Practice to Deceive (22 page)

“Oh, God,” I whispered, stooping, holding the doorframe to keep from falling, and stroked the dead animal behind the ears. Its body was still warm.

I backed away, lost my balance, and fell off the steps, landing on my right knee and tearing a hole in my jeans.

“Shit, shit, motherfuck, shit …!” The obscenities flowed loud and fast as I fought to keep down the contents of my stomach. After a few minutes, I pulled myself to my feet, leaning heavily on the crutches. I looked back at the porch but did not go inside, wondering who the cat had belonged to. “Bastards!” I spat at whoever had mutilated it.

The huge lilac bushes that separate my neighbor’s property from mine rustled noisily. I turned toward the sound and saw a body trying to push through. I dropped my crutches—both of them—putting weight on my right leg, reaching for the Beretta on my hip. My leg couldn’t support the weight, and I went to my knee again as I brought the Beretta up, pointing it at a young girl carrying a basketball.

Tammy looked at the gun, frowning like this sort of thing happened to her frequently. Tammy Mandt, the daughter of my neighbor, the girl who had given me Ogilvy. “What’s the matter?” she wanted to know.

“Dammit!” I yelled too loud. The sound of my voice startled the eleven-year-old. “Sorry,” I added quickly. I returned the Beretta to its holster, then used the crutches to get to my feet.

“You OK?” Tammy asked.

I nodded. “Listen. I want you to do me a favor. Keep Ogilvy for a while longer.” As I spoke I slipped my money clip out of my pocket and peeled off two twenties.

“Sure,” she said, then added, “What’s this?” when I handed her the bills. “You don’t have to pay me to take care of Ogilvy.”

“That’s for food and litter,” I told her. “Keep the change.”

“OK.”

“Something else. I want you to keep away from my house. Don’t go near here until I tell you. No shooting hoops in my driveway. All right?”

Tammy stared at me for a few beats, a concerned expression on her face. Then she asked again, “Are you OK?”

I flashed on the dead cat in my porch, but did not mention it. “Just stay away for a while,” I said. “Oh, and watch out for strangers. Tell your mom if you see anyone suspicious hovering about.”

Tammy promised that she would, then added, “You’re in trouble again, aren’t you?”

FIFTEEN

I
T WASN
’
T THE
explosion that woke me at three-thirty in the morning. Or even the flames. It was the squealing tires of a car as it accelerated out of my driveway. I bumped my sore leg as I went to the window, but I did not have much time to contemplate the pain. The front of my house was on fire!

T
HE FIRE NEVER
actually reached the structure; it stopped about a half-yard short of my stucco walls, consuming instead the hedge of shrubs and low-growing trees that Laura had planted and a fifteen-foot wide oval of grass. The Roseville fire crew doused the front of my house just the same—better safe than sorry. A deputy chief sidled up to me while I watched. He was holding the neck of a broken beer bottle in his gloved hand. It reeked of kerosene.

“This landed about six feet short of your house and blew backward,” he told me. “Whoever threw it had no arm whatsoever. You were lucky.”

Funny, I didn’t feel lucky. Especially after the Roseville cops arrived, followed by the media.

The cops wanted to know if the attack had anything to do with Levering Field’s murder and my subsequent arrest. “Probably,” I told them, but not much else. They weren’t pleased by my reticence and did not go away happy.

The media was not happy, either, but for an entirely different reason—the fire had been extinguished before their trucks arrived; there were no action shots of the Roseville firefighters to be had. One cameraman asked the firemen to start the blaze again. He was genuinely upset when the firemen told him to go to hell. But not as upset as me. I had to stand there, leaning on my crutches, shivering in the thirty-two degree morning temperature, answering questions, trying to explain that it wasn’t a hate crime, suggesting that it was probably just a kid’s prank, that April Fool’s Day was—what? Tomorrow?

The only way to make the news media go away is to give them a story. If you try to stonewall them, try to argue your rights to privacy, they’ll stay camped on your doorstep until hell freezes over. That’s just the way they are. So I stood outside, answering their questions until dawn. To my general astonishment, no one asked about my leg, no one said, “Hey, aren’t you the guy who was arrested for murder a couple weeks back?” And I certainly wasn’t about to volunteer the information. Still, I felt a little like day-old bread.

After they had been satisfied, I took the telephone off the hook and went back to bed, saying a little prayer before dropping off: “Dear God. Bring me the head of Michael Zilar.”

I slept until noon.

I
RETURNED THE
receiver to its cradle and went about fixing lunch. Well, breakfast actually. The telephone rang thirty seconds later. It was Cynthia.

“You’re in the news again,” she told me.

“I’m like Princess Di. The media can’t get enough of me.”

“A Molotov cocktail?” Cynthia asked.

“Can you imagine?”

“Why is this happening?”

“Payback for what I did to Levering Field. And I figure Michael Zilar is trying to soften me up before the kill.”

Then I told Cynthia what I told Tammy the day before. “Stay away from my house for a while. Stay away from me.”

“How long is a while?”

Good question.

I
T WAS MUCH
too early for gardening. The ground wasn’t ready and the nighttime temperatures were still dropping below freezing. But Amanda Field was out there just the same, digging in the three-foot-deep strip of dirt that ran from the front door to the corner of her house. She did not see me approach and jumped when I said, “Excuse me, Mrs. Field.”

“Who are you?” she demanded to know, still on her knees, holding a trowel like it was a weapon.

“Excuse me for intruding,” I repeated. “I’m hoping you will answer a few questions for me concerning your husband’s murder.” I was uncomfortable as hell speaking with her, but what could I do?

“I have spent days answering your questions. Haven’t you had enough?” By then she noticed the crutches. “You’re not with the police, are you?”

I shook my head.

“Who are you?” Amanda repeated. “Are you with the media?”

“I’m Holland Taylor,” I admitted.

“Holland Taylor,” she said slowly, like a curse, then lunged at me with the trowel, the business end pointed at my groin. I pivoted on my left leg—probably causing me greater pain than getting stabbed in the nuts—and parried her thrust with my right crutch. The blow drove the trowel from her hand. I dropped both crutches, fell to my right knee, and grabbed her hands, trying to keep my bad leg straight. Her face, her eyes … You’ve heard the expression “She looked like an animal”? Well, she looked like an animal. A big one. A predator. But she did not make a sound except for the hissing of her breath. That painful grunting you heard? That was me.

“I didn’t kill your husband, Mrs. Field. I swear to God I didn’t.”

She turned her wrists this way and that, trying to break my grip. “Then who did?” she wanted to know.

“Michael Zilar,” I answered looking directly into her eyes.

“Who’s he?” she asked without beating so much as an eyelash.

“A contract killer from Chicago.” As if she didn’t know, I was thinking.

Her pupils narrowed, and she stopped struggling. A calmness settled around her like a comforter on a cold night. She smiled. “I think the neighbors have seen enough,” she told me quietly.

I released her hands.

She rose to her feet, picking up my crutches and handing them to me. Grateful, I pulled myself upright.

“Let’s go inside,” she said, wiping her hands on her jeans and moving toward the door. I almost didn’t follow her. The look in her eye frightened me. Not the one I saw when we were struggling. The one that replaced it.

I made sure she was well inside, made sure I could see her empty hands, before I entered her home. The house looked exactly the same as when Levering had invited me over, except for the carpet. The carpet was new.

“I will not offer you anything,” Amanda said.

Fair enough.

“Who would hire someone to kill my husband? The only enemy he had was you.”

“Levering was having an affair,” I told her.

“So I discovered. It was you who sent the flowers, wasn’t it?”

I refused to admit it, to apologize, for fear there was a tape machine nearby. Instead, I said, “You didn’t know until then?”

Amanda shook her head slowly.

“Swell,” I said.

“Indeed.”

I pushed on. “Where were you Saturday morning?”

“Shopping with my daughter.”

“No, you weren’t,” I said.

“Yes, I was. Look, I went over all of this with the police. They seem satisfied.”

“Why did your daughter come into the house alone?” I pressed on. “You didn’t arrive until an hour later.”

“I dropped her off, then went to visit my friend.”

“What’s your friend’s name?”

“The police have the name of my friend.”

“Is this the same friend you met at a hotel in Bloomington just a couple of days before your husband was killed?”

“I met my friend at his office, and we went to the hotel for a drink. The hotel has a bar—or didn’t you know that?”

I refused to let it go.

“Did Levering know you were having an affair?” I asked.

Amanda was standing next to a telephone table with a drawer large enough for a telephone directory. She had moved there slowly while we were talking and I hadn’t noticed—not until she flung open the drawer and pulled out a .38 Smith & Wesson. I instinctively went for my Beretta and managed to get my hand around the butt before I heard the
click
of the S & W’s hammer being thumbed back. I froze.

“Go ahead. Take out your gun,” Amanda told me calmly, the .38 looking as big as a grenade launcher in her small hands. “After everything that’s happened, no one will call it murder.”

I straightened up, leaving the Beretta in its holster. No sense making it easy for her. “You might get away with having your husband killed, but not this,” I warned her.

Amanda was six feet away, her feet spread, weight evenly distributed, a two-handed grip holding the gun steady, pointing it at my heart. I got the impression she knew what she was doing. I hoped to keep her talking, hoped the weight of the gun would bring her hands down. Then I would make my move. I didn’t like my chances.

“I’ve never killed anyone, Mr. Taylor,” she told me calmly. “Certainly not my husband, though I admit I thought about it. I’ve never been angry enough to kill anyone. Except now. Except you. You threatened my family. You killed my husband. You ruined my life.…”

“I didn’t—”

“Now you dare come to my home, accusing me, looking to save yourself.”

I heard the key in the lock behind me. So did Amanda. I turned my head just so, hoping to draw her gaze to the door as it opened. She didn’t move, didn’t take her eyes off mine. She was good. And she was going to kill me unless whoever came through the door stopped her.

There was a gasp behind me, then silence. Then the rustle of a jacket. I saw the girl first out of the corner of my eye. It was Emily Field. She moved next to her mother, the jacket draped over her arm. “This is Holland Taylor, isn’t it?” she asked Amanda.

“Yes,” her mother said.

“I can go back outside,” the sixteen-year-old volunteered. “Later, I can tell the police I didn’t see anything.”

“No,” Amanda said. “That’s not necessary. Mr. Taylor was just leaving.”

“Are you sure?” the girl asked, just as cool as can be.

“I’m sure.”

I left the house as quickly as I could without running. No pronouncements, no wisecracks, no bray of last words. I got out of the house and beat as fast a pace to my car as my crutches would allow, cursing myself with every step. Letting a woman get the drop on me like that, an amateur to boot … I had no business working as a detective. I should become a baker. Get a job with McGlynn’s. Beat up on some bread dough. That was about my speed.

I started up the Colt and drove away without looking at the house, my hands trembling on the steering wheel.

C
RYSTALIN
W
OLTERS WAS
not in school. Somehow I didn’t expect that she would be. I went to her apartment. The door was open to the hallway, so I knocked loudly on it and walked in, leaning on a single crutch, calling her name, my right hand in my jacket pocket—the pocket containing a 9mm Beretta. I had no intention of making the same mistake twice.

I found her in the center of her living-room floor, kneeling before a large carton, wrapping the base of an expensive-looking lamp in newspaper. She looked up from the task when I entered the room but did not speak.

“The door was open,” I told her, excusing myself.

“You’re Holland Taylor,” she told me. “You killed Ring.”

“No, actually, I didn’t. That’s why the cops let me go. That’s probably why I was shot.”