Life's Work Read online

  I pulled the pistol from my belt, unlocked the safety, and got a good firm grip on the butt.

  “How do we get in there?” I said in a whisper.

  Laurel pointed to her left, where a gravel path made its way between the ranch house and the garage.

  “That goes to the kitchen,” she whispered.

  “All right. Stay behind me. Keep your arms at your sides. And try to be quiet. If anything happens to me, go straight to the car and drive away. I’ve left the keys in the ignition. Don’t look back. Don’t think about it. Just get the hell out of here and call the cops as fast as you can.”

  “Harry,” she said shakily. “I’m really scared.”

  I said, “It’s going to be all right.”

  I started walking across the yard and Laurel fell in behind me, so closely that I could feel her press against my back as if we were riding double on a motorcycle. When we got to the path between the outbuilding and the ranch, I stopped, and Laurel bumped up against me.

  “Where’s the kitchen door?” I whispered.

  “About twenty feet up ahead,” she whispered back. “On your right.”

  With my back to the ranch house wall, I worked my way slowly down the path, both hands on the pistol. A bit of dawn light was beginning to spread through the woods—enough of a glow so that I could see a white frame screen door in front of me. The screen door was hanging open above a one-step concrete stoop. The kitchen door looked as if it was open, too. Just the way, I assumed, that Laurel had left them.

  “There’s a light switch to the left of the door,” Laurel whispered.

  “Stay where you are,” I whispered back. “I’m going inside.”

  I crept up onto the stoop, knelt down, and eased around the doorjamb, holding the pistol close to my body. Inside, I could see the silhouette of an overturned kitchen table, its aluminum legs sticking up like the stiff, splayed legs of a dead horse. There was a lot of broken crockery on the floor—shards of porcelain and glass. The room looked as if it were tiled with glass.

  It wasn’t until I was actually through the door—hunched on my heels, back against the doorjamb, gun arm extended—that I got my first whiff of blood. That stale, coppery smell, like the taste of pennies on the tongue.

  I crept across the doorway to the left-hand wall and crouched in front of a cabinet. From that angle, I could see farther into the house, past the wrecked kitchen table into the hall. There was a gelid pool of something glistening on the floor and the shocking silver reflection of a knife blade, shining so brightly in the dawn light that it looked like a white hole in the carpet. Without standing up, I reached above my head, feeling along the wall for a light switch. It took me a while, but I found it and flipped it on.

  The room filled with light from an overhead fixture. I had to shut my eyes for a second to adjust to the brightness. When I opened them, I took another look at the kitchen, then called Laurel into the room. She came around the doorjamb slowly, clinging to the wall as if she were walking on a ledge.

  Laurel stared dully at the broken plates. Her eyes swept across the floor to the hall, where the knife lay in its pool of coagulating blood. She jerked her head away and put a hand over her mouth.

  “Oh, Christ!” she said with terror.

  “Are you going to be all right?” I said.

  She nodded, her head still turned away.

  “Stay put,” I said.

  Laurel nodded again.

  I walked across the kitchen—across all those broken dishes—to the hallway. The crockery crunched like rock salt underfoot. There was a trail of blood leading away from the pool with the knife in it toward a closed door at the far end of the corridor. I stood there for a moment, listening so intently to the silence of the house that I could hear the blood pulsing in my ears. There was no sound anywhere in the place.

  I held the pistol in front of me and followed the bloodstains down the hall to the closed door. I hesitated for a second in front of it, then put my free hand to the knob. It felt like a lump of ice in my palm. I turned it and pushed. The door fell open noiselessly, and the smell of death hit me full in the face. I covered my mouth with my free hand and felt along the wall with my gun hand for a light switch. I found one and clicked it on.

  She was lying on the bed—spread-eagled. Her legs had been tied to the bedposts with wire coat hangers, her arms to the headboards. The hands dangled lifelessly above the wrists. There was a swatch of white tape across her mouth, stained reddish-brown at either end. Her eyes were wide open, still staring up at the ceiling in agonized horror.

  I didn’t look at her for long. I couldn’t. What had been done to her lower body with the knife, to her belly and to what had been growing inside it, was almost too awful to believe. So awful it was like an atrocity picture or one of Foxe’s lives of the martyrs, a horror so sneaking and gruesome that it sickened, then numbed me.

  I gazed around the room, at her dresser with its combs and brushes, at the vials of makeup standing in a glass tray, at a framed photograph of her and Parks propped in front of the dresser mirror. Unlike the kitchen, none of the furnishings in the bedroom had been broken. None of the dresser drawers had been ransacked. The folding closet door beyond the bed stood open, garments hanging in eerie neatness from a long wooden rod. Except for the blood-soaked bed, everything seemed to be in its place. It made me think that she’d been unconscious when she’d been tied down—stabbed after a fight in the kitchen, then carried to the bedroom and butchered. There was nothing subtle about the killing. Nobody had taken a fine hand to her body. It was a messy, vicious murder, done by someone who’d wanted to make her suffer horribly. Done by someone who’d wanted to kill her, and the life inside her too.

  Except for the Ripper killings, it was the most terrible murder I’d ever seen. And if it hadn’t been so goddamn awful that it was almost unreal, and if I hadn’t come across it so casually, I think I might have gone into shock. As it was my legs went rubbery and my throat dried up as if it were parched. I slapped at the light, and it went off—mercifully. Then I backed out of the room, closing the door behind me.

  There was one other room off the hall, to the left and a little beyond the room with C.W. O’Hara’s corpse in it. It would have to be checked. I knew it would have to be checked. But for a good half minute, I couldn’t make my legs stop trembling. And even after a full minute, they still felt loosely connected to me, as if I were dangling them from a bars tool.

  I forced myself to open the door of the second room, and nearly fired my piece into a mirror that was sitting opposite the doorway—shooting at my own reflection in the glass. The shock of seeing someone standing in front of me when I opened the door sent a jolt of adrenaline through my body, raising gooseflesh on my arms and waking me up as if I’d been drenched with ice water. I clawed at the wall until I found a light switch and flipped it on.

  Aside from the mirror, a chair, and a small desk, there was nothing in the room. No pictures on the walls. No drapes. No rug. The chair sat in front of the mirror. The floor between them was heavily scuffed, as if someone had been gouging it with a file. I knew at once that that was where he had sat—for the past week, according to Laurel—practicing curls in the looking glass. In fact, I found the curling bar on the floor of a large walk-in closet at the back of the room. The only other thing in the closet was a short-sleeve shirt hanging from a wire clothes hanger. Maybe it was because her closet had been so full of clothes, but that single shirt, hanging all by itself in the huge closet, gave me the creeps. I examined it anyway. There were no visible bloodstains. I took a look inside the desk too.

  In the top drawer I found a well-used pair of curling gloves, a jar of resin, several pamphlets announcing the end of the world, a dog-eared photograph of a middle-aged woman sitting on a porch swing, a muscle magazine with Sergio Oliva on the cover, a karate magazine, a survivalist handbook, and dozens of red and white capsules lying like loose change all over the bottom of the drawer. I slipped several of the caps
ules in my pocket, figuring the cops would never miss them. I wanted to take the photograph too. Instead, I spent a moment trying to memorize the woman’s features—a plump, pretty, cheerful-looking face, ringed with curls. I closed the drawer, wiped my prints from the handle with a handkerchief, turned off the light, and walked back down the hall to the kitchen.

  Laurel had righted a chair and propped it beside the door. She was sitting in it gravely, hands crossed in her lap, shoulders straight against the cushion, as if she were sitting in a pew.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?” Laurel said in a stricken voice.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s very ugly.”

  Tears spilled from her eyes and down her cheeks, but she didn’t move to stop them. She didn’t move at all. She was going into shock.

  I took my jacket off and draped it over her shoulders. Then looked around the room for a phone. I found one above the sink. I picked it up and dialed the operator. “Give me the police,” I said.

  “County or city?” the operator asked.

  “County.”

  She went off the line for a second, and I asked Laurel, “What’s the address here?”

  “Fifty-six Devil’s Creek Road,” she said mechanically.

  “Devil’s Creek,” I said to myself.

  When the sergeant came on, I told him where we were and what we’d found there. He said a team of detectives would be sent out immediately.

  15

  I DIDN’T have a chance to examine the rest of the house to see if Parks had left anything behind him other than his dead lover’s torn body. But C.W.’s corpse was, in itself, a pretty unequivocal piece of evidence. Laurel had already told me that C.W. and Bill had been fighting violently about the baby and their impending marriage. It looked now as if Bill had probably left camp to finish the argument, spending that long hot week holed up in his room at the ranch house, high perhaps on those red and white capsules, meditating the bloody work that he’d finally committed himself to in a frenzy of hatred. The loathing he’d felt for his lover, and for the baby she was carrying, was evident in the crime.

  Before the cops arrived, I found several notes taped to the refrigerator in the kitchen, little reminders that C.W. O’Hara had apparently written to herself in the kind of flowery hand that must have won the heart of her third-grade writing teacher. All the i’s had little hearts above them. You could have driven a truck through the loops of the l’s and the hoops of the o’s. It was a bold, grossly self-advertising hand—the script, I thought, of a shrewd, sugary, ambitious girl, a girl who had relied, even in notes to herself, on her sexual charm. A girl who certainly didn’t seem to be aware of the disaster that was in store for her. One of the notes made reference to a Dr. A. Get report from Dr. A. A second note read Get in touch with Dr. P. And a third, Meet with Reverend Dice at 4:00, and was dated Saturday the 25th, which had just dawned in full through the kitchen window. The only note that smacked even remotely of family tensions was one that was printed, rather than written—one that was apparently meant for Parks himself. It said, in big block letters, BILL, CALL JEWEL. There was an out-of-state number written beneath it. Out of habit, I copied the number into my notebook, along with the texts of each of the other notes. I wanted to ask Laurel about them, about the doctors and Reverend Dice; but she was too far gone in grief and shock to answer questions.

  The cops showed up around six A.M.—bubble-tops sprinkling blue light through the pines and breaking the dense, woody silence with the Klaxon wail of their sirens. They had an ambulance in tow. I had to move the Pinto to let all the police cruisers into the yard. And then the newspaper and television guys started trickling in. By seven the entire drive from Devil’s Creek to the ranch house was lined with cars.

  I managed to call Hugh Petrie before the newsmen showed up in force. When I told him what I had found in C.W.’s house, there was dead silence on the line. When he finally responded, he sounded thoroughly shaken up, as if Parks had finally pushed him past some limit of endurance, some nadir of cynicism, that he’d set in his own mind.

  “I don’t think I believe it,” he said in a lifeless voice. “My God. Are you certain that it was Bill who did this?”

  “Fairly certain, yes. He’d been fighting with the girl all week about the baby, and the way she was killed—well, it seems obvious that he was the one who murdered her.”

  “My God,” Petrie said again. “He must have gone completely out of his mind.”

  “I think he’s been out of his mind for a long time, Hugh.”

  “And am I responsible for that?” he said wildly, as if I’d accused him. “I just hire them, for chrissake. To play a fucking game! I run a business—that’s all.”

  I didn’t answer him. In half a minute, he’d recovered his cool.

  “Are the newspapers there, yet?”

  “Just a couple reporters, so far,” I said. “But the cops are here.”

  He sighed heavily. “Okay. Better let me talk to whoever’s in charge.”

  I handed the phone to the head honcho, a tall, pawky lieutenant named Larson, who had an Ichabod Crane face and a stinting, by-the-book manner. Larson was a bad, incompetent cop. He hadn’t even had enough sense to cover the O’Hara girl’s body with a sheet when Laurel made the identification. The result was that Laurel had gone into hysterics and had to be sedated by the coroner. Larson wrote the incident off as just one more instance of women’s weakness, and proceeded with the main business at hand—trying to bully me into a confession. His conversation with Petrie seemed to straighten him out a little, and he did withhold Laurel’s name when the TV guys showed up, although I could see that it cost him something to bite his tongue. TV shows were the whole reason he’d become a cop, and he felt a greater obligation to shape up in front of the cameras than he did in front of me, Laurel, and his own men.

  At eight A.M. the coroner’s team carried what was left of C.W. O’Hara out to the ambulance in a green rubber body bag. I was sitting on a plaid sofa in the living room, drinking cold coffee out of a styrofoam cup. Laurel, who had fallen asleep after the coroner sedated her, was stretched out beside me, covered from neck to toe with newspaper. I watched the paramedics work the body bag through the kitchen door and glanced at the girl beside me. I felt the urge to wake her—to make her rattle those newspapers like a businessman at breakfast. It was a childish urge and I restrained myself. I just wanted to make sure she was alive. I’d lost too many other women I’d felt affection for to my work. And that, I had promised myself, was never going to happen again, although I couldn’t help suspecting that the only way to insure that it didn’t was to keep from feeling anything for anyone. And if I followed that melancholy road, one day I’d wake up and find myself alone with my inexorable bachelorhood.

  That was such a wearying prospect that it made me close my eyes. When I opened them again, a burly man was standing over me, smiling. He was a big guy, middle-aged and nicely dressed in a blue open-collared shirt, silk sports coat, and tan slacks. At first I thought he was one of the newspapermen. But as he sat down across from me in a wing chair, I realized that he was too neat and prosperous-looking to be with the press. What he really looked like was a dapper, small-time hood. His shiny brown hair was razor cut, wrapped like a scarf around his ears and plumped up at the nape in a little ducktail. His face was tanned and creased around the eyes with good-natured laugh lines. He wore an immaculately trimmed beard and mustache, and when he smiled, which he hadn’t stopped doing since he’d sat down, he radiated some of the vain, little-boy charm of a Burt Reynolds. I had the feeling that I should have known who he was. He certainly acted like he knew me. He had that kind of grin—like we went back years together, like it was time for me to return that mower I’d borrowed from his garage.

  “Harry,” he said in a pleasant baritone.

  “That’s what they call me,” I said. “Do we know each other?”

  “No,” he said. “I got your name from Hugh Petrie. I’m Clayton. Phil Clayton.”
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  The name rang a bell, but I was so tired and dispirited that it took me a few seconds to place it.

  “Where is he, Harry?” Clayton said with infinite patience, as if he’d been asking me that same question for hours.

  “Who?” I said dully.

  “Bill Parks,” Clayton said.

  “I don’t know.” My mind cleared and I remembered where I’d seen his name. Sergeant Phil Clayton of District Two. He had been the arresting officer in the Candy Kane assault case. “I don’t know where Parks is,” I said again. “Why don’t you tell me? You’re the guy who arrested him, aren’t you?”

  I’d meant it as a wisecrack, but Clayton took it seriously.

  “Why do you think I know where he is?” he said, tugging gently at his shirt cuffs to even them up beneath the sports coat.

  I started to tell him that I’d been kidding, then decided I didn’t owe him an explanation. In fact, I didn’t owe him anything.

  “Look, what is this?” I said irritably. “I just spent two hours getting grilled by the county cops, and I don’t feel like doing it again. This case is out of your jurisdiction, anyway. What business do you have asking me about Parks?”

  “Let’s just say that Bill is important to me,” he said with his unruffled smile.

  “Let’s just say that I don’t give a fuck.”

  “Harry,” Clayton said, scratching his earlobe. “You’re not being very cooperative. Just answer a few questions and I’ll leave you alone.”

  “What questions?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Did you see Bill tonight?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Did you follow him here?”

  I said no again.