Defense for the Devil (40 page)

“You planning to be up a bit longer?” Frank asked Barbara in the living room. Alan was in the dinette with his book.

“Awhile,” she said. “I’m working on my closing argument. Maybe I’ll even get a draft of it down. What about you?”

“What I aim to do is take a very long bath, snuggle with a book for half an hour, and then sleep. Sounds pretty good, don’t you think?”

She grinned and nodded, then stood up and walked to the hall.

“I’ll tell Alan he might as well come share the fire with the monsters; I’ll be up in the office.” Both golden cats were stretched out full-length as close as they could get to the fire without singeing their fur. In the corner the Christmas tree glowed and sparkled, untouched this year, every ornament in place. She almost regretted how fleeting childhood was for cats. Well, Alan could enjoy the fire and tree; she would leave the lights on it for him. She had taken only a few steps when the doorbell rang, long and piercing, as if someone was holding a finger on the bell. She turned toward the door; Bailey? Had he forgotten something? Then, magically, Alan was passing her. He motioned her back to the living room, and Frank grabbed her arm. Alan went to the front door, looked out the peephole, then came to them, just inside the living room doorway.

“Trassi,” he said.

“Alone?” Frank asked.

“Didn’t see anyone else, but there’s shrubbery out there.”

“Let’s turn on the floodlights,” Frank said, walking into the hallway. “Ask him what he wants; I’ll do the lights.”

Alan nodded and returned to the door. “Mr. Trassi, it’s pretty late. Won’t this keep until morning?”

Frank flipped the switch for the outdoor lights, and as if on signal, gunfire erupted. Five, six shots, as loud as cannons. The cats streaked past Barbara, up the stairs. She was immobilized, and Frank stood with his hand on the light switch, as motionless as she was. Alan now had a gun in his own hand, and he was opening the front door.

“Just back up,” he snapped. “Palmer, put the gun on the step, then back up, or I’ll shoot you. Now!”

“Call nine-one-one,” Frank said to Barbara, and he hurried toward the door. She ran to the kitchen phone and made the call.

“Tell them two men are down, maybe three,” Frank yelled as she spoke into the phone. “We need an ambulance.”

The dispatcher wanted her to stay on the line, to keep talking, but she put the phone on the stand, and ran to the door. Trassi was leaning into the front of the house, with Alan patting him down, holding his gun very steady as he did. He motioned Trassi away and told Palmer to walk very slowly toward the house. Then Barbara saw two men lying in the rain, with blood all around them both. Frank was kneeling by one of them; he stood up, walked the few steps to the other one and did the same thing, knelt down, felt for a pulse.

“One of them might still be alive,” he said. “Maybe a couple of blankets.”

She ran to get the blankets. Stael and Ulrich, she thought, Palmer had killed Stael and Ulrich. He had delivered them to her doorstep, just as he said he would. Fighting hysteria, she groped in the linen closet for blankets, then hurried back to the front porch. Frank covered the two men on the ground.

“Do you suppose we could get inside out of the rain?” Palmer asked then. “I’m afraid Mr. Trassi is exhibiting signs of shock.”

Trassi was shaking violently. His skin was blue-white, even his lips.

“Are they clean?” Frank asked. Alan said yes. “Get inside,” Frank snapped to Palmer. Already, the wail of a siren was all around, the noise reverberating against the low clouds. Up and down the street, lights had come on; people had come to doorways, some all the way out to the street, huddling under umbrellas. “We’ll go in, too,” Frank said. “You okay out here?”

Alan said sure, and leaned against the house on the porch, out of the rain. Barbara thought irrelevantly how different he looked, no longer the friendly kid delivering a pizza, or one of the youths riding a bike aimlessly around. He looked like a man Bailey would hire and trust to do his job. His gun had vanished again.

Inside, Frank said, “You want to put on some coffee? This might take a while.” He ushered Trassi and Palmer into the living room, where they drew near the fire, both of them soaked. Frank was only slightly less wet. She hurried to the kitchen to make coffee, saw the phone again, and hung it up. The siren sounded as if the ambulance or police car, or both, had turned the corner of their street.

After the initial confusion of uniformed officers asking questions, of medics whisking both men away to the hospital, Lieutenant Lester Cookson arrived with two plainclothes detectives and asked what was going on. Without hesitation, Palmer said, “I shot them both.”

Trassi was huddled in a chair with a blanket around him, still shaking, but less violently now. His color was better, more white than blue; he looked terrified. Palmer was seated comfortably in another chair close to the fire. His clothes were steaming; he had turned down Frank’s offer of a blanket.

“We’d better go to the station and let you make a statement,” Lieutenant Cookson said.

“I prefer to explain in front of Ms. Holloway and Mr. Holloway,” Palmer said coolly. “They should know what happened on their doorstep, don’t you think?”

Just then Bailey arrived, and after a little argument between Frank and Cookson, he was admitted.

“Why not?” Palmer said. “The more the merrier.” He watched one of the detectives open a laptop computer, and he shrugged. “Tell me if I speak too fast. Earlier this evening Mr. Trassi and I had dinner together. Mr. Trassi is my attorney, and it was a business meeting and meal. Afterward, we met Ms. Fredericks, who is a private investigator in my employ. The three of us boarded an elevator together to return to our rooms, but we were stopped on the second floor. Two men boarded; they grabbed Mr. Trassi’s arms and dragged him off the elevator, and were hustling him toward the stairs when the doors closed, and we began ascending again. They were Stael and Ulrich, both of whom I employ now and then, and, frankly, I was quite alarmed. I told Ms. Fredericks to lend me her gun, a forty-four I believe it is, and at the next floor I left the elevator and ran down the stairs, hoping to catch up with the kidnappers. I could hear them in the stairwell, and I followed them to the lower-level parking garage, where I glimpsed all three of them on the opposite side of the area. They got into a car, and I got into my own car, and was close enough to catch up with them at the street exit. I followed after them out into the street, quite worried, and not knowing what other course to take, except to keep them in sight until they stopped somewhere, and then confront them.”

He spread his hands in a gesture that suggested helplessness. “I had no idea of their intentions, of course, nor any idea where they might be going or what was being said in their car, and the rain was very hard. It was difficult just keeping them in sight.”

He might have been describing a jaunt to the beach, he was so self-assured and at ease. Watching him, Barbara again felt the chill that his presence had brought on before. His voice was almost hypnotic in its rhythmic cadences.

“When they turned into this street, I didn’t know where we were,” he continued. “I saw a car pull out of the driveway at this house, and they pulled in. I stopped at the curb down a way and came after them on foot. Stael and Ulrich shoved poor Mr. Trassi to the door, and they both stepped behind bushes; Stael had a gun in his hand, and that’s when it occurred to me that this could be the Holloway residence.”

He frowned and said with an air of apology, “I’m afraid it gets a little confusing now. I was close enough to hear Stael say something like, As soon as the door opens, we rush them. No one’s going to walk away. I’m not repeating his words verbatim; he was using very vulgar language and I see no point in echoing his exact words; however, that was what he meant. My worst fears were confirmed.” He looked at Trassi and shook his head. “He was quite helpless. After all, Stael was holding a gun on him.

“My next move was to step forward and call out, ‘Bud, for the love of God, stop this. Put that gun away and get out of here before someone gets killed.’ Just as I spoke, many lights came on, and the two events, my voice coming from behind him, as well as sudden lights all around, made him panic, I’m afraid. He spun around and started shooting. I shot back. And Ulrich had drawn his gun from his pocket, and I shot him also. Perhaps unnecessarily, but at the moment it was quite a reflexive action,” he added. A very slight smile curved his lips for a moment, then he added, “Mr. Trassi did the only sensible thing. He threw himself flat on the ground when the shooting started.”

He was going to get away with it, Barbara thought then. Trassi would back him up, and Palmer would come out a hero who had saved the lives of her and her father, and Alan. He looked at her, and she could almost hear him say, “I delivered them right to your door.”

Trassi added a few details: Stael and Ulrich had meant to rush the door as soon as it opened. They knew there was a security system, and it had to be opened from inside. They both had silencers on their guns, and they would have killed him, too. They wouldn’t have left a witness. In a high-pitched and tremulous voice he confirmed Palmer’s story. He didn’t look at Palmer once.

It wasn’t long after that when the lieutenant said, “Thank you, Mr. Palmer. I still have to ask you and Mr. Trassi to come downtown with us, but it shouldn’t take long.”

“I understand,” Palmer said. “I shall be of any assistance possible, of course. I wonder if it would be permitted to go back to the hotel long enough to change clothes first? I did get rather wet, you know, and poor Mr. Trassi must be even wetter, and neither of us in heavy coats. I am reluctant to leave the warmth of the fire.”

Cookson spoke with two officers and they left with Palmer and Trassi. At the doorway Palmer turned back toward Barbara and ducked his head in a little bow. “I so regret such unpleasantness outside your door. I apologize.” She did not say a word.

After they were gone, Cookson said to Frank, “We have a crime-scene tape up, and a car will be parked out front overnight. A television crew is out there now and it’s going to get worse. I’d like to keep them off the property until we’ve had a chance to look around in daylight.”

With everyone gone, the house secured again, Frank said bitterly, “Christ on a mountain! Rush the door, shoot everyone in the house! Lunatics!”

“They weren’t going to get in,” Alan said. “No way was I going to open that door. I meant to give Bailey a call and have him drive back over.”

“That’s how we set it up,” Bailey said. “Once the security system goes on, no outsider gets in unless he’s escorted by me or one of my guys.”

“That wasn’t the plan, anyway,” Barbara said. “The plan worked exactly the way Palmer arranged it. He set them up and then killed them. He delivered them to me. That’s his business, special deliveries. Guaranteed.” She became aware of Frank’s appraising gaze and stopped.

Alan nodded in agreement. “By the time I got the system off and the door open, Palmer was at Stael’s side. I think he put his hand over Stael’s on the gun and fired twice. I heard two more pops from the silenced gun after Palmer stopped shooting.”

Bailey and Alan went to check out the house then, to make certain nothing had been opened during the confusion, and Frank put his arm about Barbara’s shoulders in the living room.

“You going to be okay the rest of the night?”

“Sure,” she said. “Safest night so far with a cop car parked out front.”

Later, wide awake in bed, she was remembering John’s bitter words:
How many more bodies do we get to count?
Thelma Wygood, the other Palmer man in Miami, Belmont in New Orleans, Mitch, Gilmore, now Stael and Ulrich. In spite of the warmth of the room, the warmth of her blankets, she couldn’t stop shivering.

She never had believed in evil as a thing in itself. People did evil things, usually for understandable reasons, money or power to gain possession of what they coveted, or keep what they possessed, to exact revenge….

But evil infects some people, she thought, it gets in the system and stays like a virus that is never killed, that might lie undetected for years and then surface again, a virus that is so contagious that those who have even casual contact with the carrier are endangered; no one is safe in its presence, and it spreads like a plague.

Any accommodation strengthened evil, a wink, a nod, a hurried glance away, a minor deal, a favor accepted or returned, a denial of word or act, the slightest compromise—they all added to its power, because such evil was very aware of its ability to ensnare, and finally enslave, those who accepted it. Those it used might be unthinking, unaware whose cause they served, but evil was never unaware; it used its tools when it needed them, discarded them when their usefulness ended, and never without full awareness.

She had met evil for the first time, she realized, and she was afraid of it. She was afraid of Palmer, and he knew her fear.

In her mind she heard his softly spoken words, almost purring,
I don’t think we’re through yet, Ms. Holloway.

He had offered her a deal, to deliver Stael and Ulrich, and he had carried out his part even though she had said no. But she had dealt with him before, over the money for Maggie and the return of the program. They were not through yet.

38

Frank looked terrible
and the next morning, drawn and old, as if he had not slept, and she looked like death itself, but they reassured each other that they were fine, just fine.

“Things are happening,” he said at the table. “Story’s out, of course, but no names attached. Ulrich was DOA, Stael died an hour later in the operating room. The usual, names withheld pending notification of next of kin. Jane wants us in chambers when we arrive in court. I expect the good judge is a bit upset, and no doubt Gramm and Roxbury are, too. The press is out there clamoring, as expected. Palmer’s given a couple of interviews, modestly downplaying his part in saving our lives. Let’s see, what else?”