The Pressure of Darkness (6 page)

Nicole surprised him. She set down her drink and exploded into loud, good-natured laughter. "Okay, good. That line got you hired."

Burke did not smile back. "Not so fast. First, tell me what you want me to do."

Nicole walked over to the tinted, floor-to-ceiling window and looked out into the canyon. The sun was high enough to have chased cool shadows behind the brush and back under the overpriced homes. One scrawny deer emerged from the hardy foliage to drink from a hidden sprinkler. Nicole sipped her drink. She appeared to choose her words with care. "I want you to look into my father's death. If it was a suicide then fine, but if it was murder I want to know."

"Okay."

"And if it was murder I also want you to tell me who it was, why . . . and
how
they did it."

"That could be a tall order."

Nicole Stryker turned to face him. Her eyes narrowed.
The bitch is back
. "That detective promised me that you were the best man for this. I need to believe he was telling me the truth."

"That probably depends on what you mean by best."

"If I need something . . . unusual done, can I count on you?"

Burke's face remained blank. "I don't kill people for money, Miss Stryker."

"Nicole." She leaned back against the window and took another swallow of the wine cooler. "But you have killed people before, am I correct?"

Fucking Scotty, how much had he told her?

"I'm told you were a police officer until a couple of years ago, Mr. Burke."

"Yes. I was."

"Where?"

"In Las Vegas."

"What happened?"

"I left. Sounds like you already know why."

"To make more money."

"That's right."

He volunteered nothing more. Nicole grinned approvingly. "And before that you were in the service. You saw combat in Somalia."

Close enough.
"Among other places."

Nicole sipped. "I think I saw that movie, in fact. You boys got your asses kicked."

Burke did not respond, but the room seemed to chill by several degrees.

"Will you answer some more direct questions, Mr. Burke?"

He sighed and eased back to a standing position. "You know something? I don't think I like you, Nicole."

She frowned. "I beg your pardon?"

"There is a man who can help you, his name is Lynwood. He's in the Encino telephone book under Private Detective Services. Call him." Burke turned, started back up the stairs.

Nicole Stryker cleared her throat. "Nine hundred a day, plus expenses."

Burke kept moving. He was reaching for the front door when she called out: "One thousand a day, plus expenses."

Burke's needs betrayed him. He stopped, envisioning medical bills and a long line of impatient creditors. He swallowed bitterness and his shoulders slumped forward. "On one condition," he said. After a long moment he turned. "Nicole."

"Go on."

"You don't ask questions. I do that. You just shut up and let me do my job."

They glared like alley cats, neither one looked away. Nicole considered, finished her drink and then, conceding defeat, found something fascinating way out in the canyon. "How do we get started?"

Burke, silent as a predator, returned to the living room and his former position. "Tell me about your father."

She saw his hands were empty. "Aren't you going to take notes?"

"I don't need to. Did your father have any enemies?"

"He had several, to be honest." She took a piece of paper from her pocket. She folded it again and again into a tiny square, flipped it at Burke.

He caught it one-handed, annoyed by her little games. "And this is?"

"It's a list of people who hated my father enough to have killed him or ordered his death. These are people who are also, to some extent, wealthy and intelligent enough to have pulled off a murder this . . . sophisticated. You can examine that at your leisure, Mr. Burke, just not on my time."

He tucked the paper into the pocket of his jeans, rugged face bland. "Go on, then."

Nicole sat down on the carpet and crossed her legs, Indian style. She pulled her hair back, and the pose reminded Burke of something lifted from a Hindu painting. "I assume you know enough about my father's career to know that he was a very wealthy man."

"Yes."

"He also suffered from what appeared to be some confusion about his gender orientation."

"I see."

"No, you don't," she whispered. Her voice cracked with emotion. "But you will in a minute. Please sit down."

Burke slipped off his running shoes and sat on the couch, also cross-legged. He ordered his mind to absorb all relevant information, whether spoken or merely observed.

"Just let me talk for a while, Mr. Burke. Then if you have any questions you can ask them."

"Go ahead."

"My mother was an heiress, the granddaughter of one of the Martingale twins. As you may know, the family made a fortune in canned goods. I am my father's only child. I say my father's because my very wealthy mother died in childbirth and my father raised me. I do not remember Father dating in the customary sense of that word. He employed the occasional mistress for sexual release, but he seldom brought one home or introduced me. As for me, I had a series of nannies, plump and pleasant European women who indulged my every whim."

Nicole Stryker was delivering a monologue of sorts, and as her voice droned on, the sun beyond the tinted windows seemed to drop directly behind her pretty head, creating an odd halo effect, with tendrils of grayish light. As he sank into a trance state, she embodied the goddess and Burke felt the presence of what Carl Jung called 'the numinous.'

"My father was a remote man, but lest you think passionless just read one of his novels. His soul was burdened by a dark and only marginally contained lust, Mr. Burke. But it was not for mere hedonistic physical sensations. My father craved power over others. And my mother's wealth gave him access to that power. That is why he loved to learn."

"Didn't he attend medical school at some point in his life?"

"In his twenties, on scholarship. He was way ahead of the class. He hated it, or so I was told. He dropped out from sheer boredom."

"And the writing?"

"His writing began as a lark, or so he claimed. He'd always liked anagrams, word games, crossword puzzles, things like that. And he loved to read. Then he happened upon a collection of stories by an alcoholic journalist named Ambrose Bierce, who was an employee of William Randolph Hearst in the eighteen hundreds. Bierce enjoyed writing and publishing very disturbing fiction. My father was inspired by a rather bleak and cheerfully sadistic story called '
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
.' He adored the surprise ending and immediately set about writing a derivative story of his own. With his typical lack of humility he sent it out to a magazine. It was, of course, rejected.

"Mr. Burke, one simply did not say no to my father. He flew into a rage. I remember, I was perhaps nine at that time—he actually threatened to buy the magazine just to humiliate and fire the editor. Father immersed himself in horror fiction at that point. He began with the masters, Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Stoker, Mary Shelley, and Saki. He moved to the modern best-selling authors, such as King, Straub, Koontz, Anne Rice, and Robert McCammon.

"He educated himself for more than a year. Then he sat down at his computer and tried again. He produced a somewhat derivative novel about an abandoned tenement in a New York City slum that was actually the gate to another, and quite evil, dimension. The book,
Passageway
, won a Bram Stoker award from the Horror Writers' Association. It then sold to a paperback house and went on to be a bestseller and a film of the same name. The money and accolades poured in. I recall how my father reveled in it all. Of course, now he had even less time for me than before."

"And the author Peter Stryker was born."

"Yes."

Burke absorbed her words greedily, with every fiber of his consciousness. It was easy to do; Nicole was beautiful in the steadily dimming light, sitting like a
fakir
, her face obscured by shadow. His eyes were half closed and heavy. It took him a moment to realize she had stopped speaking. He shook himself awake. "May I ask a few things now?"

"Of course."

"What was your father's real name?"

"Peter Philbin. He was an English teacher when he met my mother. As I heard the story, her car broke down in the rain near a small town in New England. Her driver walked off into the storm in search of assistance. My father happened upon the limousine and offered to assist her. She was intrigued by the fact that he was a medical student at the time. She later invited him to a party at the mansion. They went outside for a drink and a chat. I'm told she was initially just trying to be polite, but then they fell in love."

"How did her family feel about this?"

Nicole Striker chuckled in a low and throaty voice. Burke felt the short hairs on his neck flutter. "My mother's family despised Peter Philbin, Mr. Burke, especially once they heard that he had dropped out of medical school. They hated him even more after my mother's untimely death. My father inherited a fortune, but never their goodwill. In fact, they never spoke to him again."

"Didn't they want to know their grandchild?"

Nicole hesitated. "Not according to my father. If they tried to send birthday cards or telephone, I never heard about it. In fact, they are dead to me."

Burke breathed slowly, allowed his mind run over what she had already revealed to him, and looked for any unspoken threads. Finally he said: "So now he has money and fame to go along with what you described as a lust for power. How did all that affect him?"

"He continued to write," Nicole replied. "And each book became more successful than the last. Did you know that all but one was made into a movie, and that all of those films topped two hundred million dollars in domestic box office?"

"No, I don't read much horror fiction."

Nicole seems to read his mind. "Perhaps you have seen a few too many horror facts?"

"Perhaps."

"Well, my father made sure everyone else knew about statistics like that. He would drop those figures at every opportunity. Fame made him even vainer, Mr. Burke, even more insufferably self-centered. Each novel became darker than the last, too. More visceral, more explicit and disturbing. As you noted, he had a medical background and he took great pride in shocking people."

"That seems appropriate for his chosen profession."

"Of course. But in order to stretch the boundaries he also had to research extensively. He read a great deal about witchcraft, human sacrifice, torture, the Holocaust, the Spanish Inquisition. The list goes on and on. To be honest, I remain convinced that such material eventually warped his mind."

"What makes you say that?"

"Father began to lock himself in his study for hours on end, and sometimes I would hear him screaming and crying. He would vanish for days or weeks, always without warning. He was gone most of my high school years, but suddenly ceased flying a few years ago. He became completely phobic about air travel after September 11th and never rode on another plane. He turned to comparative religion and devoured eastern thought. Nonetheless, his fear of the finality of death became overwhelming."

Burke focused more energy and gathered a deeper sense of the man they were discussing. He did not like the resultant feeling. "You are describing someone very capable of killing himself."

"I know. But hear me out."

Burke shrugged.
It's your money
. Nicole Stryker shifted into a standing position, so effortlessly his pulse raced. She moved away from the tinted window, buttocks rolling smoothly, back to the bar to refresh her drink. Burke was both amused and unduly baffled by this young woman. He shook his head slightly. "Go on."

The tinkling of ice in a glass. "As I said, my father was terrified of death. The more he read about it, and those who explore and worship it, the more frightened he became. If his many fans had realized how pathetic a figure he was in real life, they would have abandoned him in droves. In the last few years his fame was a curse. He could not go out in public without being asked for his autograph. He learned to disguise himself."

Burke smiled. "You're not suggesting that's why he . . ."

"Yes, that's why he began to wear women's clothing. To go out in drag. According to my father, it was the only way he could escape the house without being troubled."

Cross-dressing for privacy?
It read as total nonsense. Burke could not tell if she believed her own rationalization, so he said nothing.

"And by the way," Nicole continued, "even discussing the themes he wrote about began to give him anxiety attacks. A supreme karmic joke, wouldn't you say?"

"It sounds that way," Burke replied. "May I have a glass of water, Nicole?"

The fact that he had used her first name increased the static dangling in the air. Burke rose and strolled over to the bar. He moved to the other end and reached out with his right hand. Nicole Stryker poured club soda into a crystal goblet, added ice, and slid it down the bar so their fingers would not touch. It was clear that she felt something, too.

"Was he on medication for these attacks?" Burke was thinking of drugs like Ativan and their sedating effect, also how dangerous they were when combined with alcohol.

Nicole Stryker shook her head. "Not in the way you're thinking," she says. "He saw a psycho- pharmacologist named Markoff at UCLA and was prescribed an anti-depressant."

"Do you recall which one?"

"No."

Burke searched his memory bank. "An SSRI, like Lexapro?"

"I've forgotten. That sounds right. Whatever it was, it didn't make him further depressed. In fact quite the opposite. He became more agitated."

"Did your father do recreational drugs of any kind?"

"Not that I know of, but it wouldn't surprise me. My father . . . experimented with life, Mr. Burke."

"That prescription you mentioned? I would like to know what it was." Burke drank the club soda. The fizz tickled his upper lip.