Fever: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels) (23 page)

I parked between the Krochek house and the one belonging to Rebecca Weaver. The wind bent and swayed limbs in the trees along the canyon rim, and you could hear it thrumming in the telephone wires. It was like a hand on my back as I walked up the front walk to the Weaver house.

When I pressed the doorbell, a few chords of some vaguely familiar song echoed inside. Cute. Like the song
snatches that the cell phone companies used in place of a good old-fashioned ring.

Two minutes, and the door stayed shut.

I let the bell play its tune again. Same result.

Well, hell.

There was a flagstone path that wound through the fronting cactus garden. I went along there onto the Krocheks’ property, following the route Rebecca Weaver had taken the day I’d met her. The front gate was closed but not locked. I went across the inner patio and pushed the bell there. Normal chimes, and as expected, no response.

It took me about fifteen seconds to decide to exercise a certain tacit right accorded me as Mitchell Krochek’s representative. The Krocheks’ spare key was still under the decorative urn at the front wall; I dug it out and used it on the door.

The coolness inside was faintly musty, the way houses get when they haven’t been aired out in a while. All the drapes were closed tight, making it too dim to find my way around without turning on some lights. The telephone and answering machine were in an arched alcove off the formal living room. The blinking light on the machine indicated that there were two messages. The first was from one of the friends Krochek had contacted about his wife, asking if everything was okay; the second was a familiar male voice saying curtly, “Carl Lassiter, Mrs. Krochek. Call me.” That one had come in at 2:45 yesterday afternoon, before my meeting with him.

I went into the kitchen. The dried blood smears were still there on the tile; Krochek had followed my advice on that score, at least. He hadn’t touched anything else in
there, either; the dirty dishes still jammed the sink, giving off the sour odor of decay.

Nothing had changed in the rest of the house, as far as I could tell. The empty Scotch bottle and overflowing ashtray and strewn clothing still cluttered the spare bedroom. The bed in there was unmade, the sheet pulled loose at the bottom corners—testimony to a couple of long, sleepless nights for Krochek before he moved in with Deanne Goldman.

Back to the kitchen and into the laundry room. A quick look around there told me nothing. I turned the deadbolt on the outside door and stepped into the backyard.

The narrow half-moon gouge in the lawn caught my eye again. I got down on one knee to look at it this time. Half-inch or so deep, which meant that it had been made by something heavy; the grass that hadn’t been ground down into the dirt was brown and dead.

Wheelbarrow?

Could be. The width of the furrow was the right size for a barrow tire. And a wheelbarrow was a convenient way to move a body from one point to another. To a car, say, backed into the garage or up close to the garage door.

There was no sign of a wheelbarrow out here, but I thought I remembered seeing one among the other garden implements when I’d looked into the garage last time. I headed over that way. What stopped me before I’d taken a dozen steps was a smell carried on a gust of the cold wind. Rank, noxious—

Rotting meat.

The hair on my neck stood up like quills. When the wind
gusted again, bringing me another whiff, I followed the odor to a fenced-in section between the garage and the gate that led out front. Another gate opened into a narrow enclosure where the garbage cans were kept. Garbage smell, that was all. Except that it was too strong here, too distinct.

I eased the lid up on one of the cans. The stench that poured out was bad enough to make me recoil, start me breathing through my mouth. The can was stuffed with paper-wrapped packages and freezer bags, all of them showing bloodstains. At first glance I thought: God Almighty, he killed her and cut her up. But when I took a closer look, swallowing bile, I saw that it wasn’t human remains the packages and bags contained, but steaks, chops, roasts, hamburger.

The second can was filled with more of the same. Plus brand-name bags of fruit, vegetables, fried potatoes; TV dinners and other kinds of quick meals. The sort of items you buy in the freezer sections of supermarkets.

Discarded and long-thawed frozen goods, all of it.

As if somebody had emptied out a freezer.

I slammed the lid down, backed out of the enclosure, and opened the side door to the garage. Dark, empty, the only odors those of oil and dust. I found a light switch and two rows of hanging fluorescents came on. The wheelbarrow sat against the near side wall, next to a propping of shovels, rakes, and brooms. Its metal interior was scored and dirt-streaked, but there were other, darker stains on the sides. I scratched a fingernail through one of them, held a fleck up for a closer look. Dried blood, all right.

At the far end was a loft supported by beams and heavy chains. Most of the storage space looked to be empty.
Below it, at the back wall, a plywood partition had been erected to create a small separate room. The sound of my steps on the concrete floor seemed loud and hollow as I walked back there, stepped through the doorless opening in the partition.

Storage boxes piled on one side, and on the other, set between the plywood and the back wall, a big floor-model freezer.

I knew what I was going to find even before I opened it. I took a couple of deep breaths before I lifted the lid. Through the icy vapor that wafted up I had a clear look at the dead woman inside.

She had been wedged in there at an awkward angle, knees drawn up, one arm twisted under her and the other down against her abdomen. Her eyes were open, staring; the coating of frost gave them and the death rictus of her mouth an even more repellent look. She wore jeans and a white blouse, the blouse splotched across the chest and stomach with frozen blood. The frost and the blood made it impossible for me to tell what had caused the wound or wounds that had killed her.

All of that was bad enough. But the biggest shock was her identity.

It wasn’t Janice Krochek I was looking at.

It was Rebecca Weaver.

I
lowered the freezer lid, quit the garage, and went back through the house and out the way I’d come in. Following a cold, prickly little hunch now. Nothing lost if it didn’t pan out; another few minutes wouldn’t make any difference to the law or Mitchell Krochek or the dead woman in the freezer.

I crossed the strip of lawn that separated the Krochek property from Rebecca Weaver’s. All three of the homes here had the same general layout. The gate in the narrow fenced area next to the garage, where her garbage cans were kept, was unlocked. So was the second gate that gave access to her backyard. And so was the side door into the garage. I opened that one and looked inside. The car in there was a Pontiac Firebird, low-slung and sporty and either new or close to it.

All right. I went through the yard to the back door: also unlocked. Easy, so far. But if the rest of my hunch proved out, it would stop being easy pretty damn quick.

I eased the door open partway, leaned in to listen. Faint sounds somewhere inside, unidentifiable from here. I stepped through onto a utility porch similar to the Krocheks’, then across the kitchen. The sounds were louder now—a familiar and discordant series of electronic beeps, clangs, and bongs. They stopped abruptly as I passed through the kitchen; I stopped, too. The new silence was heavy and unbroken.

The dining room, formal living room, and family room were empty. I made my way down a hallway that bisected the full width of the house, walking soft. Four doors opened off of it; the last one on the west side was open. I edged forward until I had a clear look inside.

It was like looking into some sort of surreal three-dimensional exhibit. Motionless shapes, shadows, one halo of stationary light, and one bright rectangle of shifting colored images in an otherwise darkened room. And all of it wrapped in a hush that put a strain on my eardrums, tweaked at nerve ends.

Spare bedroom turned into an in-home office—desk, chairs, couch, bookshelves, computer workstation. Blinds drawn, the only illumination coming from a halogen desk lamp and the computer screen. She sat hunched forward in front of the screen, her back to me and her body stiff with tension; the only part of her that moved, now and then, were the fingers of her right hand as they manipulated the mouse. The back of her neck and the ends of her hair were wet with sweat. A half-smoked Newport burned in a full ashtray on her left; ash littered the desk around it and the air was thick with smoke. An empty glass, a bottle of
Scotch, a woman’s wallet, and a scatter of credit cards were on her right. I didn’t need to see the silent monitor to know what was going on.

I went in there, still walking soft and at an angle until I was parallel with the desk and within the range of her vision. She didn’t notice me; she was in a kind of trancelike zone, as if the images on the monitor had hypnotized her.

“Hello, Mrs. Krochek,” I said.

I had to say the words again before they registered. Her head jerked sideways, but even when the brown eyes focused on me, there was no other physical reaction except a tightening of the muscles around her mouth. “Oh, it’s you,” she said with no discernible emotion. As if it was perfectly natural for me to be there. As if I were no more than a small, annoying interruption, like a buzzing fly.

The look of her was chilling. Hair wildly tangled, no makeup, skin sallow and moist, eyes bagged and feverish with excitement. Clothes wrinkled and soiled. Soiled body, too; the room stank of sweat and unwashed flesh mixed with the stale odors of booze and tobacco smoke. If she’d slept at all in the past three-plus days, it had been for no more than a few minutes at a time. If she’d eaten, it hadn’t been enough to dirty more than the two plates and two cups that sat on the low table in front of the couch. Existing the whole time on Scotch and cigarettes and adrenaline.

Her eyes flicked away, drawn magnetically back to the screen. She stared at it for a few seconds, moved the mouse, moved it again. “Shit,” she said then, still without any inflection. “Another loser. I should’ve kept on playing the twenty-line slots, let this damn site cool off a while longer.”

She was playing seven-card stud now, I saw when I moved a little closer. She clicked on the ante for a new hand, or “posted the blind” as it’s called, looked at her hole cards—king of diamonds, ten of clubs—and made a bet: $50. Reckless and foolish, without a pair in the hole.

“I had a hot streak going for a while,” she said, “shooting the pickle and winning two out of three hands. At one time I was ahead fifteen thousand. Can you believe it? Fifteen thousand! I couldn’t lose.”

“But then you did.”

“Yeah. My luck never holds for—Shit!” She’d lost another hand.

“How much are you down now?”

“I don’t know. Twenty K, maybe. It doesn’t matter.”

“No? Why not?”

“Plenty more where that came from.”

“Rebecca Weaver’s money.”

She didn’t deny it; she was still in the fever zone. “I’ll win it back,” she said. “All of it. My luck’s starting to change again. I can
feel
it.”

“Credit cards? Or did you tap into her bank account, too?”

She didn’t answer. Her eyes were fixed on the screen.

“Is that why you killed her? To get your hands on her money?”

“… What?”

“I found her body,” I said. “In the freezer in your garage.”

Nothing until the hand being played was finished and she’d lost again. Then, as she posted the blind for a new one, “I didn’t do it on purpose. It wasn’t my fault.”

“What happened?”

“… What?”

“What happened with Rebecca, Mrs. Krochek?”

“She came over to my house. She said she wanted to see if I was all right but it wasn’t me she was worried about, it was Mitch. She … Yeah, baby, that’s it, that’s it! Wired aces!”

The bet she made on the aces was $250. I didn’t try to talk to her until the hand played out; she wouldn’t have heard me. She lost that one, too—lost another $1200 of Rebecca Weaver’s money on a single hand.

It was the amount of the loss that made me step forward and do what I should have done sooner: flip the switch on the workstation’s power strip. She let out a yell when the screen and the desk lamp went dark. Sudden rage brought her up out of the chair, sent her flying at me with her hands hooked into claws and her nails digging at my eyes. I couldn’t control her; in her fury she had a man’s strength. The sharp nails got in under my guard and opened burning furrows down the left side of my face. I had no choice then but to clip her. It didn’t hurt her much, but it knocked her down and drove the fight out of her. When I was sure that she wasn’t going to come at me again, I hauled her up by the arms and pushed her down on the couch.

She said, dully now, “You son of a bitch.”

There was a ceiling globe; I switched it on. In the stronger light, she made a pathetic, wasted figure slumped down on the cushions. The excitement had gone cold in her eyes. They were bleak, bloodshot, reflecting the light with the same empty glassiness of an animal’s.

I pulled the chair out from the workstation, straddled it
in front of her. My cheek stung like the devil; when I touched the ragged furrows, my fingers came away bloody. I shook out my handkerchief, held it against the wounds. Sometimes it pays to be old-fashioned enough to carry a handkerchief.

“Why did you kill Rebecca Weaver?” I asked her.

“I didn’t mean to.” Her voice wasn’t much louder now than a hoarse whisper. “She made me do it.”

“How did she do that?”

“Real sweet at first, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But then she started ragging on me about hurting Mitch. I told her to shut up, go away, but she wouldn’t. Just kept ragging, calling me names, bitch, gambling slut. You know what she told me then? Take a guess.”

“That she had an affair with your husband six months ago.”