The Sweetman Curve Read online

  William shouted hoarsely, ‘Pull over! Step on the brakes and then pull over! There’s an exit up there!’

  Clenching his teeth, John jammed his foot down on the Chrysler’s power-assisted brakes, and the car’s tyres shrieked in protest as it bucked and nosedived.

  What happened then was so unreal and slow that John could remember it later as if it had taken a week, or even a month. As he braked, the Chrysler was hit from behind by a massive green truck, crumpling the trunk and the fins and pushing the whole car helplessly past the Grand Prix and into the steel dividing rail. John twisted uselessly at the steering wheel as his car was ground against the barrier, wrecking its fenders and crushing its hood. He could see Vicki shielding her face, and he knew that she was screaming, even though the hideous noise of mashing metal blotted out any kind of sound. He could see his father clinging on to the windowsill, his face alarmed and wide-eyed.

  But just as he thought it was over, and that they’d survived, he felt something spraying through the car, sparkling and bright, and realised that it was thousands of tiny fragments of shattered glass. He pushed Vicki down towards the floor, and he was reaching for his father when the back of his father’s grey hair flapped upwards like a toupee, and in front of his eyes, his father’s cheek and nose seemed to swell, as if a terrible black boil was growing on his face, and then burst open in a geyser of mucous membrane and blood. His father’s hands were rising towards his face in surprise, but then he pitched forward and collapsed on the floor of the car.

  There was an extraordinary silence. Then he heard someone tugging at the twisted door of his car, and saying: ‘Are you all right in there? Jesus, are you all right?’

  Six

  He had waited in the hospital reception area for more than five hours, under a flickering fluorescent light that hurt his eyes. There was a low table with a stack of dog-eared National Geographic magazines and an ashtray, but he couldn’t concentrate on the hunting rituals of the Dayak Indians, and somehow it didn’t occur to him to smoke. A homely nurse with higgledy-piggledy teeth brought him a cup of coffee, and he drank it without tasting it. He knew that he was probably in shock, but as long as his father was still in the operating theatre, he wanted to keep awake.

  About a half hour ago, they had let him look in on Vicki. She was white-faced, as white as the stack of pillows that propped her up. Both of her eyes were bruised, and there were lacerations on her arms, but she had suffered no serious injuries, and the doctor had told her that she could probably leave the hospital in a couple of days. John had kissed her, shakily, but when she had tried to ask him what had happened, and why, he put his finger to her lips, and shook his head.

  ‘I want you to get some sleep,’ he told her gently. ‘We’ll talk about it tomorrow.’

  From where he was sitting, he could see the duty nurse’s desk, and the elevator. Once or twice, he had seen senior-looking doctors emerge from the elevator doors, and go to talk quietly to the nurse on duty, but the hours went by and nobody came his way. He shifted himself on the blue vinyl upholstery, feeling empty and devastated and hopelessly tired.

  Just before ten o’clock, a thin man in a green jacket and badly-pressed pants appeared, murmured something to the nurse, and then walked towards him. The man was charcoal-chinned, dark-eyed, and he wore a small green hat that didn’t fit him. He came up to where John was sitting, and produced a leather wallet with a silver badge.

  ‘My name’s Morello, from the LAPD.’

  John shrugged. ‘I told your officer everything I saw, and everything I heard. You want something else?’

  ‘Just a couple of minutes. But I could always come back tomorrow.’

  John shook his head. ‘No, sit down. I could use the company.’

  The detective sat opposite him, and tidily straightened the stack of magazines. ‘You said in your statement you didn’t see the guy’s face too good. Just sunglasses, you said.’

  ‘That’s right. Those sunglasses that have mirrors for lenses.’

  ‘And that’s really all you saw? No facial features? No idea of the guy’s general build? No scars?’

  John rubbed his forehead tiredly. ‘I was trying to keep control of a crashing automobile. I wasn’t out on a nature walk.’

  The detective sat back in his seat and crossed his legs, revealing thin white ankles. ‘You’re pretty sure it was just the one guy, though? He didn’t have any passengers with him?’

  ‘Not that I noticed. But, as I’ve told you, I was more interested in keeping my hands on the wheel.’

  ‘We think it was just the one guy,’ said Detective Morello.

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘Well, it seems to figure that way. He fired four shots at you. One hit the front fender, that was the first one; then another hit the front door, just by the hinge. The third one went through the rear window after the truck hit you, and the fourth one struck your father.’

  John coughed. ‘And that means there was only one guy?’

  ‘It seems to point that way. He fired two wild shots for starters, and considering he was only thirteen feet away, that was pretty bad shooting. The weapon, incidentally, was a Colt automatic .38 calibre. They’re not celebrated for their accuracy, but even an amateur should be able to hit a man’s head from thirteen feet. Our supposition is that he was driving and firing at the same time, and in that event he was probably alone.’ John nodded. ‘I see. So you’re looking for a lone maniac.’

  ‘We believe so. A homicidal maniac who selects any car at random and slaughters the occupants.’

  ‘This has happened before?’

  ‘Don’t you read your papers? We’ve had eleven random shootings on the freeway in as many months. Some from passing cars, others from overpasses or out of the bushes at pull-offs. It’s an epidemic.’

  John stood up, and walked across to the hospital window. Through the Venetian blinds, he could see the night-time traffic crawling past MacArthur Park eight floors below. ‘You think it’s just this one guy, this homicidal maniac?’

  ‘Not for certain, but out of eleven shootings, we’ve retrieved only three different kinds of bullet. Colt automatic, like the one that hit your father; and two Army rifles, an M-14 and an M-16.’

  ‘Then it could be three homicidal maniacs.’

  Detective Morello took out a cigarette and lit it. John watched him, but didn’t ask for one. Maybe he’d go out and smoke a whole pack if he heard that his father was going to live. Maybe he’d never smoke again.

  ‘It could be eleven homicidal maniacs,’ said Detective Morello. ‘But in each case, some guy’s called The Los Angeles Times the following day, given a code name, and claimed credit for the killing. He calls himself The Bald Eagle.’ He paused. ‘We call him The Freeway Fruitcake.’

  John turned away from the window and stood over the detective like a tired attorney who has almost run out of questions to ask his witness.

  ‘Do you have any clues?’ he asked him. ‘Any idea who might have done it, or for what reason?’

  Detective Morello shook his head. ‘People don’t seem to need a reason to kill each other any more, not like they did in the old days. I took a kid in last week, and he confessed to stabbing an old hobo up at Cahuenga Peak, because he was bored. He took an afternoon off from school, and he was bored.’

  ‘What about this shooting? What are you going to do about it?’ John asked.

  ‘Follow it up the best way we can. We’ll catch him one day.’

  ‘How many people have to be shot before you find out enough to arrest him?’

  Detective Morello looked pained. ‘We’re dealing with a headcase,’ he protested. ‘Headcases have patterns of behaviour, but most of the time they don’t make any sense to anyone except themselves. I had a homicidal headcase last year, and he was only strangling women in Chemin-de-Fer jeans. Don’t ask me why. But we’re obviously dealing with the same kind of nut right now.’

  ‘There’s no pattern at all?’ asked John. ‘Nothing yo
u can pin him down to?’

  Detective Morello shook his head. ‘The victims have nothing in common at all. None of them had any enemies. All of them were happy, well-balanced people. They happened to be sitting in the wrong car at the wrong time on the wrong freeway, that’s all. This guy is a random killer. He does it for the sheer pleasure of it.’ John bit his lip. ‘I haven’t seen my father in three years. He may have had enemies.’

  ‘The same enemies that Ken Galozzo had. Mr Galozzo was a notions salesman from Pasadena. Then there was Mrs Helen Walker, a housewife from Sherman Oaks. And Juan Fernando, a car-wash attendant from downtown L.A. Not to mention Mr Ben Oliver, who was a retired airline pilot on a visit from Missoula, Montana. All of those folks were shot, Mr Cullen, and there wasn’t a single damned reason why, except some lone freak picked them out at random and decided it was their day to die.’

  John was silent for a long time. Then he said, ‘Okay. I guess you’re up against a stone wall. I’m sorry.’

  ‘We’ll get him, don’t you worry,’ said Detective Morello. ‘But we can’t work miracles. We’re human beings, trying to track down someone who’s a damned sight less than human.’

  At that moment, a nurse came down the corridor and said softly, ‘Mr Cullen?’

  ‘What’s happened? Is he out of surgery?’ John asked nervously.

  The nurse gave him a gentle smile. ‘Please come this way, Mr Cullen.’

  John glanced down at Detective Morello, but Morello simply nodded and said, ‘You go ahead. If I want anything, I’ll call you at your house.’

  The nurse was already walking down the corridor, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the polished linoleum floor. John hurried to catch up with her, and she led him around the corner, past the duty desk, and through a pair of double doors. He was suddenly and poignantly reminded of Mrs Bendpzzi’s doors, but that seemed like a lifetime ago.

  A doctor in a white coat and heavy tortoise-shell spectacles was standing up from behind his desk to greet him. He was a very small doctor, almost like a precocious child dressed up, with hair as black and curly as astrakhan.

  ‘I’m Doctor Nathan,’ he said. ‘Would you like to sit down?’

  John, uneasily, sat. ‘How’s my father?’ he asked, in a whisper.

  Doctor Nathan came around his desk and laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘I want to tell you the truth,’ he said. He carried with him the smell of antiseptic and non-allergenic soap.

  ‘The truth? What does that mean?’

  ‘The truth is that your father will not recover. We have done all within our power to save him, but the bullet damaged his brain beyond repair, and he is dying.’

  John felt a harsh constriction in his throat. ‘There’s no hope at all?’ he heard himself saying. He felt as if he was someone else altogether. Could it really be his father? He couldn’t understand it.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  There was an awkward pause. Then John said, ‘Can I see him?’ He was suddenly so near to tears that he could hardly speak.

  ‘Of course. Come this way, please. Nurse, would you help?’

  It was a strange dream about hospitals. It couldn’t possibly be real. But his legs seemed to carry him along the corridor, past trolleys of surgical equipment, and past a group of interns, who turned and stared as he went by, and finally down to a door at the end of the building, a door which led into a blue-painted room.

  His father lay on a white-draped bed in the centre of the room, connected to intravenous drips and a panel of diagnostic equipment. The sound of his heartbeat, electronically amplified, paced out his last few moments. His face was heavily bandaged on the left side, and his right eye was closed up with bruising.

  John went up to the bed. He said, ‘Father?’

  ‘He can’t hear you,’ Dr Nathan said. ‘He’s in a coma.’

  ‘Will he regain consciousness? Will I be able to say anything to him?’

  Dr Nathan shook his head.

  John looked back at the bed, where this frail damaged man lay dying. He thought of all the days in his boyhood when this man had taught him and cared for him and helped him. The day they went down to the river to net pollywogs, and John had fallen in, and his father had carried him home, dripping wet, along a sunny dusty road. The day they had flown kites together, with the grey clouds tumbling overhead. The day his father had told him about sex, in such a warm, understanding way that he had been aroused as much by the possibility of loving as he had been by the idea of copulating. Days of laughter and Hershey bars and baseball and friendship.

  The tears ran down his cheeks. He couldn’t stop himself from feeling more desolate and more miserable than he ever had in his whole life.

  ‘Father,’ he said. ‘Oh, Father. Oh, Christ.’

  He took the cold hand that lay on the white sheet. It didn’t seem like a real hand at all. But he bent his head and lifted it up to his lips, as if he could squeeze life into it.

  The heartbeat signal skipped, and then faltered.

  The nurse said, ‘He’s going, doctor.’

  John kept his eyes on his father’s face, as if at the last moment he might miraculously wake up, and at least give him the chance to tell him that he loved him, and that he would miss him for the rest of his life.

  The heartbeat signal skipped, and then faltered.

  There was an aching silence.

  John pressed his lips tight together to stop himself from sobbing, but a muted sound of hopeless pain still wrenched forth, and there was nothing he could do to check his tears. The nurse put her arm around him, and led him gently from the room. John sat on a small folding chair in the corridor and cried.

  Seven

  The air-conditioning inside the white Fleetwood was so chilly that she sat wrapped in her white fur stole, cuddling it up to her neck with fingers that sparkled with sapphires and rubies and pavé-set diamonds. She liked it cold. She liked to think of herself as the Snow Queen, the frigid erotic empress who froze men’s hearts until they shattered into tiny pieces. And even after all these years, even after Across the Yukon and Passionate Pretenders had been repeated so many times that most TV channels relegated them to two a.m. or later, and most of her movie roles were ‘special guest appearances,’ she was still disturbingly attractive, still carnivorously feline, and still deserving of one gossip columnist’s off-the-record remark that she was ‘the haughtiest woman ever to leave off her dance pants.’

  Adele Corliss, at fifty-nine, was all that her cosmetic surgeon could make her. Her well-sculptured face, with wide-apart eyes and sharp straight nose, was as smooth and free of laugh lines as a twenty-five-year-old. Her neck was soft and firm, and her hands were clear of liver spots or wrinkles. Under the furs and the close-fitting white satin dress, her breasts had been lifted, her stomach had been trimmed, and her thighs were slender and smooth. She didn’t believe in growing old, gracefully or disgracefully. She believed in whatever youth money could buy.

  She appraised herself in the gold-backed mirror she took from her purse. Her hair was ashblonde, curled and braided and tied at the back with a white silk bow. Her clear brown eyes looked back at her out of a deep golden tan. She could have been looking at her own daughter, except that her own daughter wasn’t half as finely-preserved. All that disturbed her was a faint sense that she was looking at a transparency of a young face superimposed on a hauntingly elderly one.

  Behind the wheel, her black chauffeur Mark sat in his crisp white uniform, gently humming to himself as he drove up Laguna Canyon Road towards Interstate 5. It was a brilliant sunny afternoon, and the sky was that dense inky blue of summer, even though it was mid-November. That Friday morning, they had travelled all the way from Palm Springs to Laguna Beach to pay their monthly homage to Adele’s eighty-three-year-old mother at her retirement home. As usual, they had sat out on the balcony, watching the sun glittering on the sea, while old Mrs Corliss, all fraying white hair and magnifying spectacles, had mumbled and muttered about the days gone by, and her
house in Anaheim, long since demolished, and the night that Uncle Richard had caught his foot in a zinc pail, and had to walk all the way home in the middle of the night, bomp-clang, bomp-clang, down Brookhurst Avenue.

  Adele didn’t like to be reminded of those days. They were days of poverty, and shabby rooms, and apart from that they were disconcertingly long ago. Since those days, she had risen to fame as a child celebrity, and then a star. She had married four times, borne two children, attempted suicide three times, owned seven houses, drunk thousands of bottles of champagne, broken countless mirrors, ridden in fleets of Cadillacs to dozens of premières, travelled, wept, argued, screamed, pleaded and laughed, and if all she had now was her mansion in Palm Springs, a comfortable income, her looks and her sanity, then she was well satisfied. Always provided, of course, that she had enough men.

  ‘Did you enjoy yourself, Mark?’ she asked, semi-sarcastically, as they left the last blue view of the ocean behind them.

  ‘Just as usual, Ms. Corliss,’ Mark responded, glancing at her in his rear view mirror.

  Adele smiled. ‘You’re very diplomatic. Still with a dingus like yours, you can afford to be.’

  ‘Thank you, Ms. Corliss,’ said Mark flatly.

  Adele sat back in the soft white hide of the seat. ‘You don’t have to be so modest,’ she teased him. ‘Doesn’t the Bible say that the well-endowed shall Inherit the earth?’

  ‘The meek, Ms. Corliss, begging your pardon.’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, in that case, you win out both ways.’

  ‘Thank you, Ms. Corliss.’

  They were approaching the intersection with El Toro Road. Adele was reaching forward to open the Cadillac’s burled-walnut bar and take out a split of champagne, and she nearly missed seeing the hitchhiker altogether. But he waved from the roadside as they went by, and she turned quickly, and said, ‘Mark, stop. Mark!’