Bernhardt's Edge, page 18
part #1 of Alan Bernhardt Series
At the far end of the pool, Betty Giles was getting out of the water. Bernhardt glanced at his watch. The time was six o’clock. If she did as she’d done yesterday, she would lie beside the pool for a half hour, drying out and reading. Then she’d go to her cabin, to change her clothes. At seven o’clock, give or take, she’d get in her car and drive to a restaurant, one of the two that were open in town. It would probably be dark, when she returned from dinner, almost completely dark. Understandably, she would be reluctant to let him into her cabin, after dark.
So it must be before she left for dinner, that he’d do what he’d come to do. Showered and scented, he would change into fresh clothes, with his gun concealed beneath his loose-fitting sports shirt. Then he would walk the fifty feet to the door of her cabin. He’d knock, and he’d smile—and he’d do what he came to do.
7
ALMOST BEFORE HE FINISHED knocking, he saw the curtains stir at the window beside the door. Good, she was being cautious. He stepped back from the door, took one of his newly printed business cards from his pocket, and smiled as the door came open on the chain. He’d rehearsed his opening lines, knew exactly what he wanted to say, and how he wanted to say it:
“I’m Alan Bernhardt, Miss Giles. I’m sorry to bother you, but we’ve got to talk. Here—” He extended the card. “This is my card. If you’d like to call your mother, to check me out, I’d happily pay for the call, put it on my credit card.”
“My mother?” Her hand came through the space between the door and the frame; she took the card between thumb and forefinger. “You know my mother?”
“Yes, I do. We spent a long time together, talking about you.”
“A private investigator—” Distrust was clear in her voice, plain in her small oval face behind the chain.
“Listen—” He stepped down off the small cement door stoop, standing on the desert sand. “Listen, why don’t we go and sit beside the pool? It won’t take long, what I’ve got to say. But I feel dumb, standing here like this, talking through the door. I feel like a door-to-door salesman.”
“Did my mother send you?”
“No, she didn’t. But she’ll be glad to learn that I’m here, I can guarantee that.”
She didn’t respond, but only looked at him appraisingly. How often had he suffered through this same suspicion-charged silence, standing on the wrong side of a stranger’s door, trying to look harmless, and sincere, and reassuring—all while he labored to keep a fake smile in place.
“There’s no one at the pool. Can we sit there for a few minutes, and talk?” He widened the smile. “I’ll even buy you a Diet Coke. Or a Seven-Up. Your choice.”
“All right. Just a minute. I’ve got to comb my hair.”
“Fine.” With his hands in his pockets, he moved away from her cabin to stand beside one of the head-high ocotillo cacti that defined this part of the low desert, and were protected by local statute. The motel owners had taken pains to protect the desert vegetation, outlining pathways with rocks, and the meandering driveway with fallen logs. A split rail fence, Abe Lincoln style, surrounded the entire tract. Rustic signs reminded tenants that the narrow driveway was one-way only, ending where it began, at the broad, graveled drive that opened on the county road. As nearly as Bernhardt could calculate, only a few of the twenty-odd cabins were occupied. Yesterday evening, he’d walked around the outside perimeter of the motel grounds, following the split rail fence as he familiarized himself with the sparsely populated neighborhood. Most of the nearby houses were upscale winter retreats built on acre-plus lots. Most of the lots were unfenced and undefined, merging into the desert. Except for the full, lush trees planted close to the homes, where water was pumped up from the Borrego aquifer, the desert landscape was undisturbed: silent, vast, primeval.
He heard the night chain on her door rattle, saw the door swing open. She was dressed in designer khaki bush pants and a colorful Madras blouse. Both the pants and the blouse were cut close enough to hint at the fullness of a figure that her bathing suit had already revealed. Her dark hair, cut medium short, was casually combed. She carried a Mexican-style tooled leather bag slung over one shoulder. Her sandals, too, were tooled leather. As they turned together into the rock-bordered footpath that led to the pool, he said, “Except for that couple with the little girl, and a man that came last night, I don’t think there’re any other people here but us. At least, there’re just four cars.”
She made no reply, gave no indication that she’d heard. She simply walked beside him, eyes front. The set of her face, the way she walked, the way she carried herself, all conveyed a kind of measured detachment, a calculated aloofness. Or was it a shyness, an uncertainty of the spirit, her grim, silent secret?
Or was she, simply, afraid—and trying not to show it?
At poolside, he gestured to the redwood lanai, and the shade it offered. “How about here?”
She nodded. “Fine.”
“I meant it about that soft drink—” He smiled, gestured across the driveway to the office, and the vending machines beside it. “My treat.”
“No, thanks. But you go ahead.” She sat in a straight-backed chair: a black metal frame covered with crisscrossed strips of white plastic.
“Not now. Later, maybe.” He moved a companion chair to face her, and for a moment they sat silently, looking at each other. In close-up, her features, like her body, were pleasingly formed, but slightly coarsened, denying her the kind of head-turning masculine attention that some women parlayed into a free trip through life.
“I guess,” he said, “that I might as well start at the beginning, tell you why I’m here, the reason I’ve come.”
Watching him carefully, she nodded—once. “Good.”
“I came to Borrego Springs because, originally, I was hired to find you when you were staying in Santa Rosa—at the Starlight Motel.”
Her reaction was instantaneous: a sharp, sudden shudder. Instinctively, she moved forward in her chair and shifted her feet, unconsciously poised for sudden flight.
“You—” She licked at her lips. “You were there? At the Starlight?”
He nodded. “I stayed right across from you and Nick. You were in room twelve.”
“Nick—?” It was a half-choked whisper. Eyes wide, she glanced quickly to the right and left. It was another instinctive body movement, signifying her sudden shrinking from a terror remembered. “You knew Nick?”
“I didn’t know him, any more than I knew you. As I said, I was hired to find you. And I did.”
“Wh—who hired you?” As she spoke, she lowered her voice, moved forward in her chair. Responding, he moved his chair closer to hers, also confidentially lowering his voice:
“I worked for a large company at the time—Herbert Dancer, Limited. So all I know is what my boss told me to do—find you, and report to him, when I’d found you. He reported to his client. The next day, in the afternoon, I was taken off the case. I had an option. I could go back to San Francisco, or I could stay in Santa Rosa, since the room was already paid for. I decided to stay. And the next morning, I heard about Nick.”
“It was DuBois,” she said. “He hired you.” She spoke softly, numbly, without inflection. Her eyes were blank. Her body was inert now, no longer poised for flight. Whatever she feared, she’d lost the will to resist, lost the strength to flee, even in her thoughts.
“Not me. Maybe he hired Dancer, I don’t know. That’s what I’m telling you. I was just the flunky.” He paused, watched her face, watched her think about it—saw the rigidity of fear and shock slowly fade as her mind began functioning again, working with the pieces of the puzzle he represented.
He let the silence lengthen, watched her slowly sink back in her chair, watched her eyes sharpen and her mouth tighten as, plainly, she began to believe that he hadn’t come to harm her.
“Who’s DuBois?” he asked finally.
“He’s a financier,” she said. “And an art collector.”
“Did you work for him?”
Clear-eyed now, pointedly refusing to answer the question, she said, “You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”
“I think it’s possible that Nick was killed by a professional killer. I’m not sure, but that’s what I think—what the evidence suggests. And if that’s true, then I was hired to set Nick up. I don’t want that on my conscience.”
“So you’re trying to find the man who killed Nick.” She spoke ironically, disbelievingly.
“No. That’s for the police. I just want to find out what really happened in Santa Rosa. If the murder was a street killing, then I’m off the hook. But if it was planned, then I very well could’ve been involved. And if that’s true, I want to know about it.” He let a beat pass, watching her eyes narrow as she thought about it. Then he said, “That’s why I wanted to find you.”
“I don’t understand your reasoning.” She spoke coldly.
“There’s nothing complicated about it. You could have the answers I need. Or, between us, we could have the answers. Your mother called me after you called her. She told me what you said, that you’d make them pay, for killing Nick. And you’ve just told me that you know who retained Dancer. So it’s obvious that if you want to, you can tell me why Nick was killed. You could have the answer I’m looking for.”
“What if you are involved? You could go to jail, couldn’t you?”
“I won’t know that until I know what happened—who hired who, and why.”
“And you think I can tell you that.”
“I think you can fill in some of the blanks.”
“How do I know that you aren’t doing what you did in Santa Rosa? How do I know there isn’t someone on his way here to kill me?” She spoke evenly, calmly challenging him. Once she’d recovered from the shock of being discovered, she was thinking faster, gaining strength, beginning to ask the tough questions.
“Would we be talking like this, if I was setting you up? Being seen with you is the last thing I’d want. I’d make a phone call, and I’d split.”
“Like you did in Santa Rosa.” She spoke bitterly. Watching her, he approved. Slowly, surely, anger was displacing fear. Betty Giles was stronger than she thought—stronger than he’d thought, only minutes before.
Deliberately, he looked at his watch. “It’s seven o’clock. What’re you planning for dinner?”
“I’m not hungry. Not now.” She hesitated, then ventured, “What about you?”
“Mostly,” he answered, “I want to talk. I’ve got to get this settled. But I’m hungry, too. And—” He smiled at her, as warmly as he could, his big-brother impersonation. “And I always think better on a full stomach.”
She remained motionless for a moment, measuring him with dark, solemn eyes. Then, plainly having made some significant decision, she rose to her feet. “I’ve got a kitchenette in my cabin—and some eggs. Would you like some? Then we can talk.”
He rose to his feet and gestured for her to precede him down the path to her cabin. “Definitely, I’d like some eggs.”
8
RACING THE DARKNESS, HE’D been driving the Camaro steadily for two hours, windows rolled up, air-conditioning on, stopping only to make additions to the penciled map he’d drawn of the town, the first thing he’d done. Army officers, tac squad commanders, they all used maps, too. Because planning, that was the secret. You imagined everything that could happen, everything that could go wrong, accidentally or on purpose. Then you figured out an answer, a solution to the problem.
Accidentally on purpose…
It was something they’d said when they were kids, one of those catch phrases, one of the things kids say, words that meant nothing. And nothing times nothing was nothing, the story of his life, when he was young. Sometimes it seemed like a dream: all those years, one long nightmare, fading now—finally fading, finally leaving him in peace. But then, at odd times, odd places, the nightmare came back, as real as a hand at his throat, strangling him: the sights, the sounds, the smells, they all could come back, demons from out of nowhere.
Especially the smells.
Everything he did, then, everywhere he went, there was a smell to it, a smell for everything: garbage, piss, shit—sex—they all had smells. Sometimes it seemed like his life had its own smell, a smell he’d never forget.
Ahead was the circle, the center of Borrego Springs. He slowed the Camaro, flipped the turn signal lever, checked the mirror, everything squared off, everything righteous.
Why was it, right about now, making his plans, this close to doing it, why was it that scenes from the past popped and sputtered through his mind like electrical flashes gone wild, arcing in the dark, lighting up a place, a face, a fight, or a body, some bodies alive, some of them dead? Why couldn’t he concentrate, make his mind do what it had to do? Because it was all he had, his mind. Whatever you thought, that’s how you acted, how you were. He knew that now. Just about now: twenty-eight years old, going on twenty-nine. Just about now, he was figuring it out. Everything. Every little thing he needed to know. Finally.
Everything, and nothing.
Idling along, turning out of the circle and heading west, passing through the center of town now—by now familiar—he ticked them off: on the north side of the main street, Palm Canyon Drive, there was a restaurant, a hardware store, a variety store, a real estate office, a small, off-the-street shopping mall—and the sheriff’s office, with a squad car parked in front.
Earlier, he’d seen a policeman standing beside this same car, talking to a man and a woman. He’d been a young man, the policeman, not more than thirty years old, short and stocky, wearing a khaki-and-green uniform and a wide-brimmed felt hat, hick Western. No question, it was a deputy sheriff he’d seen, probably one of two or three deputies. Plus the sheriff, certainly more than thirty years old.
Gently, he increased the pressure on the accelerator. He was passing a larger shopping mall on the left, very fancy, built to attract the people who came for the winter—the rich ones, with the big, expensive houses…
…the houses that, around the clock, the police would be watching, checking them out every round they made, especially now, before the season started, with most of the houses still empty.
While he’d been driving around, systematically checking out the town, he’d only seen one of the sheriff’s cars, on patrol. They’d met each other east of town, between the town limits and the airport, on Palm Canyon Drive. The limit was forty-five, east of the central circle, so there’d only been a second that they’d been able to see each other. He’d decided to look at the sheriff, keeping his face expressionless, look him straight in the eye. And, yes, the sheriff had looked at him—a different sheriff from the one he’d seen earlier, or the one he’d just seen. Older, maybe the real sheriff, not a deputy.
His motel was ahead on the left, at the western edge of the town. Except for a gas station, on the right, the motel buildings were the last ones in town. It was here that the terrain began to rise, as the string-straight desert road began curving up into the foothills, only a few miles to the west. Looming above the foothills, the low mountains were close, less than ten miles away…
…ten miles to safety. Especially at night, in the mountains, with dozens of side roads to take, and at least two small foothill towns between the desert floor and the Los Angeles basin. And once in the basin, on a freeway, one car among thousands, traveling in darkness, he would be safe. He would drive to LAX, turn in the car, get a room at the airport Hilton, and wait until Saturday, when he’d get the rest of the money. He’d get a suite, and he’d rent another car, a Mercedes, or a BMW, this time, and he’d drive over to Rodeo Drive. He’d find a place that sold shirts for five hundred dollars, and slacks for three hundred. And he’d buy two of everything—all on “Fisher’s” credit card.
Sometimes he thought of Fisher as a real person, a living, breathing person. It was important to do that, Venezzio had told him—important to get inside the person you create, the paper man, the front, the cutout, whatever. Because that man could be your only protection, the only thing between you and the gas chamber. And that’s what he’d done: made up a real man, as real to him as a TV character. There was a real address, a small apartment way across town from his own apartment. Twice a month, at least, he got dressed in Fisher’s clothes, and put Fisher’s wallet in his pocket, with Fisher’s driver’s license, and Fisher’s social security number, and Fisher’s bank passbook—and, most important, Fisher’s VISA card. And he stayed a night or two, in Fisher’s apartment, telling people he’d been out of town, out of the country, whatever, on sales trips. Because Fisher was a salesman, a wholesale candy salesman, he’d decided. He’d even hired a kid, a good, dependable kid, to check the apartment, keep the hallway outside picked up. He’d been amazed, how easy it had been to create a man, a whole man, out of nothing. First he’d started a bank account—a cashier’s check for eight thousand dollars. Then he’d gotten the apartment, and the driver’s license, and the social security number. Every week, he churned the bank account, depositing, withdrawing, writing checks, thousands of dollars in and out. And after a year, he’d gotten what he needed: the VISA card, his passport to anything, anywhere.
Just ahead, he saw the last turnoff before the upgrade to the foothills began, a road that led north, toward a collection of expensive homes and condominiums surrounding a golf course with an artificial lake, everything lush green, with palm trees that waved in the strong desert wind, just like Palm Springs, where “shacks,” someone had told him once, cost a “half million, give or take.”
