i a72d981dc0406879 (39 page)

To my absolute horror, my friend and colleague, Mr. Straight
Arrow, the only innocent policeman in a morass of corruption (or
such had been his reputation], turned his gun on
me
¹
.

"Hey!" I protested. "Wish? That's not funny."

"Not meant to be," he said grimly. "We're not going anywhere.
You're coming inside that house with me, right now. You wanted to
see Dr. Van Zant, and he told me to watch you, not to let you out
of my sight, and to shoot you if I had to, to keep you from doing
anything foolish."

Wish had walked right up to me as he spoke, and now we stood
only about a foot apart, with the long barrel of that Colt grazing
my breasts. I looked him in the eyes. "My friend, what has he done
to you? Did he hypnotize you, is that it? Against your will? But I
heard that can't be done, you can't hypnotize someone against their
will."

A cultured voice came from somewhere in the vicinity of my right
shoulder, saying, "That is not so. I can hypnotize anybody. Even
you, Fremont Jones."

Turning my head, I saw Van Zant at the top of the porch steps
before one of the beige houses. Wish had a desperate, trapped
expression on his face. "Indigo?" he said in a pathetic voice.

Van Zant sniggered. "Your precious Indigo is in here. Bring Miss
Jones with you and come on inside. We must offer her the same
hospitality we have given Indigo, mustn't we?"

"Go, Fremont, move. He means it," Wish said under his breath,
and for a moment I thought he was only pretending to be under the
influence of William Van Zant. I fancied that Wish would suddenly
gather himself together and become a hero of legendary proportions.
This was because I couldn't quite see what I was going to do, how I
was going to get out of this alone.

But then I got a good look at Wish Stephenson's eyes, and it was
like looking in at somebody else, a non-Wish, looking out from
inside his head. Decidedly an eerie sensation. "I'm going, I'm
going," I croaked, my voice breaking with strain.

"Where is she?" Wish demanded as soon as we'd crossed the
threshold into the modest house. "I must see her!"

"In a moment," said Van Zant. "First we should talk to your
friend Fremont and find out what she knows."

"I know a good deal more than you probably think I do," I said,
on the theory that the best defense is a good offense. One learns
these things playing field hockey at Wellesley; field hockey is
much more of a blood sport than one might think, especially as
played by women when there are no men around to interfere. But I
digress. Returning to the point, I went on: "For example, I suggest
that you not consider doing anything rash to my person, because I
have in my possession-though not
on
my aforementioned
person-certain letters you wrote to Abigail Locke."

"You
have them? I don't believe it. Move, go on down the
hall, back that way, to the kitchen. Mr. Stephenson, for God's sake
do try not to be so clumsy!"

Wish had tripped over a clothes tree and sent it crashing to the
floor. He did not, however, lose control of his gun-not even for a
minute; and the gun was still trained on me, not on William Van
Zant. I had no choice but to keep moving in the direction of the
kitchen.

"Yes, indeed, I do have your letters," I said, deliberately
provocative. "You must not have looked very hard. You gave up too
soon. What happened, was killing Abigail more difficult than you'd
thought it would be? Did you lose heart? Or is it just that your
physical condition is poor and so you ran out of energy? Which is
it, Dr. Van Zant?"

"There is nothing wrong with my physical condition," he said
defensively, "and furthermore I think you're lying. There was
nothing resembling a packet of letters in that whole house. I
looked, I virtually combed through every inch of it, and I didn't
have to rush. She was dead, she couldn't bother me, could she? And
that dandy of hers, that hanger-on, Mr. Charming and Debonair
Rule-well, he was off somewhere, wasn't he?"

"So," I said, pausing in the doorway to the kitchen and turning
around, "you admit you killed Abigail Locke."

"Of course I admit it. She was a fraud, a charlatan, and a
whore, who didn't deserve to live."

"Ah," I said, as if in agreement. And then I went into the
kitchen, which was a mistake. A big mistake. A little cry escaped
me when I saw what must once have been Indigo Swann, and that cry
brought Wish Stephenson, and then all hell broke loose.

He had tortured her. She was indeed a female, tall, apparently
accustomed to wear men's clothes. That she was female was evident
from her bare and mutilated breasts, and the clothes she partially
wore were trousers, undone; a shirt hanging open, with the buttons
all ripped off; a jacket that matched the trousers . . . except for
the patches that were soaked in blood. He had tortured her. She was
seated in a contraption like a very high-backed chair, with a vise
arrangement to hold one's head in place. I quickly surmised that
this was so that the person in the chair would be forced to look
into Van Zant's eyes.

Poor Indigo Swann had no eyes anymore. They had been burnt out.
And her nipples had been burnt off, and her navel; and then she had
been strangled with a four-in-hand tie, probably the very tie she
had been wearing with that very nicely cut man's suit. As I looked
at her I knew I would never, myself, dress as a man again. I'd
never be able to, because from now ever after, when I saw a woman
dressed in male clothing, I would think of Indigo.

"She had to be punished," Van Zant said to Wish Stephenson. "She
would not tell me what I wanted to know, even under hypnosis. She
was stubborn, wicked, disobedient."

Poor Wish had turned white as a ghost. His eyes, which, as I
previously mentioned, were bloodshot, burned hot as the real coals
that had put out the eyes of Indigo Swann.

"So," Van Zant said, in that ever so superior voice of his,
"you, Mr. Stephenson, will have to tell me everything she knew.
Because she did tell
you
everything, I know she did. You
will cooperate because you were a much better hypnotic subject than
she was. You will go into trance, deeper and deeper, until you tell
me everything I need to know."

As Van Zant said this, Wish began to sway on his feet. In spite
of his anger, which I could feel from many feet away, Wish's
eyelids drooped until they were half closed.

"Deeper and deeper," Van Zant said. "Now, you will give me the
gun. That's right. . . ."

But Wish did not give Van Zant the gun. He was not in deep
trance, as anyone who knew him well could have told you. He was
instead almost paralyzed by grief and rage, unable to move and
scarcely able to speak.

Van Zant had no weapon; I still had my walking stick in my right
hand. Like many a man of science and intellect, William Van Zant
was arrogant-and I intended to exploit that weakness to my
advantage. In one quick, practiced motion I unsheathed my blade,
and I used it to keep the villain at a distance while I walked over
to Wish and simply said quietly, "Wish, give me the gun." He
did.

I ordered Van Zant, "Sit down at this table and stay there, or
I'll blow your sleek, mean little head off with this revolver, and
when I've done that I'll slash you to ribbons to make up for what
you did to my mattress and pillows. That
was
you, I
presume?"

Van Zant, obediently taking a chair, nodded yes. Like all
persons of his type, if you took away his cherished but superficial
trappings of power, he crumpled. Such men are not built to stand
and fight, they are essentially cowards.

I asked Wish if he were up to going after the police and he said
he was, that the shock of seeing what Van Zant had done to Indigo
had broken through the hypnotic suggestions the psychologist had
planted in his mind. "I'm sorry, Fremont," he said miserably.

"Don't be sorry, just go for help," I said.

"Let me cover her first," Wish said miserably, nodding toward
the mutilated body of Indigo.

"Were you very fond of her, Wish?" I whispered.

He nodded. "I loved her. I never loved a woman until Indigo, not
really. I only knew her for"-he hung his head abjectly-"less than
three weeks."

I made a decision. "Cover her, then, even though the police
won't like it. I'll say I told you to, I'll take the blame."

Wish covered Indigo, or Ngaio, I never did know which was her
real name, with a bedspread he brought from upstairs. Then he left,
and while he was bringing back the police, I got to ask my own
questions of William Van Zant.

"You were in love with Abigail Locke, and she rejected you," I
began.

Van Zant just sneered and preened a bit. He could see his image
in the glass of the back door.

"You vowed to have revenge on her. But why kill her?"

"Because, as I keep telling you, she deserved to die. All those
women do. Eventually I'd have killed them all. Next question."

"And you don't mind if everybody knows you killed Abigail Locke
and Ingrid Swann."

"I'll deny it in court, mind you."

I ignored that. "But poor Indigo-what did she ever do to
you?"

"She knew about my business dealings, which your friend and
colleague Mr. Stephenson also found out. A very persistent fellow,
Mr. Stephenson. He dogged me for weeks, always just a step behind
me, before I was able to find out who he was. All these little
intertwined relationships-ha-ha"-he laughed in a most unpleasant
manner-"it's positively incestuous! You work with Stephenson,
Indigo is the sister of another medium who had to die, and the two
of them-Stephenson and Indigo-between them could destroy everything
I've done to make myself a wealthy man so that I could leave this
psychologist sham behind me forever."

"These things you've done to make yourself wealthy-they'd be
illegal, one presumes."

"One presumes correctly. Haven't you guessed? Hasn't your
colleague hinted? Don't you have any imagination, Fremont
Jones?"

"Oh, I can guess, all right. It's a wonder you can sleep at
night."

AS DIFFICULT as it was to believe, by lunchtime the police had
arrested William Van Zant, who was no more a doctor than I am, and
Wish and Michael and Edna-who in the space of a couple of hours had
become a great favorite of Michael's, and vice versa-and I were
having a late lunch around the kitchen table. There was more
interest in talk than in food.

Wish had explained to us how for weeks he had followed the
progress of someone who was opening and emptying graves in
forgotten little graveyards that dotted the Richmond District, then
claiming the plots as newly cleared land and selling it for
development. That someone turned out to be William Van Zant, and
the person who had first identified him had been none other than
Indigo Swann-who either had or had not been Ingrid's real sister.
Now we would never know; I certainly didn't intend to make any
effort to find out, because Wish had been in love with Indigo. It
would do him no kindness to find out the truth, if that truth (say,
that the two were lesbian lovers, or worse, incestuous sisters)
were damaging to the image of his love.

"Your testimony and Wish's will put Van Zant in prison and maybe
will hang him for murder," Michael said.

"And what is more important, the J&K Agency will get a lot
of favorable publicity!" I said.

"Yes, you've done well, Fremont." Michael's compliment, his
approval, was what I had been waiting for. "And so have you, Wish,"
he added.

"Maybe," Wish said. He was sunk in gloom.

I was about to suggest that he go home and rest for the
remainder of the day when the little bell on the front door rang
out and a woman's clear, high voice called out, "We're back! We
found it!"

We all looked at each other around the table.

"Emperor Norton's treasure," I explained. "I sent Patrick and
Frances to look for it, following instructions she'd received from
the Emperor himself in automatic writing. I really did it just to
get them out of my hair, I never expected them to
find
anything."

They came into the kitchen hand in hand, Patrick and Frances,
both a bit disheveled, with smudges of dirt here and there, and
smiles so incandescent they could have lit a goodly portion of San
Francisco through the night.

Frances had obviously declared herself permanent spokesman of
this pair, for she burbled on, "We saw you, Fremont, you and Wish,
we were only a couple of blocks away, but then you went and
disappeared into some house."

"Where were you?" I asked.

Frances shrugged, "Who cares?" She looked at Patrick.

He said, ' We were in some cemetery, where half the graves had
been opened and robbed. It was really, really unpleasant and
spooky."

"We weren't there for the graves though, we were there because
of this one particular old tree-"