Muller, Marcia - [McCone 04] Games to Keep the Dark Away (v.1,shtml) (14 page)

I
froze. For a moment all I was conscious of was the icy
blade against my neck. Its tip was sharp and pressed my skin. I was
afraid to move for fear it would penetrate. It had done that to at
least three other people——

Other sensations returned. I heard Snelling's shallow breathing. I
felt the sinewy strength of the arms that pinned me. I smelled the
mustiness of the tool shed and the fragrance of Liz's perfume.

I tried to speak but my mouth was dry with fear. Snelling groaned
again and I started to look that way, then realized the motion would
put pressure on the knife. I swallowed twice, and managed to say, "It
won't work this time, Liz. You've got a witness."

She laughed, an ugly sound like the cawing of a crow.

"He's still alive," I said.

"He's unconscious. Dying. I'd have finished him if you hadn't
come across that lawn."

She began dragging me backward, toward the wall opposite where the
lawnmower stood. Her grip on me was clumsy, one arm around my
shoulders, the other lapped over it, holding the knife. Still, one
quick jab…

She backed flat against the wall and we stood there in the dark. I
could feel her heart beating fast.

I began talking, hearing my voice high-pitched and shaky. "Liz,
you killed Jane and John Cala. You've almost killed Snelling. And now
you want to kill me. You can't go on like this. You can't keep
killing. There'll be more people who suspect, more who know—"

"Shut up." She shifted her weight from one foot to the
other, forcing me to slump back against her. The pressure of the
blade increased.

Still, she didn't do anything. We merely stood there in the
darkness, listening to Snelling's breath, which now had begun to
wheeze.

Was she waiting for him to die? I couldn't believe Liz Schaff had
scruples about stabbing an already dying man. What had she been
waiting for?

"Liz," I said, "1 know about the women you killed
at the hospice. Abe suspected, and so did Jane. It's only a matter of
time before the police catch on. You can't kill an entire police
department."

"The women at the hospice were different."

"How?"

"I didn't kill them. I procured drugs. They wanted to die."

"You mean they were sort of mercy killings." Cautiously
I felt backward on the rough board floor with my right foot. Her
weight was mostly on that side.

"They
were
mercy killings."

"Did they pay you?" I moved my right hand slightly, to a
small space between her left arm and the hand that held the knife.

"Of course. There was risk involved. I had to get the drugs
from the pharmacy in town where I worked at night."

"How much did they pay you?" I shifted my weight to my
left leg and tensed my muscles.

"Enough."

"Well, it sounds like killing for hire to me," I said,
and shot my hand up through the small space between her arms. I
knocked the knife away from my neck and kicked back with my right
foot, circling her leg and pitching forward as hard as I could.

Liz stumbled sideways and careened across the shed. She slammed
into the rack of garden tools and I heard something crash down on
her. My bag and gun were lost in the shadows. I grabbed a
sharp-pointed trowel from a shelf by the lawnmower, almost stepping
on Snelling.

Liz straightened. She still had the knife. Its steel blade glinted
in the moonlight that came through the small high windows.

"Put the knife down, Liz."

She stood there, panting.

"Put it down!"

She came at me, crouching, the knife extended. I thought she was
going to try to come up under the trowel at my throat. Instead she
dodged to the side and scurried out the door of the shed. I dropped
the trowel and went after her, hurling myself at her feet like an NFL
tackle.

She went down and I saw the knife fly from her hand. I crawled
after it, expecting a struggle. Again she surprised me, jumping to
her feet and running toward the cypress grove. I started to get up,
but my foot slipped on the damp grass and I fell ingloriously on my
rear.

Snelling, I thought, he's dying in there.

"Help!" I yelled. "
Help
!"

Lights began to go on in the main building.

"Help!" And I began to run toward the cypress grove.

The sliding glass doors of the building opened and two nurses and
a man in a bathrobe appeared. They hesitated, then hurried across the
lawn.

"There's a man in the tool shed!" I shouted over my
shoulder. "He's been stabbed. Dying! Get a doctor!"

Ahead I could hear thrashing noises as Liz ran through the thickly
planted trees and scrambled over the rocky ground. I plunged into the
underbrush after her. My hands outstretched in front of me, I pushed
branches aside and ran in the direction of the noises. If I could
overtake her in here—

Suddenly my foot rammed against a big rock. My toe caught and I
fell forward. I landed flat, struggled partway up, and fell again.
The sounds in the trees ahead of me stopped.

Liz was already out of the grove, racing for—where?

I got up and went along more carefully, aiming at an opening where
the grove bordered the lawn. When I got there I stopped, scanning the
grounds for Liz.

She was on the platform where the steps led down to the beach, the
place where I'd seen the two old ladies sitting the day I'd gone out
on the reefs to look at the tidepools. She was silhouetted against
the horizon, looking back at the cypress grove.

I came out of the trees, running.

Liz whirled, first to her right and then to her left. She spun and
plunged toward the stairway.

What was she doing, going down there at high tide? I thought. She
couldn't run down the beach. It was under water.

I jumped onto the platform and rushed to the edge. Liz was halfway
down the stairs. Waves slapped at the cliff, sending showers of spray
over her. The bottom three or four steps were engulfed in the roiling
water.

"Stop!" I yelled. "There's no place to go!"

She looked up at me, the wind whipping her cap of blond hair.

"Come back up here! You'll drown!"

She looked back down at the water, then jumped from the steps. I
watched as she floundered and righted herself. The water, though
turbulent, only came to a little above her knees.

I started down the stairway after her.

Liz plunged into the surf, swimming toward the reefs. A couple of
the larger ones were still above water. By the time I reached the
step where she'd jumped
off
the stairway, she was clinging to a reef maybe thirty yards away.

I jumped down into the icy water. The cold shocked me and I almost
fell. Then I started wading into the sea, battling the waves for
balance. The water splashed upward, each wave bringing a new shock
until I could feel my skin turning numb. Finally I ducked under and
began swimming.

I reached the reef and put out a hand for support. I could still
touch bottom, but the current was treacherous. At any minute I might
be swept off my feet. Liz, sitting on top of the reef, kicked at my
hand.

"Give it up, Liz. There's no place for you to go from here."

She kicked at my hand again. I let go, and a wave sucked me under.
Salt water filled my mouth. I bobbed to the surface, spitting and
coughing.

When I looked up, Liz had retreated to the far side of the reef.
Cautiously, I began climbing. The rough rocks cut at my hands. The
knee ripped out of my jeans. I felt a trickling that was probably
blood.

I pulled myself to the top of the reef and crouched there,
panting. Liz was about eight feet away. Her hair was plastered flat
against her skull and water dripped down her face. Her coat and jeans
clung to her slight body. She stood with her hands balled into fists
at her sides, her knees slightly bent. Weaponless, she was still
dangerous.

I stood up. "Liz, there's nothing you can do. Come back to
shore with me."

She laughed, a wild crow's caw.

I started forward, one, hand outstretched.

She backed closer to the edge of the reef. One foot slipped. She
looked down at the swirling water, then back at me.

"Get away from me."

"No."

"I mean it!"

She lunged forward, grabbing my shoulders. Her hands went to my
throat. I put my own hands up, trying to pry her fingers loose. They
were as steely as the blade of her knife.

Liz shook me. "I mean it! You stop coming at me! They were
always coming at me. Wanting something. All of them. More and more…"

My vision was blurring. I clawed frantically at her fingers.

"More and more and more. They wouldn't stop coming after me."

My knees sagged. I dug my fingernails into her hands a final time.
The gray blurriness gave way to red and gold flashes…

Cold water hit my face. I groaned. An icy pool formed under my
cheek. There was a second icy splash, and I groaned again. Salty
water rushed into my mouth. I choked, coughed, and struggled to sit
up.

I was lying on the reef, rocks cutting into my flesh. As I pushed
up, they scraped my palms. I looked around, saw nothing. The surf was
slapping higher than before, spilling over around me.

I looked down at where my face had been and saw an indentation
full of water. A tidepool. I'd been lying face down in a tidepool.
Liz had left me to drown as the water rose higher.

I sat up, looking around. She was no longer on the reef. Where had
she gone? I couldn't have been unconscious long. Where was she?

I pushed to my feet, shivering with chills, and peered around. The
white water spewed up over the reef, slapping at me and almost making
me stumble. The stairway from the beach was half covered now. I could
still make it back, good swimmer that I was, but the water would be
treacherous. And I was so tired.

But Liz. Where…?

And then I spotted her, on the only other reef that was still
above water, many yards away. She stood there, her sodden clothing
flapping in the wind. She was looking back at the beach, as if trying
to gauge her chances.

I shouted but wasn't sure she could hear me over the wind and the
surf. I shouted again, waving my arms over my head.

Then Liz turned. She saw me and shrank back, clasping her arms
behind her.

"Get off that reef!" I screamed.

She shook her head, stepping backward.

I went to the edge of my own reef, prepared to jump and swim for
shore. Turning, I tried one last time. "Get off or you'll
drown!"

Again she made the negative gesture.

I looked beyond her and saw a huge wave rolling in. It was just
peaking. It would break right where Liz was standing.

"Watch it! Behind you!"

The wave broke over her. I saw her tumble. The foaming water
rushed on toward shore, but I couldn't see Liz anymore.

A second wave, even larger, was rolling in right behind it. This
one would reach my own reef. I jumped into the swirling water and
struggled toward the stairway.

When
I entered Abe Snelling's hospital room, he was
sitting up in bed reading this week's
New Yorker
. He was
pale, and his eyes were deeply underscored with bluish semicircles,
but otherwise you would never have guessed that two days ago he had
been fighting for his life. When he saw me, he smiled and set down
the magazine.

"How're you feeling?" I asked.

"Not bad. You?"

"Fine." It was the truth; I'd been staying at Don's
since the night Liz Schaff had been swept off the reef and drowned.
He'd encouraged me to indulge in wine, home-cooked Italian food, good
music, and other pleasures. "I'm going back to San Francisco
today for a trial where I have to give evidence, but I'll be back by
the weekend. I wondered if there was anything you wanted from your
house."

"Thanks, but my former sister-in-law already drove up and got
me what I needed." He gestured self-consciously at an
arrangement of home-grown flowers on the bedside table. There was
another bouquet on the bureau—a lavish combination of roses and
carnations. I looked at it quizzically.

"From The Tidepools," Snelling said. "Keller and
Bates are probably afraid I'll sue because I got stabbed on their
grounds."

I grinned and took a chair beside the bed. "The police told
you the Coast Guard picked up Liz's body?"

"Yes. Lieutenant Barrow and I talked for several hours this
morning. He's sure they can close the books on all the murders now."

I sat for a moment, silently reviewing the victims of those
murders. Probably Abe was doing the same. Then I said, "One
thing I wanted to ask you—did Jane Anthony figure out who you
were by your photographic style?"

He looked surprised. "Yes. How did you guess?"

"I'm an amateur, but I've got an eye for style. Yours is
distinctive; anyone who had seen Andy Smith's photos would wonder why
Abe Snelling's were so much the same."

"That's what Jane did. She knew my work from when I showed it
in little exhibits around Port San Marco. One day she just appeared
on my doorstep in San Francisco. She recognized me, in spite of how
I'd changed my appearance, and demanded I take her in, plus pay her a
monthly… allowance, she called it."

"Blackmail."

Snelling nodded. "You know, when I first went up to San
Francisco, it never occurred to me that someone would recognize me
from my photographs. I was always afraid I'd be recognized by my
face. In fact, that's why I kept taking pictures—because I
could go out on the streets and use a camera as protective
coloration."

"What do you mean?"

"When you're holding a camera, people rarely look at you.
Surely you've noticed that. They focus on the camera itself, or they
get worried you're going to take a picture of them, so they start
fussing with their hair. The photographer is just the anonymous
figure behind the black box."

"Now that you mention it, yes, I
have
noticed."

"It was ironic—Jane located me because of my work."

"How could you stand to have her in the house, when she was
blackmailing you?"

Snelling shifted and adjusted a pillow behind him. "At first
it was awful. I even contemplated causing her to have an
accident—slipping in the shower or something. But I couldn't. I
realized that when my own wife asked me to help her out of her pain
and I couldn't. I guess Jane sensed that and, as insurance, she wrote
a letter about who I was, saying she was blackmailing me and that if
she died violently I would have been the one responsible. She left it
with her mother, to be opened in the event of her death. But it
hasn't turned up yet."

"I doubt it will. Mrs. Anthony probably opened it and, when
she realized what her daughter was, couldn't bear to show it to
anyone."

"Probably you're right. Anyway, strangely enough, Jane and I
became friends of sorts. The kind of relationship a prisoner and his
jailer might develop. We used to cook together. We'd talk photography
and I'd let her help me in the darkroom."

"And all the time you were paying for her silence."

"Yes. I think she was putting the money away, with some
thought of helping Keller out of his financial mess."

"You knew about Keller?"

"Only that there was a boyfriend some place. I wasn't aware
it was Keller until you told me on the phone a few days ago." He
paused, his eyes clouding. "You know, if Jane and I hadn't
developed that friendly adversary relationship, she and the others
would probably still be alive."

"Why do you say that?"

"A few days before she disappeared, she was helping me
organize my files. She must have seen the negatives of Liz Schaff at
the Blue Owl and started to wonder."

"Why did you take those pictures anyway?"

"I recognized Liz as someone I'd known at The Tidepools and
felt I should document her presence in San Francisco. But then the
robbery happened and the shooting started. And, what with everything
else that's gone on in my life since then, I forgot all about the
negatives."

"And what Jane saw in them was the same thing both you and I
noticed the other day—that Liz was wearing a pharmacist's smock
rather than a nurse's uniform." I hadn't even picked up on that
when I had had lunch with her at the Blue Owl, because it had been a
cool day and she'd kept her coat on. "Jane must have remembered
that Liz also had a degree in pharmacy and had moonlighted at one
while she worked at The Tidepools."

"I guess so. At any rate, she took off a couple of days
later. And she did have Liz's hours at the S.F. General Pharmacy
written down in her phone book, as if she'd done some checking."

"Do you think she knew Liz was in San Francisco before that?"

Snelling shrugged. "I think they may have had lunch a couple
of times, but that didn't mean Jane knew she was working in the
pharmacy until she saw the negatives."

So what Liz had told me about becoming worried when Jane missed a
lunch date was most likely true, I thought. Only she'd been worried
about her own skin, not her friend's. Probably she'd feared she'd let
something slip at one of those lunches. "You hired me because
you were worried about the letter Jane had left with her mother,
didn't you?" I asked.

"Yes. I was constantly afraid something would happen to her—a
car accident, anything—and then when she just disappeared…
Well, I had to know."

"But when she
was
killed, you didn't run."

"I started to. I packed my bags, but I couldn't bring myself
to do it. I've been a recluse so long that the idea of going out in
the world and beginning life all over again was just inconceivable. I
decided to stay, and resigned myself to the fact that the letter
would be opened and I'd be arrested. But then, the other day, when I
started figuring things out, I actually felt some hope."

Figuring things out, I thought. Just like Jane had. "Once
Jane verified from the hospice records that Liz had been on the team
that had worked with all three patients who overdosed," I said,
"it must have been pretty apparent to her how they got their
drugs. And, since Liz still held a job and drove a rattly old black
VW, Jane probably realized she must have salted away most of the
mercy-killing money. So she decided to try blackmail on a larger
scale."

"I wonder why the police didn't catch on to Liz in their
investigations of the overdoses?" Snelling said.

"Probably no one knew about Liz's pharmacy job. The
Tidepools, like most health-care facilities, must have fairly
stringent rules against moonlighting."

Snelling nodded, looking tired now. "You think Jane set up
the meeting with Liz on the old pier?"

"Yes. And when Liz fled after killing Jane, John Cala
recognized her. But she also saw him."

"So she set up her own meeting and killed him too."
Snelling lay back against his pillows. "At The Tidepools, in
that shed, she kept ranting at me about how people wouldn't leave her
alone. There she was, having killed all those people, and she was
carrying on as if
she
were a victim."

"She was—the victim of herself." I was silent a
moment. Snelling was tired and I should let him rest, but there was
one other thing I had to know. "Abe, what exactly happened at
The Tidepools? When did you get there?"

"A little before ten. After I left San Francisco, I drove
down here and went to Susan's house. I had to ask her if she
remembered Liz Schaff as being part of Barbara's medical team. I
thought she had been, but I couldn't remember for sure. Needless to
say, Susan was shocked to see me, but she did remember. She wanted me
to call the police immediately, but I decided I had to verify from
the personnel records you mentioned about the other women who
overdosed. I drove up to the hospice, but there was someone in the
office and, even if there hadn't been, the burglar alarm was turned
on. Dumb on my part."

"And then?"

"I was on my way back to my car when Liz appeared, walking in
from the road."

It fit with the time element, I thought. Liz had left San
Francisco considerably after Snelling had, since she'd taken the time
to ransack his house. "Go on."

"At first I tried to duck behind my car, but she spotted me.
She acted friendly and said she knew why I was there, that she hadn't
done the killings but knew who had. She claimed she had proof and
asked me to come with her. I did. Dumb again."

"And she took you to the tool shed?"

"Yes. We were halfway there before I realized she'd trapped
me. Then it was too late. She had the knife at my ribs. She forced me
in there and started ranting at me. She carried on for I don't know
how long and none of it made sense. Then she used that knife,
suddenly, and that's all I remember until I came to in the recovery
room here after surgery."

"You were lucky she got you into a dark place like the tool
shed," I said. "She probably didn't realize at first that
she hadn't killed you. And, by the time she did, I had crossed the
lawn and she was afraid to do anything more than hide in the shadows.
The darkness probably saved your life."

"No," he said. "You did."

I felt a flash of pleasure, followed by embarrassment. "I
only wish it were that deliberate or well-thought-out. But, whatever,
I'm glad you're on the way to recovery. And I'd better get out of
here before you have a relapse."

He grinned wanly, and we agreed to get together once he got back
to San Francisco. I went out and started down the hospital corridor,
which was as starkly white as Snelling's living room. Halfway to the
elevators, I spotted Susan Tellenberg. She was dressed in a crisp
linen suit and heels, and her cheeks glowed as rosily as the basket
of apples she carried. She didn't see me as she moved purposefully
toward Snelling's room, and I didn't bother to call out to her.

In the lobby, I found a pay phone and called Don on the Hot Hit
Line. We agreed to meet Friday night at the Sand Dollar; he had
arranged to have the whole weekend off. Then I went out to my car and
drove from the parking lot, toward the road that led through the
hills to the freeway.

I flicked on the radio to KPSM and smiled as I heard Don
frantically extolling the virtues of the local Black Angus Steak
House. Then he did a traffic report, followed by a shampoo
commercial. Finally he promised three terrific hits, back to back, no
interruptions.

He dedicated the first song to me. It was called "Somewhere
Between Lovers and Friends."

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MARCIA MULLER'S Sharon McCone mysteries have won her critical
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character who has found a home in the hearts of mystery lovers
everywhere.