The Devil's Analyst (14 page)

When they left the airport, Danny turned west on a street bordering the facility, crested a hill and headed toward the ocean, which was grey and foaming from the offshore winds. As they passed the last of the airport runways, Cynthia noticed a series of streets curving gracefully on the sandy hills. But instead of standing houses there were only the ghostly diagrams of a former neighborhood.

“What’s that?” she asked.

Danny glanced to his right. “The airport bought out an entire community that used to sit here. They tore down all the houses. I guess it was too noisy.”

Cynthia wondered about the people who once lived on these shadows of former streets. What did they think at the time? Did they welcome the progress of an expanding airport? Or did they just resent the powerful who pushed them away from the ocean? How did anyone compete with the forces of progress?

Danny turned right on the busy highway that followed the ocean and then turned left into an empty parking lot. “We can walk here. It’ll be noisy with the jets overhead, but we won’t have much time before the rains start. Are you sure you want to do this?”

Cynthia didn’t understand why it was so important to her to feel the slapping sting of cold air, but it was. No one else was on the beach. In the distance she saw unused volleyball nets. Far to the south were the towers of an industrial complex. To the north, just below the impending clouds, she could discern the outline of low mountains. “A little fresh air. That’s all I need to be better.”

“I understand.” Danny knew it wouldn’t be enough.

For several moments, they walked quietly side by side, leaving footprints in the cold, wet sand that was firm from the ebbing tide. The pounding of the waves mixed with a susurrant gasp of water being absorbed into the sand. Now and again, the roar of a departing plane punctuated through the sound of the surf. The smell of ozone made everything clearer to Cynthia. Reality was falling into place. She didn’t like what it told her, but she also didn’t believe in deluding herself.

“Chip is dead,” she said.

“Don’t say that,” Danny pleaded.

“Whoever stole the money is the person who did it. We need to find Chip and we need to find that money.”

Danny didn’t know what to say.

“The last time I talked to Chip he mentioned that he thought he was being followed or watched. He told me he was reminded of someone back in Thread. Just because of a hat.”

Danny looked at her so oddly that she wondered what he was thinking, but she continued. “He said he thought of Pete Peterson. Remember that guy? What was it that the cook at the Loon Town Café always called him?”

“Reverend Willy,” Danny said.

He was flushed. Cynthia remembered how uncomfortable Danny always seemed when they were teenagers. Something else also clicked into place—how the cook Thelma always tried to protect Danny.

“Yes, that’s right,” said Cynthia. “Thelma did talk about him a lot. But I don’t think she ever said his name when you were around. Was it because he was your neighbor? Do you even know how he got that odd name?”

“Because he went to every church service in town.”

That didn’t sound right to Cynthia. “Really? Wasn’t it connected to his showing silent movies on his garage door and acting like doing that was as holy as a church Mass? Oh, I don’t know, I just remember he was an oddball.”

“I think we should be going back. I just felt some raindrops.”

Cynthia felt the chill sting as well, but she didn’t mind. Compared to Wisconsin, this California weather felt almost balmy. Getting wet in a sudden storm would only prove she could survive. But Danny had turned around. He was motioning her back toward the parking lot.

“But I know it wasn’t Reverend Willy or Pete or whatever you want to call the man who was following Chip.”

Danny slowed his pace. “Of course not, what would Pete be doing in Los Angeles?”

“Maybe looking for you,” Cynthia joked.

Danny didn’t laugh.

Cynthia went on, “But Pete’s dead. I talked to Daddy. He told me the guy was found murdered a few years ago, and no one knows who did it.”

Danny turned the switch
; the gas fireplace in his bedroom flared to life. Outside, the threatening storm was gaining force. Rain-streaked windows overlooked the city below where city lights disappeared into the veil of water. In the distance, where Cynthia and he walked earlier in the day on the shores of the Pacific, nothing could be seen.

Cynthia had retreated to the guest room at the other end of the floor. Her room, like the master bedroom, occupied an entire wing and its windows faced in three directions. When she entered the room earlier in the afternoon, she went from one window to the next, locking the frames, pulling down the shades, and drawing the drapes. When she glanced over, Danny tried to hide his bewilderment at her actions, but he didn’t ask what she was blocking out.

And she offered no real explanation. “I can’t feel exposed,” is all she said.

The storm was now in full force. It had only been impending as they first drove east from the beach. By the time they reached the house atop the hill, their car was being pelted. The rain was now assailing the tiles overhead. The Spanish-style roofs were low-pitched, and had no attic to dampen the noise. For a moment, he considered moving Cynthia to a guest room on the lower level, where she could escape the constant rain that beat from above.

Cynthia placed her suitcase on the bamboo-style luggage stand, opened it, and pulled from among her clothes a small set of speakers and Walkman. After a moment connecting the pieces, she pressed a button and low tones of classical music filled the room. “That sounds better, don’t you think?”

The day slowly edged forward. Lacking energy to cook and with the weather precluding a drive to one of the restaurants in the village area below, Danny called in an order for Thai food. As he waited for the delivery boy, he made sure to turn on all the lights at the front of the mansion. Often service people claimed that they couldn’t find the house, although sometimes he wondered if some lingering reputation connected to the previous owner scared people away.

But the pad thai and mee krob arrived quickly. Sitting at the marble counter of the kitchen island, with lights blazing and Cynthia’s music playing, they discussed the day ahead. After Danny told Cynthia about his visit with Lopez, Cynthia wanted to visit the Pacific Dining Car restaurant to try to talk to the waiter who served Chip that day. Maybe he would remember something. She also suggested stopping by the Premios offices to see whether Kenosha had finished her research on potential investigators. And, of course, they needed to visit the Bonaventure Hotel. Cynthia had arranged for Chip’s luggage to be stored there when he failed to return to the room, and she needed to retrieve it on the chance that they could find some clue in his stuff. Left unsaid was the likelihood that the local police had already done similar things.

Danny left unvoiced his earlier conversations with Josh, who admonished against encouraging Cynthia’s pursuits. “You’re not a private eye,” Josh snapped, “and you and Cynthia aren’t in some Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys mystery. Leave the detective work to the professionals.”

But how could Danny do that?

The evening ended
early. Cynthia retreated to her room with the excuse that it had been a long day. Danny watched the fire within the bedroom fireplace and the rain outside the room’s windows, and he brooded.

Cynthia’s bringing up the name Pete Peterson troubled him and he couldn’t understand why. Admittedly, for years, he avoided thinking about Pete, but then just a few days earlier he saw that hat. Of course, there was no chance that the person he glimpsed in the museum was Pete, and he was just as certain that Pete had not been outside the warehouse when Chip had been searching for the computer hackers. Pete wasn’t the kind of person to stalk anyone.

Still, even though he had no reason for clinging to such a belief, he was also certain that Pete wasn’t dead. He didn’t care what Red Trueheart once told his daughter. If Pete had been murdered, Danny knew he would have felt the loss. Something connected them. Danny couldn’t imagine a universe in which he wouldn’t have been touched in some way when the man died, for if the psychic world had seen fit to forewarn him about his mother, then surely those same emanations would have alerted him to Pete’s death.

Maybe he was being superstitious, but he could never be completely rational when it came to Pete. God, how he hated that some people back in Thread used to call the man Reverend Willy. That nickname turned a good man into an object of derision and the taunt had taken over so fast in town. Danny always felt responsible for that. When the man faced a fork in the road, Danny turned him down the wrong one. That choice broke Pete. But no one else knew that, and, like so many things in his life, Danny wasn’t ever going to tell anyone.

The wrong path all started with watching that movie. That day was going to be the last time Pete would be able to show a film in the old Thread Theater. The bank was repossessing his building. He joked that the future would force him to screen the images against his garage door. Danny laughed because if Pete did that then he knew he would be able to watch them from his bedroom window since his house was next door to Pete’s.

The film that night was an obscure silent film called
The Sad Vampire
. In the years that followed, Danny never heard anyone else ever talk about the movie, but he remembered how Pete loved it. The opening scene zoomed in on a crowded nighttime street in a Middle European city gone wild with Oktoberfest. A young man, really a boy, was lost in the revelry and unable to speak the language. Danny remembered how even the subtitles distanced the viewer by being written in German. An aristocratic man appears. The light seems to change as he sweeps the boy up and helps him to reunite with his mother.

The mother is so thankful. Her son is a violin virtuoso on tour, and the savior, supposedly a German count, soon attaches himself to both mother and son. As they travel the Continent together on the musical tour, the count appears only at night. Danny was fourteen when he watched this film with Pete, but even at that age he recognized that the story hinted at some larger tragedy than a vampire sucking the blood of a boy. The horror of the mother and of her friends grew as they began to suspect why the boy is ill, and the mother, without explanation, begins to pull back from the victim as much as from the predator.

Even now, Danny wasn’t certain that the veiled ideas of this movie from the twenties had anything to do with so-called inverts (as he later learned homosexuals were sometimes called then). He only knew that Pete grew increasingly distressed by the film. When the lights were turned back on, tears were streaming from his face. Danny felt that his old protector—the man who guided him even as his own parents, each in their own way, abandoned him—wanted to say something and Danny, as young as he was, sensed that he couldn’t let Pete speak, so both sat as silent as the film that just ended.

The dark rain outside the window transformed the glass into an imperfect mirror in which Danny saw his own reflection. In his image was something of Pete’s emotions that night. The memory made him shudder.

Something else about that film’s credits niggled in the back of his mind before suddenly bursting into his consciousness. The memory of the projected black and white lettering of the director’s name seemed so clear: the credit was for Augustus Cambrian, the same man who had died in this house.

He jumped to search the bookshelves on the other side of the room. Josh had purchased some thick book about Cambrian, but Danny never read any of it. He preferred not to think about the house’s past history. By now, the largely gutted and modernized mansion was their creation, not someone else’s legacy. He found the title:
The Life and Work of Augustus Cambrian
. Thick and heavy, it was more a coffee table book than a traditional biography. He scanned the table of contents to find a filmography, and then turned to it. He moved his finger down the titles beginning in 1919. He didn’t have far to go. The table for the year 1924 listed
The Sad Vampire
.

Danny repressed his urge to rush down the hall, wake Cynthia, and exult over this amazing coincidence. He wanted to grab the phone and call Josh in New York. But he stopped. What could he tell either of them? That he had once seen a movie directed by the man who owned this house? Cambrian’s occult and horror talkies from the Thirties remained popular to this day. Probably everyone had seen at least one of his films. The coincidence would only seem amazing if Danny could explain what seeing the film with Pete had meant to him.

Danny’s discovery was one of those strange things in life destined to never be more than a private memory. To quiet his emotions, he paged through the book. Several photos from the later films highlighted familiar ghouls from many a famous film. He never liked horror pictures as a boy. They gave him nightmares, even though sometimes the thrill of looking into the face of something frightening was just too alluring to resist.

When he found a chapter on this house and Cambrian’s movie memorabilia collection, he stopped paging through the book, and instead quickly read the text, which provided details that largely matched what the realtor told them about the house. Over the decades, the director had amassed a major assortment of horror movie props and stills, as well as medieval instruments of torture. Danny reread one paragraph more carefully. The author claimed that Cambrian kept his most valuable items in a secret room off a basement chamber. He described an elaborate light sconce that when moved triggered the opening of the hidden door, and Danny recalled that his friend Francesca referenced a similar secret chamber a few weeks ago.