The Simeon Chamber (24 page)

Stunned, the chauffeur withdrew several feet toward the corner of the room, a look of bewilderment in his eyes. Momentarily he stooped in pain and slowly lifted his head from his wounded shoulder to see the red stain of his own blood as it spread through the muslin of his gown. He raised his eyes and looked squarely at Nick, the muscles in his face tightening with rage.

Phillipe Lamonge had gone to his niece on the floor in the opposite corner of the room and helped her to her feet. She struggled and tripped on the tattered pants that fell 291

around her ankles. Modesty compelled her to use one free hand to cover her bare breasts. The chauffeur feigned a lunge toward the girl and the old man. Nick cut him off, swinging the tire iron wildly to hold him at bay.

“The door,” said Nick looking at Lamonge. “Get out of here. Now! Get help.”

The Frenchman hesitated for a moment and looked at Nick, then at his niece. Then the old man and the girl scrambled toward the hall and the stairway to the shop. The big man picked up a chair and threw it at the door, just missing Lamonge as Nick lashed out again with the tire iron. He caught the back of the chauffeur’s hand and the man grabbed his fingers, grimacing in pain.

For a moment the hulking figure on the other side of the room was still. He studied the red welt that began to rise across the knuckles of his hand and examined the fist, clenching and opening it as if to test some mechanical object after a mishap. For the first time Nick concentrated on the man’s face.

It was crimson with fury. The intensity gathered in his eyes as his rage boiled over, and in one maniacal charge the man lowered his shoulder and rushed at Nick, who swung the tire iron, catching his assailant with a glancing blow to the other arm. It did nothing to stop the man’s momentum. Nick careened through the pedestal table under the telephone, his body reeling into a heavy armchair across the room. The chair overturned and the big man came down on top of Jorgensen.

There was a brief scuffle. Nick found himself ensnared in the coiled cord of the telephone, part of it wound around the handle of the tire iron. He grabbed the receiver and tried to untangle it, but the chauffeur already had his massive hands at opposite ends of the iron, his legs straddling Nick’s chest. Nick held the center of the iron tightly with both hands, but the combined weight and leverage of the larger man made it a losing battle. He tried to lock his elbows but they bowed like green twigs about to snap. The muscles of his upper arms gave way as the tire iron settled across his throat and began to cut off his air. Vision became blurred and Nick lost the strength in his arms. In seconds the will to fight had completely left his body. His physical senses passed that point of ultimate pain that transforms life’s consciousness to an 3

ethereal indifference as the steady pressure on the cold hard steel began to crush his larynx.

The room of the old inn, while not luxurious, was quaint. A colorful quilt covered the double high-poster bed, and a delicate floral pattern papered the walls. The room was furnished with authentic antiques and looked out on a small, well-manicured courtyard.

By eight o’clock Sam and Jennifer had finished dinner and ordered coffee in Sam’s room.

Seated in a chair with his feet propped on the bed, Sam dumped the contents of a large brown paper bag on the table beside him and began poring through the items. Jennifer sat on the bed and watched in silence as he pawed through the handful of personal belongings from her mother’s old dresser. The fact that she had produced any of it surprised him.

She watched his every move as she kicked off her shoes and leaned back against the headboard of the bed. “Why wait until morning?” she asked. “We have Symington’s address. Why don’t we simply drive over to his house and talk to him tonight?”

“I don’t know about you, but I’m bushed. i think it would be wiser to talk to him tomorrow, when we’re both fresh.” Sam sensed that as the sun settled and darkness set in Jennifer grew increasingly pensive.

“Will your stepfather wonder where you are?”

“Not likely. I come and go as I choose.”

“Maybe we should give him a call anyway. Just so that he doesn’t worry.” He gestured toward the phone on the nightstand.

“What’s with you? Why this sudden interest in my stepfather?”

“No reason. Just thought it might be the kind thing to do.” He guessed that the last thing Jennifer Davies wanted was to tell her stepfather she was in Cambria. The old man would certainly want to know why, and Bogardus believed that the colloquy that would follow, at least the half he might hear, could shed some light on Jennifer’s real purpose.

“Forget it.”

Sam examined each item from the bag and slowly passed it to Jennifer on the bed. He had transferred nearly all of the objects to the mattress when Jennifer spoke.

“There is something interesting about this.” 5

She held a photo album in her hand. “I have gone completely through it and there isn’t a single picture of my father or Raymond Slade. I mean there are pictures of everyone else, his ground crew and other sailors at the base, but not a single picture of either of them. And that’s not all. Look at this.” She moved over and positioned herself on the bed with a pillow propped up behind her back, and picked up the photo album. She turned several pages and stopped. “Here it is.” Jennifer turned the book so Sam could see.

There in the middle of the page was a perimeter of dried glue where a photograph had once been fastened.

The album pages of manila paper were yellowed and brittle with age. But the space where the picture had been pasted was as fresh as the day the book was purchased.

“What does the writing under there say?” asked Sam.

Jennifer read: “`Spence, Ray Slade, Johnnie Peters—comrades in arms, March 1942.`” She rose from the bed and walked to the window, still holding the album.

Sam remembered the navy’s file photograph of Slade. It too had now disappeared with the Davies file from his office. She was right. Someone was methodically removing all pictures of James Spencer and Raymond Slade, erasing their images as if neither man had ever existed. Why?

He picked up a cup of coffee from the tray on the table.

“Maybe your mother did it,” he said.

There was no response. Instead her eyes narrowed and a dark frown came over her face.

What was it that she wasn’t telling him? For the first time in days Sam was beginning to believe that whatever it was, her motives were not sinister. Her actions appeared to be more the product of confusion, of some painful doubt, some crippling uncertainty. As she stared from the window at the courtyard below she had the look of a woman whose thoughts were lost in the past.

Jeannette Lamonge was hysterical by the time she reached the alley behind the shop. She was some distance ahead of her aging uncle, clutching what appeared to be an oil-soaked work rag to her upper body and screaming 7

uncontrollably as she hobbled toward the street at the end of the alley. In her frenzied state she failed to notice the silhouette of the large man approaching from the street. Ten feet farther on she ran headlong into him. He grabbed her forcefully, his fingers gripping the bare skin on her arms and back. He shook her in an effort to bring her out of her hysteria. “Where’s Nick Jorgensen?” Jake’s voice was firm and insistent.

Jeannette sobbed uncontrollably.

“He’s killing him.” Tears from her eyes joined with saliva from her mouth and ran down her face.

Her hands moved in a state of frenzy.

Her uncle, seeing a strange man pressing his niece against the brick wall of one of the buildings, approached cautiously. He was dazed and unable to speak. Then he recognized Jake Carns. Jake released his hold on Jeannette and she sank to the pavement, her back propped against the wall. He turned and ran off down the alley, past the old man and through the back entrance to the shop.

As he entered the back door to the shop Jake saw the open door to the second-story apartment and heard the sounds of scuffling upstairs. He scaled the steps two at a time and ran headlong in the direction of the commotion. As he entered the room he could see only a single figure, a large man with his broad back cloaked in white, on his knees behind a divan, his shoulders hunched, pressing with all his weight toward the floor.

Carns moved quickly toward the man and with a single blow of his right fist he caught the side of the chauffeur’s head and sent him sprawling, dazed, on the floor several feet away. Jake kicked the tire iron that lay propped across Nick Jorgensen’s throat and it clattered across the floor. Nick’s face was blue. Carns knelt on the floor beside him and pressed with both hands against Jorgensen’s chest, alternately pressing and releasing. He tilted the head back, stuck a finger down Nick’s throat, clearing the airway, and locked his mouth over Nick’s. He had administered several heaving lungfuls of air when he noticed the man on the floor across the room sit up, shake his head and begin to rise on rubberlike legs. Jake continued to exhale fully into Nick’s mouth, feeling the prostrate chest lift with each breath. With one eye 299

he watched the figure in the white gown wobble to his feet, slowly surmounting the effects of the blow.

Carns looked at Nick, whose face had lost its cyanotic tinge. He glanced at Nick’s chest and watched as it rose and fell, gradually resuming a normal pattern of breathing. Jorgensen’s eyes were still closed, but his legs had begun to move in obvious distress.

Jake turned his attention to the large man standing only ten feet from him near the center of the room.

The man’s face and arms were bloodied. The chauffeur cast about, latching onto the first object within reach, a small chair, and flung it at Carns, who casually ducked as the chair crashed harmlessly into the wall behind him. Rage spilled from the chauffeur’s eyes and spread across his face.

He lowered his shoulder and charged. Jake moved to one side, grabbed the back of the man’s gown with both hands and assisted him on a headlong plunge into the wood-paneled wall. The chauffeur’s head hit the paneling, sending a shudder through the room as he crumpled in a heap to the floor. He lay motionless for several seconds, emitting slight moans, one hand twitching at his side.

Suddenly Nick began to cough, a violent spasm that brought blood to his mouth. He rolled his head from side to side on the floor and moved one hand to his throat, tenderly feeling the bruise left by the tire iron. Jake knelt and gently lifted Nick’s back from the floor, dragging him a few feet to the divan where he propped him in a sitting position.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Nick cleared his throat and tried several times to speak, searching for his voice, which appeared, at least for the moment, to have abandoned him.

Unable to warn him with words, Nick pushed Jake to the side with his last ounce of strength. Carns instinctively rolled on the floor as the flashing metal of the tire iron slashed by his face, missing his cheek by no more than an inch. The hulking form of the chauffeur was barely recognizable as human. A crimson red stain spread over the white material covering the shoulder where Nick had caught him with the tire iron. His face was a pulp, one eye completely closed. There was a massive bruise across the man’s forehead that conformed in shape and size to a clear indentation in the oak wainscot on the wall. The 1

chauffeur swung a second time with the iron and it whistled harmlessly a foot from Jake’s head.

Jake moved into the center of the room with the large man in pursuit and swinging the tire iron wildly, lashing without precision at Jake’s body. Jake kicked a chair into the corner of the room, clearing an area where he could move. He began to dance on his toes, backpedaling around the center of the room in a counterclockwise direction, his forearms dangling limply at his sides, his fists clenched.

The chauffeur stepped toward him and swung with the tire iron. Carns eased his upper torso back several inches as the tip of the iron passed harmlessly in front of his face. The momentum of the heavy metal carried the man into a follow-through and before he could recover, Jake flashed his right fist into his opponent’s good eye. Carns followed the first blow with a counterpunch to the man’s left cheek that sent him staggering back several steps. Jake continued to move in a counterclockwise direction around the man who now twisted awkwardly in a circle in the center of the room. The chauffeur placed both hands on the tire iron and swung it like a baseball bat in Jake’s direction but missed badly.

The chauffeur began to take lunging steps with the tire iron poised over his shoulder, both hands gripping the handle. On his third step Jake jabbed his left fist in the man’s face, snapping his head back. He followed with a solid right blow to the forehead and another left to the man’s chin. The last punch sent the man reeling backward toward the large bay window at the front of the study. Struggling to keep his legs under him, the man backpedaled in full stride. His back crushed the wooden muntin bars as his upper body smashed through the glass. For a brief instant he seemed perfectly poised, balanced with his buttocks on the windowpane and his upper torso beyond the wall of the building under the night sky like a trapeze artist on the bar. Then, his legs lifting as if in a backward somersault, the chauffeur pitched through the window to the street below.

Nick slowly rose to his feet, taking several seconds to steady himself, and walked to the window. Fingering the bruise on his throat he looked down through the gaping opening left by the shattered window. There, two stories below on the sidewalk, was a crumpled mass, the 303

confusing stains and shadows of the grotesque gown only serving to further disguise the form of the broken body. 9

Sam drove by the first time without seeing it and had to turn around several hundred feet down the country road. As he came back he saw the rural mailbox stuck on a post at the edge of a gravel drive. The letters in black paint on the side of the box read “Symington.”

The blue Porsche wound its way up the narrow driveway overhung by branches of pine and redwood. On the right was a grove of well-pruned fruit trees. They drove past a barn and rolled to a stop in front of a single-story white wood-frame house. The building fit in well with its surroundings. One side was nearly lost in the grasp of a wild tangle of blackberry vines. A low picket fence and a bed of wildflowers punctuated with weeds separated the house from the driveway. Wisteria clung to the lathework that decorated the porch. The place had an air of abandonment.