The Sweetman Curve Page 12
The Beetle speeded up, passing the Firebird, and then abruptly swung right into the centre lane. The tall man jammed his foot on the gas to follow it, but the huge truck was coming up too fast on his lefthand side, and the gap where the Beetle had been was closed.
He tried one more desperate shot, in a sharp trajectory between the front of the truck and the tail of an Olds in the next lane. He could just make out the Beetle’s back, a fast-disappearing curve of orange with a waving CB antenna, and the M-16 was so heavy and ill-balanced that he wasn’t sure that he could even hope to hit it. But he fired one shot, and then manhandled the rifle back onto the passenger seat. Under his breath, he said, ‘Shit.’
In the dusky Santa Monica twilight, he slowed down and pulled off the freeway at the Rimerton Road exit. On Rimerton Road itself, he drew into the side, and parked, and switched off his lights. He was covered in freezing sweat, and his mouth was dry. The radio was still whispering to him; he switched it off.
There was silence, except for the swishing, droning sound of traffic on the freeway. There were no insects, no voices, no winds. He wiped his face with the swimming towel, and then sat back in his seat and let out a long, tense breath.
Maybe he should have shot them as they came out of the house. Maybe he should have blasted their heads off as they sat at the lights on San Vicente. But that wasn’t what these freeway killings were all about. That wasn’t the way this divine retribution was supposed to happen. The cold breath of the angel of fatal disapproval was meant to take these people’s lives openly and publicly, on the freeway, and yet inside the private sanctuary of their own cars. It was an invasion of the American womb, a mass abortion of those who took everything in which he believed in vain.
He gave himself five or ten minutes to cool off. Then he started up the car again, and headed east on Mulholland Drive, winding his way slowly across the mountains as far as Laurel Canyon. He didn’t know whether he wanted to go to the sex movies any more or not. A much more demanding instinct than sex was still frustrated, and his mind surged with electric tension that had no place to go for relief.
It was 6:31. He decided to buy himself a Chinese take-away meal and eat it in the solitude of his apartment. He parked the Firebird on Yucca Street, just north of Hollywood Boulevard, and packed the M-16 away in a brown leather case he had kept on the back seat. Then he locked the car, tossed the keys into the nearest garden, and walked towards Hollywood Boulevard in search of a taxi.
Sixteen
The Volkswagen coughed up Topanga Canyon, and only just made the drive in front of the house before it let out a whirring sound, and stopped altogether. Mel held on to the handbrake while John groped in the dark for a couple of bricks to wedge against the back tyres, and then Mel and Vicki climbed slowly and exhaustedly out of the car.
Vicki put her arms around John and held him relentlessly close for almost three long minutes, saying nothing, just trembling with shock and relief. Mel took his flashlight out of the glove box, and examined the Beetle all over.
‘Here it is,’ Mel said quietly, after a while. ‘This must have been the first one.’
They went over to take a look. There was a deep pockmark in the Beetle’s roof, where a bullet had glanced against it and ricocheted off.
‘I guess the second shot must have hit the engine someplace,’ said Mel. ‘There seems to be oil leaking all over, but I can’t see where it struck. I’ll have to take a look in the morning.’
‘Are we going to call the police now?’ asked Vicki. ‘Sure,’ said John. ‘I know what they’re going to say, but they have to know. Who’s for a drink?’
Mel nodded. ‘Jack Daniels, straight up, straight out of the bottle.’
They climbed up the wooden steps to the house, and John switched on the lights. While Mel and Vicki went through to the living room, he walked down the corridor into the kitchen, and opened the icebox.
For a moment, John closed his eyes and pressed his forehead against the cold top of the icebox. A feeling passed over him like a heavy black flag waved across a windy sky. It was a feeling of fear, but a feeling of survival, too – that extraordinary sensation of having come out of danger unscathed. He thanked God that he was still alive, and he thanked God that Vicki was safe, and he thanked God for Mel and his amazing driving.
He stood up straight and opened his eyes. He was sure now that Mel was right, and that this freeway psychopath wasn’t just knocking people off at random. If he had been, why would he have bothered to follow them and try to kill them again? Maybe they’d seen more of the killer that first time than he would have liked, and he was trying to eliminate some possible witnesses. But that kind of after-sales service was far more characteristic of mob killings, professionally arranged murders, than it was of random psychopathic butchery.
John rolled up the sleeves of his blue hound’s-tooth shirt, and poured out three glasses of straight bourbon. He felt as if he’d stepped through the looking-glass, out of the world of fussing old women like Mrs Benduzzi and their pampered pet dogs, out of the world of sprinkled lawns and over-polished cars, into a strange existence where there was real fear, and real death, and all the stories you read about in the newspapers happened not to other people, but to you.
He took the bourbon into the living room. Vicki was standing by the window, looking out into the dark garden, and Mel was thoughtfully hunched on a chair.
‘Do you have Detective Morello’s number?’ Vicki asked.
‘It’s right by the phone. I’ll call him in just a minute. I just want to get my nerves knitted back together.’
Vicki took her bourbon, and swallowed a mouthful nervously. She coughed and her eyes watered, but she smiled again, and that was more than he’d hoped for. He kissed her cheek, and she briefly stroked his short-cropped hair.
‘What interests me is how he knew where we were,’ Mel said.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Vicki.
‘Well, he must have tailed us before we got onto the freeway. He wasn’t just cruising up and down the freeway hoping that one day he might catch sight of us. He must have tailed us all the way from Mrs Daneman’s, because he couldn’t have known in advance which route we were going to take. We didn’t even know ourselves. It was only a spur-of-the-moment decision we went up San Vicente instead of La Cienega.’
‘So he knew we went to see Mrs Daneman,’ said John. ‘And if he knew that, he must have realised we were trying to check up on him.’
‘More important, he must have cared about us trying to check up on him. And if he cared, that means there must be some common factor between all these freeway victims that he doesn’t want us to find out.’
‘That’s pure speculation, isn’t it? I mean, we don’t have any proof,’ Vicki said.
‘Not yet, honey,’ Mel said, ‘but we have the beginnings of proof, and those beginnings are that Charles Daneman and William Cullen shared six or seven things in common. They both had connections with the marines, they both read Newsweek, they both attended church regularly, they both liked cheeseburgers, and they both had developed a particular political view about mutual respect between the government and the people.’
Mel took a hefty swallow of Jack Daniels, and went on. ‘What we need to do now is talk to some more survivors, and find out whether any of those common factors was shared by the person that they lost. The political bit is obviously the most important, although I wouldn’t discount the marine connection either, or the Newsweek bit. Magazines have mailing lists, and those mailing lists are usually for sale. It’s possible that our psychopath is killing people just because their names appear on a particular list.’
‘What about the cheeseburgers?’ asked Vicki. Her voice had a noticeable barb in it.
Mel accepted her sharpness with good grace. ‘A psychopath can kill for all kinds of crazy reasons. It may be that he just doesn’t like people who like cheeseburgers. But I don’t think so.’
Vicki was silent for a moment, and then she ran
her hand tiredly through her long dark hair.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to sound bitchy. It’s just that I’m so scared for you. I’m pretty scared for myself, too.’
John put his arm around her. ‘We’ll find him. He gave himself away by chasing us today, and the more he gives himself away, the more vulnerable he becomes. One day soon, he’s going to make a mistake that shows us just who he is, and then we can call the cops right in and they’ll bust him.’
Vicki smiled wanly. ‘Honest to God,’ she said. ‘I don’t know which one of you is Starsky, and which one of you is Hutch.’
*
That night, for the first time in a week, on their big brass frontier bed with its home-made patchwork coverlet, they made love.
They were careful and tender with each other, careful with their bruised bodies and tender with their unhealed emotions. They kissed with the exploratory softness of children, and when he held her breast in his hand and took her wide nipple in his mouth, she let out little sighs that were quieter than he could ever remember.
He parted her legs with his fingers, and slid himself up inside her slowly and gently, until she stretched and sighed again. They were almost silent while they worked gradually towards a climax, and when it happened, it was like a drop of brilliant colour on the surface of a quiet pool, spreading wider and wider, until it faded into the night.
Above their bed was an embroidered sampler which read: ‘We Are Made Perfect Through Sufferings.’
Seventeen
In the bright glare of Wednesday morning. Detective Morello and two officers from the ballistics department crouched around the Beetle’s open engine compartment and peered into its rusty pipework as if it was the latest V-8 from Ford.
The two officers from the ballistics department wore creased lightweight suits with open-necked shirts, and had matching droopy moustaches. Detective Morello, looking more dapper than usual, was dressed in a cream-coloured linen jacket and pale-blue sports slacks.
John was sitting on the bottom step of the house in jeans and T-shirt, watching. Vicki was on the verandah, rocking backwards and forwards in their turn-of-the-century rocking chair, and stringing up the last of her homemade Indian beads for Mrs Tadema. She wore skintight French jeans and a close-fitting sweater of thin white shiny wool. Mel waited patiently beside his injured Beetle, his arms folded over his big chest.
The morning sun slanted down through the trees in fluted columns, and the woods were alive with birds.
Eventually, one of the ballistics men said, ‘I think I see where it’s gone.’
He opened the Beetle’s door, folded the driver’s seat forward, and peered down into the back.
‘Here it is. It’s buried in the trim, right here.’
He took out a pair of pincers, and extracted the bullet from the Beetle’s body, holding it up for everyone to see. ‘That’s the one, all right. It went straight through the rear engine cover, straight through the oil pump, straight through the back seat, and wound up in the fabric trim. You were lucky it wasn’t six inches higher and six inches further to the right.’
Detective Morello scrutinized the bullet with his nose wrinkled up. ‘Do you know what it is?’ he asked the ballistics man.
‘Hard to tell, it’s pretty flattened out. It must have been a rifle bullet, though, with that kind of velocity. Maybe M-14, or M-16.’
Detective Morello pulled a resigned face. ‘Okay, get it back to the lab and report on it as soon as you can.’ The two ballistics men popped their find into a plastic bag, and left. Detective Morello came across to where John was sitting. He sat down, and took a small cigar from his breast pocket. ‘Did you get a look at the guy?’ he asked. ‘Did you recognise him from last time?’ John shook his head. ‘The last time he-was wearing those mirror sunglasses. This time, he could have been anybody. He had a kind of peaked cap on, and you couldn’t really see his face at all.’
‘How about the car?’
‘A tan Firebird. Plain metal roof. I didn’t catch the licence.’
‘It was a California licence, though?’
‘I think so.’
Detective Morello lit his cigar, and tucked his light.er back in his pocket. He looked out over the sunny, leafy canyon, and puffed away thoughtfully.
‘You seem like you’re holding something back,’ he said, without turning John’s way.
‘Like what?’
‘You tell me,’ said Detective Morello. ‘You’re the one who’s holding it back.’
John shrugged. ‘It’s only an opinion.’
‘So? Opinions can help.’
‘Well, it’s just that Mel here and I both believe that these killings are probably planned in advance. We don’t believe they’re completely haphazard.’
‘What gives you that idea? The fact that he chased you last night?’
‘Partly.’
‘Let me guess,’ said Detective Morello. ‘You believe that all of the twelve victims may have had something in common which the unimaginative cops have overlooked. You’re not sure what it is, but maybe the killer is worried that you do. So last night he tracked you down and tried to bump you off before you lit up like a “Ford has a better idea” bulb and put the fickle finger of fate on him.’
John turned and looked at him. ‘You’re a better detective than you look,’ he said quietly.
‘Well, thanks for nothing. But why else did you go around to see Mrs Charles Daneman, except to establish that her dead husband had something in common with your dead father?’
‘You knew we were there?’
‘Mrs Daneman called us after you left. She just wanted to check that you were genuine. She does have a son to care for, after all.’
‘I see.’
Mel had joined them by now, and said, ‘All the same, we did discover that Charles Daneman and John’s father had quite a few things in common. Things that you don’t seem to have latched on to.’
Detective Morello examined the lighted end of his small cigar as if he expected it to do something unusual, like sprout paper flowers, or explode. Then, with what he obviously considered to be tremendous patience, he said, ‘I have personally checked over the family details of every single one of our twelve victims, and I have done it with the kind of nitpicking care that most people usually reserve for picking nits.’
‘And what did you find out?’ John asked.
‘I found out that every person in the whole wide world has a little in common. I found out that our twelve victims, comparatively speaking, had quite a lot in common. But I also found out that nothing of what they had in common was worth killing them for.’ He sucked at his cigar, and then continued. ‘We haven’t ruled out the possibility that all of our twelve victims were killed because of some common factor, even if that common factor, to anyone with a sane mind, appears to be totally crazy. But if they were killed because of something like that, then they must have been killed by a lone fruitcake, and the only time we’re ever going to find out why he did it is when we catch him and ask him.’
‘But what about politics?’ asked John. ‘My father was—’
‘Your father was a slightly left-of-centre liberal, as were most of the other victims, and as are a generous percentage of people in the whole world.’
‘You did actually consider a political motive?’ Mel said.
‘We considered every motive,’ answered Detective Morello. ‘But for someone to be killed for political reasons, they have to be politically significant. None of these people were. Only three of them were active members of a political group. Five of them had never cast a vote in their lives.’
Mel took off his glasses and polished them with his handkerchief. ‘I guess I owe the police some kind of apology,’ he said. ‘You’re not as dumb as I thought you were.’
‘But wait a minute,’ John interrupted. ‘How did the killer know we were at Mrs Daneman’s yesterday? That’s where he must have picked us up, and started to trail us.’
John rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘I don’t know. That seems to be stretching rationalisation kind of thin.’
Detective Morello stood up. ‘Not as thin as trying to cook up some political assassination plot. Take it from me, Mr Cullen, there’s a lone psychopath out there, and he’s killing people for kicks, or for some odd motive that neither you nor I could ever comprehends Now, I’d really take it as a great favour if you’d keep well out of this, and not try to do our job for us. You could warn the killer away from a stake-out without realising it, or get yourself seriously hurt.’
Vicki came down the wooden steps. Her hair was clean and brushed, and it shone in the sunlight. She sat down beside John and put her arm around him.
‘Thank you, Detective Morello,’ she said simply.
Eighteen
He lay on his back on his crumpled bed, fully dressed, feeling tired and sweaty. Next to him, naked, lay a girl of not more than thirteen or fourteen, with tangled blonde hair and freckles. She was sleeping with her mouth slightly open.
He wasn’t sure what day it was. His usual routine had been thrown out of sync, and the memory of what he had done the night before – eating a Chinese takeaway meal and then going out to find a girl – didn’t seem to fit into his normal week at all. He sneezed twice.
They hadn’t done very much last night, the tall man and the young blonde girl. He had been tired and distracted, and even when she had tried to coax him, he had irritably pushed her away. She had shrugged, and gone to sleep. While she slept, he had watched a late night movie on television, eaten pretzels out of the bag, and cleaned his two Smith & Wesson hammerless .38 revolvers.