Frenzy (23 page)

"Rita. What a nice surprise. I just never expected to see you here."

"I'm not the receptionist. I usually work back there," she said, gesturing vaguely toward another area, "but Terry had to take her child to the doctor so I'm filling in. When you called I started to say something but it took a minute to sink in that it was you. I've had so many of the local police and reporters talk to me that . . . And what are you doing back in St.
Louis
anyway?"

"I'm working on some gang homicides."

"I saw your name in the papers once. Some investigation where you were in the headlines, and I wasn't surprised. I knew you were going to be famous. You were so dedicated."

"Remember the DA's office?" They both laughed. "That was a fun place," he said, and she sneered and puckered her lovely mouth.

"Yeah. Real fun. I got out of there not long after you left St. Louis."

"You married the big lawyer. That guy you were dating when we knew each other, Haubrich."

"Yep," she admitted. "Good memory."

"His name's something like Don?"

"Winslow. Winslow Haubrich."

"God. That's right. Winslow. Good ole Winslow," he said without conviction. "How is old Winslow?"

"I haven't seen old Winslow for a while, I'm pleased to report. We're divorced."

"Oh. Sorry," he said with even less conviction.

"You still married?"

"Not for a long time," he said, shaking his head. "Well," he sighed, having to force his mind back on the case at hand, "this is great to see you. What a nice surprise." He meant it.

"It's nice to see you too. You really haven't changed a bit." She smiled and he loved it.

"You either." He thought she was a lot better-looking since the last time he'd seen her — but that was years ago. Maybe he hadn't been quite as horny back then. He would never have recognized her in a crowd and he realized immediately it was her hairdo and clothing and not her face. She'd aged beautifully. "Excuse me — just a second." He walked across to a water fountain.

"Sure." He took the Tylenol and walked back to the desk.

"We might get interrupted," she told him, "but we can go ahead and talk if you want to."

"Sure, okay. Let me just get my notes here. What can you tell me about the Laclede Landing shooting? "

"It's just like I said to the other guys, which I know you have in your files and all. I wish I could help but I really didn't get more than just a glance at them. It all happened so quickly. I heard the noise and the man hit me almost at the same time. I just saw a car. It was a car with either two or three men in it. I know I saw a gun out the right-side window in the front seat and I just have an impression of a — a shotgun, I think it was — and I can't be sure if somebody was in the backseat or not. It was all so fast."

"You got a look at the car?"

"Not really. I just have that impression. Of a gun out of a window and the firing. I couldn't even say it was a dark color car for sure. I just . . . Well, the shots hit that man and he hit me as he fell and I went into the wall and it was all over in just a second. I was getting up, trying to get up. It was kind of like if you had real bad whiplash in a car accident or something. I heard all the screaming and there was a lot of blood. I saw the men who had been shot then. And people were all crouched down and it was so frightening — I don't know —"

"That's fine. I just thought perhaps we could talk. Sometimes if you think back you can remember some little detail you might have overlooked. The appearance of the man with the gun, for example. You don't remember anything about his face?"

"I couldn't tell you if he had a beard, what nationality, nothing. I just didn't retain anything about him. Just that short shotgun sticking out the window as he fired again and how loud it was. It was enough to scare you to death. I'd never been through anything like it in my life."

"You said shotgun the first time, then short shotgun. What kind of a short shotgun? What do you mean?"

"Oh, like you see in the movies. Sawed off, I guess. It was a short gun. Not a pistol. It had one barrel, not two like some of my dad's guns. I remember this gun, oh, I do recall seeing a hand move on the gun like it was cocking it or whatever you call it. That's when I got hit, as the second shot was fired and the man got hit next to me on the sidewalk."

"Rita, I noticed in the reports you had a severe injury. Obviously you seem to be fine now." So fine, in fact.

"Yes." She smiled. "I was pretty lucky. It was weird. I thought for a day or two I was going to be in some trouble. The doctor was talking about the possibility of surgery on a disc, and I was getting kind of worried. It was very painful, like a pinched-nerve thing back here." She gestured toward the back of her neck, a move that rearranged her clothing in a most attractive way, and Eichord fought to look impassive and official as she continued telling him about X rays, and how it was better the next day, and how she was okay now.

She was warm, outgoing, genuine, sunny, affectionate-appearing, and yes, very sexy. And she was someone pleasant in a day of unpleasantness and he just stood there drinking her in. God. Rita Paul. Who'd a-thunk it. Her cheerfulness and warmth, and yes, her sexiness chipped away at his official reserve. She finally broke his icy police professionalism down but it hadn't been easy.

It had taken her a good twenty or thirty seconds of conversation. He felt like silly putty.

It wasn't only the fact that she was dynamite-looking. It was also the fact that the day was half over and he hadn't had lunch. It was the fact that this was as good as he was going to feel the rest of the day. And, too, let's be fair. It was the fact that she was DYNAMITE-LOOKING! All right. Wow! Ummm. Yes. He could no more walk away from Rita than the man in the moon could turn into cheese.

"Let's get to the bottom of this," he said in his most Sherlockian tones, saying it just to be saying something funny, then as the words came out he winced at the hidden double entendre, and she laughed sweetly, and . . . oh, shucks. The rest of the day just faded into a hazy memory, when he looked back at it. The fact that he'd walked into the office of someone who was a witness to a crime scene and ended up asking her out for coffee was merely — oh, what would you call it? — a social courtesy. Public relations. Just being friendly. Let's have a cup and talk about it. That kind of thing. A good with-it police representative wants to have cordial relations with the public as much as he possibly can, right? And Jack DESPERATELY wanted to have relations with Rita Haubrich.

What's the matter with me? he remembered thinking to himself, knowing full well the answer as a timeless Hawaiian malady coursed through his veins. Looking back on the fuzzy day all he could really recollect was that he'd had a marvelous time with this colossal-looking lady from out of their mutual past and that it hadn't turned out to be such a bad day, after all.

By the time he ended up back at Twelfth and dark it was late midday and time to do serious policework. This is why there was a federally funded Task Force sitting there throbbing, humming, purring away with its network of interfaced computer linkages. This is why the most sophisticated forensic scientists and advanced criminologists in the world called McTuff the "greatest contemporary aid to law enforcement." This is why the combined brainpower of a great metropolitan law-enforcement agency would reach out for help. It all came down to one man. The finest detective of the century.

Genius is an abused word, he thought, but perhaps it does apply in this case. The genius crime crusher of all time. Thank GOD that these people had the wisdom and the courage to reach out for Jack Eichord to help them solve these puzzling homicides.

Here is what they got that afternoon for their money. Okay, first off — unless you really have a comprehensive understanding of vector analysis, the calculus of complex mechanistic variables, the ellipsoidal harmonics of heterogeneous configurations, hypergeometric functions and orthogonal para-nomials — in other words, just your basic genius stuff — this won't seem like much to you.

First, Jack drew an enormous letter
A
that filled a sheet of white paper with its symmetry, and with a felt-tipped pen made it look as if it had been carved from wood, complete with knot holes and dents and gouges, and then he gave it dimension and then he shadowed in the perspective.

Next — and this was the brilliant part — he carefully printed out the names of everyone he'd come in contact with today whose first or last named ended in a letter
A.
Sorg
A,
Rikla he hadn't met but he'd thought a lot about so he printed Rikl
A,
Rita he printed with an especially neat
A:
Rit
A,
printing the names so they'd sit next to each other beside the giant
A
which would then be the last letter of their names, you see. This is his "Big A Doodle," which took up a good ten to fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, genius that he was, he was able to listen intently to the whispered conversation around him.

He learned that the Cards were three and oh on the season, Dr. Watson, and had dropped thirteen of their last fifteen games counting regular season play. That everybody on the Cardinal bench hates Dallas. That two detectives named T. J. Monahan and Pat Skully had either a friend or colleague named Art Castor who told disgustingly gross jokes. That it was going to rain tonight. That the tomatoes were all gone.

This so inspired Eichord that he took his felt-tipped pen and began an "Art Castor Doodle." He was pleased with the intricacy of it: an ornate series of interconnected squigglies that surrounded a twenty-word transposition of the name "Art Castor," and — here's the wonderful part — made contextual sense. The sentence that comprised the doodle read "Art Castor cast a rat to act as Castro," and "to cast Coast actors to co-star as Croats to roast Astro Astor." He felt a surge of unbridled excitement as it occurred to him he might add a phrase "to tar or rot a Tarot tart, to start to trot," which would add a dozen more words that could give him another fifteen minutes of doodling, when a voice behind him said. "I'm certainly glad we got McTuff's heavy hitter on this bitch. Now that I see the caliber of brilliant detective work we can expect," followed by maniacal laughter.

Eichord turned and a huge man towering behind him was laughing.

"Bud Leech, Intelligence." He laughed. "Gladaseeya."

"God, I hope so," Jack said, laughing with him. Two friendly faces in one day, it was almost too much luck for one afternoon. Leech was more like the cops Eichord was used to, and they went downstairs and had coffee, Eichord beginning to slosh when he walked, and talked some about the case and the peculiarities of the city.

Jack learned what it was. The unit had been burned recently in a citywide scandal involving the mob and two of the coppers who had been caught on the take. Everybody had figured him for a natural shoe-fly. They assumed the McTuff thing was a setup by the sneaky assholes in Internal Affairs Division.

And Bud Leech told him a lot more as the day wore on. He learned about how the mob had penetrated the highest levels of the force here, how their tentacles stretched out into the court system and into the senior strata of government. Facts to reaffirm Eichord's feeling that St. Louis was more than it appeared. He was beginning to at least see some of the pieces of the puzzle, but the problem was what names to ascribe to them.

Law-abiding or lawless, victims or victimizers, as always in what laughingly gets called real life, nothing much is pure black or white. Reality appears in shades. Degrees. And there was an added layer of complexity here. Eichord suspected they were dealing with something more than warring mob factions.

He played Las Vegas style. When you're cold, you fold; when you're hot, you shoot your shot. He phoned Rita Haubrich, getting her voice on the first ring, and wondered if she'd help a newcomer find his way around the town a little this weekend and he could remember later thinking about all the red hair and those long legs and that mouth and getting in the car and he's singing softly about how the pale moon didn't excite him and trying not to move his lips, thinking about this great-looking redhead when the first October raindrops started splashing down on his windshield.

In Spain's motel room he had a small box with the printed legend
Greta Griswold.
The box contained a man's brown hairpiece, a pair of ordinary rectangular-framed glasses with clear lenses, a pipe and pipe tobacco, and other small items that he used to pull a certain persona together. This was the persona who, under yet another alias, owned the fictitious company Direct Import Enterprises. And it was behind this mask and assumed character that Spain went whenever he had personal contact with one Greta Griswold, who was his cutout gofer, hence the name on the box.

Thanks to her efforts he'd be in the house soon. He was already working on plans for the Interrogation Room, which would add a necessary dimension of security to what he was about to do. The higher up in the organization his revenge took him, the greater the hazards would be to him personally, and this was one of the reasons for a safe, sanitized, soundproofed place where he could linger with his targets, take his time with them, take as long as he liked, where their screams would not draw unwanted attention. Where the blood could flow.