SUMMER of FEAR (38 page)

"One of these days, I'll write a best-seller," Erik said with
a boyish smile. "Then we'll be equals in the field of letters, too."

"Russell can write better than you," said Grace rather
seriously.

"Which is exactly why I work so hard at it," answered Erik,
still smiling. "If I remember correctly from five years ago, when I was
seeing Amber, your grades in English hovered around the C mark."

"And you suggested I reread
Moby-Dick."

Wald shrugged, set his coffee on one of the desks, and took a seat
behind it. I brought up a chair to face him. Grace sat atop the other desk, to
our left, dangling a leg.

"Russell," said Erik, slipping on a pair of glasses,
"I've been racking my considerable mind for the last hour trying to figure
out why in hell you were coming here. You have my curiosity up. So shoot."

And shoot I did. I walked him through the dire events of July 3 and 4;
the burial of Alice Fultz
_;
Amber's reappearance; Martin's secret lab
work and dubbed tape-, the impending indictment from Peter Haight's office. I
explained what I could of the bad blood between Grace and Amber; the monies at
stake should she die; and Grace's actual presence at the scene.

Wald listened carefully and took very spare notes. His attention went
back and forth between Grace and myself. He groaned when I told him about
Alice's hillside funeral. He nodded when I tried to account for the
competition and dislike between mother and daughter, Wald being familiar enough
with both to fill in the blanks himself. He looked at me with an expression
that suggested exasperation at both women, then turned the same look upon
Grace.

"Now that you feel superior, are you ready to help us?” Grace asked
him.

Wald said nothing for a long while. He stared off through a window
toward his backyard fountain. He took off his glasses studied the lenses, then
put them on again.

"Parish disgusts me," he said quietly. "He always has. I
can't say I'm dumbfounded that he'd do this. I always believed there was
something profoundly unbalanced in Martin. The trouble is, you've got no
evidence. Martin's got the evidence, and it all points to you."

"That's exactly why I'm here," I said.

"That was hardly brilliant, Erik," noted
Grace.

"But it's true," he answered, turning toward her. "And
what's true is going to get you out of this. Not what's brilliant.” Pivoting
back to me, he said, "Now... I assume you have plan."

"He didn't leave anything behind at Amber's. I saw him but that
doesn't prove anything. I don't think we can touch him for Alice without
touching him for something else first."

"Such as?"

"Another attempt on Amber's life."

He looked at me skeptically.

I explained that if the situation was good—no, not good but
perfect—Martin could be tempted to finish what he had begun on July 3. Until
now, Amber had been safe with my father and his diligent Remington, but
if
Amber would offer up hers as bait, we could set a trap into which Parish might
possibly fall.

"Why
would he try again? I assume Amber was bright enough to do a little adjusting
of her will. Right?"

"That's right. It's not the money anymore, Erik. It's the hate, the
violence, and he needs her silent. He'll try it again if he's sure he can get
away with it. I believe that. All we need to do is create the opportunity for
him—and be there to stop him."

"That is to say, I could make the opportunity," said Wald.
"We assume that any information coming from you to Martin— especially
information on the... vulnerability of Amber at such and such a time and
place—would be instantly suspect. I, on the other hand, could point him in the
right direction in all... innocence."

"How can you be so smart and so dumb at the same time?" Grace
said.

We both looked at her.

"Amber won't cooperate. She's a total
coward."

"Let us handle Amber," I said.

Wald was studying me hard now. "You're asking me to set him
up."

"Yes."

He continued to stare at me. Grace's dangling leg swung to and fro. The
morning light came through an east window and lighted the trophy case. He slid
off his glasses again, wobbled the temples in his hand as he looked down at
them, the right temple swinging loosely on the frame, barely secured.

"Lost one of the screws," he muttered, hopelessly searching
his drawer, desk, lap, and floor. "I hate these things."

Erik's mind was obviously not on his glasses.

And neither was mine, until the realization crashed down on me that I
had a spare screw—found in Amber's bedroom— still inside the cap of my pen.
Involuntarily, I blinked. And with equal involition, my mind began to race.

"Me, too," I said.

Wald looked at the frames. "I only wear these damned things when
the world won't see me, image being everything, right? Anyway... back to
Parish. Look, if he's done what you've said he's done, then I agree—he'll try
to finish her off
if the opportunity is there.
It seems to me that we
need to get him a chance at Amber alone. Right?"

"I think Amber's house would be best—he's familiar with it; it's
remote. But we need to move soon. He's about to thro me to Haight."

Grace sighed impetuously. "I still don't think
she'll help

Wald turned to look at Grace, who was now leaning back on her hands,
legs still lolling off the edge of the desktop. "You think more like your
mother every day."

"I'm sure that sits fine with you."

"You are both very bright women."

He turned to me.

"Russell," he finally said, slipping his glasses back into the
drawer, "let's set up a little sling, then get Martin Parish’s ass into
it."

He offered me his hand. I shook it. "Thank you," I said
absently, smiling with a similar absence. My mind, in fact, was reeling.

Wald stood. "I actually think this may go rather smooth! I'll have
that oaf after Amber like a trout on a fly. I look forward to seeing the look
on his face when we take him down for. well... what shall we shoot for?
Burglary? Attempted murder? Russell, one hour from now, you and I will both be
sitting in the same room with him, trying to figure how to play the Midnight
Eye right. My guess is that Martin Parish will do everything he can to keep the
Eye on the street until he can do Amber once and for all. He'll use the Eye's
MO, like he tried to originally."

"I think you're right," I said.

"Thanks,
Waldie," said Grace. She lurched off the desk and came to Erik, planted a
polite kiss on his cheek, then shook his hand. "It means a lot to have a
friend."

"You can count on me for that, Grace."

He was smiling broadly at her now, his blue eyes lighted with something
like fascination, and something like mischief.

I used his phone to call the Medical Center. Isabella was awake and
feeling well. I asked them to tell her I'd be there as soon as I possibly
could.

One hour later,
we were, in fact, seated in Dan Winters's office, gathered to devise our
strategy regarding the Midnight Eye. I found myself unable to look at either
Wald or Parish with fearing that my suspicions were written on my face as
clearly as a headline. It was no easier to focus on Winters, whose penetrating
black eyes seemed, as always, to find their way straight into the weakness
behind my own facade. Why did he bother to include me here, with an indictment
from the DA on its way? Was he simply keeping his enemies close?
Or---outlandish as it would have been—had Parish bypassed his boss? Was it even
possible that the indictment was nothing more than a terror tactic from Parish,
that he had no intention arresting me for a murder he himself had committed?
Karen would hardly look at me, so compromised did she feel at having tipped me
to Martin's plans. The thought crossed my mine he may have used her. The
thought also crossed my mine she was willing to be used. Suspicions of betrayal
and treachery piled so high inside me, I could hardly hear myself think. I
concentrated on the notepad in front of me, on the pen in my hand, and on the
question that had been bothering me as much as it had been bothering John
Carfax. How had the Eye managed to bypass the intercepts? We knew he had
electronic know-how, this from the testimony of Mary Ing. We knew that there
were commercially available products for scrambling, encoding, and decoding,
for testing whether a line was "transparent" or not. With some
experimentation and a little brains, the Eye might have found the application
he was looking for—namely, making calls on a line with no number. But how could
he get access to the lines?

In contrast to my silent deliberations, both Parish and Wald argued
heatedly about how to handle the Midnight Eye. Their voices seemed to cascade
over me like the roar of a waterfall behind which I was standing.
How did
the Eye get access to the lines?

The key question for Parish and Wald was whether to reveal him as Ing or
not. He had threatened massive violence if we did, but, as Parish pointed out,
keeping Ing active was the key to finding him. Wald took the opposite view,
that to enrage Ing was to endanger the county, and that any time we could
purchase with mollification was time we badly needed. At one point, Wald and
Parish were yelling and Winters had to shout them both down.

"What's your call, Russell?" he asked me.

"ID him," I said absently. "Make him feel the pressure.
I'm with Martin. Smoke him out."

Wald looked at Winters, visibly aghast. "It's going to backfire,"
he said.

"First decent idea Monroe's had in a week,"
said Parish.

"Thanks. Here's another one. Ing works around phone lines. He knows
how to work them, like taking apart the phone when he was a kid. That's why he
can place the calls around the intercepts."

"We've already talked to everyone we could think of said Winters.
"Right, Martin?"

"Right. The linemen at the phone company, the utilities people, the
city maintenance crews. Everyone."

"What about the phone company? Not the field crew but right there
at the hub, in Laguna?"

"Wald covered it," said Parish.

"You
covered it," said Wald.

An utter grayness descended over Martin's face. "I haven’t screened
the hub people—that was Wald's damned Citizen Task Force's job. He asked for
it."

"Bullshit," said Wald. "You said your people were
handling it."

"Oh no," said Winters. "I can't believe what I'm hearing.
You mean
nobody's
been out there to the goddamned phone company with
that picture?"

The silence that reigned again seemed, logically, to focus upon Martin
Parish. "No."

"Enough of this shit!"
bellowed Winters, hurtling up from his desk and backhanding a pile of
files to the floor. "This is what we do! No more games. No more crap
between you people I'll fire all of you motherfuckers if I have to. Now you
will listen and you will obey. One, Monroe, file the article about Mrs. Ing'
identification. File the one on Ing's childhood. See if the
Journal
will
run the graphic without the damned beard. Karen, give them one of Mrs. Ing's
snapshots of this bastard. Parish, get out to the phone company right now.
Wald, either get those citizens to come up with something or get them the hell
out of this building. They're using up my air conditioning. Now get out of my
sight and do it!"

I gathered my notebook and left the room. Behind me
came the sound of Wald and Parish yelling again, the same accusations and
warnings.

In the pressroom, I used a fax machine to file my story suggesting that
the Midnight Eye was William Fredrick Ing. I talked to Carla Dance about the
photographs and she was only too willing to run another picture of the suspect.
She thanked me again for the best series of scoops she could remember printing.

"Gosh, I hope this doesn't come back to haunt
us," she said.

"Carla, I don't know what else we can do. And, by the way, can you
hurry along those checks? I'm broke."

"I'll talk with Accounting."

Then I went out
to my car and drove back down the freeway toward Erik Wald's house in the
Tustin hills. I wanted to have a conversation with the walls of his home, and
then I wanted, very badly, to see my Isabella.

The same
overpowering heat that was allowing the Midnight Eye into the homes of
innocents also gave me easy entry into Wald's study. I pried off the screen of
an opened window in the rear, slid up the glass, and climbed in, well concealed
beneath the towering eucalyptus and oak that ran down Wald's property line to
the east.

I went to the desk, opened the drawer, and took out Wald's glasses. From
the pen in my pocket, I removed the screw I'd found in Amber's room. Working
under the light of Wald's desk lamp, I placed the screw into the empty temple
hole and twisted it in. The fit was perfect. It had the same coppery finish
that the metal of the frames did. I tilted the glasses over, wiggled them
gently, and watched the screw fall to the blotter. Stripped, I thought, exactly
what had allowed it to fall out in the first place. I could feel my heart
pounding in my fingertips as I gathered up the little part and replaced it in
my pen.