Vixen (13 page)

So I went back to work myself, at least for that day. Routine desk work, same as before. I'd been in touch with Tamara, of course, and Jake Runyon had called to offer his condolences. They had filled me in on Jake's face-to-face with Frank Chaleen. Nothing had happened since. The waiting game was still in effect.

But something was going to happen sooner or later. Probably sooner, since Kenneth Beckett's trial was rapidly approaching. We all pretty much agreed on that. This was one of those powderkeg cases, with all the principals and their interactions so unstable that an explosion of some kind seemed inevitable. What worried me was that when it came, one or more of us would suffer collateral damage a lot worse than a cut on the forehead.

 

15

JAKE RUNYON

Seven-fifteen p.m., the following Wednesday.

Runyon had just come out of a Chinese restaurant on Taraval, a few blocks from his apartment. Chinese food had been Colleen's favorite; they'd eaten one kind or another two or three times a week during their twenty years together. After she was gone he'd kept up the ritual as a way to hold onto the memory of the good times they'd shared. But during his period with Bryn, he ate Chinese less often and only on nights when he was alone. Now he was back to it regularly again, but not in a compulsive way. Because as much as he cared for any food, he liked Hunan and Szechuan. And because every time he ordered a plate of moo shu pork or sesame chicken, he visualized Colleen's smile and felt her there close to him once again.

He was keying open the door to his Ford when his cell vibrated. The caller window told him who it was.

Kenneth Beckett. Finally.

He slid in behind the wheel before he opened the line. “Yes, Ken?”

“Oh man I'm glad you picked up, I can't talk very long.” Fast, breathless, the kid's voice pitched low; Runyon had to strain a little to hear him. “Cory's in the shower and Mr. Vorhees will be here any minute. It's tonight, Mr. Runyon, he's going to do it tonight.”

“Who is? Do what?”

“Chaleen. Kill Mrs. Vorhees.”

“How do you know that?”

“The way Cory's been acting, all excited, going out to meet that bastard … I know it's tonight. I'd've called sooner but this is the first chance I've had. You've got to stop him.”

“Where? How?”

“I don't know.”

“What makes you so sure it's Chaleen and not both of them?”

“Cory never does anything herself, she always makes other people do what she wants. She—”

Audible in the background was a sudden chiming noise. Doorbell.

“Oh God, Mr. Vorhees is here,” Beckett whispered. Panicky now. “Don't let Chaleen do it, Mr. Runyon, don't let her be killed!”

“Ken, wait—”

The line went dead.

*   *   *

A light fog was drifting in from the ocean, just thick enough to wrap the tops of trees in faintly luminous skeins, as Runyon drove into St. Francis Wood. He had a good memory for addresses; he'd remembered the street and number of the Vorhees home without having to look them up. He swung off Sloat below the fountain at the boulevard's upper end, rolled slowly along the cross street to the big Spanish-style house. Even with all the vegetation, he could see that the porch light was on and that another burned behind one of the thinly curtained front windows. Security lights, possibly, but he wouldn't know for sure until he checked. He parked just beyond the driveway.

The mist made the evening chilly; he pulled his coat collar up as he passed through a gate in the front hedge. Risky business, coming here. For all he knew, Beckett had made up or imagined an attack tonight on Margaret Vorhees. But he couldn't afford to ignore the possibility that the kid was right and something was about to go down.

This was the only place he knew to start looking for Margaret Vorhees. If she was home alone, he'd have to make up some kind of story for the after-dark visit, one that wouldn't provoke the kind of alcoholic rage she'd directed at Bill. If Chaleen was there and she was all right, he'd still have to make up a story, but his arrival ought to be enough to prevent her from being harmed. Temporarily, anyhow.

Moot concerns: nobody answered the bell.

The house's security system wasn't armed; the red light on the alarm panel would have been on if it was. Still possible she was here, then, drunk and not answering the bell. He rang it again—four, five, six times. Chimes, fading echoes, silence.

Runyon tried the latch. Locked. Just as well; he had no cause for an illegal entry.

He turned back down off the porch. Thinking: Check the detached garage, see if he could tell if her car was inside. He'd have a choice to make if it wasn't, and neither of the options worth a damn. Hunting for the woman was needle-in-a-haystack stuff. Waiting here for her to come home was potentially just as futile; if Beckett was right and she'd gone to meet Chaleen, she wouldn't be coming home at all.

A flagstone path led to the garage through a geometrical arrangement of flower beds and thick, tall shrubbery; outdoor lantern-style lights were strung along it, but they were all dark. He picked his way to where the path angled around some kind of flowering shrub, and then he could see the garage and a lighted window in the nearside wall. The interior overheads left on for some reason?

The path angled toward the window and a closed side door beyond. As he drew closer, he realized that the light behind the glass had an oddly unsteady, nebulous quality. That was the first warning sign. The others came quickly: a low, steady rumbling from inside the garage, just audible in the night's stillness, then a faint acrid smell that twitched his nostrils—familiar, too familiar.

Runyon broke into a run, the skin pulling along the back of his neck. When he put his face up close to the window, he was looking at moving layers of gray as if thick clouds of fog had been trapped inside. Through the billows he could make out the shape of a low-slung sports car, its engine throbbing like an erratic pulse.

The door next to the window was locked or jammed. Runyon ran around to the front, but there were no outside handles on the double garage doors: electronically controlled and locked down tight. Back fast to the window in the sidewall, where he broke the glass with his elbow. The construction of the garage must have provided a tight seal; waves of carbon monoxide came pouring out, driving him back and to one side.

He ducked his head, threw his weight against the door, but he couldn't break through that way, succeeded only in jamming his shoulder. Then he did what he should have done in the first place—stepped back, pistoned the bottom of his shoe into the panel next to the knob. The second time he did that, the lock tore loose and the door scraped inward on the concrete floor.

Runyon shoved it all the way open, releasing more of the churning poison, held a sucked-in breath, and plunged blindly inside.

Despite the dull furry glow from an overhead light, he could barely see; the monoxide burned his eyes, started them stinging and watering. He smacked into the car on the passenger side, bent to squint through the window. A figure was slumped over the wheel, but he couldn't make out whether it was a man or a woman. He fumbled for the door handle. Locked. Clawed his way around to the driver's side. That door was locked, too.

The exhaust fumes had gotten into his lungs, was tearing the air out of them in a burst of staccato coughing. No way he could stay in here now without putting himself at risk. He groped back around the car, stumbled out through the side door. Leaned against the garage wall, gulping fog-damp air until his head and chest cleared.

When he could breathe again, he dragged out his pencil flash and ran along the path to the house to hunt for a hose bib. Found one, soaked his handkerchief in cold water. The emissions were no longer quite as thick when he returned to the garage; he could see the car more clearly now, a black Mercedes. He sucked in another breath, held the wet handkerchief over his mouth and nose, pushed back inside.

First thing was to get the double entrance doors open to let more of the monoxide empty out. He no longer felt any sense of urgency; as dense as the trapped fumes had been, the Mercedes' engine had to've been running a long time—much too long for the person slumped behind the wheel to still be alive. He splashed the walls with pen light until he located the switch that operated the automatic door opener. When the mechanism began to grind, he turned back toward a workbench that stretched along one wall.

A bunch of hand tools hung neatly on a pegboard. Hammer … no, it'd take too long to break through safety glass on a Mercedes. Pry bar was what he needed. There, hanging behind a handsaw. He yanked it down.

Coughing again, he managed to wedge the thin end of the bar into the crack next to the lock on the driver's door. Couldn't spring it at first, thought he'd have to use the bar to beat a hole in the glass, then gave it one more yank and the door popped open.

He threw the bar down, leaned in past the slumped figure—a woman—and twisted the ignition key to cut off the wheezing rhythm of the engine. The woman and the car interior both stank of whiskey. He got both hands under her arms, dragged her limp body out of the car. His legs had a rubbery feel by the time he'd hauled her partway down the driveway; the drop to his knees beside her was as much a temporary collapse as a willful lowering. His chest still burned, sickness roiled in his stomach.

Somebody started shouting out on the street, but Runyon was too focused on the woman to pay much attention. Fortyish, black hair piled atop her head, eyes wide open with the whites showing, lips stretched wide and curled inward, the skin of her face a bright cherry red. No need to feel for a pulse, but he did it anyway. Too late, much too late. Would've been too late even if he'd gotten here twenty or thirty minutes sooner.

He had never seen Margaret Vorhees, but there was no doubt that she was the dead woman. He didn't need Bill's description of her to confirm it.

Running footsteps, two shouting voices now, a man and a woman. Neighbors. The man made a 911 call on his cell phone, and a good thing he was there to do it. Runyon didn't have enough breath left to speak above a cough-riddled whisper.

*   *   *

He was all right again by the time the police and an EMT unit showed up, but the EMTs insisted on checking him over and giving him oxygen. Then there was the usual q. & a. with a pair of patrolmen, and another round of the same with an African American homicide inspector named Samuel Davidson.

Why was Runyon there? A business matter to discuss with Mrs. Vorhees. What sort of business matter? Information the agency he worked for had come by pertaining to the theft of a valuable necklace of hers. Did he know the woman? No, he'd never seen her before. Was she a client of the agency? No. The information had come into their possession through another case they were investigating. Could the case have any connection with her death? He didn't know, couldn't say.

After that, Runyon faded into the background while the forensics and coroner's people went about their work. On the front seat of the Mercedes they found Margaret Vorhees' purse, the remote control unit that operated the garage doors, and a nearly empty bottle of Irish whiskey. According to the neighbors, Mrs. Vorhees had been drinking heavily since the separation from her husband. That opened up the possibility that she'd been despondent enough to take her own life, except that the police didn't find anything resembling a suicide note in the car or in the house. Which left the natural assumption that her death had been accidental. Alcoholic drives home from somewhere drunk, taking little nips of Irish on the way; pulls the car into the garage, presses the remote to lower the doors, then passes out with the engine still running. Stupid, tragic accident. Happens all the time.

But not this time.

It was murder, all right.

Runyon would have figured it that way even if Kenneth Beckett hadn't put the bug in his ear. The monoxide job had a staged feel. The nearly empty whiskey bottle on the front seat was too convenient; well-bred socialites, no matter how alcoholic, were much less inclined to suck on an open bottle while driving than your average drunk. Then there were the overhead lights in the garage; if she'd been out somewhere in her Mercedes, why would she have left the lights burning? And the security system had been switched off. No wealthy woman living alone is likely to forget to arm hers when she leaves the house, no matter how much she's had to drink.

None of the neighbors the police talked to had noticed anyone in the vicinity during the afternoon. Even if they had seen a man who'd probably been an occasional if not frequent visitor, it wouldn't seem suspicious. And it would have been easy enough for that man to get Margaret Vorhees drunk enough to pass out, carry her through the jungley side yard to the garage, put her into the Mercedes along with the props, start the engine, set the snap lock on the side garage door, and then slip away unseen.

Frank Chaleen.

Working from a scheme designed by Cory Beckett.

It galled Runyon, believing this, to have to tell evasive half-truths to the law. But he was hamstrung. Even if he'd given Inspector Davidson Kenneth Beckett's name, chances were the kid would be too scared or too intimidated to corroborate his story of a murder plot. And if he did corroborate it, it would be the ragged hearsay testimony of an unstable young man awaiting trial for grand theft, against the words of his sister and a prominent businessman.

Another thing: you learned to tread cautiously with the law when you were working the private sector, if you wanted to keep your license. Cops liked cooperation, but what they didn't like were insupportable complications; Runyon was well aware of that from his time on the job in Seattle. In a case like this, the smart thing was to keep your mouth shut and let the investigating officers come to their own conclusions.