Victims (7 page)

The black lacquered door was opened by a man who looked to be in his middle thirties. He was dressed in tight-fitting designer jeans and a tight-fitting T-shirt. The jeans displayed the considerable bulge of his genitals; the T-shirt displayed the well-developed bulges of a weight lifter’s torso. The face went with the body: self-indulgent and narcissistic, but handsomely proportioned. It was a face that belonged in the uncertain shadows of a singles’ bar, where its deficiencies would be softened. The eyes were small and unfriendly, animated only by a dull, sullen suspicion as he silently stared at me.

“I’m Lieutenant Frank Hastings,” I said, showing him my plastic identification badge. “Mrs. Kramer is expecting me.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Grudgingly, he stepped back, gesturing for me to precede him up a short flight of carpeted stairs that led to the second of the house’s three levels. From the small entryway I could see into a large living room where a woman sat. The room was a white-and-glass room: white walls, white rug, white sofa and chairs combined with glass tables, cut glass decorations, and plate glass windows that framed the view. Huge, colorful daub-and-drip modern paintings were displayed on two walls; bookshelves covered the third wall. The fourth wall was almost entirely glass.

Marie Kramer was sitting in one of the white leather armchairs. As I came toward her, she rose to her feet. Her resemblance to her father was remarkable: Her body was tall and slim, her face was lean, with a wide forehead, a thin, patrician nose, a decisively sculpted mouth and jawline, the face of a willful, arrogant aristocrat. But it was flawed, somehow.

She wore low-cut sheepskin boots, tapered trousers, and an expensive handwoven sweater. Her thick, dark hair was carelessly combed, falling in a ponytail well below her shoulders. Her makeup, too, was careless: lipstick that was smearing, eyeshadow that was smudging. Her body movements and her hand gestures were broad and exaggerated, but slightly out of sync, as if she were in the process of memorizing a character she hoped to play on the stage, but hadn’t yet learned to coordinate her mannerisms with her lines. Her voice was slightly exaggerated, too: a little too broadly accented, like a mediocre imitation of a finishing school patois. The mannerisms and the voice conveyed a kind of faded forcefulness, and odd combination of aggression and bemusement.

“Where’s John?” she demanded. “Did you bring him? Is he all right? Are you Lieutenant Hastings?”

“Yes, I’m Lieutenant Hastings. And John’s fine. Your father picked him up this morning. As far as I know, he’s sleeping.”

“Picked him up? Where?”

“At the Youth Guidance Center,” I answered reluctantly.

“The Youth
Guidance
Center?” Her voice rose indignantly. Briefly, her eyes blazed. “That’s for delinquents.
Hoodlums
.”

“That’s true. But when a child comes into police custody, he’s got to go to the Youth Guidance Center until his parents can come for him. Don’t worry. He was well taken care of. He had a private room, and a counselor slept with him until this morning, when your father sent someone for him.”

“A private room.” She snorted contemptuously and turned abruptly back to her chair, at the same time gesturing for me to sit in a facing chair. There was an outsize coffee mug on the glass-topped table beside her chair. She reached for the mug and drank from it: two long, hard gulps. From the way she did it, from the way she looked away from me while she drank, I knew that the mug contained liquor. During the last two years of my marriage, and for three years afterwards, I’d fought a long, losing battle with the bottle. I knew exactly what she was doing—and exactly why.

She set the mug on the glass table with an awkward clatter, then sat silently for a moment, frowning as she stared out at the view. Between Alcatraz and the near shore, I saw the long, low, sinister shape of an atomic submarine slipping ominously out toward the Golden Gate.

“So he botched it.” She spoke softly, bitterly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“He botched it,” she repeated, still staring with dark, brooding eyes in the direction of her expensive view. She sat forward in the chair, legs crossed, elbow propped on one knee, chin propped on the palm of her hand. The hand was gracefully shaped, with long, expressive fingers. But a network of blue veins bulged across the back of the hand. And the fingernails were bitten to the quick.

“He tried to steal John, and he got caught. And—” Incredulously, she shook her head. “And he killed a man, for God’s sake.”

“Does that surprise you?”

“Yes …” She said it ironically, mock-sagaciously. “Yes, Lieutenant, it surprises me. Gordon has his faults. He’s made mistakes, God knows. But I never thought—” She broke off, shaking her head. I saw her eyes leave the view and steal toward the coffee mug.

“You never thought he’d kill anyone. Is that it?”

She nodded: a slow, loose inclination of her handsomely shaped head. As the minutes passed, it was increasingly obvious that she was drunk. Surreptitiously, stylishly drunk.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s it.”

“He probably didn’t do it intentionally. We think he was frightened. Your father hired a guard. Charlie Quade was his name. We think he went after your husband. Maybe Quade even shot first. So it might not be as bad as it sounds.”

“My ex-husband, you mean. He’s not my husband. Not any more.”

“Yes. Sorry.”

Still with her chin propped in the palm of her hand, she turned in her chair to face me. I watched her eyes narrow as she stared at me, thoughtfully frowning. Finally she said, “Do you think he did it? Committed murder?”

“I think he probably fired because he thought he was in danger. As I said.” I hesitated, then decided to add, “He should be able to plead self-defense.”

“Did he have John with him when he killed this man? Was John there? Right there?”

“We think he was, Mrs. Kramer. That’s not what your husband says, though. He says they’d already left the house. He says they were outside on the driveway when the shooting started.” I let her think about it for a moment, then said, “John should be able to tell us something. That’s one reason I’m here. I’d like to talk to John. I’d like your permission to talk to him.”

Instead of responding to the request, she said, “If John was there, inside the house, he must’ve been terrified.” She spoke softly, musingly, with no apparent distress or emotion. It was as if she were talking about someone else’s child, not hers. Why, I wondered, had she been so angry a few minutes before, learning that John had been taken to the Youth Guidance Center? Was it because she resented his being forced to spend the night with delinquents?

Or was it because her brief burst of indignation had drained her of emotion, left her bereft of further feeling?

She was sitting motionless now, staring vaguely off across the large, elegantly furnished room, her eyes unfocused. Her momentary preoccupation gave me a chance to look at her more closely. She was probably about thirty-five. But already alcohol had blotched her skin and prematurely lined her face. The closely cut slacks revealed loose, slack flesh across her stomach and over her hips. Beneath the expensive sweater, her breasts had begun to sag into premature middle age. Ten years ago she must have been a long-legged, graceful beauty. Ten years from now, her looks would be long gone.

Finally she said, “I’m trying to imagine what happened—what could’ve happened. But—” She shook her head. “But I can’t get it straight in my mind.”

In detail, I described where Quade’s body was found, and what the physical evidence seemed to indicate. Then I told her exactly what her father said he had seen and heard. Next I described Guest’s movements in the minutes before and after the murder. Finally, I paraphrased Kramer’s testimony. As I talked, she kept her eyes fixed on my face. But, once again, her expression revealed nothing: no anxiety, no horror, no calculation. Nothing. She simply listened.

When I finished she sat silently for a moment, her eyes once more slipping vaguely away from mine. Then she began speaking in a dull, lifeless voice. It was a voice without hope, as empty as her eyes. The earlier assertiveness, the finishing school willfulness seemed suddenly to desert her, leaving her confused, defenseless.

“I never thought anything like this could happen—nothing like murder. It—it all seems like a cheap movie, one of those movies without a very convincing plot. I mean—” Her gaze wandered back to meet mine briefly, then wandered off again. “I mean, it doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

I decided not to answer. She was obviously on the point of rambling off into a typical alcoholic’s maudlin meandering. And experience had taught me that, if I listened well enough and long enough, and didn’t interrupt, I might eventually learn more than I could if I questioned her directly.

Now her face revealed some small trace of expression as her lips twisted into a kind of wan, exhausted smile. “I always knew, I suppose, that it would end badly. My life, I mean. Or, at least, I always suspected it—during those times, that is, when I allowed myself to speculate on the future. Which isn’t often, as you might imagine. I mean, I learned long ago how dangerous it is, to think about what’s happening to you—and especially, what
could
happen to you.” She broke off, suddenly looking at me directly. “You must know what I mean. You have a—a bruised look, like you’ve seen too much of what’s going on inside your head—or your life, or whatever.” She shook her head, then looked away again. “People think they can control their own destinies. They think that if they’re good enough, or lucky enough, or smart enough, they can change what’s going to happen to them. But they’re wrong, of course. They can’t. We’re all of us pre-programmed. So if we stop to think for a minute, we can predict what’ll happen. Except that nobody stops. Nobody thinks. It’s too painful to think. So we just go on hoping that, the next time, it’ll work out. Except that it never does. I knew when I married Gordon that it would never work out. If I’d taken one minute—sixty seconds—to think about it, I could’ve plotted the whole marriage, from beginning to end. But I didn’t, so I couldn’t. I thought that a baby would make a difference.” Her lips twisted in another wry, wan smile. “I fell into that old trap. Gordon wanted the child, you see. He’s Jewish, so he—” Suddenly she hiccupped. Then, as if the hiccup triggered a connected reaction, she reached for the mug and gulped down two noisy swallows. She put the mug down and sat looking at it for a moment. Then she said, “There’s booze in that cup.” She raised her eyes to mine, saying, “You know that, don’t you? I can see it in those loser’s eyes of yours. You know.”

As we looked at each other, a message was exchanged. It was a mute confession, a silent recognition that, yes, we shared a secret, she and I. We would never talk about it, never define it. But we knew that the secret we shared—and the secret behind the secret—would control our lives forever. Suddenly I realized that, incredibly, my wayward thoughts had taken me back to the kitchen of my parents’ house. I’d just come home from high school, from freshman football practice. I’d found my mother sitting at the kitchen table, crying. She’d just returned home from work, just found my father’s note, lying on the table. He was leaving us, he said. He was sorry.

“Did you know that your husband intended to try and take John from you?” I asked.

She nodded slowly, then vaguely shrugged. “I knew what my father told me.” Her lips twisted again, sadly mimicking a smile. “That’s the trouble. That’s always been the trouble, I suppose. All of my information comes from my father.” She sat silently for a moment, then said, “He did my divorce. My father, I mean. And that was the trouble, you see. It was like the Treaty of Versailles.”

I frowned. “The Treaty of Versailles?”

“Gordon had nothing left, after my father got through with him. No money, no business left—and no visitation rights, either. Not really. So he had to leave town. My father saw to that. Literally, my father drove him out of town. So whenever Gordon got his life put back together, he’d naturally want to get his pound of flesh back. Just like the Germans did, after the First World War. If it hadn’t been for the treaty, you see, then we’d never’ve had Hitler. And—” She hiccupped again, smiled sadly again, shrugged again. “I’m a history buff, you see. Or, at least, I used to be a—” She broke off, obviously struck by a sudden thought. I saw her eyes sharpen. Her mouth came spontaneously open as momentary shock penetrated her alcoholic bemusement.

“Maybe Gordon thought it was—”

I waited for her to finish it. Speaking in a hushed voice, her eyes searching mine, she said: “Maybe he thought it was my father, when he shot.”

“Yes,” I answered, “I thought about that. It would make sense out of what happened.”

“Except that Gordon’s not a killer. For one thing, he’s too smart. He’s tough enough to kill someone, maybe. But he’s too smart to do it. He was a street kid, you know, when he grew up—a Jewish street kid. So he—”

I heard the sound of a buzzer. Someone was at the front door. I looked at Marie Kramer inquiringly, but she waved a slack hand. “Bruce will get it.”

“Is he the bodyguard your father hired?”

She nodded. “That’s right. Bruce Durkin.” She smiled, mockingly lascivious. “He’s beautiful, isn’t he?”

Remembering Kramer’s statement that Marie Kramer hit the singles’ bars on the weekends, I nodded knowingly.

With the leering, boozy smile still in place, she said, “He lives downstairs. There’s a small apartment down there, completely self-contained. In case you were wondering.”

I was writing “Bruce Durkin” in my notebook when a boy came up the stairs, followed by a well dressed, middle-aged man. The boy, of course, was John Kramer. I watched him come up to the head of the stairs and stop. Standing motionless, he looked first at me, his dark eyes solemn. Then he turned toward his mother, who had risen unsteadily to her feet. For a moment the two faced each other. Then, awkwardly, the woman moved toward the boy. She steadied herself with a hand on the back of her chair, as if she were unwilling to leave the security it offered. The boy took one hesitant step forward, then another. Now he stopped, watching her with his dark eyes. His expression revealed nothing.