Show of Evil

  ARE YOU THERE, FOX?

  HERE, HYDRA. ARE YOU PREPARED?

  ALWAYS, FOX.

  HAVE YOU SEEN THE SUBJECT?

  YES, FOX. THREE DAYS AGO.

  AND THE REFERENCE?

  IN MY HEAD.

  EXCELLENT. LEAVE TONIGHT.

  OH, THANK YOU, FOX. IT HAS BEEN SO LONG.

  THE TIME IS PERFECT. THANK YOU, THANK YOU. IT IS AN EXCELLENT PLAN. BE CAREFUL.

  ALWAYS.

  IN TWO DAYS. SAME TIME. TWO DAYS.

  Fifteen

  Lex was pissed off. The last trip of the day and he had to drive thirty-five miles down to Hilltown to deliver a stinking package. Thirty-five fucking miles, and he had two ladies lined up that night. Pick-and-choose time. He laughed and slapped the wheel of the minivan. Maybe he could get them both interested. Hell, what a night that would be!

  But first things first. Thirty-five miles down to Hilltown. He couldn't speed.

  Two tickets down, one more and I'm out. He couldn't afford to lose his licence, the job was too good, except when they dumped a late load on him and he had to drive thirty-five miles down and thirty-five miles back. And drop off the stupid package. Seventy miles. Ten minutes to do the package. Two hours, no more. He'd be back in town by 8 P.M. Then he'd make up his mind.

  Toni? Or Jessie? What a choice. Brunette or redhead?

  He was thinking so hard he almost missed the turnoff.

  He wheeled the minivan off the main highway and headed down the last two miles on a two-lane blacktop.

  Christ, who the hell would want to live out in this godforsaken place? His headlights led him to the city limits.

  What a joke. City limits? A city? Twelve hundred people? The whole damn town would hardly fill up the old Paramount Theatre in St Louis. He turned on the dome light and took out the delivery slip.

  Calvin Spiers. RFD 2.

  Shit, the whole place was one big RFD.

  He turned it over. Someone had scribbled instructions on the back. He slowed down and squinted under the dim dome light.

  'Left past public library. One and a half miles to bright red mail-box just past Elmo's Superstore.'

  Well, that oughtta be easy enough.

  Ten minutes later found him out on a country road on the other side of Hilltown. Elmo's Superstore was on the right, a garish, low-slung cinder-block building with a flashing BUD sign on the roof. He drifted past it and his headlights picked up the red mailbox.

  'Piece a cake,' he said aloud.

  He pulled down the dirt road, peering into the darkness for signs of life. Finally he saw the house, off to the left through the trees. It was a small bungalow set back in the woods with a well-kept yard. The porch light was out, but he could see a light behind the curtains of what he assumed was the living room. He turned into the rutted driveway and beeped the horn twice, then got out, went to the other side of the van, and slid the door back. The package was about a foot square and light, no more than one or two pounds. He checked the name, took his delivery pad, and went to the front door.

  Must not of heard me, he thought as he went up the steps to the porch. Then he saw the note. It was tucked in the screen door. He put the package down and pulled out the note.

  UPD man: Had to run to the store. Door open. Please put package on table in den, second door on left. Thank you.

  He tried the door and it swung open to reveal a long, dark hallway that led back to an open door. Light from the living room spilled over into the hall, reflected into the darkness of the hall.

  Shit, I oughtta just leave it here. What the hell do they think I am?

  'Anybody here?' No answer. 'Mr Spier?'

  But he picked up the package and headed down the hall. He saw a light switch and flicked it, but there was no bulb in the overhead socket.

  Great. Coulda left me a flashlight at least.

  'Anybody here? UPD,' he called as he approached the den door.

  He peered inside the darkened room, squinting his eyes to try to make out a light or a lamp. He put the box down and, facing the wall, swept his hands over its smooth surface, feeling for the light switch. He did not hear the figure emerge from the darkness behind him, moving slowly, raising its hand high. There was a flash in the light from the living room. Lex started to turn, then felt a searing pain piercing deep into his back and into his chest.

  He screamed and stumbled forward, felt the blade slide out of his back as he grabbed the doorjamb. Then he felt it again, this time plunging down through his shoulder. He fell to his knees, reached out in the dark and felt the back of a chair, and grabbed it.

  'Oh God,' he cried out, 'I'm just… delivery man. UPD… Please!'

  The knife struck again. And again. And again. It ripped into his back, his side, his arm as he floundered weakly, trying to escape the deadly blade. He felt his life seeping out of him. He began to shake violently. The room became an echo chamber and he seemed to reverberate within it. He tasted salt. Sweat showered from his face.

  Then he felt hot breath beside his ear and a voice whispered, 'Billy… Peter…'

  'My… God…' Lex answered feebly. The last thing he felt was the deadly blade slicing into his throat, slashing through tissue and muscle. Air burst from the gaping wound and showered blood as it hissed from his lungs. With demonic glee, the assassin kept striking over and over and over in the darkness of the room.

  When the deadly work was done, the executioner dipped a finger in the widening pool of blood and, lifting the hair on the back of the victims head, printed, R4.1102.'

  Sixteen

  The red rays of dawn filtered through the wooden slats of the shutters, casting long, harsh shadows across the hardwood floors. Vail lay on his back and stared up at the pickled-blonde cathedral ceiling, softly crimson in the floor's reflection of morning light. Vail turned his head. Jane lay on her side, her forehead resting against his arm. He pulled the feather comforter up over her naked shoulders and slid out of her bed, gathering up his clothes and shoes from where they were strung out across the floor.

  'Whew!' he said to himself, remembering how they had got there.

  Tudor Manor was one of an ensemble of mansions built in the mid-Twenties and modelled after the Tudor mansions of England. From the outside they seemed strangely incongruous with the more midwestern architecture of Rogers Park. Each building (there were four in what was collectively known as Tudor Estates) had sweeping projecting gables decorated with gargoyles and crenellations, a slate roof, ornamental chimney pots, and towering casement windows.

  Inside, Venable had turned her apartment into a bright, cheery place. Its walls were painted in soft pastels, the woodwork and cabinets were pickled-white oak. There was a large living room with casement windows facing Indian Bounty Park, fifty yards away. The rear wall of the room faced a hedged courtyard and was divided by a bullet-shaped copper-and-glass atrium, which towered up to the bedroom above. Two tall ficus trees dominated its core and climbing plants adorned its glass walls. Begonias, narcissi, and impatiens wove colourful patterns between and around the two trees. There was a guest bedroom and a formal dining room and a kitchen that looked like a chef's dream.

  He found filters and a pound of coffee in the freezer and started the coffee before heading into the guest bath. Thirty minutes later, dressed in the previous night's wrinkled suit and shirt, he poured two cups of coffee and took one back up the stairs to the bedroom.

  He placed her cup on the night table, leaned over the bed, and kissed her on the cheek. She stirred for a moment and reached out for him. Her arm fell across the empty sheet. She opened one eye and squinted up at him.

  'You're due in court in three hours,' said Vail. 'Pryor won't be happy if you're late. If you'd like to hustle, you can join me at Butterfly's for breakfast.'

  She rolled over onto her back.

  'I'll be busy for the next three hours,' she said sleepily.

  'You got something up your sleeve, Lawyer Venable?'

  She pulled the comforter
slowly down until it was two inches below her navel, held her arms towards the ceiling, and wiggled them slowly.

  'No sleeves,' she said.

  'You're gonna catch cold.'

  'I always wake up this way,' she said. 'It's too chilly to fall back to sleep. And I wouldn't dare set foot in Butterfly's this soon. It's your turf. They'd probably lynch me.'

  'I thought we were putting all that behind us.'

  'After Stoddard.'

  'That's Shana's problem.'

  'We'll see where we stand after the bail hearing.'

  He leaned over her, supporting himself on both arms, and kissed her on the mouth. 'Great,' he said.

  'See you in court.'

  On the way out, he picked up the downstairs phone and dialled Stenner's car phone.

  Stenner answered on the first ring. 'Where are you? I'm parked in front. Been calling you for fifteen minutes.'

  'Pick me up on the Estes-Rockwell corner of Indian Bounty Park,' Vail said.

  'What are you doing out there?'

  'Jogging. I ran out of breath.'

  'Damn it, what do you mean standing on a street corner in broad—'

  Vail hung up. He'd heard it all before. He headed across the park towards the far side, stopped once, and looked back. The shutters were open on one of the bedroom windows and she was watching him, wrapped only in the down comforter. She didn't wave; she just watched. Vail smiled up at her and walked through the park.

  Stenner's concern for Vail went back four years, just after Flaherty had joined the Wild Bunch. Vail leaned over backwards to be impartial, but in his heart Shana Parver and Dermott Flaherty were his two favourites, probably because he saw in them his own rebellious spirit. Parver rebelling against her rich parents, Flaherty against the streets where he grew up.

  Flaherty had been an angry kid, always in trouble, living on the streets, getting into fistfights, shoplifting, picking pockets, and heading for big trouble. He had one saving grace: he loved school. It was the one place he could rise above his desperate life. When he was busted for picking the pocket of a Red Sox fan and scalping the two tickets from his wallet, a kindly judge, who knew about him and was impressed with his grades, sent him to a half-way house for hardcase juveniles, where they kicked his ass and wore him out with leather belts and tried to whip the anger out of the wrathful orphan. The kid never cried.

  One cold night, sitting in a bare, unheated closet that served as solitary, he had a revelation: His only asset was his brain. Intelligence was the only way out of the bleak, dead-end street he was heading down. Back on the street, he scrounged for a living, earned pocket money brawling in illegal backroom bare-knuckle fights, focused his anger on books. He became a voracious, self-motivated, straight-A student. Top of his class.

  Once a month he hitched rides three hundred miles to Ossining to spend thirty minutes with the man who was responsible for his dreary existence.

  'I'm gonna be a lawyer,' he would tell the man. 'I'm gonna get ya out.'

  'Fuck lawyers,' the man would answer. 'Lawyers is why I'm here.'

  He changed his name from Flavin to Flaherty, lived on fast-food hamburgers and chocolate bars to keep up his energy, avoided friendships, fearful they would find out who he was. He lived in fear of that. When he graduated from college, he decided to put distance between himself and Rochester and hitchhiked west until he ran out of money in Chicago. He applied for a scholarship, spent hours in the public library studying for the qualification tests. His scores were astronomical. For a kid of twenty-three, he seemed to have more than a passing knowledge of the law. Nobody knew why, nobody asked, but he impressed the review board enough to earn himself a full scholarship for one year, with the future hanging on what he showed during the first four quarters. He got a job as a night janitor in one of the city skyscrapers, slept on a pallet in the utility room. When he wasn't studying, he was in the courtroom, taking notes, watching the big boys in action, always rooting for the defendants and nursing an inbred hatred of prosecutors until he saw Vail in action, read about his young Wild Bunch, and realized, reluctantly, after a year that the assistant DA had become his idol. At the end of his first year he was courting a 3.8. Two more years on scholarship and he waltzed out with his law degree and with summa cum laude on his sheepskin.

  He was twenty-seven at the time. Streetwise. Tough. Antisocial. Brilliant.

  He had offers but chose to work for a broken-down old warhorse named Sid Bernstein, a once blazing star in the legal world who had turned to alcohol and coke to get through the day. For one year, Flaherty honed his skills studying the old boy's cases; reading law books; and dragging the old drunk out of bed, holding him under ice-cold showers and pumping the blackest coffee into him, dressing him and getting him into the courtroom, then prompting him through each case with notes scratched out on legal pads and law books marked with self-stick notes. One morning when Bernstein failed to show up at the office, he went to Bernstein's apartment and discovered that his boss was in the hospital. Pneumonia. The old guy lasted five days.

  Sitting in Bernstein's drab office after the funeral, staring at the battered law books and worn-out cardboard file folders, he looked up and saw a handsome black woman standing in the office doorway.

  'Dermott Flaherty?'

  'Yes.'

  'Sorry about Bernstein.'

  The kid didn't know how to answer that. Bernstein was a cross he had borne for a year and a half. His sympathy for the man was superficial.

  'Thanks,' he said. 'What can I do for you?'

  'Are you taking over the practice?'

  'Nothing to take over. Just trying to figure out what to do with his stuff. Uh, was there something…?'

  'How'd you like a job?'

  'Doing what?'

  'Law, what else?'

  'For who?'

  'Ever hear of Martin Vail?'

  When he came in for his interview with Vail, he was wearing a black turtleneck, a tweed jacket he had bought at a Division Street pawnshop for six bucks, and tennis shoes. He had no expectations.

  'We've been watching you in court,' said Vail. 'You've been dragging old Sid Bernstein through life for a year and a half.'

  'It was a job.'

  'You've got quite a transcript, Mr Flaherty. Probably could have landed a pretty good spot with some of the better law firms around town. How come you picked Sid?'

  'Figured I could learn more from him.'

  'You actually tried most of his cases,' Vail said, flipping through papers in a file.

  'You been checking up on me?' Belligerently.

  'Bother you, does it?'

  Flaherty shrugged.

  'You're originally from Rochester, New York?'

  Flaherty hesitated, stared down at the file. Finally: 'I guess so.'

  'You guess so? You don't know where you're from?' Vail said with a laugh.

  'I put that behind me.'

  'Why? You did pretty well for a homeless kid with no parents. How long were you on your own? When did you lose your mother and father?'

  Flaherty stood up suddenly, his fists balled up, his face red with fury. His reaction surprised Vail.

  'Forget it,' Flaherty said, heading for the door.

  'What's your problem, son? You've got the makings of a great lawyer, but you have a chip the size of Mount Rushmore on your shoulder.'

  'It won't work,' Flaherty said.

  'What won't work? Sit down, talk to me. You don't want to talk about Rochester, forget it, we won't talk about Rochester.'

  Flaherty sat down. 'Can I smoke?' he asked.

  Vail wheeled his chair to the exhaust fan and flicked it on. He lit up, too.

  'Sooner or later you'll find out.'

  'Find out what, son? What kind of load are you carrying?'

  'M'mom died when I was nine.'

  'Okay.'

  He looked at Vail and sadness seemed to invest itself in his rugged young features.

  'Actually… actually, she didn't die. Actually wha
t happened… See, what happened…' And then he said out loud something he had bottled inside himself for years. 'Actually my old man killed her. Beat her to death with his bare hands. He's on death row at Sing Sing. Been there… twenty years. I used to think… I used to think that I'd get to be a lawyer and then… then I'd spring him, and then I'd take him out, and then…'

  'And then what?' Vail asked softly.

  'Then I'd beat him the way he beat my mom. Beat him and beat him until…' The young man fell silent and sat puffing on his cigarette.

  'When's the last time you saw him?' Vail asked.

  'Before I came out here four years ago. I used to go see him once a month. I never even wrote after I left.'

  'Dermott?'

  'Yeah?'

  'Your father died two years ago. Heart attack.'

  'You knew about all that?'

  'Naomi - Naomi Chance, the lady that came to see you when Sid died? Naomi knows everything, Dermott. You're one helluva young lawyer. The thing with your father? You put that behind you. It wasn't your fault, anyway. Thing is, we're pretty tight here. What the press calls the Wild Bunch. They're very supportive of each other. They'll expect the same of you. What I'm saying is, it's too heavy a load. Maybe if you share it, maybe if you put it behind you forever, maybe you can forget it. You want a job?'

  Stenner had been sceptical about the new kid, who seemed sullen and involuted and dressed in black like a funeral director and who was basically, as Stenner put it, 'a street punk'. The Shoulders case had changed all that and it put Vail in jeopardy for the first time in his life.

  Jake Shoulders, whose felony record prevented him from owning liquor stores, gun shops, restaurants, and bars, kept a low profile, but he was known in the DA's office. His game was blackmail and extortion and city hall was his target. Staff members, department heads, councilmen, anybody who had anything to hide, eventually appeared on Shoulders's list. Then he spread out into the restaurant business, obtained liquor licences under phony names, even got a piece of the airport action. Obviously he was paying off somebody in the city, somebody high up, somebody who raked it off the top and let the health and police inspectors earn their cuts by making sure the licences were nicely covered up and easily approved.