The Bad Place

Page 22

“Besides,” Bobby said, “no killer would link himself to murders he’d committed by getting ID in the name of his victim’s husband.”
Making eye contact with Julie, clearly trying to determine how much they were snowing him, Havalow said, “This guy your client?”
“No,” Julie lied. “He ripped off our client, and we’ve been hired to track him down, so he can be forced to make restitution.”
Bobby said, “Can we borrow this photo, sir?”
Havalow hesitated. He was still making eye contact with Julie.
Bobby handed Havalow a Dakota & Dakota business card. “We’ll get the picture back to you. There’s our address, phone number. I understand your reluctance to part with a family photo, especially since your sister and brother-in-law are no longer alive, but if—”
Apparently deciding that they were not lying, Havalow said, “Hell, take it. I’m not sentimental about George. Never could stand him. Always thought my sister was a fool for marrying him.”
“Thank you,” Bobby said. “We—”
Havalow stepped back and closed the door.
Julie rang the bell.
Bobby said, “Please don’t kill him.”
Scowling with impatience, Havalow opened the door.
Stepping between Julie and Havalow, Bobby held out the forged driver’s license bearing George Farris’s name and Frank’s picture. “One more thing, sir, and we’ll get out of your hair.”
“I live to a very tight schedule,” Havalow said.
“Have you seen this man before?”
Irritated, Havalow took the driver’s license and inspected it. “Doughy face, bland features. There’re a million like him within a hundred miles of here—wouldn’t you say?”
“And you’ve never seen him?”
“Are you slow-witted? Do I have to put it in short, simple sentences? No. I have never seen him.”
Retrieving the license, Bobby said, “Thanks for your time and—”
Havalow closed the door. Hard.
Julie reached for the bell.
Bobby stayed her hand. “We’ve got everything we came for.”
“I want—”
“I know what you want,” Bobby said, “but torturing a man to death is against the law in California.”
He hustled her away from the house, into the rain.
In the car again, she said, “That rude, self-important bastard!”
Bobby started the engine and switched on the windshield wipers. “We’ll stop at the mall, buy you one of those giant teddy bears, paint Havalow’s name on it, let you tear the guts out of it. Okay?”
“Who the hell does he think he is?”
While Julie glowered back at the house, Bobby drove away from it. “He’s Walter Havalow, babe, and he’s got to be himself until he dies, which is a worse punishment than anything you could do to him.”
A few minutes later, when they were out of Villa Park, Bobby drove into the lot at a Ralph’s supermarket and tucked the Toyota into a parking space. He doused the headlights, switched off the wipers, but left the engine running so they would have heat.
Only a few cars were in front of the market. Puddles as large as swimming pools reflected the store lights.
Bobby said, “What’ve we learned?”
“That we loathe Walter Havalow.”
“Yes, but what have we learned that’s germane to the case? Is it just a coincidence that Frank’s been using George Farris’s name and Farris’s family was slaughtered?”
“I don’t believe in coincidence.”
“Neither do I. But I still don’t think Frank is a killer.”
“Neither do I, though anything’s possible. But what you said to Havalow was true—surely Frank wouldn’t kill Irene Farris and everyone else in the house, then carry around fake ID that links him to them.”
Rain began to fall harder than before, drumming noisily on the Toyota. The heavy curtain of water blurred the supermarket.
Bobby said, “You want to know what I think? I think Frank was using Farris’s name, and whoever’s after him found out about it.”
“Mr. Blue Light, you mean. The guy who supposedly can make a car fall apart around you and magically induce streetlights to blow out.”
“Yeah. him,” Bobby said.
“If he exists.”
“Mr. Blue Light discovered Frank was using the Farris name, and went to that address, hoping to find him. But Frank had never been there. It was just a name and address his document forger picked at random. So when Mr. Blue didn’t find Frank, he killed everyone in the house, maybe because he thought they were lying to him and hiding Frank, or maybe just because he was in a rage.”
“He’d have known how to deal with Havalow.”
“So you think I’m right, I’m on to something?”
She thought about it. “Could be.”
He grinned at her. “Isn’t it fun being a detective?”
“Fun?” she said incredulously.
“Well, I meant ‘interesting.”’
“We’re either representing a man who killed four people, or we’re representing a man who’s been targeted by a brutal murderer, and that strikes you as fun?”
“Not as much fun as sex, but more fun than bowling.”
“Bobby, sometimes you make me nuts. But I love you.”
He took her hand. “If we’re going to pursue the investigation, I’m damned well going to enjoy it as much as I can. But I’ll drop the case in a minute if you want.”
“Why? Because of your dream? Because of the Bad Thing?” She shook her head. “No. We start letting a weird dream spook us, pretty soon anything will spook us. We’ll lose our confidence, and you can’t do this kind of work without confidence.”
Even in the dim backsplash from the dashboard lights, she could see the anxiety in his eyes.
Finally he said, “Yeah, that’s what I knew you’d say. So let’s get to the bottom of it as fast as we can. According to his other driver’s license, he’s James Roman, and he lives in El Toro.”
“It’s almost eight-thirty.”
“We can be there, find the house ... maybe forty-five minutes. That’s not too late.”
“All right.”
Instead of putting the car in gear, he slid his seat back and stripped out of his down-lined, nylon jacket. “Unlock the glovebox and give me my gun. From now on I’m wearing it everywhere.”
Each of them had a license to carry a concealed weapon. Julie struggled out of her own jacket, then retrieved two shoulder holsters from under her seat. She took both revolvers out of the glovebox: two snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .38 Chiefs Specials, reliable and compact guns that could be carried in-conspicuously beneath ordinary clothing with little or no help from a tailor.
THE HOUSE was gone. If anyone named James Roman had lived there, he had new lodgings now. A bare concrete slab lay in the middle of the lot, surrounded by grass, shrubbery, and several trees, as if the structure had been snared from above by intergalactic moving men and neatly spirited away.
Bobby parked in the driveway, and they got out of the Toyota to have a closer look at the property. Even in the slashing rain, a nearby streetlamp cast enough light to reveal that the lawn was trampled, gouged by tires, and bare in spots; it was also littered with splinters of wood, pale bits of Sheetrock, crumbled stucco, and a few fragments of glass that sparkled darkly.
The strongest clue to the fate of the house was to be found in the condition of the shrubbery and trees. Those bushes closest to the slab were all either dead or badly damaged, and on closer inspection appeared to be scorched. The nearest tree was leafless, and its stark black limbs lent an anachronistic feeling of Halloween to the drizzly January night.
“Fire,” Julie said. “Then they tore down what was left.”
“Let’s talk to a neighbor.”
The empty lot was flanked by houses. But lights glowed only at the house on the north side.
The man who answered the doorbell was about fifty-five, six feet two, solidly built, with gray hair and a neatly trimmed gray mustache. His name was Park Hampstead, and he had the air of a retired military man. He invited them in, with the proviso that they leave their sodden shoes on the front porch. In their socks, they followed him to a breakfast nook off the kitchen, where the yellow vinyl dinette upholstery was safe from their damp clothing; even so, Hampstead made them wait while he draped thick peach-colored beach towels over two of the chairs.
“Sorry,” he said, “but I’m something of a fussbudget.”
The house had bleached-oak floors and modem furniture, and Bobby noticed that it was spotless in every corner.
“Thirty years in the Marine Corps left me with an abiding respect for routine, order, and neatness,” Hampstead explained. “In fact, when Sharon died three years ago—she was my wife—I think maybe I got a little crazy about neatness. The first six or eight months after her funeral, I cleaned the place top to bottom at least twice a week, because as long as I was cleaning, my heart didn’t hurt so bad. Spent a fortune on Windex, paper towels, Fantastik, and sweeper bags. Let me tell you, no military pension can support the Endust habit I developed! I got over that stage. I’m still a fussbudget but not obsessed with neatness.”
He had just brewed a fresh pot of coffee, so he poured for them as well. The cups, saucers, and spoons were all spotless. Hampstead provided each of them with two crisply folded paper napkins, then sat across the table from them.
“Sure,” he said, after they raised the issue, “I knew Jim Roman. Good neighbor. He was a chopper jockey out of the El Toro Air Base. That was my last station before retirement. Jim was a hell of a nice guy, the kind who’d give you the shirt off his back, then ask if you needed money to buy a matching tie.”
“Was?” Julie asked.
“He die in the fire?” Bobby asked, remembering the scorched shrubbery and soot-blackened concrete slab next door.
Hampstead frowned. “No. He died about six months after Sharon. Make it . . . two and a half years ago. His chopper crashed on maneuvers. He was only forty-one, eleven years younger than me. Left a wife, Maralee. A fourteen-year-old daughter named Valerie. Twelve-year-old son, Mike. Real nice kids. Terrible thing. They were a close family, and Jim’s accident devastated them. They had some relatives back in Nebraska, but no one they could really turn to.” Hampstead stared past Bobby, at the softly humming refrigerator, and his eyes swam out of focus. “So I tried to step in, help out, advise Maralee on finances, give a shoulder to lean on and an ear to listen when the kids needed that. Took ’em to Disneyland and Knott’s from time to time, you know, that sort of thing. Maralee told me lots of times what a godsend I was, but it was really me who needed them more than the other way around, because doing things for them was what finally began to take my mind off losing Sharon.”
Julie said, “So the fire happened more recently?”
Hampstead did not respond. He got up, went to the sink, opened the cupboard door below, returned with a spray bottle of Windex and a dish towel, and began to wipe the refrigerator door, which already appeared to be as clean as the antiseptic surfaces in a hospital surgery. “Valerie and Mike were terrific kids. After a year or so it almost got to seem like they were my kids, the ones me and Sharon never had. Maralee grieved for Jim a long time, almost two years, before she began to remember she was a woman in her prime. Maybe what started to happen between her and me would’ve upset Jim, but I don’t think so; I think he’d have been happy for us, even if I was eleven years older than her.”
When he finished wiping the refrigerator, Hampstead inspected the door from the side, at an angle to the light, apparently searching for a fingerprint or smudge. As if he had just heard the question that Julie had asked a minute ago, he suddenly said, “The fire was two months ago. I woke up in the middle of the night, heard sirens, saw an orange glow at the window, got up, looked out....”
He turned away from the refrigerator, studied the kitchen for a moment, then went to the nearest tile-topped counter and began to spritz and wipe that gleaming surface.
Julie looked at Bobby. He shook his head. Neither of them said anything.
After a moment Hampstead continued: “Got over to their house just ahead of the firemen. Went in through the front door. Made it into the foyer, then to the foot of the steps, but couldn’t get up to the bedroom, the heat was too intense, and the smoke. I called their names, nobody answered. If I’d heard an answer maybe I would’ve found the strength to go up there somehow in spite of the flames. I guess I must’ve blacked out for a few seconds and been carried out by firemen, ’cause I woke up on the front lawn, coughing, choking, a paramedic bent over me, giving me oxygen.”
“All three of them died?” Bobby asked.
“Yeah,” Hampstead said.
“What caused the fire?”
“I’m not sure they ever figured that out. I might’ve heard something about a short in the wiring, but I’m not sure. I think they even suspected arson for a while, but that never led anywhere. Doesn’t much matter, does it?”
“Why not?”
“Whatever caused it, they’re all three dead.”
“I’m sorry,” Bobby said softly.
“Their lot’s been sold. Construction starts on a new house sometime this spring. More coffee?”
“No, thank you,” Julie said.
Hampstead surveyed the kitchen, then moved to the stainless-steel range hood, which he began to clean in spite of the fact that it was spotless. “I apologize for the mess. Don’t know how the place gets like this when it’s just me living here. Sometimes I think there must be gremlins sneaking behind my back, messing things up to torment me.”
“No need for gremlins,” Julie said. “Life itself gives us all the torment we can handle.”
Hampstead turned away from the range hood. For the first time since he had gotten up from the table and begun his cleaning ritual, he made eye contact with them. “No gremlins,” he agreed. “Nothing as simple and easy to handle as gremlins.” He was a big man and obviously tough from years of military training and discipline, but the shimmering, watery evidence of grief brimmed in his eyes, and at the moment he seemed as lost and helpless as a child.
IN THE CAR again, staring through the rain-spattered windshield at the vacant lot where the Roman house had once stood, Bobby said, “Frank finds out that Mr. Blue Light knows about the Farris ID, so he gets new ID in the name of James Roman. But Mr. Blue eventually learns about that, too, and he goes looking for Frank at the Roman address, where he discovers only the widow and the kids. He kills them, same way he killed the Farris family, but this time he sets fire to the house to cover the crime. Is that the way it looks to you?”