The Devil's Menagerie (25 page)

But he didn’t believe it. He had a hunch about Nancy. He felt the same immediate kinship with her that he had felt for Edie and Natalie, and still felt for Iris. Like the others, Nancy had been presented to him with minimal effort on his part, as if the gods themselves were conspiring to make everything possible for him, exactly as he had fantasized it for the past eight years.

The quartet of students left the Mexican restaurant together a half hour later. At the edge of the campus they separated, Nancy and her boyfriend returning to afternoon classes, the other couple going off on their own. From across the street Beringer studied pictures of listings in a real-estate agent’s window, suppressing his frustration. He couldn’t follow Nancy onto the campus. How was he going to find her again?

Then he heard the girl’s voice raised. It had a light, school-girlish sound that Beringer found enormously attractive, though it seemed much younger than her ripe woman’s body. “We’ll see you at the powwow!” Nancy called after the departing couple.

Beringer stared after her. The long hair was evidently a proud feature. Loose and wavy, the color of dark red Washington apples, spilling halfway down her back. She kept tossing it as she walked away with her boyfriend, unconsciously reaching back to let the heavy mane cascade through her fingers.

Beringer felt the familiar heat. She was the one.

What the hell was a powwow?

R
ICHIE
L
INDSTROM MISSED
the bus after school.

The miss was intentional. After his last class of the day he slipped into the locker room and waited until the room emptied out. Some older kids were playing basketball in the adjoining gym, the thump-thump of a dribbling basketball keeping pace with Richie’s heartbeat.

When he finally came outside the bus was gone.

The day was warm for October, the temperature in the mid-seventies under a partly cloudy sky. It was also smog season, and the prevailing yellow haze was visible to the north over the Los Angeles basin. Another Santa Ana was brewing, and even higher temperatures were forecast for the weekend ahead. Richie wasn’t sure exactly what a Santa Ana wind was, although he had heard the term at least a thousand million times on TV. He had a vague notion it had something to do with the city of Santa Ana. The only thing he knew for certain was that it meant hot desert winds and cool dry nights. Great beach weather.

Richie wondered if his real father liked going to the beach. He wondered if Sergeant Ralph Beringer had felt the hot desert winds of the Middle East during the Gulf War. He was a soldier, he must have been there. Richie actually knew very little about his father.

He thought about these things as he walked, following the route the school bus had taken without him. Richie didn’t mind walking, and he figured it was less than two miles to San Anselmo Drive where it crossed Washington Boulevard. From there he had enough change saved from his lunch allowance to catch a city bus that stopped only three blocks from his house.

The sun felt good as he walked, but the closer he came to San Anselmo the more jittery he began to feel. Mixed with his excitement and anticipation was another emotion, one that caused his scalp to tingle and his throat to go dry. He cut across the huge parking surface of the San Carlos Mall with its Penney’s, Sears, Robinson’s-May and about a thousand other stores. Just beyond the parking lot he could see the tops of the old date palms along the center divider that defined San Anselmo Drive.

For the four blocks extending north of the shopping mall toward the foothills the street was a wide boulevard. Once older estate homes on huge properties had faced each other across the boulevard; now only a few of these three-story Victorian piles remained, converted to law offices and insurance offices. The rest had been torn down to make room for apartment houses and condominium complexes—Mediterranean style buildings in pink stucco with tile roofs, sleek modern structures of glass and steel, imitation Cape Cod designs painted in gray or blue and white, a few older apartment houses with tropical motifs and plantings. Walking slowly up the street, Richie realized with dismay that these large buildings contained hundreds of apartments and condominiums. By the time he reached the last of the four long blocks with the palm tree center islands, Richie’s excitement had faded. At the end of the last block the street narrowed to two lanes where it climbed into the hills. On these curving hillside streets San Carlos’s wealthier citizens had built secluded estates when they fled the mall-dominated flats below.

Richie guessed that his father wasn’t living in the hills. He had come to San Carlos only recently. It made more sense that he might be staying in one of the many apartments along the boulevard, but how was Richie to find him? Maybe he didn’t even live on this street. Maybe he had only turned this way on the day Richie spotted him because he was going to the mall.

Richie’s disappointment was not as sharp as he had expected. There was also an odd relief, a lifting of tension, taking away the nervous edge to his anticipation.

Crossing the street, he started back along the opposite side, peering at the buildings and what he could see of the subterranean parking areas. There were cars parked all along both sides of the street, but the gated underground parking caught his eye. Although, like many youngsters, he saw gates and barriers as more of a challenge than a deterrent, he recognized the futility of trying to sneak into every one of the garages in the hope of recognizing a dark blue 1993 Buick LeSabre. The multiunit buildings also had many entrances, each with banks of mailboxes. The chance of finding one with Ralph Beringer’s name on it seemed remote.

Richie had no sooner accepted this depressing conclusion than he saw the car.

In the middle of the next block, a dark blue car emerged from an underground parking garage and paused before entering the street. It was a late model Buick, immaculately maintained, its glossy paint glittering in the sun. Richie started to run. The Buick suddenly shot out into the street.

A break in the center island strips allowed the car to cross through and turn left without pausing. Richie shouted and waved. His legs pumped furiously, his heart thudding, the quivery excitement building with each stride. “Dad! Dad! Wait for me!”

But his father didn’t see him. The Buick pulled smoothly away, slowed at the next corner, then accelerated down the street.

Richie pulled up on the sidewalk, panting heavily. Tears stung his eyes. He felt a weight as heavy as despair, out of all proportion to what had happened. His dad hadn’t seen him, that’s all. He hadn’t run away.

Besides, now you know where he lives
.

The realization cut through Richie’s anguish. He blinked back the tears and scrubbed at his eyes with his knuckles. His gaze turned away from the boulevard where the Buick had vanished toward the building it had come out of.

The apartment complex was called Vista Valencia. Mature evergreen plantings surrounded the walled patios of the front units. Masses of bougainvillea, hyacinth and geraniums lent their colors to the beige stucco buildings. All of the units, Richie noticed, had either small balconies or private patios. The shrubbery next to the patios was tall and thick enough to hide someone in their shadows, especially at night.

The long row of units had three entrances but only one driveway leading down to the lower level garage, which was secured by a grilled barrier. The entrances had locked gates. Just inside were stacks of brass mailboxes set into a side wall.

Richie peered through the wrought-iron grille of one of the entries at the narrow name slots above each box. By squinting he could make out most of the names.

There was no name tag for a Ralph Beringer.

Richie repeated the process at the remaining two building entries with the same disappointing results. Then he returned to the central entrance, next to the driveway. A car had stopped on the ramp just below Richie—a silver Honda Accord. At that moment, with a heavy rumbling, the barrier at the front of the garage began to lift.

Instantly Richie realized what was happening. The driver of the Honda had activated the barrier by punching a button on the remote control he carried in his car. As the small car drove through the opening, Richie slid down a short incline, jumped to the pavement, and darted into the gloom of the garage before the slow-moving gate could close.

Quickly he slipped to the side, away from the entrance. Halfway down a long row of stalls the Honda slid into a parking space. Richie heard a car door slam and the blip of an electronic lock. He crouched between two cars. The footsteps of the Honda’s driver came toward him, echoing hollowly through the garage. But at the last moment the driver turned away toward a back wall. Peering after him, Richie saw lighted signs over a stairway and an elevator. The Honda driver summoned the elevator with the push of a button and stepped inside.

Richie waited. Silence settled over the vast wilderness of concrete and metal where he crouched. Emboldened by the silence, Richie stepped out of his hiding place and walked along the center aisle he found himself in, looking at the parked cars on either side. He returned along the next aisle. More than half of the parking slots were empty. The people who used them were probably at work, Richie thought, or shopping at the mall.

The Buick was gone, of course, so Richie didn’t know exactly what he hoped to find. The spaces were identified by numbers, not names. He guessed the numbers would be the same as their owners’ apartment numbers. Richie had no way of knowing the number of the unit where Beringer was staying.

He stopped next to a gray Ford Taurus, parked in slot 110. His heart gave a little jump, like a blip on a TV screen.

More than a week ago, the Sunday he went to the beach with his fa—with his stepfather—he had seen a car just like this one. Later, when he spotted the blue Buick near his house and following his school bus, Richie had concluded he was wrong about seeing the Taurus more than once that Sunday. But it had been a Hertz rental car. So was this one.

Richie didn’t know why, if he had only recently come to San Carlos, Ralph Beringer would need two cars. But he had no doubt whatever that this was where his father was staying.

Vista Valencia. Apartment 110.

A
T FIRST
D
AVE
Lindstrom thought the detective on the phone wanted to talk to him about the harassment complaint against Ralph Beringer. Then the caller, whose name was Braden, identified himself as a homicide investigator looking into the recent deaths of two San Carlos College coeds.

“We’re all shocked,” Dave said. “Nothing like this has ever happened here before. As campuses go, ours has had a better record than most. But I don’t see how I can help you.”

“It’s my understanding you had both of these young women in your classes. I thought maybe you could tell me something about them.”

“Well, I’ll try.”

They made an appointment for three o’clock, after Dave’s last class of the day. Waiting for the detective to arrive, Dave thought about the two murdered girls. He recalled Edith Foster more clearly than the Rothleder girl because Foster had made a point of being noticed. It wasn’t the first time Dave had had a student show off her legs or excess cleavage, but he had never had any trouble turning down the invitations, spoken or implied. Foster had been more persistent than most, and her roommate had implied knowledge of something more than flirtation between them. Had she told the detective as much? Was that why he wanted to talk to Dave? The question left him feeling uneasy.

Detective Braden arrived at precisely three o’clock. Dave waved the cop to the only extra chair in his small office, an oak chair by the window that was usually occupied by a worried student. Every inch of space in the room was taken. One whole wall was filled with bookshelves. Crowded freestanding bookcases stood against two other walls, one of them devoted entirely to videos of movies, sandwiching a four-drawer file cabinet and stacks of cardboard file boxes. Dave’s desk was piled with folders, correspondence trays and heaps of papers and periodicals. The one small open wall space was filled by a poster from the early 1940s of Bette Davis in
In This Our Life
.

“Would you like some coffee, Detective? We have a large coffeemaker in our conference room. It’s just down the hall.”

“Thanks. I’m coffeed out.”

The detective had a blunt, no-nonsense manner. His face was all hard planes with weary eyes and a tight mouth that reminded Dave of a line in Thomas Hardy’s
Return of the Native
describing the rural peasants as having lips that met like the two halves of a muffin.

He wasn’t sure exactly what he had expected. His adolescent and adult life had been circumscribed by movies, as fan and scholar. In college he had been an actor and even a neophyte moviemaker; in real life, as he put it, he had ended up as a critic, analyst and teacher of the medium he loved. Over all those years of watching movies he had observed thousands of cops on screen, but he suspected that the reality of homicide investigation had rarely if ever been captured. The movies preferred lone knights-errant—private eyes, courageous reporters, angry survivors—to the dogged, weary investigators who solved real crimes. He wondered if Braden had ever been involved in a lethal car chase, a confrontation in a dark abandoned warehouse or a silent stalking in the woods.

“How can I help you?” Breaking the silence, Dave realized that the detective was quite content to let it linger.

“You don’t mind if I tape this conversation?” Braden produced a small tape recorder and set it on a corner of the desk.

Dave stared at it, surprised. “No … of course not.”

“Good. Saves a lot of paperwork.” He pushed the record button and the tape began to wind. “This is an ongoing investigation into the deaths of Edith Foster and Natalie Rothleder …”

Braden gave the date, time and place of the interview before recording Dave’s name, address, home and office phone numbers and his occupation as an assistant professor of film studies at San Carlos College. Then he said, “You knew the two students whose names I just gave.”