Speak for the Dead (23 page)

Bennett turned off that set of lamps and moved the next forward. Eight stands of horn-shaped bulbs formed a wide circle around the platform. Stiff white paper like some Wager had seen at Tanaka’s studio covered the boards. In the ceiling hung a rectangle of two-by-fours slung on a pulley; more lights aimed down from there. “If you got ideas, man, you should be able to get the dude, right?”

“I don’t have enough for a probable-cause warrant,” said Wager.

“I’m not into what you’re saying.”

“It means I need more evidence before I’ve got grounds for a search warrant.” That wasn’t quite true; officers other than Wager—Ross or Devereaux—could get a warrant because they’d been in homicide long enough to have the court’s trust. And Doyle’s. But Wager didn’t want Ross or Devereaux to get the warrant.

Bennett loosened a clamp and slid a bar of lights halfway down its stand, turned them on, and tightened a flickering bulb. “That sounds weird, man. I mean, if you got a line on the dude, you should be able to bust him.”

“Yeah,” said Wager. “It should be that way.”

The door clattered open and a lithe brunette panted in lugging a small suitcase and a plastic clothes bag. “Phil! I’m sorry I’m late! That damned car wouldn’t start again.”

“Right, honey; but time’s money. You know where to change—I been waiting for you. Let’s swing it.”

The girl wailed “Oooh” and half ran toward a whitewashed plywood box that shut off one corner of the room.

“They’re always late,” said Bennett. “And they lay all sorts of hype on me—everything from a stuck zipper to a dying cousin.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how many cousins have died two or three times. But if you let them get away with it, man, they just get worse and worse.”

“Was Tommie Lee late a lot?”

“No, not her. She was one of the few you could set your watch by. She was serious about the program, you know?” He rested a moment on a light stand. “She had everything to be great.”

“Some people think different.”

“Name one, man!”

“Les Tanaka.”

“Aw, he’s so full of shit his eyes are brown! That slopehead couldn’t tell a real model from … from a goddam cemetery angel.” Bennett jammed a new bulb into its clamp. “Tanaka can’t tell if anybody has talent because he props them up like goddam sandbags and then pisses and moans because they come across like goddam sandbags. Tanaka!”

“O.K., Phil, I’m ready.” The brunette came out of the tiny dressing room wearing a silky white evening dress that caught the gleam of lights up and down her long thighs as she walked. Wager watched the cloth stretch tight as she stepped onto the platform, then watched as she slowly turned in the light, winding the cloth down her body like the strokes of long fingers. She saw him and winked.

“Jesus, honey,” said Bennett. “Is that what you told me you were going to wear?”

“Yes—what’s wrong with it?”

“Shadows, baby. That kind of cloth is a bitch to get all the shadows out.” He shifted two or three stands of lights and switched on the ceiling bank. “But we’ll just have to do what we can—right, baby?” Turning to Wager, he smiled. “Sorry to cut you out, man, but business is business. You dig?”

Wager smiled back. “I want to stay. I never saw this kind of work before.”

Bennett started to say something, then shrugged. “O.K. with you if this dude stays, honey?” he asked the girl.

“Sure.” A wide smile of perfect white teeth shone down on Wager. “I like an audience.”

“Yeah, fine—but, baby, keep your attention on me, right? If you’re going to stay, man, move back out of the light and we’ll try to make like you’re not here.” He muttered something about tourists and adjusted a few more lights, then moved in with the camera. “O.K., honey, just stand still a minute and let me get some readings.”

“My, we’re all business today.”

“Always, baby, you know that.” He held something in his hands and peered at it, then turned off all the lights except those around the platform and the dim workbench near the wall. Then he took more readings. Wager dragged a chair away from the wall.

“Hey, man, keep the fucking noise down!” The photographer sighted half a dozen angles through the camera’s viewfinder and went back to the light stands one more time. “O.K., let’s get with the program, baby. Let yourself go a little bit; you’re about as loose as a goddam telephone pole. Take a deep breath, baby, that’s it—now unlax.” He fussed and muttered and sighted. “O.K.—now a little live jive and we’ll be on our way.” He stepped out of the circle of lights and flipped on a radio. The loud blast of a rhythm-and-blues station bounced around the concrete walls while the photographer began swinging his camera around the model like a hovering mosquito.

“Come on, baby—get loose!” He ran around the platform and clicked the trigger. “Give it to me—that’s it—gimme, gimme, gimme!” He ran back, the girl bending and pulling against the dress. “Hit me, baby, come on! Lay it on me hard!”

It went through four thumping songs, the last a wailing Negroid voice that Wager heard everywhere and tried to ignore: “When your body thinks it’s had enough and it’s flopped out flat on the floor, I’m gonna show you what true love is and slip you a little bit more.”

Wager watched the shifting, bobbing shape of the photographer gyrate against the twirling, swaying model. Bennett must have been this way with Crowell, too. What was it Ginger Eaton said? That he made a model unfold? He watched the lithe brunette spin and halt, step, stretch—in its way it was a kind of dance. In this woman’s mind, maybe even in Bennett’s, it was a kind of creation. But, Wager figured, detectives must lack artistic souls, because to him it just looked like a pile of crap.

“O.K., baby, let’s break it!” Bennett snapped off the glaring lamps and rewound the film. In the sudden darkness, the model seemed to shrink. “Honey, you really got to unlax. You’re not helping me at all, and I can’t do it all by my lonesome. You’re supposed to be a model, baby, not a dummy. You can do it, O.K.?”

“I’m sorry, Phil. I’m really trying! But you didn’t give me even one minute to catch my breath—I came rushing in and had to rush right through make-up!”

“It’s not my fault you were late, honey.”

“I told you what happened!”

“All right, all right. Don’t blow what cool you got. Get into the negligee and we’ll try some skin shots. All you have to do is sit there and breathe deep, O.K.?”

She strode to the dressing room and slammed the thin door. Bennett spread a light-colored quilt on the platform and propped a wide sheet of white paper in a frame as a backdrop. His lips moved, but through the whining clatter of another song, Wager heard no words.

By the time Bennett had the lights rearranged, the girl was back wearing a short pink negligee. It wasn’t until she stepped into the glare of the lights that the shadows beneath the cloth told Wager she wore nothing else.

“I want you to relax, now, honey. Just listen to old Phil and move with him, O.K.?”

“I’ll try.”

“Do better than just try, honey. Do the deed. Hey, I got it—just a minute.” He went to the workbench; at one end sat a small refrigerator. “You want some wine?” he called to Wager.

“Sure.” He liked full, red wine. But the stuff Bennett poured was white and almost tasteless. Still, it was cold and, in the room’s dry heat, good. “Do you give all the models a drink?”

“It depends. It helps them relax. And cools them off so they don’t sweat and run their make-up.”

He sounded like a dog-trainer. “Did Crowell drink wine?”

“Yeah. She liked a shot or two before we got started. Hey, honey, you didn’t eat breakfast, did you?”

“No!”

“Then you want to lose some weight, baby. You’re getting a pot.”

What looked like a pot to Bennett looked downright skinny to Wager.

“O.K.—lights, camera, action—drink up, honey, and we’ll start with some mood shots.”

He placed the kneeling model so she sat on her heels, arms and back straight, face turned over her shoulder to the lights, smooth curve of naked buttock peeking beneath the garment’s hem. The dark tip on one breast rose tautly under the negligee. “All right, honey, let me see what’s on your mind; show it, baby, with the eyes; good, good, a little more with the eyes, now the lips. Sweeten those lips, honey, get them out just a little—lick, baby, lick the lips. O.K., baby, a deep breath and lots of boob, hold it… .”

The dance started again; Bennett changed lenses and moved closer, then away, clicking and talking, sometimes singing his instructions to whatever tune blasted from the radio. Wager watched the model through two more changes of clothes—a flaring pants suit with a long scarf that trailed like smoke as the girl spun; a denim outfit that Bennett said looked almost as good as a sack of potatoes. Finally, “O.K., honey, that’s it—you done good.”

She let out a deep breath and smiled again at Wager, then went to the little dressing room.

Bennett turned out the scorching floodlights and lowered the radio’s blare. “Want some more of that?” He pointed to the empty wineglass.

Wager shook his head. “How many sessions do you have in a day?”

“Today, three. I’ve done as many as six. But, man, there’s nothing left when it’s over. I mean, people think models do all the work, you know? Maybe they do for dudes like Tanaka; but with me, I get good pictures because I sweat.”

The girl came back wearing the denim clothes of her last costume. “When can I see them, Phil?”

“Week after next, honey.”

“That’s too far off!”

“Baby, I’m buried! I got forty rolls ahead of yours, and a lot of that’s finish work.”

She tugged at the collar of his open shirt. “Couldn’t you just slip mine in? Please?”

He winked at Wager. “They all love me. O.K.—for you, I’ll see what I can do. Give Alice a call next week. And burn that denim outfit, honey—it just ain’t you.”

“Poo!” she said, and kissed him on the cheek; turning another of those very wide smiles on Wager, she was gone in a bustle of make-up kit and clothes bag and the faint aroma of perfume.

Bennett watched the door shut behind her and shook his head. “Hamburger.”

“What?”

“She’s like a pound of hamburger—all meat and a little cellophane and nothing else. And she wonders why she can’t get big assignments.”

“She looked real nice to me.”

“Real nice is all right for you, maybe. But for me it’s got to be great. If Tanaka was working with her, she wouldn’t even look like hamburger. She’d look like shit.” He opened the camera and licked a label to stick on the canister of film, then poured himself another glass of wine. “What did you want to ask me?”

That was a good question, and one Wager had tried to concentrate on as the model had turned and breathed deeply and smiled in front of the camera.

“I’m still working on the connection with the Botanic Gardens. I can’t see why somebody wanted to do that,” said Wager.

“Hey—that was sick. Whoever did that had to be flaky, right?”

“It makes good grounds for an insanity plea.”

“Yeah.” Bennett held up the film canister. “Let’s make this scene in the darkroom, man—time is money.”

Wager followed the photographer through the curtained light chamber; the single white bulb in the ceiling of the darkroom was on, but the flat black paint of walls and shelving absorbed its glow. On the far side of the room, Wager saw what he had not found in the studio itself: the fuse box.

“Stand still, man; it takes a while for your eyes to adjust.”

Before Wager could move, Bennett snapped off the overhead light. The sudden darkness was so total that Wager’s hands lifted by themselves to push against the solid black. Then he froze; if Bennett still had the knife he used on Crowell, it would be somewhere in this room where the photographer felt at home. Fumbling with one hand for the stability of the doorsill, Wager loosened the automatic holstered at his back. Movement—he heard Bennett moving around. Tennis shoes scraped on the gritty floor; a drawer slid. Wager eased his shoulders along the black wall and tried to listen over the muffled pulse of his own blood. Gradually his blinking eyes felt the red glow of the work light, and in a few seconds he saw Bennett move like a shadow across the dim pink canvas of a print dryer.

“Can you see yet, man? I don’t want you bumping into my equipment.”

“Me either.” Wager’s voice squawked and he pumped spittle down the dry walls of his throat. You learn from mistakes, his mind told him; and from another corner of that same mind came the answer: just don’t make one mistake too many. Wager felt his way around the wall to the far end of the workbench where Bennett’s shape tapped open rolls of film and clipped them into trays filled with developer. He watched the vague form agitate the pans, then carefully move from left to right, rinsing each strip and bathing it in a second solution, then hanging it to dry in a cupboard above the bench. The distance from Wager to the large sink near Bennett was at least six feet; a body could lie there.

“So what’s your thing about the Botanic Gardens, man?”

And the darkroom sink would catch the drippings. “Whoever put the head there used a key.”

“But there’s a lot of keys, right?”

“No. In fact, every one’s accounted for.”

Bennett worked in silence for a few moments. “You’re saying you know who used one that night?”

“Everybody who owns a key has a good alibi.”

“Oh.” He clipped another strip into the drying locker. “That kind of leaves you hanging, doesn’t it?”

“Unless there’s one more key nobody knows about. Say, a duplicate.”

“Is that what you think, man?” Tension raised the pitch of Bennett’s voice, and Wager wished he could see the man’s eyes.

“What other answer is there?”

“But you got to find that key to prove it, right?”

“I figure it was thrown away. But if I can link Crowell with somebody at the conservatory, I can get a search warrant. And science is wonderful, Bennett.”

“I’m not with you.”

“A search warrant lets the police lab people in. They can find anything—old blood, for instance. They got a luminol test that brings out bloodstains no matter how much a place has been scrubbed or how long ago.”