“Sure. I don’t know whether you were involved in your wife’s killing, but there’s no reason you should be illegally harassed. I’ll look into it.”
“That’d be wonderful,” Bekker said. Gratitude saturated his voice, but a spark of contempt flared in his eyes. “I’m glad I asked you in: I had an intuition that you’d understand . . . .”
They sat in silence for a moment, then Lucas said, “She was killed here in the kitchen. Your wife.”
“Oh, yes . . . I suppose she was,” Bekker said, looking around vaguely.
Wrong reaction, asshole. Bekker had to know where she was killed. He must have thought about it, looked at the spot, carried the image in his head: anyone would, innocent or guilty, crazy or sane. And that business about a divorce being simply annoying. If you believe that, you’re stupider than I think you are. . . . Lucas waited, expecting more, but Bekker pushed off the barstool and dumped the last of his coffee into the kitchen sink.
“The men you killed, Lucas. Do you think they went anywhere?” His tone was casual.
“What do you mean?” Lucas asked. “You mean, like, to heaven?”
“Or hell.” Bekker turned to study him. His voice was no longer casual.
“No. I don’t think they went anywhere,” Lucas said, shaking his head. “I used to be a Catholic, and when I first started police work, I worried about that. I saw a lot of people dead or dying for no apparent reason . . . not people I killed, just people. Little kids who’d drowned, people dying in auto accidents and with heart attacks and strokes. I saw a lineman burn to death, up on a pole, little bits and pieces, and nobody could help . . . . I watched them go, screaming and crying and sometimes just lying there with their tongue stuck out, heaving, with all the screaming and hollering from friends and relatives . . . and I never saw anyone looking beyond. I think, Michael, I think they just blink out. That’s all. I think they go where the words on a computer screen go, when you turn it off. One minute they exist, maybe they’re even profound, maybe the result of a great deal of work. The next . . . Whiff. Gone.”
“Gone,” Bekker repeated. His white eyebrows went up. “Nothing left?”
“Nothing but a shell, and that rots.”
“Hah.” Bekker turned away, suddenly shaken. “Very sad. Well. I have to get to bed. I have work tomorrow.”
Lucas stood, drank the last of his coffee and left the cup on the bar. “I wonder if I could ask something. I’m sure other cops have been all over the house. Could I take a look at the room where Stephanie and her friend were . . . spending time?”
“You mean her bedroom,” Bekker said wryly. “I don’t see why not. Like you said, the carpets are virtually worn-out from the impact of all the flat feet . . . no offense.”
Lucas laughed in spite of himself, then followed Bekker up the long staircase. “I’m down there,” Bekker said, when they reached the top. He gestured to the left, but turned to the right. Halfway down the hall, he pushed a door open, reached inside, clicked on a light, stepped back and said, “Here we are.”
Stephanie Bekker had slept in an old-fashioned double bed with a rough-cut French frame. The quilt, blankets and sheets were in a heap at the foot of the bed, lying across the frame and partially covering an antique steamer trunk. A dozen magazines on home decorating, antiques and art were piled on the trunk. Near the head of the bed, a Princess phone sat on a bedstand, along with a clock, two more magazines and a Stephen King novel.
A door opened to the left. Lucas stuck his head inside and found a compact but complete bathroom, with a vanity, toilet, tub and shower. A ruby-colored bath towel hung from one of two towel racks. There were traces of fingerprint powder on the vanity, toilet handle, shower handles and towel racks. Lucas turned back into the bedroom, noticed another towel on the red-toned Oriental carpet.
“Just like . . . the night . . .” Bekker said. “The laboratory people said they’d call and tell me when I can clean up. Do you have any idea when that might be?”
“Have they filmed it?”
“I think so . . . .”
“I’ll check that, too,” Lucas said. He looked at Bekker across the bedroom, measuring him, and asked, “You didn’t do it?”
Bekker looked at him now. “No,” he said levelly, with the same straightforward, unflinching gaze.
“Well. Nice meeting you,” Lucas said.
Outside, the night had turned colder, sliding into frost. The cold air was welcome on his face after the heat of the house. Lucas strolled up the sidewalk, took a right to the alley, looked around and walked down the alley until he was behind Bekker’s house. The killer had probably come in this way.
At the side of the house, a light came on, a long narrow shaft gleaming bright at the edge of a curtain. Struck by a sudden impulse, Lucas pushed the gate in the hurricane fence along the backyard. Locked. He glanced around, then vaulted the fence and walked carefully through the dark backyard, feeling with his feet as much as his eyes, wary of loose garbage can lids and invisible clotheslines . . . .
At the side of the house, he moved by inches to the lighted window, put his back to the outside wall, then slowly rotated his head until he could see through the crack.
Bekker was in the study, nude, lurching from one end to the other, chewing convulsively, his face twisted into a mask of pain, terror or religious ecstasy, his eyes turned so far up into his skull that only the whites were visible. He shuddered, twisted, threw out his arms, then collapsed into a leather chair, his mouth half open. For a minute, then two, he didn’t move, and Lucas thought he might have had a heart attack or stroke. Then he moved, his arms and legs uncoiling, smoothing themselves into an upright attitude, like that of a king on a throne. Laughing. Bekker was laughing, a mechanical “Ha-ha-ha-ha” choking out of his throat. And still his eyes were looking inward, at God.
Lucas dreamed of Bekker’s face. Had to be drugs. Had to be. In the dream he kept arguing that point, that it was drugs; but no drugs were found, and Bekker, lightly restrained by two faceless cops in blue uniforms, would swoop up and screech, I’m high on Jesus. . . .
The dream was one of those where Lucas knew he was dreaming but couldn’t get out. When the alarm went off, just after one in the afternoon, it was a positive relief. He rolled out, cleaned up and was about to pour a cup of coffee when Del banged on the door.
“You’re up,” Del said, when Lucas answered.
“Come on in. What’s going on?”
“Got some calls on the tip line. Nothing much.” He shook a no-nicotine, no-tar cigarette out of a crumpled pack and lit it with a Zippo as they walked through the house to the kitchen. “And Sloan talked to a woman named Beulah Miller this morning—another one of Stephanie Bekker’s friends. He asked about the psychologist, and she said, ‘Maybe.’ ”
“But the shrink denies it . . . .”
“So does his wife,” Del said. He settled at the kitchen table, and when Lucas held up a pot of coffee, he nodded. “Sloan went back and got her alone. She said he’d had an affair, years ago, and she knew about five minutes after it started. There haven’t been any since. And she said that after Sloan went away after the first visit, she went straight back to her husband and asked him. He denied it. Still denies it. And she believes him.”
“Has she got a job of her own?” Lucas asked, handing him a cup of hot coffee.
“Sloan thought of that,” Del said. “And she does—she’s a lobbyist for the Taxpayers’ Forum and a couple of other conservative interest groups. She’s got a law degree, Sloan says, and she probably makes a pretty good buck.”
“So she doesn’t need a meal ticket.”
“Guess not. Anyway, she suspected that Stephanie was having an affair. They never talked about it, but there were some pretty heavy hints. And she says she thinks they never talked about it because she probably knew the guy, and maybe the guy’s wife, and Stephanie didn’t know how she’d react. Like she was afraid Miller’d freak out or something.”
“So she says it’s not her hu
sband, but probably somebody they know . . . .”
“Yeah.”
“Did Sloan get a list of possibilities?”
“Naturally. Twenty-two names. But she said some of them were pretty remote possibilities. Sloan’s looking at the most likely ones today, the rest of them tomorrow . . . but he got something else you might be interested in.”
Lucas raised his eyebrows. “What?”
“Bekker apparently had an affair sometime back, two or three years ago. A nurse. Common talk around the hospital. Sloan got her name and address, went over to see her. She told him to get lost. He pulled the badge, but you know Sloan, he likes people a little too much . . . .”
“Huh. You think . . . ?”
“What I think is, you’d be the perfect guy to talk to her,” Del said.
“Why not you?”
“I’d like to come along, but I don’t look right to do it by myself,” Del said, shaking his long black hair. “I look a little too much like Charlie Manson. People don’t let me in the door, even, unless they’re assholes. But you—when you put on one of those gray suits, you look like the fuckin’ Law.”
Cheryl Clark didn’t want to let them in.
“This is about a murder, Miss Clark,” Lucas said, cool and official, his ID in her face. “You can talk to us, and the chances are about ninety percent that we’ll walk away. Or you can refuse to talk, and we’ll take you downtown and let you call a lawyer, and we’ll talk to you that way.”
“I don’t have to talk.”
“Yes you do. You don’t have the right to refuse to talk. You have the right not to incriminate yourself. If you think you’re going to incriminate yourself, then we’ll go downtown, you can call a lawyer, we’ll get you a grant of immunity from prosecution—and then we’ll talk. Or you’ll go to jail for contempt of court,” Lucas said. His voice warmed up a couple of notches. “Look, we don’t want to be jerks—if you haven’t done anything criminal, I’m telling you, it’d be a lot easier just to have an informal chat right now.”
“I really don’t have anything to say,” she protested. Her eyes skittered past Lucas to Del, who waited at the foot of the stoop, looking at a motorcycle.
“We’d like to ask anyway,” Lucas said.
“Well . . . all right. Come in. But I might not answer,” she said.
Her apartment was tidy but impersonal, almost like a motel room. A television was the most prominent piece of furniture, dominating one wall, facing a couch. The couch was covered with a thick green baize that might have been taken off a pool table. A sliding door led to a tiny balcony, with a view toward the Mississippi River valley.
“Is that your boyfriend’s Sportster outside?” Del asked, friendly.
“It’s mine,” Clark said shortly.
“You ride? Far out,” Del said. “And you smoke a lot of dope?” He stood in front of the balcony doors, looking out at the river. He was wearing a long-sleeved paisley shirt under a jean jacket, and dirty black jeans with a silver-studded black biker’s belt.
“I don’t . . .” Clark, dressed in her white nurse’s uniform, sat rigidly on her couch. Her eyes, sunk deep in her pale face, were underlined by black smudges. She looked at Lucas. “You said . . .”
“Don’t bullshit us,” Del said, but in a friendly voice. “Please. I don’t give a fuck about the dope, just don’t bullshit us. You could get a goddamn contact high off these things.” He flicked the curtains with his fingers.
“I don’t . . .” she started, then shrugged and said, “ . . . smoke a lot.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Lucas said to her. He sat on the couch himself, half turned toward Clark. “You had a relationship with Michael Bekker.”
“I told the first officer. It was almost nothing.” Her hands fluttered at her chest.
“He’s under investigation in the murder of his wife. We’re not accusing him, but we’re looking at him,” Lucas said. “You seem like an intelligent person. What we need from you is . . . an assessment.”
“Are you asking me . . . ?”
“Could he kill his wife?”
She looked at him for a moment, then broke her gaze away. “Yes.”
“Was he violent with you?”
There was a moment of silence, and then she nodded. “Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“He . . . used to hit me. With his hands. Open hands, but it hurt. And he choked me once. That time, I thought I might die. But he stopped . . . . He’d go into rages. He seemed unstoppable, but he always . . . stopped.”
“What about sexual practices? Anything unusual, bondage, like that?”
“No, no. The thing is, there almost wasn’t any sex.” She looked up at Lucas to see if he believed her.
“He’s impotent?” Lucas asked.
“He wasn’t impotent,” she said. She glanced at Del, who nodded, encouraging her. “I mean, sometimes we did, and sometimes we didn’t, but he didn’t seem driven so much by sex as . . .”
“What?”
Clark’s fear of them had slipped into the background and she seemed to be searching for the right phrase, interested despite herself. “He needs to control things. He’d make me do . . . you know, oral sex and so on. Not because it turned him on, I don’t think, but because he liked to make me do it. It was the control he liked, not the sex.”
“Did he ever use drugs while you were around?”
“No . . . well, he maybe smoked a little marijuana. You know, though, I think he might have used steroids. He has a very good body . . . .” She dropped her eyelashes. “But he had very small testicles.”
“Small?”
“Very small . . . almost like marbles,” she said. “You know, he lifts weights, and weightlifters sometimes use steroids. Testicles can shrink with prolonged use of steroids, so I asked him, and he got angry . . . . That was the time he choked me.”
“Did you ever see him dance?” Lucas asked.
“Dance? His dance?” Clark pulled back. “You’ve been watching him . . . .”
“So you’ve seen it,” Lucas said. Del was frowning at him, confused.
“One time, he beat me up,” Clark said in a rush, bouncing on the couch. “Not bad, I mean, nothing showed, but I was hurting, and crying, and all of a sudden he started to giggle and jump up and down. I couldn’t believe . . . it was like a dance. It was a dance, a jig . . . .”
“Jesus Christ,” Del blurted. “A jig?”
Lucas nodded. “I’ve seen it. It’s gotta be dope. You should talk to your people, see if he’s buying on the street.”
Del looked at Clark and asked, “Why’d you go along with him?”
She looked up at him and said, “Because he’s beautiful.”
“Beautiful?”
“He’s beautiful. I’d never had a beautiful man.” She looked between them, looking for understanding. After a moment, Del nodded.
They left her ten minutes later.
“She knows something else,” Lucas said. “She didn’t tell us something, and she thinks it might be important.”
“Yeah. But there’s no way to tell how important it is.” Del scratched his head, looking back at the apartment house door. “And if we squeeze, she’ll either crack like Humpty-fuckin’-Dumpty or call a lawyer . . . .”
“Which is worse . . .”
“Yeah.”
They were walking along the sidewalk to the car. “Where’s your wife?” Lucas asked suddenly. “I heard she split.”
“Yeah. More’n a year ago.”
“You gettin’ laid?”
“Only by Lady Fingers,” Del said, with a dry chuckle. “Look at me, man, I’m a fuckin’ wreck. I’m stoned half the time and I’m walkin’ around with a gun in my armpit. Who’d go out with me? Other’n maybe a couple of hookers?”
“Yeah.” Lucas looked at the other man. “You know what? She kind of liked you. Clark did. Talking about bikes and all. I mean, she’s a rider and you’re . . . like you are.”
Del shook h
is head. “Man, I can do better’n her.”
“You haven’t been,” Lucas pointed out. “And doing better won’t tell us what she knows.”
“I’d say twelve or thirteen of them are straight-out nutcases, and we didn’t want to bother you,” the dispatcher said, handing Lucas a stack of call slips. “I’ve marked those. Six of them wouldn’t identify themselves at all. You can judge for yourself, but they’re a waste of time . . . . There are a half-dozen you ought to get back to. People who knew the Bekkers or Armistead and say they might have a piece of information for you. None of them thought their information was particularly urgent.”
“All right. Thanks.”
“That last one, she said it was personal.”
Lucas looked at it. Cassie Lasch.
He thought about not calling. An easy way out, if you didn’t call for long enough. He went home and ate a microwave dinner, aware of the telephone out on the edge of his vision. He lasted an hour before he picked it up.
“You didn’t call,” Cassie said.
“I’m working. Give me a little time.”
“How much time does it take to call? Where do you live?”
“St. Paul.”
“Why don’t I come over?” she asked.
“Ah . . .” Lucas felt himself freeze for a moment, an impulse to push her away. He was looking at the kitchen table, piled with newspapers and unopened mail, books, some read, some not, a couple of unopened cereal boxes, a stack of unwashed bowls . . . .
He wasn’t doing anything. He was barely alive.
“You know where Mississippi River Boulevard is?”
CHAPTER
13
Cassie was muscular and intense, and fought him, wrestling across the bed. When they were done, she lay facedown on the extra pillow, while he lay faceup, sweat evaporating from his chest, chilling him.
“Jesus,” he said after a while. “That was all right. I was a little worried.”
Her head turned. “About what?”
“It’s been a while.”
She propped herself up on one elbow. “Ah. A little depression?”