The Simeon Chamber (36 page)

Now, clutching the handle of the gun in his hand, Sam’s head settled slowly back against the soft upholstery of the couch and he closed his eyes. Sleep had been an unwanted but relentless companion all the way from the city to the Davies vineyard. He could no longer resist its hypnotic lure. The sleep was sound, undisturbed, the slumber of one who had dismissed all doubt and dealt with all indecision.

Bogardus now knew what he had to do.

He had no idea how long he had slept when suddenly something landed on his lap, waking him with a start.

He jerked his head from the back of the couch and looked down. There, rubbing its feline body against his chest, was a spotless white Persian cat, its coat puffed like a blowfish. It purred and pushed its face under Sam’s chin, dragging its back in a serpentine movement across his chest. Self-consciously, Bogardus looked about the room to see if anyone had seen him sleeping.

He was alone except for the cat. He gently pushed the animal from his lap onto the floor and stood in an effort to stave off sleep.

Sam walked from the couch toward the fireplace, examining an array of items on the mantel. His attention was captured by a gold watch sealed in a small glass case, a family heirloom.

He tapped the glass.

“Ahem.” The old woman cleared her throat. She had come into the room and stood in the door behind him, her face a picture of reproof.

“It’s a beautiful watch,” said Sam. “Looks like a Howard. My grandfather had one similar to it years ago.”

She stood silently in the doorway.

Bogardus picked up a photograph from the mantel. 7

“Is this Mr. Davies—Jennifer’s stepfather?”

“Yes.”

He was in his mid-forties, austere, with a touch of gray at the temples. But Sam assumed that the picture had been taken some years before, for Bogardus had fixed the man’s age from the earlier photograph, the one that he’d taken from Treasure Island. Staring back from the frame in his hand were the cold dark eyes of Raymond Slade.

Sam sat paralyzed behind the wheel of the Porsche on the bluff overlooking the blustery Pacific under a silver, cloud-laden sky.

He was only a mile from the entrance to Drake’s Beach, but his thoughts were lost in the tangle of Jennifer Davies’s unspoken secret.

For days he had been tormented by the knowledge that she knew something about Raymond Slade, some perverse secret. Now he knew that those suspicions were not the product of idle speculation.

In Symington’s vaulted warren under the castle Jennifer had pursued a single line of inquiry: “Do you think you would be able to identify Raymond Slade if you saw him?” she’d asked.

From that morning in the hospital when she first came to visit him she had been obsessed in her quest for the man’s photograph, first from the firm’s file containing the Treasure Island photo, and when that couldn’t be found, from her mother’s old picture album.

But Slade was always one jump ahead. And why not? Raymond Slade, alias Louis Davies, had taken pains to remove any vestige of his wartime image from the house where Jennifer lived. Sam hadn’t quite figured out how Slade had gained access to the law office and taken the office file, but he was certain that he had.

Bogardus had to have been blind not to see it earlier.

But then Jennifer hadn’t known for sure herself.

That was why she needed the photograph. After Pat’s death Jennifer could no longer confide in Bogardus. She lived with the growing belief that her stepfather had committed murder. How could she disclose that gnawing suspicion to the man whose partner—whose lover—Louis Davies had 459

killed?

He guessed that she’d heard something that day years before, outside her parents’ bedroom when they had argued—something that she couldn’t bring herself to tell another living soul. His mind turned the missing piece until, like a child’s puzzle, it fit the only vacant space. Jennifer Davies had lived with the thought that her mother and Raymond Slade had had an affair, a tryst that led the two of them to plan the murder of her father, James Spencer, a deed that Slade carried out on the blimp that fateful afternoon.

The Goodyear pilot was right. Two men came off the ship that day, but one of them was dead. How else could the disappearance of James Spencer be explained? If the man were alive he would never separate himself from his own child for a lifetime.

But could Slade really kill his own stepdaughter? Suddenly Sam realized that he knew nothing of Jennifer’s relationship with Louis Davies. The man had killed her father. She had lived for years with the question that hung like an ominous cloud over her life, a dark shadow that appeared whenever she looked into his eyes. For a child seeking love it was a fate the equivalent of death. And now the suspicion that she had harbored all of those years had been confirmed.

Sam’s thoughts turned increasingly to Louis Davies, the man he’d never met and whose voice he had heard only once during that brief telephone conversation to Jennifer from the hospital. It was a bizarre sensation, the knowledge that he had spoken to Pat’s killer only hours before she was murdered.

The afternoon light was already casting long shadows on the bleak span of beach that stretched north from the estuary. Sam parked the Porsche. A white sedan, the only vehicle in the otherwise deserted lot, was backed into a space three slots away. Directly in front of the Porsche was a sign leaning in the stiff ocean winds: Drake’s Beach

He sat motionless behind the wheel, his eyes fixed on the deserted beach and the bluffs surrounding it.

Off to the left fifty yards away 461

stood a lone wooden structure, a combination nature display and small coffee shop.

Two women, one short and squat wearing a loud print dress and bandanna and the other tall in a long coat and hat, walked a small dog near the surf. The pup yapped at the waves crashing on the white sand as the shorter woman struggled in the stiff winds to keep her dress down over her plump legs. A young couple holding hands walked on some rocks several hundred yards up the beach, tiptoeing over the incoming tide, stopping periodically to check small pools for signs of sea life.

Sam walked toward the coffee shop and up the wooden ramp leading to the building. He paused at the end of the deck that was poised over the beach and surveyed the sweep of Drake’s Bay. He could see several miles to the north as the headlands of Point Reyes curved sharply to the northwest, sheltering the otherwise open bay from the relentless swells of the North Pacific. The beach in front of the wooden deck was littered with small round stones washed down from a creek that ran along one side of the parking lot.

But there was no sign of the Seven Sisters—the undulating palisades that had reminded Drake so much of the cliffs of Dover. To the south Sam’s view was obscured by the rise of a hillock.

The door to the coffee shop behind Sam opened, releasing the sound of rock music from a radio that blared from the counter inside. Sam turned with a start and stared at a girl in her mid-twenties wearing a soiled canvas apron. She stood framed in the doorway.

“Are you Bogardus?” The expression on the girl’s face was a mix of apathy and annoyance.

Sam studied her for an instant, concluded that the woman was too detached to be a threat and answered, “Yes.”

“Your friend has gone on ahead. He said he’d wait for you near the marker at the estuary.”

Sam looked at the woman wearily.

“My friend—was he alone or was there a woman with him?”

“I’m not Western Union, mister. I’m just delivering the man’s message.”

“How do I get to the estuary?”

She threw a lazy gesture with her arm in a general southerly direction, turned and walked back into the empty coffee shop. 3

Sam walked from the covered deck back to his car and opened the front luggage compartment. He picked up a pair of binoculars and hung them around his neck, then lifted the heavy package wrapped in oilcloth and tucked it under his arm.

He was just about to slam the hood of the Porsche when his gaze was seized by a small triangular swatch of cloth caught in the trunk latch of the other vehicle twenty feet away. Without removing his eyes from the car or the cloth Bogardus groped for the jack handle under the spare tire of the Porsche. As his hand felt the cold metal he stood motionless, looking at the silk paisley print of Jennifer Davies’s dress trapped in the trunk lid of the small white sedan.

Bogardus had gone less than twenty paces from the wooden deck of the coffee shop when he turned with his back to the ocean, taking in the full sweep of the headlands from Point Reyes south toward the Golden Gate. The undulating parapets of sandstone swept around the bay with Drake’s Beach at the center. The hillside formed a geologic roller coaster spanning the arc of the bay. What had been screened from his view in the parking lot and on the deck of the coffee shop was readily apparent from the sea. There before his eyes were the Seven Sisters. The cliffs loomed overhead, pocked with small caverns and stained with rust from minute iron deposits.

Sam trudged through the deep sand and made his way to the edge of the water, where the moist, firm sand gave him a better footing. He was alone on the beach except for the two women and their small dog. He could see them in the distance through the mist, the dog barking at the waves, the two human figures keeping pace and moving south along the beach.

From his vantage point atop the cliff Raymond Slade placed the ornate walking cane in the tall marsh grass near his feet.

He adjusted the scope of the high-powered rifle and zeroed in on Bogardus walking on the beach below, training the cross hairs to a point just below the lawyer’s chin. He then roamed with the eye of the powerful scope down his victim’s body until the object of his interest came into focus. The package was carried securely under the crook of the arm. A smile curled from the corners of 465

Slade’s mouth. He rose from the bushes at the edge of the cliff and moved several yards farther south. Below he had an unobstructed view of the massive wooden post—the Drake marker—and the brackish waters of the estuary. In the distance beyond the sand dunes two women walked with a small dog.

A solitary fisherman drifted with the incoming tide in a small aluminum skiff on the estuary a hundred yards from the marker. He watched as the women on the beach wandered toward the far end of the sand spit two hundred yards away. The fisherman in his boat sat motionless, apparently baiting a hook. Satisfied that these other intruders presented no problem, he returned to the edge of the cliff and resumed his vigil over the lawyer.

Sam struggled through the tall marsh grass. The sharp tips of the bladelike leaves stung the back of his right hand as he clutched the oilcloth package under his left arm. He reached into his pocket and felt the handle of the small revolver.

As Bogardus walked hip-deep through the spines of tall grass, the acrid thirst for vengeance parched his mouth. He considered the relative strengths and weaknesses of their respective positions. The discovery in the trunk of Slade’s car radically altered the values he fed into the equation. Raymond Slade had nothing left with which to bargain. Only one of them would walk off the beach alive.

As the steep bluffs closed in from all sides, sheltering the estuary from the Pacific, Sam found himself virtually alone on a high plateau of sand a quarter mile from the roaring surf.

A massive wooden piling, its girth three feet in diameter, rose fifteen feet above the beach at the edge of the estuary. Sam moved toward the post. Near the top, a metal scroll affixed by the Navigator’s Guild proclaimed the windswept dune to be the spot where Drake and his crew spent more than a month during that summer of 1579.

The area by the marker was deserted. Sam scanned the estuary, making a 360-457ree sweep with the binoculars. His view of the sand spit at the end of the beach was completely obscured by the myriad dunes that surrounded him.

He dropped the field glasses to his chest and returned his right hand to the pocket of his 467

coat and the handle of the revolver. As Bogardus turned toward the monument he froze, his focus suddenly attracted by the movement of a man who stepped from behind the marker, a rifle poised in his hand, scope to his eye. Sam braced himself, his hand paralyzed on the grip of the pistol in his pocket. There, less than fifty feet away, stood instant death.

What seemed like an eternity passed in silence as the figure with the rifle stood motionless at the foot of the piling. Sam struggled for a view of the man’s face shielded behind the scope of the rifle and his raised forearm. For an instant Sam pried his eyes away from the specter of death to an object that offered the slim thread of hope. A brass walking cane stood propped against the post of the Drake marker, two feet to the right of the gunman. Perhaps Slade was disabled. Perhaps he would be a fraction of a second slow to react. Sam still could not make out the features of the man’s face.

A centimeter at a time Bogardus lifted the point of the pistol, still shielded from view in his pocket, raising the barrel toward the man by the marker.

“Move another inch and you’re dead. Take your hand out of your pocket.”

Sam hesitated.

“Now.”

Slowly, grudgingly, Bogardus released his grip on the pistol. He raised both arms, lifting the package high in the air.

“Put the journal on the ground.” The order was issued in a cold monotone.

Sam was tempted to dive into the tall grass and take his chances with the pistol. But the scoped rifle drew a bead on him like a laser beam.

Bogardus weighed his options and decided to wait.

Sam took several steps toward the still black waters of the estuary, the book held high over his head. The gunman at the marker swiveled, maintaining a steady bead on his quarry.

“Put the rifle down,” said Sam.

“Why should I?”

Bogardus said nothing, but continued a seemingly vagrant movement toward the estuary. In two more strides the man would have his answer. Sam had reached a steep embankment, the finger of a small peninsula directly over a deep pool of stagnant water.