The law secretary dropped the receiver on her desk and Bekker could hear her walking away. A minute passed, then another, and then she was back: “Yes, tomorrow night, seven to ten, he has preparation for moot court. The other nights are clear here at the school.”
“Thank you very much,” he said, still twittering. “You’ve been very kind. What is your name? . . . Thank you very much, Nancy. Oh, by the way, where is the moot-court prep going to be? . . . Okay, thanks again.”
He hung up and leaned back in his chair, making a steeple of his fingers. George would be working late. That could be useful. What’d he drive? It was a red four-wheel-drive of some kind, a Jeep. He could cruise by George’s house later on. He lived in Prospect Park and probably left the car in the street . . . .
• • •
Druze was sure that Bekker was using, but he wasn’t sure what it was. An ocean of cocaine flowed through the theater world, but Bekker wasn’t a cokehead; or if he was, there was something else involved. At times he was flying, his beautiful face reflecting an inner joy, a freedom; at other times, he was dark, reptilian, calculating.
Whatever it was, it moved through him quickly. He’d been manic when Druze arrived at the hospital. Now he was like ice.
“He’ll be out tomorrow night,” Bekker said. “I know that’s not much time . . . . He drives a red Jeep Cherokee. Fire-engine red. He’ll be parked behind Peik Hall.”
He explained the rest of it and Druze began shaking his head. “Happy accident? What kind of shit is that?”
“It’s the only way,” Bekker said calmly. “If we try to pull him out, set him up, we could spook him. If he thinks we might come after him . . . I can’t just call him, cold, and ask him to meet me down at the corner. He’s got to be a little afraid—that somebody might figure him out, that the killer might come after him . . . .”
“I just wish there was some other way,” Druze said. He looked around and realized he was in some kind of examination room. Bekker had met him at a side door, normally locked, and led him down a dimly lit hallway to a red metal door, and had opened it with a key and pulled him inside. The walls were lined with stainless-steel cabinets, a stainless cart sat against one wall, and a battery of overhead lights hung down at the center of the room. Their voices ricocheted around the room like Ping-Pong balls. The room was cold. “It seems pretty . . . uncertain.”
“Look, the hardest thing to investigate is a spur-of-the-moment thing, between strangers. Like when you did that woman in New York. How can the cops find a motive, how can they find a connection? If you try to set something up, it leaves traces. If you just go there, where he is, and do it . . .”
“You know he’ll be there?” Druze asked.
“Yes. He’s got the moot court. He plays the part of the judge, he has to be there.”
“I guess it’s got to be done,” Druze said, running his fingers back through his hair. “Jesus, I don’t like it. I like things that can be rehearsed. Your wife, that was no problem. This . . .”
“It’s the best way, believe me,” Bekker said intently. “Look for his car. It should be in the parking lot right behind the building. There’s a lot of foliage around the lot—I checked. If he parks there, try to get close to the car, let the air out of one of his tires. That’ll give the students time to get away from the building and it’ll keep him busy changing the tire while you come up on him . . . .”
“Not bad,” Druze admitted. “But God damn, Michael, I’ve got the feeling that we’ve kicked the tarbaby. One foot’s stuck and now we’ve got to stick the other one in, trying to get the first one loose . . . .”
“This is the end and we’ve got to do it, don’t you see? For your own safety,” Bekker said. “Get him, dump him . . .”
“That bothers me, too. Dumping him. If I just whacked him, and walked away, who’s to know? But if I have to take him out to Wisconsin . . . Jesus, I could get stopped by conservation officers looking for fish, or who knows what?”
Bekker shook his head, holding Druze with his eyes. “If we kill him and leave him, they’ll know from his eyes that he must be Stephanie’s lover—why else would his eyes be cut? But that’ll throw the serial-killer pattern right out the window. And how would the killer be able to find the guy? They’re already suspicious, and if we killed him and left him in the lot, they’d be all over me.”
“We could skip the eyes . . . .”
“No.” Bekker was cold as stone. He stepped close to Druze and gripped his arm above the elbow. Druze took a half-step back, chilled by the other man’s frigid eyes. “No. We cut the eyes. You understand.”
“Jesus, okay,” Druze said, pulling back.
Bekker stared at him for a moment, judging his sincerity. Apparently satisfied, he went on. “If we dump him somewhere remote—and I know the perfect place—nobody’s going to find him. Nobody. The cops might suspect that he was Stephanie’s lover, but they won’t know if he ran because he was afraid, or because he was the killer, or if he’s dead, or what. They just won’t know . . . .”
Druze left the way he’d come, through the side door. Bekker walked back toward his office, rubbing his chin, thinking. Druze was reluctant. Not in rebellion, but unhappy. He’d have to consider that . . . .
In the elevator, he glanced at his watch. He had time . . . .
“Sybil.”
Was she asleep? Bekker leaned over the bed and pulled her eyelids up. Her eyes were looking at him, dark and liquid, but when he let go of her eyelids, she closed them again. She was awake, all right, but not cooperating.
He sat beside her bed. “I have to look in your eyes as you go, Sybil,” he said. He could feel himself breathing a little harder than usual: his experiments had that effect on him, the excitement . . . .
“Here we are . . . .” He clapped a strip of tape over her lips, rested the heel of his other hand on her forehead and pulled her eyelids up with his index and ring fingers. Her eyes open, he leaned into her line of vision and said, quietly, “I’ve taped your mouth so you can’t breathe, and now I’ll pinch your nose, until you smother . . . . Do you understand? It shouldn’t hurt, but I would appreciate a signal if you see . . . anything. Move your eyes up and down as you go through to the other side, do you understand? If there is another side?”
He was using his most convincing voice, and quite convincing it was, he thought. “Are you ready? Here we go.” He pinched her nose, holding his fingers so she could see it, even if she couldn’t feel it. Sybil couldn’t move, but there were muscles that could twitch, and they did twitch after the first minute, small tremors running through her neck to his hands.
Her eyes began to roll up and he put his face an inch from hers, looking into them, whispering, urgent. “Can you see it? Sybil, can you see . . . ?”
She was gone, unconscious. He released her nose, placed his hand on her chest, compressed it, lifted, compressed it again. She hadn’t been that close, he thought, although she couldn’t know that. She’d thought she was dying. Had been dying, would have died, if he hadn’t released his hand . . .
She owed him this information . . . .
“Sybil, are you in there? Hello, Sybil, I know you’re there.”
At two, Bekker was home, MDMA burning low in his mind, under control. The episode with Sybil had, ultimately, been unfulfilling. A nurse had come down the hall, gone into a nearby room. He’d left then, thinking it better not to be seen with Sybil. As far as he knew, he hadn’t been. He’d gone from her bedside to his office, popped the ecstasy, hoping to balance the disappointment, turned off the lights and left.
He drove past the front of the house on the way to the alley. As he passed, he saw a man, there, at the end of the street. On the sidewalk. Turning his head to watch Bekker go by. Large. Watching. Familiar.
Bekker slowed, stopped, rolled down the window. “Can I help you?” he called.
There was a long moment of silence, then the man sauntered out into the street. He was wearing a leather bomber jack
et and boots.
“Mr. Bekker, how are you?”
“You’re a police officer?”
“Lucas Davenport, Minneapolis police.”
Yes. The man at the funeral, the tough-looking one. “Is the police department camped on my porch?” Bekker asked. Safe now—the man wasn’t a mugger or revenge-bound relative—the sarcasm knit through his polite tone like a dirty thread in a doily.
“No. Only me,” the cop said.
“Surveillance?”
“No, no. I just like to wander by the scene of a crime now and then. Get a feel for it. Helps me think . . .”
Davenport. A bell went off in the back of Bekker’s mind. “Aren’t you the officer that the FBI agent called a gunman? Killed some ridiculous number of people?”
Even in the weak illumination from the corner streetlight, Bekker could see the flash of the cop’s white teeth. He was smiling.
“The FBI doesn’t like me,” the cop said.
“Did you like it? Killing all those people?” The interest was genuine, the words surprising Bekker even as they popped out of his mouth. The cop seemed to think about it for a moment, tipping his head back, as though looking for stars. It was cold enough that their breath was making little puffs of steam.
“Some of them,” the cop said after a bit. He rocked from his toes to his heels, looked up again. “Yeah. Some of them I . . . enjoyed quite a bit.”
Bekker couldn’t quite see the other man’s eyes: they were set too deep, under heavy brow ridges, and the curiosity was almost unbearable.
“Listen,” Bekker heard himself say, “I have to put my car in the garage. But would you like to come in for a cup of coffee?”
CHAPTER
12
Lucas waited at the front door until Bekker got the car in the garage and walked through the house to let him in. Bekker turned on the porch light as he opened the door. In the yellow light, his skin looked like parchment, stretched taut over the bones of his face. Like a skull, Lucas thought. Inside, in the soft glow of the ceiling fixtures, the skull illusion vanished: Bekker was beautiful. Not handsome, but more than pretty.
“Come in. The house is a bit messy.”
The house was spectacular. The entry floor was oak parquet. To the left was a coat closet, to the right a wall with an oil painting of a British Isles scene, a cottage with a thatched roof in the foreground, sailboats on the river beyond. Straight ahead, a burgundy-carpeted staircase curled up to the right. Off the entryway, a room with glass doors, full of books, appeared to the right, under a balcony formed by the stairs. To the left was the parlor, with Oriental carpets, a half-dozen antique mirrors and a stone fireplace. Beautiful and hot. Seventy-five or eighty degrees. Lucas unzipped his jacket and crouched to press his fingers against the parlor carpet.
“Wonderful,” he said. The pile was soft as beaten egg whites, an inch or more deep, and as intricately woven as an Arabian fairy tale.
Bekker grunted. He wasn’t interested. “Let’s go back and sit in the kitchen,” he said, and led the way to a country kitchen with quarry-tile floor. Stephanie Bekker had been killed in the kitchen, Lucas recalled. Bekker seemed unaffected by it, pulling earthenware cups from natural oak cabinets, spooning instant coffee into them.
“I hope caffeine is okay,” he said. Bekker’s voice was flat, uninflected, as though he daily drank coffee with a cop who suspected him of murder. He must know . . . .
“Fine.” Lucas looked around the kitchen as Bekker filled the cups with tap water, stuck them in a microwave and punched the control buttons. The kitchen was as carefully crafted as the rest of the house, with folksy, turn-of-the-century wallpaper, dark, perfectly matched wood, and touches of flagstone. While the rest of the house felt decorated, Lucas thought, the kitchen felt lived in.
Bekker turned back to Lucas as the microwave began to hum. “I know nothing at all about cooking,” Bekker said. “A little about wine, perhaps.”
“You’re handling your wife’s death pretty well,” Lucas said. He stepped up to a small framed photograph. Four women in long dark dresses and white aprons, standing around a butter churn. Old. “Are these, what, ancestors?”
“Stephanie’s great-grandmother and some friends. Sit down, Mr. Davenport,” Bekker said, nodding at a breakfast bar with stools. The microwave beeped, and he took out the cups, the coffee steaming hot, carried them to the bar and sat down opposite Lucas. “You were saying?”
“Your wife’s death . . .”
“I’ll miss her, but to be honest, I didn’t love my wife very much. I’d never hurt her—I know what the police think, Stephanie’s idiot cousin—but the fact is, neither of us was much of a factor in the other’s life. I suspected she was having an affair: I simply didn’t care. I’ve had female friends of my own . . . .” He looked for reaction in Lucas’ face. There was none. The cop accepted the infidelity as routine . . . maybe.
“And that didn’t bother her? Your other friends.” Lucas sipped at the coffee. Scalding.
“I don’t believe so. She knew, of course, her friends would have seen to that. But she never spoke to me about it. And she was the type who would have, if she cared . . . .” Bekker blew on his coffee. He was wearing a tweed jacket and whipcord pants, very English.
“So why not a divorce?” Lucas asked.
“Why should we? We got along reasonably well, and we had this”—he gestured at the house—“which we couldn’t maintain if we split up. And there are other advantages for two people living together. You share maintenance chores, run errands for each other, one can take care of business when the other one is gone . . . . There wasn’t any passion, but we were quite well adapted to each other’s habits. I’m not much interested in marriage, at my age. I have my work. She couldn’t have children; her fallopian tubes were hopelessly tangled, and by the time in vitro came around, she was no longer thinking about children. I never wanted any, so there wasn’t even that possibility.” He stopped and seemed to reflect, took a sip of the scalding coffee. “I suppose other people wouldn’t understand the way we were living, but it was convenient and comfortable.”
“Hmp.” Lucas sipped his own coffee and looked the other man straight in the eyes. Bekker gazed placidly back, not flinching, and Lucas knew then that he was lying, at least about part of it. Nobody looked that guiltless without deliberate effort. “I suppose a prosecutor could argue that since you had no interest in each other, and it made no difference to you whether she lived or died, her death would be very . . . convenient. Instead of having half of this”—his gesture mimicked Bekker’s—“you’d have all of it.”
“He could . . . if he were particularly stupid or particularly vicious,” Bekker said. He flashed a smile at Lucas, a thin rim of white teeth. “I invited you for coffee because of the people you’ve killed, Mr. Davenport. I thought you’d likely know about death and murder. That would give us much in common. I study death as a scientist. I’ve studied murder, both the victims and the killers. There are several men who consider themselves my friends out at Stillwater prison, serving life sentences. From my research I’ve drawn two conclusions. First: Murder is stupid. In most cases, it will out, as somebody British once said. If you’re going to commit murder, the worst thing you can do is plan it and commit it in league with another person. Conflicts arise, the investigators play one against another . . . . I know how it works. No. Murder is stupid. Murder plotted with someone else is idiotic. Divorce, on the other hand, is merely annoying. A tragedy for some couples, perhaps, but if two people genuinely don’t love each other, it’s mostly routine legal procedure.”
Bekker shrugged and went at the coffee. When he extended his perfect pink lips to the cup, he looked like a leech, Lucas thought.
“What’s the second thing you know about murder? You said there were two things,” Lucas asked.
“Ah. Yes.” Bekker smiled again, pleased that Lucas was paying attention. “To plan and carry out a cold-blooded murder—well, only a madman could do it. Anyon
e remotely normal could not. Serial killers, hit men, men who plot and kill their wives: all crazy.”
Lucas nodded. “I agree.”
“I’m glad you do,” Bekker said simply. “And I’m not crazy.”
“Is that the real reason you invited me in? To tell me you’re not nuts?”
Bekker nodded ruefully and said, “Yes, I guess it is. Because I thought you might understand the totality of what I’m saying. Even if I had wanted to kill Stephanie—and I didn’t—I wouldn’t have. I’m simply too smart and too sane.” He reached forward and touched Lucas on the arm, and Lucas thought: The sucker is trying to seduce me. He wants me to like him. . . . “Your fellow officers have been all over the neighborhood, quite deliberately creating an impression. I can feel it in my neighbors. I’m sure Stephanie’s crazy cousin, the dope addict, has told you that I had her killed to get this house, but if you ask her friends, you’ll find that I never had much interest in it. The house or the furnishings . . .”
“You could sell it—”
“I was coming to that,” Bekker interrupted. He made a brushing motion with his free hand, as though batting away gnats. “I’m not much interested in the house or its furnishings, but I’m not totally unappreciative, either. It is a very comfortable place to live. Success in academia is largely political, you know, and the house is a wonderful backdrop for social gatherings. For impressing those who must be impressed. I would keep it, but . . . I’m afraid Stephanie’s crazy cousin may succeed in driving me out. If all my neighbors believe I killed her, remaining here would be intolerable. You might tell that to Del, when you see him. That if I sell, it will be only because he drove me out.”
“I will,” Lucas nodded. “And if the other officers are creating problems for you . . . I have some pull at headquarters. I’ll back them off.”
“Really?” Bekker seemed surprised. “Would you?”