The Hellfire Club (6 page)

14

ONE OF THOSE
men who expand when observed close-up, Holly Fenn filled nearly the entire space of the stairwell. His shoulders, his arms, even his head seemed twice the normal size. Energy strained the fabric of his suit jacket, curled the dark brown hair at the back of his head. The air inside Natalie’s house smelled of dust, dead flowers, unwashed dishes, the breath and bodies of many men, the reek of cigarettes dumped into wastebaskets. Davey uttered a soft sound of disgust.

“These places stink pretty good,” Fenn said.

A poster of a whitewashed harbor village hung on the wall matching the one covered by their Chancel House bookshelves. In the living room, three men turned toward them. The uniformed policeman for whom Nora had mistaken Holly Fenn came into the hall. The other two wore identical gray suits, white button-down shirts, and dark ties. They had narrow, disdainful faces and stood side by side, like chessmen. Nora caught the faint, corrupt odor of old blood.

Davey came up the last step. Abnormally vivid in the dim light, his dark eyes and dark, definite brows made his face look white and unformed.

Fenn introduced them to Officer Michael LeDonne, and Mr. Hashim and Mr. Shull, who were with the FBI. Hashim and Shull actually resembled each other very little, Mr. Hashim being younger, heavier, in body more like one of Natalie’s wrestlers than Mr. Shull, who was taller and fairer than his partner. Their posture and expressions created the effect of a resemblance, along with their shared air of otherworldly authority.

“Mr. and Mrs. Chancel were friends of the deceased, and I asked them if they’d be willing to do a walk through here, see if maybe they notice anything helpful.”

“A walk through,” said Mr. Shull.

Mr. Hashim said, “A walk through,” and bent over to exam-ine his highly polished black wing tips. “Cool.”

“I’m glad we’re all in agreement. Mike, maybe you could hold that jar for Mrs. Chancel.”

Officer LeDonne took the jar and held it close to his face.

“These people were here recently?” asked Mr. Shull, also staring at the jar.

“Recently enough,” said Fenn. “Take a good look around, folks, but make sure not to touch anything.”

“Make like you’re in a museum,” said Mr. Shull.

“Do that,” said Mr. Hashim.

Nora stepped past them into the living room. Mr. Shull and Mr. Hashim made her feel like touching everything in sight. Cigarette ash streaked the tan carpet, and a hole had been burned in the wheat-colored sofa. Magazines and a stack of newspapers covered the coffee table. Two Dean Koontz paperbacks had been lined up on the brick ledge above the fireplace. On the walls hung the iron weathervanes and bits of driftwood Natalie had not so much collected as gathered. The FBI men followed Nora with blank eyes. She glared at Mr. Shull. He blinked. Without altering her expression, Nora turned around and took in the room. It seemed at once charged with the presence of Natalie Weil and utterly empty of her. Mr. Shull and Mr. Hashim had been right: they were standing in a museum.

“Natalie make any phone calls that night?” Davey asked.

Fenn said, “Nope.”

It occurred to Nora as she tagged along into the kitchen that she did not, she most emphatically did not, wish to see this house, thanks anyhow. Yet here she was, in Natalie’s kitchen. Davey mooned along in front of the cabinets, shook his head at the sink, and paused before the photographs pinned to a corkboard next to the refrigerator. For Natalie’s sake, Nora forced herself to look at what was around her and recognized almost instantly that no matter what she did or did not want, a change had occurred. In the living room, a blindfold of habit and discomfort had been anchored over her eyes.

Now, blindfold off, traces of Natalie Weil’s decisions and preferences showed wherever she looked. Wooden counters had been scarred where Natalie had sliced the sourdough bread she liked toasted for breakfast” jammed into the garbage bin along with crumpled cigarette packets were plastic wrappers from Waldbaum’s. Half-empty jam jars crowded the toaster. Smudgy glasses smelling faintly of beer stood beside the sink, piled with plates to which clung dried jam, flecks of toast, and granules of ground beef. A bag of rotting grapes lay on the counter beside three upright bottles of wine. Whatever Norman Weil and his new wife were drinking on the deck of their beach house in Malibu probably wasn’t Firehouse Golden Mountain Jug Red, $9.99 a liter.

Blue recycling bins beside the back door held wine and Corona empties and a dead bottle of Stolichnaya Cristall. Tied up with twine in another blue bin were stacks of the New York and Westerholm newspapers along with bundles of
Time, Newsweek, Fangoria,
and
Wrestlemania.

“I wish my men looked at crime scenes the way you do.”

Startled, Nora straightened up to see Holly Fenn leaning against the open door to the hallway.

“Notice anything?”

“She ate toast and jam for breakfast. She was a little sloppy. She lived cheap, and she had kind of down-home tastes. You wouldn’t know that by looking at her.”

“Anything else?”

Nora thought back over what she had seen. “She was interested in horror movies, and that kind of surprises me, but I couldn’t really say why.”

Fenn gave her a twitch of a smile. “Wait till you see the bedroom.” Nora waited for him to say something about murder victims and horror movies, but he did not. “What else?”

“She drank cheap wine, but every now and then she splurged on expensive vodka. All we ever saw her drink was beer.”

Fenn nodded. “Keep on looking.”

She walked to the refrigerator and saw the half-dozen magnets she remembered from two years before. A leering Dracula and a Frankenstein’s monster with outstretched arms clung to the freezer cabinet” a half-peeled banana, a hippie in granny glasses and bell bottoms dragging on a joint half his size, an elongated spoon heaped with white powder, and a miniature Hulk Hogan decorated the larger door beneath.

Holly Fenn was twinkling at her from the doorway. “These have been here for years,” she said.

“Real different,” said Fenn. “Your husband says you don’t think Mrs. Weil is dead.”

“I hope she isn’t.” Nora moved impatiently to the corkboard bristling with photographs. She could still feel the blood heating her face and wished that the detective would leave her alone.

“Ever think Natalie was involved in drugs?”

“Oh, sure,” Nora said, facing him. “Davey and I used to come over and snort coke all the time. After that we’d smoke some joints while cheering on our favorite
wrestlers.
We knew we could get away with it because the Westerholm police can’t even catch the kids who bash in our mailboxes.”

He was backing away before she realized that she had taken a couple of steps toward him.

Fenn held up his hands, palms out. They looked like catcher’s mitts. “You having trouble with your mailbox?”

She whirled away from him and posted herself in front of the photographs. Natalie Weil’s face, sometimes alone, sometimes not, grinned out at her. She had experimented with her hair, letting it grow to her shoulders, cropping it, streaking it, bleaching it to a brighter blond. A longer-haired Natalie smiled out from a deck chair, leaned against the rail of a cruise ship, at the center of a group of grinning, white-haired former teachers and salesclerks in shorts and T-shirts.

Some drug addict,
Nora thought. She moved on to a series of photographs of Natalie in a peach-colored bathing suit lined up, some of them separated by wide gaps, at the bottom of the corkboard. They had been taken in the master bedroom, and Natalie was perched on the bed with her hands behind her back. Uncomfortably aware of Holly Fenn looming in the doorway, she saw what Natalie was wearing. The bathing suit was one of those undergarments which women never bought for themselves and could be worn only in a bedroom. Nora did not even know what they were called. Natalie’s clutched her breasts, squeezed her waist, and flared at her hips. A profusion of straps and buttons made her look like a lecher’s Christmas present. Nora looked more closely at the glint of a bracelet behind Natalie’s back and saw the unmistakable steel curve of handcuffs.

She suppressed her dismay and stepped toward Fenn. “Probably this looks wildly degenerate to you,” he said.

“What does it look like to you?”

“Harmless fun and games.” He moved aside, and she walked out into the hall.

“Harmless?”

Nora turned toward the bedroom, thinking that maybe the Chancels had a point after all, and secrets should stay secret. Murder stripped you bare, exposed you to pitiless judgment. What you thought you shared with one other person was . . . She stopped walking.

“Think of something?”

She turned around. “A man took those pictures.”

“Kind of a waste if her sister took them.”

“But there aren’t any pictures of him.”

“That’s right.”

“Do you think there ever were?”

“You mean, do I think that at some point he was on the bed and she was holding the camera? I think something like that probably happened, sure. I took your picture, now you take mine. What happened to the pictures of the man?”

“Oh,” she said, remembering the wide gaps on that section of the board.

“Ah. I love these little moments of enlightenment.”

This little moment of enlightenment made her feel sick to her stomach.

“I’m kind of curious to hear what you know about her boy-friends.”

“I wish I did know something.”

“Guess you didn’t notice the pictures, last time you were here.”

“I didn’t go into the kitchen.”

“How about the time before that?”

“I don’t remember if I went into the kitchen. If I did, I certainly didn’t see those pictures.”

“Now comes the time when I have to ask about this,” Fenn said. “Did you and your husband ever join in your friend’s games? If you say yes, I won’t tell Slim and Slam in there. Got any pictures at home with Mrs. Weil in them?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Your husband’s a good-looking guy. Little younger than you, isn’t he?”

“Actually,” she said, “we were born on the same day. Just in different decades.”

He grinned. “You probably know where the bedroom is.”

15

THROUGH THE OPEN
door Nora saw a rising arc of brown spots sprayed across an ivory wall. Beneath the spray, the visible corner of the bed looked as if rust-colored paint had been poured over the sheets.

Fenn spoke behind her. “You don’t have to go in there if you don’t feel like it. But you might want to reconsider the idea that she isn’t dead.”

“Maybe it isn’t her blood,” she said, and fumed at Davey for having made her say such a thing.

“Oh?”

She made herself walk into the room. Dried blood lay across the bed, and stripes and splashes of blood blotted the carpet beside it. The sheets and pillows had been slashed. Stiff flaps of cotton folded back over clumps of rigid foam that looked like the entrails of small animals. It all looked sordid and sad. The sadness was not a surprise, but the sense of wretchedness gripped her heart.

Slumped in the far corner beside Officer LeDonne, Davey glanced up at her and shook his head.

She turned to Fenn, who raised his eyebrows. “Did you find a camera? Did Natalie have a camera?”

“We didn’t find one, but Slim and Slam say all the pictures in there were taken with the same camera. One of those little Ph.D. jobs.”

“Ph.D.?”

“Push here, dummy. An auto-focus. Like a little Olympus or a Canon. With a zoom feature.”

In other words, Natalie’s camera was exactly like theirs, not to mention most of the other cameras in Westerholm. The bedroom felt airless, hot, despairing. A lunatic who liked to dress women up like sex toys had finally taken his fantasies to their logical conclusion and used Natalie Weil’s bed as an operating table. Nora wondered if he had been seeing all five women at the same time.

She was glad she wasn’t a cop. There was too much to think about, and half of what you had to think about made no sense. But the worst part of standing here was standing
here.

She had to say something. What came out of her mouth was “Were there pictures in the other houses? Like the ones in the kitchen?” She barely heard the detective’s negative answer” she had barely heard her own question. Somehow she had walked across several yards of unspattered tan carpet to stand in front of four long bookshelves. Two feet away, Davey gave her the look of an animal in a cage. Nora fled into the safety of book titles, but she found no safety. In the living room Fenn had said something about Natalie’s affection for horror novels, and here was the proof, in alphabetical order by author’s name. These books had titles like
The Rats
and
Vampire Junction
and
The Silver Skull.
Here were
They Thirst, Hell House, The Books of Blood,
and
The Brains of Rats.
Natalie had owned more Dean Koontz novels than Nora had known existed, she had every Stephen King novel from
Carrie
to
Dolores Claiborne
, all of Anne Rice and Clive Barker and Whitley Strieber.

Nora moved along the shelves as if in a trance. Here was a Natalie Weil who entertained herself with stories of vampires, dismemberment, monsters with tentacles and bad breath, cannibalism, psychotic killers, degrading random death. This person wanted fear, but creepy, safe fear. She had been like a roller coaster aficionado for whom tame county fair roller coasters were as good as the ones that spun you upside down and dropped you so fast your eyes turned red. It was all just a ride.

At the end of the bottom shelf her eyes met the names Marletta Teatime and Clyde Morning above a sullen-looking crow, the familiar logo of Blackbird Books, Chancel House’s small, soon-to-be-discontinued horror line. Alden had expected steady, automatic profits from these writers, but they had failed him. Gaudy with severed heads and mutilated dolls, the covers of their books came back from the distributors within days of publication. Davey had argued to keep the line, which managed to make a small amount of money every season, in part because Teatime and Morning never got more than two thousand dollars per book. (Davey sometimes frivolously suggested that they were actually the same person.) Alden dismissed Davey’s argument that he had condemned the books by refusing to promote or publicize them” the beauty of horror was that it sold itself. Davey said that his father treated the books like orphaned children, and Alden said damn right, like orphaned children, they had to pull their own weight.

“Mrs. Chancel?” said Holly Fenn.

Another title shouted at her from the bottom shelf.
Night Journey
protruded at a hasty, awkward angle from between two Stephen King encyclopedias as if Natalie had crammed it in anywhere before running to the door.

“Mr. Chancel?”

She looked at the
D
’s, but Natalie had owned no other Driver novels.

“Sorry I wasn’t more helpful.” Davey’s voice sounded as if it came from the bottom of a well.

“No harm in trying.” Fenn stepped out of the doorway.

Davey shot Nora another anguished glance and moved toward the door. Nora followed, and LeDonne came along behind. The four of them moved in single file toward the living room, where Slim and Slam faced forward, automatically shedding any signs of individuality. Davey said, “Excuse me, I have to go back.”

Fenn flattened his bulk against the wall to let Davey get by. Nora and the two policemen watched him go down the corridor and swerve into the bedroom. LeDonne quizzed Fenn with a look, and Fenn shook his head. After a couple of seconds, Davey emerged, more distressed than ever.

“Forget something?” Fenn asked.

“I thought I saw something—couldn’t even tell you what it was. But—” He spread his hands, shaking his head.

“That happens,” Fenn said. “If it comes back to you, don’t be shy about giving me a call.”

When they turned to go down the stairs, the two FBI men split apart and looked away.