Читать книгу The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels - Michael Marshall - Страница 16

He built a fire while she sat in one of the threadbare armchairs, her feet on the coffee table. He was aware of her assaying the surroundings in the lamplight: the tastefully worn rugs, shabby chic furniture, paintings only a hotelier could love. The floorboards were painted creamy white, and a spray of local flowers sat perkily in a vase a few inches from Nina’s feet.

‘So what time’s Martha Stewart dropping by?’

‘Just as soon as you’ve gone,’ he said, heading to the bathroom for glasses. ‘Me and her, it’s like an animal thing.’

Nina smiled, and watched the kindling in the grate. The fire clicked and crackled, pleased to be wakened, ready to consume. It seemed like a long time since she’d seen a real fire. It reminded her of childhood vacations, and made her shiver.

When Zandt returned she screwed the cap off the bottle and poured two measures. He stood a moment longer, as if still unwilling to commit himself to joining her, but then took the other chair. The room slowly began to warm.

She held the tooth glass up to her lips with both hands, and looked at him across it. ‘So, John – how’ve you been?’

He sat, staring straight ahead, and didn’t look at her.

‘Just tell me,’ he said.

Three days previously, a girl called Sarah Becker had been sitting on a bench on 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California. She was listening to a minidisc, on a player she’d received for her fourteenth birthday. She had printed out a neat little label on the computer at home, and her name and address were stuck to the back of the player, fixed with invisible tape to prevent the ink from wearing off. While she’d hated to compromise the machine’s sleek brushed chrome, she disliked the idea of losing it even more. When the player was found, it emerged that the album she’d been listening to was Generation Terrorists, by a British band called the Manic Street Preachers. Except, as Sarah knew, you called them The Manics. The band wasn’t big at her school, which was one of the reasons she listened to them. Everybody else mooned over feisty pop princesses and insipid boy bands, or else bobbed their heads while some hip-hop yahoo bellowed last year’s slang over someone else’s tune from the safety of a walled compound in Malibu. Sarah preferred music that sounded as if, somewhere down the line, someone had meant something by it. She supposed it was her age. At fourteen, you weren’t a kid any more. Not these days, and not by a long shot. Not in LA. Not here in 2002. It was taking a while for her parents to come up to speed, but even they knew it was so. In their own ways they were getting used to the idea, like Neanderthals warily watching the first Cro-Magnons coming whistling over the rise.

At the end where she was sitting, by the fountain opposite the Barnes and Noble, the Promenade was pretty empty by this time in the evening. A few people came and went from the bookstore, and you could see others through the two-storey plate-glass window: leafing intently through magazines and books, geeking out over computer specs or scouring for magic spells in screenwriting manuals. Her family had gone on a two-week vacation to London, England, the year before, and she’d been baffled at the indigenous bookstores. They were utterly weird. They just had, like, books. No café, no magazines, no washrooms even. Just rows and rows of books. People picked them up, bought them, then went away again. Her mom had seemed to believe this was cool in some way, but Sarah thought it was one of the few things she’d seen about England that really sucked. Eventually they’d found a big new Borders, and she’d fallen upon it, discovering The Manics at one of the listening posts. British bands were cool. The Manics were especially cool. London was cool in general. That was that.

She sat, head nodding in approval as the singer loudly proclaimed himself a ‘damned dog’, and watched down the Promenade. Down the other end of the three-block pedestrianized zone was mainly restaurants. Her father had dropped her off twenty minutes before, and would be coming to pick her up at nine sharp – a once-monthly occurrence. She was supposed to be meeting her friend Sian at the Broadway Deli. They were ladies who dined. The supper club had been the brainchild of Sian’s mom, who was adapting to her daughter’s adolescence by throwing open all the doors she could find, for fear that leaving the wrong one closed might ruin their special relationship. Sarah’s mother had gone along with it pretty easily: partly because everyone tended to go along with Monica Williams, but also because Zoë Becker was sufficiently in contact with her younger self to realize how much she’d have liked to have done the same at her age. Sarah’s father had occasional right of veto, however, and for a long, bad moment she thought he was going to exercise it. A few months prior there had been a spate of gang-related killings, part of the seasonal undertow of corporate restructuring in the crack industry. But eventually, after proposing and reaching agreement on a battery of precautionary measures – including dropping and picking her up at closely defined times and places, demonstration of a fully-charged cellular battery, and a recitation of the key common-sense means of avoiding the chaotic intrusion of the fates – he’d agreed. It was now part of the social calendar.

Problem was, when they’d pulled up this evening, Sian hadn’t been standing on the corner. Michael Becker craned his neck, peering up and down the street.

‘So where is the legendary Ms Williams?’ he muttered, fingers drumming on the wheel. Something was bitched with the series he was developing on the Warner lot, and he was big-time stressed: heavy calm spiked with jumpiness. Sarah wasn’t sure exactly what the problem was, but knew her father’s credo that there were an infinite number of ways for things to go wrong in The Business, and only one way of them going right. She had seen proposals and drafts for the show’s pilot episode, and he’d even picked her brains over a few things, gauging her reaction as part of the potential target audience. Actually, and to her slight surprise, Sarah had thought the series sounded pretty cool. Better than Buffy or Angel, in fact. She privately thought Buffy herself was kind of a pain, and that the older English guy didn’t sound half as much like Hugh Grant as he seemed to think. Or look enough like him, either. The heroine in Dark Shift was more self-contained, less showy, and less prone to whining. She was also, though Sarah didn’t realize this, loosely based on Michael Becker’s daughter.

‘There she is,’ Sarah had said, pointing up the way.

Her father frowned. ‘I don’t see her.’

‘Yeah, look – up under that streetlight, outside Hennessy and Ingels.’

At that moment some asshole blared his horn behind them, and her father swung his head to glare ominously out of the back windshield. He almost never got angry within the family, but he could sometimes lay it on the outside world. Sarah knew, having recently covered it in school, that this was a pecking order thing, hierarchy being established in the asphalt jungle – but she was privately nervous that one of these days her dad would choose to assert his will with the wrong naked ape. He didn’t seem to realize that fathers could antagonize the fates, too, or that age made little difference to the vehemence of their retribution.

She opened the door and hopped out. ‘I’ll run over,’ she said. ‘It’s fine.’ Michael Becker watched tight-mouthed as the impatient guy in the LeBaron pulled out around them.

Then he turned, and his face changed. For a moment he didn’t look like he had story arcs and demographics running behind his eyes, as if he saw the world through a grid of beat lists and foreign residuals. He just looked tired, in need of some hot caffeine, and like her dad.

‘See you later,’ Sarah said, with a wink. ‘Have a heart attack on the way home.’

He looked at his watch. ‘Haven’t got the time. Maybe a little prostate trouble instead. Nine o’clock?’

‘On the dot. I’m always early. It’s you who’s late.’

‘As if. Nokkon, little lady.’

‘Nokkon, Dad.’ She shut the door and watched him pull back into traffic. He waved at her, a little salute, and then he was gone: swallowed back into an interior world, at the mercy of people who bought words by the yard and never knew what they wanted until it was already in syndication. As she watched him disappear, Sarah knew one thing for sure – The Business wasn’t getting her for a sweetheart.

Sian hadn’t been under the lamppost, of course. Sarah had only pretended, to help her father on his way, so he could get home and back to work. She continued to not be there for another ten minutes, and then Sarah’s phone rang.

It was Sian. She was currently standing by her mom’s car on Sunset, and just about annoyed enough to spit. Sarah could hear Sian’s mother in the background, imperiously letting off steam at some hapless mechanic, who’d probably seen mother and daughter in distress and developed visions of his own real-life porno film. Sarah hoped he now realized that not only was this not going to happen, but if he didn’t get the car fixed pronto he’d be a dead man.

Either way, Sian wasn’t going to make it. Which left Sarah in a quandary. Her father wouldn’t be home yet, and when he pulled into the drive he’d be a vortex of bullet points and plot fixes, maybe already on the phone to his partner, Charles Wang, conjuring ways to pull the project back into the comfort zone. There was some big deal breakfast meeting with the studio the next morning, a make-or-break powwow over decaf and cholesterol-free omelettes. She knew her father dreaded that kind of meeting most of all, because he never ate breakfast and hated having to pretend he did, toying with toast to avoid fiddling with the silverware. She didn’t want him to get any more stressed than he already was, and her younger sister, Melanie, would be providing plenty of background noise by herself.

So then she realized – she didn’t actually have to call at all. She had a little under two hours, and then he’d be back. The Promenade was wall-to-wall browsing opportunities, most of them still open for business. She could get a Frappuccino and just hang. Wander round Anthropologie, on the lookout for gift ideas. Check the listening posts in B&N, in case they’d finally racked up something new. Even go sit in the Deli, and have a Cobb salad by herself. Basically, bottom line, simply make sure she was at the right place at the right time, and then – depending on what kind of mood he was in – either reveal that Sian hadn’t showed, or pretend everything had gone as usual.

She dialled Sian to make sure that this plan wouldn’t be undermined by Mrs Williams calling her mom. She couldn’t get through, which probably meant the car was up and running again and out of radio contact in a canyon. Sarah was confident that if her mother had been contacted then she’d know all about it already. Helicopters would be circling overhead, Bruce Willis being lowered down toward her on a rope.

She left a message for Sian, then walked over and went into Starbucks. It had occurred to her that if she did go to the Deli she could have whatever she wanted, rather than ordering the Cobb salad because that’s what they always did, dieting twenty years before they needed to. She could have, of all things, a burger. A huge great big burger, rare, with cheese. And fries.

She was thinking that maybe this was what it was like to be a grown-up, and that it could work out kind of interesting.

She’d come to the end of her Frap, and The Manics had bellowed their last this time round, when she saw a tall guy come out of the bookstore. He ambled a few yards, then stopped and peered up at the sky. It wasn’t yet dark, but it was getting past twilight. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and struggled to extricate one from the packet while juggling what was evidently a heavy bag of books. This went on for quite a few moments, the man completely unaware of Sarah’s amused scrutiny. She was thinking that in his position she might try putting the bag down, but this obviously hadn’t occurred to him.

Eventually, exasperated, he walked over to the fountain and stuck the bag down on the edge. Once he’d got the cigarette lit he put his hands on his hips, looking down the way, before glancing at her.

‘Hello,’ he said. His voice was soft and cheerful.

Now that he was closer she thought he was probably about forty, maybe a little less. She wasn’t sure how she knew this, as there was a lamp behind his head and his face was slightly difficult to see. He just had that kind of older guy thing.

‘Say that again.’

He said: ‘Er, hello?’

She nodded sagely. ‘You’re English.’

‘Oh God. Is it that obvious?’

‘Well, like, you have an English accent.’

‘Oh. Of course.’ He took another drag of his cigarette, and then looked at the bench. ‘Do you mind if I join you?’

Sarah shrugged. Shrugging was good. It didn’t say yes, it didn’t say no. Whatever. The bench was plenty wide. She was salad-bound within seconds anyway. Or burger-bound. Still undecided.

The man sat. He was wearing a pair of corduroys, not especially new, but a light jacket that looked well-made. He had big, neat hands. His fair hair had been dyed a stronger blond, but expensively, and his face worked pretty well. Like a hip science teacher, or maybe social studies. The kind that probably wouldn’t sleep with a student, but could if he wanted.

‘So are you an actor, or something?’

‘Oh no. Nothing as grand as that. Just a tourist.’

‘How long are you here for?’

‘A couple of weeks.’ He reached in his pocket and pulled out a small object, made of shiny chrome. He flipped the top off and revealed it to be a small portable ashtray.

Sarah watched this with great interest. ‘The English smoke a lot, don’t they.’

‘We do,’ said the man, who wasn’t English. He stubbed out his cigarette and slipped the ashtray back in his pocket. ‘We are not afraid.’

They chatted for a little while. Sarah reminisced about London. The man was able to join in convincingly, as he had returned from the country only two days before. He did not reveal that the Barnes and Noble bag he was carrying was full of books he had owned for some years, nor that he had spent a full hour in the bookstore sitting in the Politics and Economics section, his face averted from the other customers, watching out of the window for Sarah to arrive. He instead asked for suggestions for what else he should see in the city. He listed the parts of Los Angeles he had already visited, a selection of the usual tourist traps.

Sarah, who took her responsibilities seriously, suggested the La Brea tar pit, Rodeo Drive, and the Watts Tower, which she felt would give a good span of where LA had come from, and where it was going. Plus, she thought privately, on Rodeo he could replace his corduroys with something a little more bon marché, as Sian – who’d vacationed in Antibes last year – was fond of saying.

Then the man went quiet for a moment. Sarah was thinking that it was time for her to windowshop her way down to dinner. She was gathering herself to say good night, when he turned and looked at her.

‘You’re very pretty,’ he said.

This might or might not be true – Sarah’s opinion was currently fiercely divided on the subject – but it was without question straight out of the ‘Watch out, a wacko’ box of conversational sallies.

‘Thanks,’ she said, bright-eyed with deflection. For a moment the evening seemed a little cooler, then steadied as she took control. ‘Anyway, nice talking to you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, quickly. ‘That’s rather an odd thing to say, I know. It’s just that you remind me of my own daughter. She’s about your age.’

‘Right,’ Sarah said. ‘Cool.’

‘She’s back in Blighty,’ the man went on, as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘With her mother. Looking forward to seeing them again, don’t you know. Top hole. Gor blimey. Princess Di, God rest ’er soul.’

His eyes flicked away from her then, took a quick glance around. Sarah assumed he was embarrassed. In reality he was estimating that in about twenty seconds all paths would converge to convenience him, the lines of sight all elsewhere. He was good at judging this kind of thing, at telling when he would be in vision, of seeing the small steps that would take him back out of sight. It was one of his special skills. He shifted a few inches closer to the girl, who stood up.

‘Anyway,’ Sarah said. ‘I got to go.’

The man laughed, as he felt the lines fall into place. He grabbed Sarah’s hand and tugged it with surprising force. She squawked quietly and fell back onto the bench, too shocked to resist.

‘Let go,’ she said, fighting to stay calm. The ground seemed to be falling away, a vertiginous, fluid feeling. She felt as if she had been caught cheating, or stealing.

‘Pretty girl.’ He gripped her hand more tightly. ‘A keeper.’

‘Please, let go of me.’

‘Oh shut up,’ he muttered, all pretence of an English accent gone. ‘You ludicrous little slut.’ His fist jackhammered up in a compact, short-armed punch, smashing straight into her face.

Sarah’s head jerked back, her eyes wide open and stunned. Oh no, she thought, the interior voice quiet and dismayed. Oh no.

‘Take a look, Sarah,’ the man said, his voice low and urgent. ‘Look at all the lucky people. The people who aren’t you.’

He nodded down the Promenade. Only a block down, the street was crowded. People going in and out of stores, taking exploratory looks at restaurant menus. Around Sarah and the man there was nobody to be seen.

‘Once there was just bush here, do you realize that? Ragged coastline, rocks, shells. A few tracks in the sand. If you’re quiet you can hear the way that it was, before any of this shit was here.’

Blinking against her watering eyes, Sarah tried to work out what he was getting at. Maybe there was something she could do, some unexpected final question in this test, some way of scraping a pass. ‘But people don’t see,’ he continued. ‘They don’t even look. Blind. Wilfully blind. Trapped in the machine.’

He grabbed her hair, turned her face so she could see into the Barnes and Noble. There were plenty of people in there, too. Reading. Standing. Chatting. Why would you look outside, when you’re in a bookstore at night? Even if you did, would you see more than a couple of dark figures on a bench? Why would that seem exceptional?

‘I should do you here and now,’ the man said, in a tone of quiet indignation. ‘Just to show it could be done. That nobody really cares. When you’re surrounded by people you don’t know all the time, how can you tell what’s wrong? In five square miles of disease, who cares what happens to one little virus? Only me.’

Sarah realized there was going to be no get-out-of-this-free question, not now or ever, and gathered herself to scream. The man felt her chest expand, and his hand quickly looped over her face. Two fingers grabbed her upper lip from above, tugging it hard. The scream never made it out of her throat. Sarah tried to struggle, but the hand held her in position, coupled with the weight of his arm, pressing down on her head.

‘Nobody watching,’ the man assured her, with the same hateful calm. ‘I made it this way. I can walk where nobody sees.’

Indistinct noises came out of the girl’s mouth, as she tried to say something. He seemed to understand.

‘No they’re not,’ he said. ‘They’re not on their way. They’re at home. Mommy’s a Jackson Pollock in the kitchen. Daddy’s in the garden, with little sister. Both naked. They make an interesting tableau. Some might even consider it obscene.’

In fact, Sarah’s mom and Melanie were watching a Simpsons rerun at that moment. It was, as Zoë Becker would always remember, the episode where George Bush moves into Springfield. Michael Becker was typing furiously in his den, having found, he fervently hoped, a way of making everything all right. If he could just fix the opening ten minutes, and find a way of selling the idea that some of the characters had to be older than teenagers, then everything would be okay. Failing that, fuck it, he’d just make them all teenagers – and reinstate all the fucking pans down the front of the high school, the way Wang wanted it. A few miles away, Sian Williams had just picked up Sarah’s message, and was feeling a little envious of her friend’s Out Alone adventure.

‘If you keep wriggling,’ the man said, ‘I’ll pull your teeth out. I will. I promise. Not easy, but it’s worth it. It’s really a very unusual sound.’

Sarah went completely still, and for a moment neither of them moved. The man seemed to take a pleasure in sitting that way, the girl’s mouth pulled up to a point of screaming pain, as if they were sharing a private moment in the middle of a busy street.

Then he sighed, like a man reluctantly putting aside an absorbing magazine. He stood, pulling Sarah up with him. Her minidisc player slipped to the floor with a brittle clatter. The man glanced at it, and let it lie.

‘Goodbye and good night, good people,’ he said, in the general direction of the other end of the street. ‘You’ll all rot in hell, and I’d love to lead you there.’ His right arm rotated around Sarah’s head until his hand was clamped firmly over her mouth. With his other hand he picked up the bag of books. ‘But I have a date, and we must go.’

Then, with quick, long strides, he dragged Sarah across the street and into an alley where his car was parked. She had no choice but to accompany him. He was tall and very strong.

He threw open the back door, then grabbed her hair again and peered closely into her face. The close presence of his face scared all useful thought out of her head.

‘Come, my dear,’ he said. ‘Our carriage awaits.’ Then he head-butted her just above the eyes.

As Sarah’s knees buckled, her last thought was matter-of-fact. In her bedside table was a notebook in which she had written down many thoughts. Some of the most recent were about sex: breathless musings on a part of life she had not yet experienced, but knew was coming her way. Most were transcriptions of things Sian had told her, but she’d used her own imagination too, plus what she’d gleaned from TV and movies and a not-too-gross magazine she’d found under the Pier.

The notebook was hidden, but not very well. When she was dead, her mother and father would find it, and they would know she had brought this evening upon herself.

Nina was unaware of much of this, but this was the event she described. When she had told what she knew, she topped her glass up. Zandt’s remained untouched.

‘Four witnesses put Sarah Becker on the bench between 7.12 and 7.31. Their descriptions of the man with her range from “Nondescript, maybe tall”, to “Shit, I don’t know”, via “Well, he was, like, a guy”. We don’t even have an age or colour that I’d take to the bank, though we got two hits with white and blond. Two say he was wearing a long coat, another said a sport jacket. Nobody saw them leave, despite the fact that the bench is within yards of a zillion people. If the man spent any time in the bookstore before accosting her, then nobody noticed him. Another witness describes seeing a car of undetermined colour and model in the nearest side street. It’s possible that a trashcan may have been placed to obscure the number plate – which is pretty slick, though does require more confidence than God. Anybody could have just moved the can, and he was illegally parked. The car was gone by 8.15.

‘The girl’s father arrived at the south end of the Promenade at 9.07. He parked up in the usual place, waited. When neither his daughter nor Sian Williams appeared after a few minutes, he went into the restaurant. The staff told him they hadn’t served a table who matched his description, though they did have a no-show in the name of Williams. He called the other girl’s mother and found that the dinner had been cancelled at the last moment due to a problem with the Williamses’ car. The car’s been checked, but we can’t get a firm opinion on whether it was tampered with.

‘Michael Becker demanded to speak to the girl herself and was eventually told Sarah had left a message saying she didn’t want to bother her dad, and that she was going to just kill time and wait for the usual pickup. He searched up and down the street without finding any sign of his daughter. Finally he made it up to the far end and after checking in the Barnes and Noble he spotted a Sony minidisc player lying partially obscured under the bench. His daughter’s ownership of this device was certain, both through a label she had affixed and because he had bought it for her. The disc in the machine was some album by her favourite band. She has a poster of them on her bedroom wall. Becker then called the sheriff’s department, the LAPD, and also his agent, somewhat bizarrely. He seems to have thought that she would have more pull with the cops than he did. He called his wife, and told her to stay where she was in case their daughter arrived home by cab.

‘The whole area was searched. Nothing. There are no prints on the player apart from the girl’s. There are about a hundred cigarette butts around the bench, but we don’t even know if the perpetrator smoked. One of the witnesses said he thought he might have done, so some poor fucker in a lab is currently trying for DNA off a whole bag of them.’

‘The father isn’t a suspect.’

‘Not in this universe. They were very close, in the right ways. Still, for a couple of days that’s what people were wondering. But no. We don’t think it’s him, and the timings don’t work at all. We’ve also eliminated his partner, a Charles Wang. He was in New York.’

Zandt slowly raised his glass, emptied it, lowered it again. He knew there was more. ‘And then?’

Nina pulled her feet off the table, reached over to pick the file up off the floor. Inside, in addition to a large number of copied documents, was a thin package wrapped in brown paper. What she pulled out, however, was a photograph.

‘This arrived at the Becker residence late the following afternoon. Some time between half past four and six o’clock. It was discovered lying on the path.’ She handed it to Zandt.

The picture showed a girl’s sweater, pale lilac, neatly folded into a square. What looked like ribbed ribbon had been tied around the sweater into a bow.

‘It’s been tied up with plaited hair. Sarah’s was long enough for it to be hers, and it’s the right colour. Forensics has taken samples off her hairbrush, and will have confirmation very soon.’

Zandt noticed that his glass had been refilled. He drank. The whiskey stung in the dryness of his mouth, and made him nauseous. His head felt as if it were a balloon, blown up slightly too much, floating a couple of inches above his neck.

‘The Upright Man,’ he said.

‘Well,’ Nina said, judiciously, ‘we’ve checked with the families of the victims two and three years ago, and every officer who was involved in those investigations. We’re pretty convinced that the nature of the parcels he left on those occasions has remained secret. It could still be a copycat. I doubt it. But I have an all-media scan in operation, including the Internet, for any use of the phrases “Delivery Boy” or “Upright Man”.’

‘The Internet?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Kind of a computer thing. It’s all the rage.’

‘It’s him,’ Zandt said. Only he was fully aware of the irony inherent in his confidence.

She looked at him, and then reached reluctantly back into the file. This time the photograph showed the sweater after it had been carefully unwrapped and laid out flat. Sarah’s name was embroidered on the front, not fancily, but in neat block letters.

‘The hair used for the name is of a dark brown. It is much drier than the hair that we believe to be Sarah’s, suggesting that it was cut some time ago.’

She stopped then, and waited while Zandt slowly reached into his pocket. He pulled out a pack of Marlboros and a matchbook. He had not smoked since they had been in the room. There was no ashtray. His hands, as he pulled a cigarette out, were almost steady. He did not look at her, but only at the match as he struck it: regarding it with fixed concentration, as if it were something unfamiliar to him, but whose purpose he had divined through intuition. It took three attempts before it flared, but the match could have been damp.

‘I made sure the dark brown hair was tested first.’ She took a deep breath. ‘It’s a match, John. It’s Karen’s hair.’

She left him alone for a while, went and stood outside in the cold and listened to the darkness. Muted laughter drifted across from the main building, and through the window she could see couples of varying ages, bundled up in sensible sweaters, plotting tomorrow’s adventures in hiking. A door was open on the other side of the building and through it she could hear the clatter of plates being cleaned by someone who didn’t own them. Something small rustled in the undergrowth on the other side of the road, but nothing came of it.

When she returned, Zandt was sitting exactly as she’d left him, though he had a new cigarette. He didn’t look up at her.

She put a few more pieces of wood on the fire, inexpertly, unable to remember whether you piled them on top or placed them round the sides. She sat in the chair and poured herself another drink. Then sat up with him through the night.