear tell there’s been flash flooding east of here, out near Cal Neva, and worse around Stateline. Undermined a few telephone poles, brought down the lines. Word is, it’ll be repaired in a couple of hours.”

“I never knew it rained this hard in the desert,” he said as she gave him change.

“Don’t rain—really rain, I mean—but maybe three times a year. Though when we do get a storm, it sometimes comes down like God is breaking his promise about the fire next time and figures to wipe us out with a great flood like before.”

The stolen Merkur was parked half a dozen steps beyond the exit from the store, but Ben was soaked again during the few seconds needed to get to the car. Inside, he popped open a can of Pepsi, took a long swallow, braced the can between his thighs, peeled the wrapper off a candy bar, started the engine, and drove back toward the interstate.

Regardless of how terrible the weather got, he would have to push toward Vegas at the highest possible speed, seventy or eighty miles an hour, faster if he could manage it, even though the chances were very high that, sooner or later, he would lose control of the car on the rain-greased highway. His inability to reach Whit Gavis had left him with no alternative.

Ascending the entrance ramp to I-15, the car coughed once and shuddered, but then it surged ahead without further hesitation. For a minute, heading east-northeast toward Nevada, Ben listened intently to the engine and glanced repeatedly at the dashboard, expecting to see a warning light blink on. But the engine purred, and the warning lights remained off, and none of the dials or gauges indicated trouble, so he relaxed slightly. He munched on his candy bar and gradually put the Merkur up to seventy, carefully testing its responsiveness on the treacherously wet pavement.

 

Anson Sharp was awake and refreshed by 7:10 Tuesday evening. From his motel room in Palm Springs, with the background sound of hard rain on the roof and water gurgling through a downspout near his window, he called subordinates at several places throughout southern California.

From Dirk Cringer, an agent at the case-operation headquarters in Orange County, Sharp learned that Julio Verdad and Reese Hagerstrom had not dropped out of the Leben investigation as they were supposed to have done. Given their well-earned reputation as bulldog cops who were reluctant to quit even hopeless cases, Sharp had ordered both of their personal cars fitted with hidden transmitters last night and had assigned men to follow them electronically, at a distance from which Verdad and Hagerstrom would not spot a tail. That precaution had paid off, for this afternoon they had visited UCI to meet with Dr. Easton Solberg, a former associate of Leben’s, and later they had spent a couple of hours on stakeout in front of Shadway Realty’s main office in Tustin.

“They spotted our team and set up their own surveillance half a block back,” Cringer said, “where they could watch both us and the realty office.”

“Must’ve thought they were real cute,” Sharp said, “when all the time we were watching them while they watched us.”

“Then they followed one of the real-estate agents home, a woman named Theodora Bertlesman.”

“We already interviewed her about Shadway, didn’t we?”

“Yeah, everyone who works with him in that office. And this Bertlesman woman wasn’t any more cooperative than the rest of them, maybe less.”

“How long were Verdad and Hagerstrom at her place?”

“More than twenty minutes.”

“Sounds like she might’ve been more open with them. Have any idea what she told them?”

“No,” Cringer said. “She lives on a hillside, so it was hard to get a clear angle on any of the windows with a directional microphone. By the time we could’ve set it up, Verdad and Hagerstrom were leaving anyway. They went straight from her place to the airport.”

“What?”
Sharp said, surprised. “LAX?”

“No. John Wayne Airport here in Orange County. That’s where they are now, waiting for a flight out.”

“What flight? To where?”

“Vegas. They bought tickets on the first available flight to Vegas. It leaves at eight o’clock.”

“Why Vegas?” Sharp said, more to himself than to Cringer.

“Maybe they finally decided to give up on the case like they were told. Maybe they’re going off for a little holiday.”

“You don’t go off on a holiday without packing suitcases. You said they went straight to the airport, which I suppose means they didn’t make a quick stop home to grab a change of clothes.”

“Straight to the airport,” Cringer confirmed.

“All right, good,” Sharp said, suddenly excited. “Then they’re probably trying to get to Shadway and Mrs. Leben before we do, and they’ve reason to believe the place to look is somewhere in Las Vegas.” There was a chance he would get his hands on Shadway, after all. And this time, the bastard would not slip away. “If there’re any seats left on that eight o’clock flight, I want you to put two of your men aboard.”