And she was the one who’d come back.
She’d preyed on him, haunted him, followed him with her black eyes. For six weeks he’d doped himself, screaming through the nights, afraid of sleep. He’d seen her in his waking hours, too, in the shiny reflections from his instruments, from mirrors, in panes and fragments of glass . . . .
She’d faded, finally, beaten down with drugs. And Bekker had known instinctively that the physical eyes made the difference.
For the next woman, he’d been prepared. He’d pinned her, choked her and, with a stainless-steel scalpel, cut her eyes as she’d died. And slept like a baby.
The third one had died quickly, too quickly, before he could cut her eyes. He had cut them dead, but he still feared that she would follow him into his dreams: that it was necessary to cut the living eyes.
But it was not. He’d never seen that one again.
He’d cut the eyes on the old man dying of congestive heart failure, and the old woman with the stroke—they’d delivered those two right to him, in the pathology department, and he still had the taped description of the cutting of the old woman’s eyes. And he’d cut the eyes of the boy and the girl from Pediatric Oncology, although he’d had to take a good deal more risk with those. The girl he’d gotten to just before they moved her body out of the hospital. For the boy, he’d had to go to the funeral home and wait his chance.
That had been a bad two days, waiting, the boy out there . . . .
But in the end he’d cut them all.
He hadn’t been able to cut George.
And George was here now, coming for him.
Deep in his closet, naked, his arms wrapped around his knees, his eyes wide and staring into the beyond, Bekker began to scream.
CHAPTER
15
“You’re sure?” Lucas asked Swanson. “It’s Loverboy?”
Swanson scratched his belly and nodded. “It’s gotta be. I went over to Bekker’s as soon as I heard. Shook him out of bed. This was about three hours ago, six A.M., and he looked terrible, and I said, ‘For the lover, how about Philip George from the law school?’ He went like this”—Swanson mimed Bekker’s perplexed look—“and he said, quote, If you told me so, I wouldn’t be . . . shocked, I guess. I mean, we knew him. Why? Is it him? Unquote. Then I told him about George. He seemed kind of freaked out.”
“You got the time George disappeared? It’s nailed down? Exactly?”
“Yeah. Within five minutes, I’d bet,” Swanson said, nodding. He was unshaven, holding an empty Styrofoam coffee cup, his eyes glassy from fatigue and caffeine. He’d been rousted out of bed at five o’clock, after four hours’ sleep. “There was a guy with him, a student, when George started changing the tire. The student was supposed to get right home to his wife, she’s pregnant, due anytime, so he was anxious. Anyway, he’s got a clock on the dashboard of his car. He said he looked at it going out of the lot, and remembers it was ten-fourteen. He remembers that close . . . .”
“What about this shrink Shearson’s been looking at?”
Swanson shrugged. “I always thought that was bullshit, but Daniel wanted him covered.”
“Sonofabitch,” Lucas said in a black fury. Del was leaning in the doorway, listening, and Lucas bolted past him, out of his office, took a turn down the hallway, then almost trotted back, his face white. “The cocksucker was using me as an alibi. You know that? I’m Bekker’s fuckin’ alibi . . . .”
“If George is dead,” Swanson said. “That’s a pretty big if. And if Bekker had something to do with it . . .”
Lucas poked Swanson in the gut with his index finger. “George is dead. And Bekker did it. Believe it.” Lucas turned to Del. “Remember when you said the San Francisco alibi was a little too convenient?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, how about this? He invites an investigating cop over for a drink, to talk, he tries to fuckin’ seduce me, man, precisely when the main witness is being taken off. How’s that for a motherfucking coincidence?”
Del shrugged. He didn’t say “I told you so,” but his shoulders did.
Lucas turned back to Swanson, remembering his odd characterization of Bekker. Bekker had looked fine the night before: sleek, even. Beautiful. “You said he looked terrible? What do you mean?”
“He looked fucked up,” Swanson said. “He looked like he was a hundred years old. He ain’t getting no sleep.”
“ ’Cause he was working a fuckin’ murder. That’s why. ’Cause he had a murder going down last night,” Lucas said. “All right. We’re gonna take him down. One way or another”—this time he poked Del—“the motherfucker falls.”
Sloan was coming down the hall, rolling an unlit cigarette around between his lips, his hands deep in the pockets of his trench coat.
“Bekker did it?” he asked.
“Fuckin’ absolutely,” Lucas said grimly.
“Huh,” Sloan said. He shifted the unlit cigarette. “You think he killed George before or after he drove his Jeep out to the airport?”
Lucas looked at him blankly: “Say what?”
“Airport cops listed the bulletin for his Jeep, found it in the long-term ramp. Long-term. Like he ain’t planning to come back.”
Lucas shook his head. “Bullshit. If George is the one, he ain’t running. He’s dead.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” Sloan said. “He coulda took off for Brazil. He could of cracked, decided to split.”
“Who’s talking to his wife?” Lucas asked.
“Neilson, but I’m going over later,” Sloan said.
“I tell you, the motherfucker is dead,” Lucas said, settling back in his chair. “How’s he gonna leave a lug nut in the parking lot? How can you forget to put on a lug nut? You’ve got the bolt sticking out at you, you can’t forget. The flat tire was a setup.”
“How old is the Jeep?” Del asked Sloan.
Sloan shrugged. “New.”
“See?” Lucas said with satisfaction. “Flat, my ass.”
They were still arguing when Harmon Anderson leaned in the door, a piece of white paper in his hand. “You’ll never guess,” he said to Lucas. “I’ll give you two hundred guesses and betcha a million bucks you don’t get it.”
“You don’t got a million bucks,” Swanson said. “What is it?”
Anderson dramatically unfolded the paper, a Xerox copy, and held it up like an auctioneer at an art sale, pivoting, to give everybody a look.
“What is it?” Del asked.
The Xerox showed a painting of a one-eyed giant with a misshapen head, half turned, peering querulously over a hill, a naked sleeping woman in the foreground.
“Ta-da,” Anderson said. “The Bekker killer, as seen by Mrs. Bekker’s lover. A cyclops, is what it is.”
“What the fuck?” Sloan said, taking the paper, frowning at it, passing it to Lucas.
“We got it in the mail—actually, this is a copy, they’re looking at the original for prints,” Anderson said.
“Is the original in black and white?” Lucas asked.
“Yeah, a Xerox. And there’s a note from Loverboy. We’re sure it’s for real, because he goes over some of the stuff he said in the first letter. Calls him a troll, not a giant.”
“Jesus,” said Lucas, rubbing his forehead, staring at the face of the giant. “I know this guy from somewhere.”
“Who? The troll?”
“Yeah. I know him, but I don’t know from where.”
The other three cops looked at Lucas for a moment; then Sloan said skeptically, “You been talking to any gruff billy goats lately?”
“When was it mailed?” Lucas asked.
Anderson shrugged. “Sometime yesterday, that’s all we know.”
“Anybody know where this painting comes from?” Lucas asked.
“Not as far as I know . . . We could check it out.”
“I mean, if it’s from a book, maybe he got it out of the library or something,” Lucas suggested.
Sloan and Swan
son looked at each other, and then Sloan said, “Right. See, this guy is really freaked out after witnessing this killing, and he’s got about a hundred cops on his ass, so he goes down to the library and says, Here’s my card, just go ahead and put me in your permanent computer records so Lucas Davenport can come in here . . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s weak,” Lucas said, waving Sloan off.
“It’s not fuckin’ weak, it’s fuckin’ limp.”
Lucas looked at the photocopy. “Can I keep this?”
“Be my guest,” Anderson said. “We only got as many as you can make on a Xerox machine.”
Bekker, straight, the morning sun slashing into him, went out to a phone booth and called Druze.
“You didn’t do the eyes,” he said, when the receiver was picked up.
There was a long silence, and then: “No. I forgot.”
“Jesus, Carlo,” Bekker groaned. “You’re killing me.”
Lucas went home at noon, driving through a light, cold drizzle, darker clouds off to the west. He spent five minutes building a turkey sandwich with mustard, put it on a paper plate, got a Leinenkugel from the refrigerator, went and sat in the spare bedroom and stared at the wall.
He hadn’t been in the room for months, and dust balls, like mice, half hid under the edge of the guest bed. On the walls were pinned a series of paper charts, laying out possibilities and connections: traces of the Crows case. Most of what he needed to find the men was on the charts, organized, poised, waiting for the final note. He closed his eyes, heard the gunfire again, the screams . . . .
He stood, exhaled and began pulling down the charts, pushing the pins back into the wall. He looked over the names, remembering, then ripped the papers in halves, in quarters, in eighths, and carried them to the study and dumped them into his oversized wastebasket.
The drawing pad was still there, and he sat down, opened it, chose with some care the precisely right felt-tip marker and began to make lists as he ate the turkey sandwich.
Bekker, he wrote at the top of the first sheet. And under that: Drugs, Times and Places. Friends? At the top of a second he wrote Killer. And below that:
Looks like troll
Knows Bekker
Could be dope dealer?
Is he paid? Check Bekker accounts
Theater connection?
Do I know him?
On the Bekker sheet, he added:
Cheryl Clark
Vietnam killings
Cancer kids
On a third sheet he wrote Loverboy, and underneath:
Cleaned drain
Changed sheets
Xeroxed note
Philip George?
He carried the new charts to the bedroom, pinned them on the wall and stared at them.
Why had the killer gone after George, if indeed he had? If George had known him, why hadn’t he said so when he called 911? And if he hadn’t known him, why would the killer worry about it? Maybe they worked together, or moved in the same social circles? That didn’t fit with the drug thing . . . unless George was a user? Or maybe George was involved with Bekker? What if Bekker, a doctor, was dealing, and a junkie knew that, came into his house . . . but then, why Armistead?
He stood, speculating, trying to come up with something he could hold onto and work with. He found it right away. He thought about it, got his jacket and called Dispatch. As he dialed, he looked out the window: still raining. A cold, miserable slanting spring rain, out of the northwest.
“Could you get in touch with Del and have him meet me at the office?” he asked when Dispatch came on. “No big rush, this afternoon sometime . . .”
“He’s sitting in a bar,” the dispatcher said. “He’s taking calls there, if you want the number . . . .”
“Sure.” Lucas took a piece of paper from his shirt pocket, the Xerox of the painting of the one-eyed giant, and scribbled down the number. When he called, a bartender answered and put Del on. He could meet Lucas at four o’clock. As they talked, Lucas looked at the giant peering at the sleeping woman. The creature had a nearly round head, like a basketball, and thin, wide twisting lips. Where . . . ?
When he finished talking to Del, Lucas pulled out the phone book and called the rare-book room at the university library.
“Carroll? Lucas Davenport.”
“Lucas, you haven’t been coming to the games. Zhukov is about to go after the Romanians north of Stalingrad . . . .”
“Yeah, Elle told me. She said you needed Nazis.”
“No fun for the Nazis from here on out . . .”
“Listen, I need some help. I’ve got a picture of a one-eyed giant. He’s looking over a mountain at a sleeping woman and he’s got a club. It’s a painting and it’s kind of crude. Childlike, but I don’t think a kid did it. There’s something good about it.”
“It’s a one-eyed giant, like a cyclops from The Odyssey?”
“Yeah, exactly. Somebody said it’s a troll, but somebody else said that technically it’s a cyclops. I’m trying to figure out what book it came from, if it came from a book.”
There was a moment of silence, then the book expert said, “Damned if I’d know. An expert on The Odyssey might, but you’d have to get lucky. There are probably about a million different illustrations of cyclopses.”
“Shit . . . So what do I do?”
“You say it’s crude but good. You mean slick-crude, like a Playboy illustration, or . . .”
“No. The more I look at it, the more I think it might be famous. Like I said, there’s something about it.”
“Huh. Well, you could take it over to the art history department. There’s a good chance that nobody will be there, and if there is somebody there, he might not talk to you unless you’ve got a fee statement.”
“Hmpf. Okay, well, thanks, Carroll . . .”
“Wait a minute. There’s a painter, over there in St. Paul—actually, he’s a computer genius of some kind—and he comes in here to look at book illustrations. He’s pretty expert on art history. I’ve got a number, if you want to give him a ring.”
“Sure.” Lucas heard the receiver being laid on a desk, then a minute of silence, then the receiver being picked up again.
“The guy is a little remote, out in the ozone, like painters get. Use my name, but be polite. Here’s the number . . . . And come on back to the games. You can be Paulus.”
“Jeez, I don’t know what to say . . . .”
When he got the book expert off the line, Lucas dialed the number. The phone rang five or six times and he was about to hang up when it was answered. The painter sounded as though he’d been asleep, his voice gruff, cool. An edge of wariness entered it when Lucas explained he was a cop.
“I got your name from Carroll over at the U. I’ve got a question that he said you might be able to help on . . . .”
“Computers?” Wary. Lucas wondered why.
“Art. I’ve got this picture of a giant, a painting, weird-looking. Kind of strong. I need to know where it came from.”
The artist didn’t ask why. Again, Lucas thought that was odd. “Is the giant biting the head off a dead body?”
“No, he’s . . .”
“Then it’s not Goya. Has the giant got one eye?”
“Yeah,” Lucas said. “Big mother, one eye, looking over a mountain . . .”
“At a nude woman in the foreground, lying on the mountainside. Like one of those saints on a Catholic holy card.”
“That’s it,” Lucas said.
“Odilon Redon. The painting’s called The Cyclops. Redon was French, mostly did pastel. Painted the cyclops around the turn of the century. The nude’s got her back to the cyclops, so you’re looking right at her . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s it. What kind of book would that be in? I mean, obscure, or what?”
“No, no, there are any number of books on Redon. He’s in vogue right now. Or was. The library would have something. He’s not exactly a household name, but anybody who knows about painting wo
uld know about him.”
“Hmph. Okay. So probably a book.”
“Or a calendar. There are dozens of art calendars around, and art postcards and art appointment books. Depends on what size it is.”
“Okay, thanks. That’s about what I needed. You say that you’d have to know something about art . . . .”
“Yeah. If you want some kind of index, I’d say maybe one percent of the people walking around on the sidewalk would know about Redon, would know his name. Of those, one in five could tell you a picture he painted.”
“Thanks again.”
“Always delighted to help the police,” the artist said. He sounded like he was smiling.
Del was not smiling. Del was twisting his hands.
“Jesus Christ, it’s not hard,” Lucas said, squatting beside him. Del sat in the metal folding chair on the visitor’s side of Lucas’ desk. “You just tell her you’ve been thinking about her. You say, ‘I want to apologize for the way I acted, you seem like a really nice woman. You got nice eyes.’ Then she’ll ask, sooner or later, ‘What color are they?’ And you say, ‘Hazel.’ ”
“How do I know they’re hazel?” Del picked up the phone receiver in one hand, holding down the hang-up button with the index finger of the other.
“ ’Cause they are,” Lucas said. “Really they’re brown, but you make it sound nice when you say hazel. She knows she’s got brown eyes, but she likes to think they’re hazel. She’ll think you care more if you say hazel . . . . Christ, Del, when was the last fuckin’ time you asked a woman out?”
“ ’Bout twenty-two years ago,” Del said, his head hanging. There was a moment of silence; then they both started to laugh. Del said, “Ah, fuck me,” and started punching phone numbers. “Does it have to be tonight?”
“Sooner the better,” Lucas said, moving behind the desk. He wanted to be where Del could see his face, in case he needed coaching. The phone rang six times and Del reached out to hang up, when Cheryl Clark answered.
“Ah, is this, ah, Miss Clark?” Del stuttered. Twenty-two years? Lucas shook his head. “Ah . . . this is the cop who was over there with the other cop, I’m the one with the headband. Yeah, Del. Listen, uh, this is got nothing to do with the investigation, you know, but, uh, I been thinking about you, and I finally decided to call . . . . I don’t know, you seemed like a pretty nice chick, uh, woman, you know, shit, you had real nice eyes . . . . Uh, huh . . . yeah, kind of, if you’d like to, I was wondering if you’d be interested in a cup of coffee. Un-huh, okay.” He turned away from Lucas, hiding his eyes, his voice dropping. “How about Annie’s over on the West Bank? Uh, huh. I’ll pick you up, is that okay? Uh. Forty-one. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, why, they’re hazel, really pretty, you know . . . . Yeah. Okay. Listen, about six-thirty? Get something to eat, a couple burgers? Okay?” By the time he hung up, Del’s face was running with sweat.