DARK THRILLERS-A Box Set of Suspense Novels (50 page)

The authorities, without having possession of the head, had no way of determining the identity of the corpse, but the county coroner, a man who had handled both the Marilyn Monroe case and the notorious Brown-Goldman case, told reporters all the parts belonged to one woman.

Karl shook his head at the cruelty involved in such a crime. It didn't do much good for his business. It didn't do much for Hollywood. The finding of body parts all over the place had effectively rid the streets of hookers, afraid the casualty came from their ranks, but it had also dampened the enthusiasm of shoppers along Rodeo Drive and Sunset Boulevard. You couldn't turn on a radio or television without being bombarded with the harrowing facts from the media.

Lois knocked on his private office door and then slipped inside, shutting the door behind her. She held a secretarial notebook and pen to her chest.

"Can I talk to you?" she asked.

Lois, even more than his assistant, was his right hand. Most of the work carried on at LaRosa Enterprise was conducted by her.

"Sure," he said, nodding and pointing to the chair before his desk. "What's up?"

"Well, I got a call from your accountant the other day when you weren't in the office."

Karl felt bad news coming. He sat up in his chair and leaned on his elbows on the desk. "Go on."

"He said the IRS had been in touch with him concerning your last quarterly. I'm afraid it's not good news, Karl."

"I owe money," he said, wondering why he was not surprised. If someone had been able to put the screws to the credit reporting agencies, why not the IRS?

Lois looked down at the pad in her lap. "A lot," she said.

"A lot? How much?"

"The accountant said they're doing an audit. They're claiming you owe a hundred and twenty thousand in back taxes to the government. Employee taxes that were miscalculated or unpaid or something. Or maybe he said it was taxes on unreported earnings. I can't remember now, it upset me so much."

"Jesus." Karl swiveled away from the desk, turning his chair so he could look out the window at the street.

"The accountant says they're wrong, but he sounded worried. He wants all our files. All the way back for six years."

Karl didn't say anything. He entertained no doubt this latest round of bad luck was generated by his stalker. Before this his dealings with the federal government had been pristine. It was a nuisance case, plain and simple. Numbers were scrambled in his file some way. How in the hell did someone do that?

"Don't worry, Lois." He turned back to her. "You're worrying. You look like you just came from your best friend's funeral. This stuff is just temporary glitches, all right? It'll get worked out. I know it's more work for you, getting the files out of storage, but I don't want you to worry about me."

"It seems . . ." She had tears in her eyes and looked down at her pad again.

"What is it?" he prodded gently.

"It seems too much that's bad is happening to you. I don't understand it. The office broken into, your house ransacked, the . . . wreck."

She didn't know the half of it. His people in the office didn't know all about the notes he got or the way someone had manipulated his credit reports. They didn't know someone in the business who was involved with the shooting of a new film was using the script as a roadmap. Still, if he could, he needed to reassure his secretary. The rest of the office took cues from her. If they saw her upset and worried about him, it put everyone in the doldrums.

He stood up and circled the desk between them. When Lois rose he put his arm around her shoulder and turned her toward the door. He spoke softly. "It's going to be okay. Everything's under control. This IRS thing is just an aggravation. I don't owe that kind of money for back taxes. They made a mistake, that's all. Why don't you order a few pizzas for lunch to be delivered? Let's cheer the office up. You want to do that?"

She smiled up at him. "With anchovies?"

"Oh, god, no."

She grinned prettily. "I was just kidding. I know anchovies make you sick."

She was a good person, efficient, understanding, and, when she wasn't worried about his affairs, she could be a great little tease.

"Get outta here," he said, aiming her out the door. "I have to call some people."

He shut the door and stood with his back to it for a few moments. A hundred and twenty thousand. Someone was very good with computers. Someone was extremely intelligent and competent in finding ways to ruin him. At least with Marilyn telling him each day's shooting script, he wouldn't have to be so afraid of being caught unawares. He now had his own inside information. He wasn't blundering around blindly now, waiting like a clay pigeon to be shot out of the air.

Things could be worse.

38

"How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?"

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

The Body did a remarkable job at that day's shooting despite the air of distress that hung over the crew about the woman's dismembered parts found all over Hollywood.

They'd never identify her without the head. And Cam must have taken care of that since he came to the set and never said a word about it when the reports started coming in. Just what The Body had counted on. If there was one person who wouldn't want to get involved in a murder investigation, it was Cambridge Hill. Not when his movie was at stake.

The Body wondered all day how Cam had reacted when he found Marilyn's head on the seat of his fancy Cadillac. And what he did with it before he came to the studio lot. He couldn't have just put it in the trunk to dispose of later, could he? No, he would have already done that. The Body just hoped he hadn't stuffed it into his curbside garbage pail. It might be found too soon if he had.

Too bad about Marilyn. She had a scene coming up with Olivia tomorrow and that's when everyone would begin to worry when she didn't show up. Eventually they'd all begin to theorize about how she came up missing at the same time as the news was full of reports of a woman's body parts being found all over the city, but by then it would be too late to worry about it interfering with The Body's plans.

If only she hadn't been so insistent in the Phoenix that night that they must tell Karl about the script. Looking at her from behind a potted palm, The Body's vantage point at the bar, it had been almost more than The Body could do to keep from strangling her in front of everyone.

At day's end, The Body drove past Karl's house just in time to see him exiting a yellow taxicab and paying the driver. He wasn't driving the loaner car!

The Body rolled on past, eyes straight ahead. It was twilight and the car's headlights beamed white, unforgiving light on the tall, skinny palms and fragile crepe myrtles. They looked washed out, not green enough to be real. Nearby the sea hissed along the private stretches of beach adjoining the Malibu enclaves.

The Body turned around and drove past Karl's house again, noticing the lights on inside. Parking at a distance, The Body jogged back to the driveway and crept to the far side of the Chevrolet Caprice. Hunkered down. Looked beneath the car to the exhaust system, hunting for the simple bomb device put there the day before.

As suspected, it was gone.

Marilyn had called him. She'd told him. Before The Body had gotten to her and despite the warning phone call, she had told him about the script and the very next scene.

Scrabbling back away from the car and moving stealthily down the drive, The Body fumed. If Marilyn weren't already dead, she'd die in a different fashion. Not from a knife through the heart this time. She'd be alive while having her limbs taken off, one by one. She'd know what was being done to her beautiful young body before she expired. She'd witness her own desecration.

On the way home, The Body stopped at a phone booth set away from a gas station and dialed Karl's number.

~ * ~

Karl jerked up the phone on the second ring before the answering machine could engage. "Yeah?" He was dripping water, just out of the shower and not yet dried off. The towel hung from his free hand and he saw that his wet footprints looked dark gray against the carpet leading from the bath.

"I'm going to kill you," a voice said.

Karl pressed the receiver hard against his ear. "Who is this? You're not going to kill anybody. You're a coward, a slithering, snake-bellied coward and I'm not afraid of you."

"The pieces of that body they found?"

The voice was muffled and of indeterminable gender. Karl wouldn't have made out the words had he not been concentrating and listening carefully. Now he bit down on his lip at the mention of the crime that was all over the news. He knew, knew suddenly, what the caller was going to say and it made his legs rubbery so that he had to collapse onto the side of the bed. He pressed the receiver so hard to his head that it hurt.

"What are you talking about?" he whispered.

"You know what I'm talking about. The arms and legs, the torso. They don't know who it is. But we know, don't we? It was that lying, bigmouth bitch Marilyn. She told you about the bomb. You had it removed."

There was a pause and Karl could hear the caller breathing.

"You can't stop me now. You're a dead man."

Before Karl could say anything, the call was disconnected. He sat naked, bewildered and grieving, droplets of water from his hair sliding down his forehead and the back of his neck, chilling him.

Marilyn had been killed because of him, because she'd tried to save him. Oh God in heaven. Oh dear God. Because of him. The foul evil that had been aimed at him had found another target for just a little while and Marilyn had been sacrificed in the furnace of that hatred.

He had to call the police. He had to tell them he knew who those scattered limbs belonged to. He had to let them know there was a killer on the loose. An insane murderer.

'The phone rang again and Karl jerked up the receiver.

"I forgot to tell you something."

“You . . . !”

"You call the cops? That's what you were just thinking, isn't it? You call the cops, though, and I make you a promise. Another old girlfriend loses her head over you."

'The cackling laughter rung in Karl's ears long after the caller had hung up and the dial tone buzzed monotonously. Karl sat with the receiver lying in his lap and he could still hear the sexless, maniacal laughter. It was so macabre it could have been coming from an open, windswept grave on a black November night.

39

"O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven! Keep me in temper. I would not be mad."

William Shakespeare, King Lear

Cambridge Hill was a slob. Lived in his own shit. Disgusting. With his money he could have hired two-dozen domestics, but it looked like he only had someone come in occasionally. That occasion had not been recent.

The Body winced with distaste while maneuvering the piled and scabbed dishes in the kitchen, noted the overflowing ashtrays and scattered newspapers in the living room that was the size of a ballpark, swore at the stacks of unopened bills and invitations and junk mail piled all over the small eighteenth-century teakwood desk in what appeared to be Cam's ruined bedroom. Covers hung from the mattress to the floor. Discarded clothes were everywhere, covering every surface of furniture, dirty damp towels stood wadded and mountainous just outside the bathroom door.

Where would the script be? Under this stack of mail? No green cover in sight. Where—hell—where would he have put any extra copies?

He might have them in his office at the studio.

Getting in there would take so much effort. Might not be able to do it. Guarded too well, too much security.

Goddamn it, the script had to be here somewhere.

The Body toppled the stacks of mail. Envelopes fluttered to the floor and behind the desk. In the four drawers there was more mail, some of it opened, some not. Pencils, pens, paper clips, rubber bands, stamps.

No script.

The Body moved from the bedroom after peeking into the bathroom. The terrible mess in there made The Body's nose wrinkle. It smelled like mildew overlaid with men's cologne. Stunk worse than an old whorehouse. He must never wash his socks. There was a mountain of them all black, as tall as the damp towels. He probably bought new socks every week. Perhaps every couple of months he threw out the old stinking ones.

What a fucking pig.

It was in the library-study that the script was unearthed. This was no gentleman's library, no alphabetically arranged system of books in beautifully wrought wood shelves. Much handled and tattered paperbacks were squashed between hardbacks, magazines sprawled from shelf edges and over the floor, textbooks with broken spines were tilted precariously against vases full of dead flower arrangements and there were scripts literally everywhere. Stacked on the seats of chairs, spread three deep over a reading table in the center of the room, lying on the shelves, fallen open on top of magazines.

How did Cam ever find any damn thing in this chaos? He lived like a mad mystic. The Body imagined him going from one interest to another in the room, moving swiftly between an open encyclopedia to a magazine on a shelf to some scene in one of the myriad bent and littered scripts that sparkled with Post-it notes in three violently fluorescent colors.

Pure and Uncut had been bound in metallic green covers. The Body searched for twenty minutes amid the paper rubble before finding a copy beneath a weighty tome on criminal behavior.

Snatching it up, The Body grinned and thought if anyone were watching, he would think that grin malign. Got it. Got the plan and no one could take it away. No one would even know. Cam obviously hadn't looked at this particular copy of the script for ages. He had his own personal copies at the office, no doubt. This might have been an early working copy.

Now to get out of this place before Cam showed up. Get out where there was fresh air to clean away the stink of a life that obviously thrived in this massive disorder.