Whispers Page 7

  won top prize in his division, he never seriously considered quitting his job and plunging into the creative life. That was nothing more than a pleasant fantasy, a bright daydream. No son of Carlo Clemenza would ever forsake a weekly paycheck for the dread uncertainties of self-employment, unless he had first banked a windfall from Las Vegas.

  He was jealous of Michael Savatino’s good fortune. Of course, they were still close friends, and he was genuinely happy for Michael. Delighted. Really. But also jealous. He was human, after all, and in the back of his mind, the same petty question kept blinking off and on, off and on, like a neon sign: Why couldn’t it have been me?

  Slamming on the brakes, jolting Tony out of his reverie, Frank blew the horn at a Corvette that cut him off in traffic. “Asshole!”

  “Easy, Frank.”

  “Sometimes I wish I was back in uniform again, handing out citations.”

  “That’s the last thing you wish.”

  “I’d nail his ass.”

  “Except maybe he’d turn out to be out of his skull on drugs or maybe just plain crazy. When you work the traffic detail too long, you tend to forget the world’s full of nuts. You fall into a habit, a routine, and you get careless. So maybe you’d stop him and walk up to his door with your ticket book in hand, and he’d greet you with a gun. Maybe he’d blow your head off. No. I’m thankful traffic detail’s behind me forever. At least when you’re on a homicide assignment, you know the kind of people you’re going to have to deal with. You never forget there’s going to be someone with a gun or a knife or a piece of lead pipe up ahead somewhere. You’re a lot less likely to walk into a nasty little surprise when you’re working homicide.”

  Frank refused to be drawn into another discussion. He kept his eyes on the road, grumbled sullenly, wordlessly, and settled back into silence.

  Tony sighed. He stared at the passing scenery with an artist’s eye for unexpected detail and previously unnoticed beauty.

  Patterns.

  Every scene—every seascape, every landscape, every street, every building, every room in every building, every person, every thing—had its own special patterns. If you could perceive the patterns in a scene, you could then look beyond the patterns to the underlying structure that supported them. If you could see and grasp the method by which a surface harmony had been achieved, you eventually could understand the deepest meaning and mechanisms of any subject and then make a good painting of it. If you picked up your brushes and approached the canvas without first performing that analysis, you might wind up with a pretty picture, but you would not produce a work of art.

  Patterns.

  As Frank Howard drove east on Wilshire, on the way to the Hollywood singles’ bar called The Big Quake, Tony searched for patterns in the city and the night. At first, coming in from Santa Monica, there were the sharp low lines of the sea-facing houses and the shadowy outlines of tall feathery palms—patterns of serenity and civility and more than a little money. As they entered Westwood, the dominant pattern was rectilinear: clusters of office highrises, oblong patches of light radiating from scattered windows in the mostly dark faces of the buildings. These neatly ordered rectangular shapes formed the patterns of modern thought and corporate power, patterns of even greater wealth than had been evident in Santa Monica’s seaside homes. From Westwood they went to Beverly Hills, an insulated pocket within the greater fabric of the metropolis, a place through which the Los Angeles police could pass but in which they had no authority. In Beverly Hills, the patterns were soft and lush and flowing in a graceful continuum of big houses, parks, greenery, exclusive shops, and more ultra-expensive automobiles than you could find anywhere else on earth. From Wilshire Boulevard to Santa Monica Boulevard to Doheny, the pattern was one of ever-increasing wealth.

  They turned north on Doheny, crawled up the steep hills, and swung right onto Sunset Boulevard, heading for the heart of Hollywood. For a couple of blocks, the famous street delivered a little bit on the promise of its name and legend. On the right stood Scandia, one of the best and most elegant restaurants in town, and one of the half dozen best in the entire country. Glittering discos. A nightclub specializing in magic. Another spot owned and operated by a stage hypnotist. Comedy clubs. Rock and roll clubs. Huge flashy billboards advertising current films and currently popular recording stars. Lights, lights, and more lights. Initially, the boulevard supported the university studies and government reports that claimed Los Angeles and its suburbs formed the richest metropolitan area in the nation, perhaps the richest in the world. But after a while, as Frank continued to drive eastward, the blush of glamor faded. Even L.A. suffered from senescence. The pattern became marginally but unmistakably cancerous. In the healthy flesh of the city, a few malignant growths swelled here and there: cheap bars, a striptease club, a shuttered service station, brassy massage parlors, an adult book store, a few buildings desperately in need of renovation, more of them block by block. The disease was not terminal in this neighborhood, as it was in others nearby, but every day it gobbled up a few more bites of healthy tissue. Frank and Tony did not have to descend into the scabrous heart of the tumor, for The Big Quake was still on the edge of the blight. The bar appeared suddenly in a blaze of red and blue lights on the righthand side of the street.

  Inside, the place resembled Paradise, except that the decor relied more heavily on colored lights and chrome and mirrors than it did in the Santa Monica bar. The customers were somewhat more consciously stylish, more aggressively au courant, and generally a shade better looking than the crowd in Paradise. But to Tony the patterns appeared to be the same as they were in Santa Monica. Patterns of need, longing, and loneliness. Desperate, carnivorous patterns.

  The bartender wasn’t able to help them, and the only customer who had anything for them was a tall brunette with violet eyes. She was sure they would find Bobby at Janus, a discotheque in Westwood. She had seen him there the previous two nights.

  Outside, in the parking lot, bathed in alternating flashes of red and blue light, Frank said, “One thing just leads to another.”

  “As usual.”

  “It’s getting late.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You want to try Janus now or leave it for tomorrow?”

  “Now,” Tony said.

  “Good.”

  They turned around and traveled west on Sunset, out of the area that showed signs of urban cancer, into the glitter of the Strip, then into greenery and wealth again, past the Beverly Hills Hotel, past mansions and endless marching rows of gigantic palm trees.

  As he often did when he suspected Tony might attempt to strike up another conversation, Frank switched on the police band radio and listened to Communications calling black-and-whites in the division that provided protection for Westwood, toward which they were heading. Nothing much was happening on that frequency. A family dispute. A fender-bender at the corner of Westwood Boulevard and Wilshire. A suspicious man in a parked car on a quiet residential street off Hilgarde had attracted attention and needed checking out.

  In most of the city’s other sixteen police divisions, the night was far less safe and peaceful than it was in privileged Westwood. In the Seventy-seventh, Newton, and Southwest divisions, which served the black community south of the Santa Monica Freeway, none of the mid-watch patrol officers would be bored; in their bailiwicks the night was jumping. On the east side of town, in the Mexican-American neighborhoods, the gangs would continue to give a bad name to the vast majority of law-abiding Chicano citizens. By the time the mid-watch went off duty at three o’clock—three hours after the morning watch came on line—there would be several ugly incidents of gang violence on the east side, a few punks stabbing other punks, maybe a shooting and a death or two as the macho maniacs tried to prove their manhood in the wearisome, stupid, but timeless blood ceremonies they had been performing with Latin passion for generations. To the northwest, on the far side of the hills, the affluent valley kids were drinking too damned much whiskey, smoking t
oo much pot, snorting too much cocaine—and subsequently ramming their cars and vans and motorcycles into one another at ghastly speeds and with tiresome regularity.

  As Frank drove past the entrance to Bel Air Estates and started up a hill toward the UCLA campus, the Westwood scene suddenly got lively. Communications put out a woman-in-trouble call. Information was sketchy. Apparently, it was an attempted rape and assault with a deadly weapon. It was not clear if the assailant was still on the premises. Shots had been fired, but Communications had been unable to ascertain from the complainant whether the gun belonged to her or the assailant. Likewise, they didn’t know if anyone was hurt.

  “Have to go in blind,” Tony said.

  “That address is just a couple of blocks from here,” Frank said.

  “We could be there in a minute.”

  “Probably a lot faster than the patrol car.”

  “Want to assist?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll call in and tell them.”

  Tony picked up the microphone as Frank hung a hard left at the first intersection. A block later they turned left again, and Frank accelerated as much as he dared along the narrow, tree-flanked street.

  Tony’s heart accelerated with the car. He felt an old excitement, a cold hard knot of fear in his guts.

  He remembered Parker Hitchison, a particularly quirky, morose, and humorless partner he had endured for a short while during his second year as a patrol officer, long before he won his detective’s badge. Every time they answered a call, every damned time, whether it was a Code Three emergency or just a frightened cat stuck in a tree, Parker Hitchison sighed mournfully and said, “Now, we die.” It was weird and decidedly unsettling. Over and over again on every shift, night after night, with sincere and unflagging pessimism, he said it—“Now, we die”—until Tony was almost crazy.

  Hitchison’s funereal voice and those three somber words still haunted him in moments like this.

  Now we die?

  Frank wheeled around another corner, nearly clipping a black BMW that was parked too close to the intersection. The tires squealed, and the sedan shimmied, and Frank said, “That address ought to be right around here somewhere.”

  Tony squinted at the shadowy houses that were only partly illuminated by the streetlamps. “There it is, I think,” he said, pointing.

  It was a large neo-Spanish house set well back from the street on a spacious lot. Red tile roof. Cream-colored stucco. Leaded windows. Two big wrought-iron carriage lamps, one on each side of the front door.

  Frank parked in the circular driveway.

  They got out of the unmarked sedan.

  Tony reached under his jacket and slipped the service revolver out of his shoulder holster.

  After Hilary had finished crying at her desk in the study, she had decided, in a daze, to go upstairs and make herself presentable before she reported the assault to the police. Her hair had been in complete disarray, her dress torn, her pantyhose shredded and hanging from her legs in ludicrous loops and tangles. She didn’t know how quickly the reporters would arrive once the word had gotten out on the police radio, but she had no doubt that they would show up sooner or later. She was something of a public figure, having written two hit films and having received an Academy Award nomination two years ago for her Arizona Shifty Pete screenplay. She treasured her privacy and preferred to avoid the press if at all possible, but she knew that she would have little choice but to make a statement and answer a few questions about what had happened to her this night. It was the wrong kind of publicity. It was embarrassing. Being the victim in a case like this was always humiliating. Although it should make her an object of sympathy and concern, it actually would make her look like a fool, a patsy just waiting to be pushed around. She had successfully defended herself against Frye, but that would not matter to the sensation seekers. In the unfriendly glare of the television lights and in the flat gray newspaper photos, she would look weak. The merciless American public would wonder why she had let Frye into her house. They would speculate that she had been raped and that her story of fending him off was just a coverup. Some of them would be certain that she had invited him in and had asked to be raped. Most of the sympathy she received would be shot through with morbid curiosity. The only thing she could control was her appearance when the newsmen arrived. She simply could not allow herself to be photographed in the pitiable, disheveled state in which Bruno Frye had left her.

  As she washed her face and combed her hair and changed into a silk robe that belted at the waist, she was not aware that these actions would damage her credibility with the police, later. She didn’t realize that, in making herself presentable, she was actually setting herself up as a target for at least one policeman’s suspicion and scorn, as well as for charges of being a liar.

  Although she thought she was in command of herself, Hilary got the shakes again as she finished changing clothes. Her legs turned to jelly, and she was forced to lean against the closet door for a minute.

  Nightmarish images crowded her mind, vivid flashes of unsummoned memories. At first, she saw Frye coming at her with a knife, grinning like a death’s head, but then he changed, melted into another shape, another identity, and he became her father, Earl Thomas, and then it was Earl who was coming at her, drunk and angry, cursing, taking swipes at her with his big hard hands. She shook her head and drew deep breaths and, with an effort, banished the vision.

  But she could not stop shaking.

  She imagined that she heard strange noises in another room of the house. A part of her knew that she was merely imagining it, but another part was sure that she could hear Frye returning for her.

  By the time she ran to the phone and dialed the police, she was in no condition to give the calm and reasoned report she had planned. The events of the past hour had affected her far more profoundly than she had thought at first, and recovering from the shock might take days, even weeks.

  After she hung up the receiver, she felt better, just knowing help was on the way. As she went downstairs, she said aloud, “Stay calm. Just stay calm. You’re Hilary Thomas. You’re tough. Tough as nails. You aren’t scared. Not ever. Everything will be okay.” It was the same litany that she had repeated as a child so many nights in that Chicago apartment. By the time she reached the first door, she had begun to get a grip on herself.

  She was standing in the foyer, staring out the narrow leaded window beside the door, when a car stopped in the driveway. Two men got out of it. Although they had not come with sirens blaring and red lights flashing, she knew they were the police, and she unlocked the door, opened it.

  The first man onto the front stoop was powerfully built, blond, blue-eyed, and had the hard no-nonsense voice of a cop. He had a gun in his right hand. “Police. Who’re you?”

  “Thomas,” she said. “Hilary Thomas. I’m the one who called.”

  “This your house?”

  “Yes. There was a man—”

  A second detective, taller and darker than the first, appeared out of the night and interrupted her before she could finish the sentence. “Is he on the premises?”

  “What?”

  “Is the man who assaulted you still here?”

  “Oh, no. Gone. He’s gone.”

  “Which way did he go?” the blond man asked.

  “Out this door.”

  “Did he have a car?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was he armed?”

  “No. I mean, yes.”

  “Which is it?”

  “He had a knife. But not now.”

  “Which way did he run when he left the house?”

  “I don’t know. I was upstairs. I—”

  “How long ago did he leave?” the tall dark one asked.

  “Maybe fifteen, maybe twenty minutes ago.”

  They exchanged a look that she did not understand but which she knew, immediately, was not good for her.

  “What took you so long to call it in?” the
blond asked.

  He was slightly hostile.

  She felt she was losing some important advantage that she could not identify.

  “At first I was . . . confused,” she said. “Hysterical. I needed a few minutes to get myself together.”

  “Twenty minutes?”

  “Maybe it was only fifteen.”

  Both detectives put away their revolvers.

  “We’ll need a description,” the dark one said.

  “I can give you better than that,” she said as she stepped aside to let them enter. “I can give you a name.”

  “A name?”

  “His name. I know him,” she said. “The man who attacked me. I know who he is.”

  The two detectives gave each other that look again.

  She thought: What have I done wrong?

  Hilary Thomas was one of the most beautiful women Tony had ever seen. She appeared to have a few drops of Indian blood. Her hair was long and thick, darker than his own, a glossy raven-black. Her eyes were dark, too, the whites as clear as pasteurized cream. Her flawless complexion was a light milky bronze shade, probably largely the result of carefully measured time in the California sun. If her face was a bit long, that was balanced by the size of her eyes (enormous) and by the perfect shape of her patrician nose, and by the almost obscene fullness of her lips. Hers was an erotic face, but an intelligent and kind face as well, the face of a woman capable of great tenderness and compassion. There was also pain in that countenance, especially in those fascinating eyes, the kind of pain that came from experience, knowledge; and Tony expected that it was not merely the pain she’d suffered that night; some of it went back a long, long time.

  She sat on one end of the brushed corduroy sofa in the book-lined study, and Tony sat on the other end. They were alone.

  Frank was in the kitchen, talking on the phone to a desk man at headquarters.

  Upstairs, two uniformed patrolmen, Whitlock and Farmer, were digging bullets out of the walls.

  There was not a fingerprint man in the house because, according to the complainant, the intruder had worn gloves.

  “What’s he doing now?” Hilary Thomas asked.

  “Who?”

  “Lieutenant Howard.”

  “He’s calling headquarters and asking someone to get in touch with the sheriff’s office up there in Napa County, where Frye lives.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, for one thing, maybe the sheriff can find out how Frye got to L.A.”

  “What’s it matter how he got here?” she asked. “The important thing is that he’s here and he’s got to be found and stopped.”

  “If he flew down,” Tony said, “it doesn’t matter much at all. But if Frye drove to L.A., the sheriff up in Napa County might be able to find out what car he used. With a description of the vehicle and a license number, we’ve got a better chance of nailing him before he gets too far.”

  She considered that for a moment, then said, “Why did Lieutenant Howard go to the kitchen? Why didn’t he just use the phone in here?”

  “I guess he wanted you to have a few minutes of peace and quiet,” Tony said uneasily.

  “I think he just didn’t want me to hear what he was saying.”

  “Oh, no. He was only—”

  “You know, I have the strangest feeling,” she said, interrupting him. “I feel like I’m the suspect instead of the victim.”

  “You’re just tense,” he said. “Understandably tense.”

  “It isn’t that. It’s something about the way you’re acting toward me. Well . . . not so much you as him.”

  “Frank can seem cool at times,” Tony said. “But he’s a good detective.”

  “He thinks I’m lying.”

  Tony was surprised by her perspicacity. He shifted uncomfortably on the sofa. “I’m sure he doesn’t think any such thing.”

  “He does,” she insisted. “And I don’t understand why.” Her eyes fixed on his. “Level with me. Come on. What is it? What did I say wrong?”

  He sighed. “You’re a perceptive lady.”

  “I’m a writer. It’s part of my job to observe things a little more closely than most people do. And I’m also persistent. So you might as well answer my question and get me off your back.”

  “One of the things that bothers Lieutenant Howard is the fact that you know the man who attacked you.”

  “So?”

  “This is awkward,” he said unhappily.

  “Let me hear it anyway.”

  “Well . . .” He cleared his throat. “Conventional police wisdom says that if the complainant in a rape or an attempted rape knows the victim, there’s a pretty good chance that she contributed to the crime by enticing the accused to one degree or another.”