Speak for the Dead (24 page)

Through the red glow, the shape silently placed two more strips of film. “You’re telling me the killer doesn’t have a chance?” It was almost a whisper, like someone talking to hear his own voice just before he jumped.

Wager shifted direction. “Why did Miss Crowell want to be a model so much?”

“Shit! Why does any broad want to be a model? Fame, money, travel, and free soap coupons.” Wager studied the silhouette hunched in the redness; it seemed to grip the edge of the bench and stare at the trays of chemical solutions. When it spoke again, the voice was calmer and the jive talk gone. “Most of them don’t want to be models—not real ones. They do a couple of shows a month and tell themselves they could have been on top if they really wanted to. It’s a goddamned ego trip for them.” The figure swayed back and forth at the edge of the workbench. “Very few think it’s the only thing in the world. Tommie thought that.”

“But she really wasn’t that good, was she?”

“Bullshit! I don’t care what that fucking Tanaka or anybody else says, she had it! With the right person—with me—she was as good as the best!”

Wager pulled the creased photograph out of his pocket and pressed it flat on the workbench. “Here’s one you took of her. She doesn’t look much different from any other model.”

Bennett squinted at the photograph. “Wait a minute—I can’t see a goddam thing.” He closed the drying locker and pulled a dark curtain across it, then flipped on the overhead light.

Sudden glare jabbed at Wager’s eyes and he blinked away the moisture. But he was glad for the light.

“Yeah. I remember this one. It was one of the first sets we did. And you’re right—there’s not much to look at, is there?”

“That’s what Tanaka said. He told me it wasn’t your fault. He said Crowell just wasn’t photogenic.”

“That son of a bitch doesn’t know photogenic from toilet paper! I’ve got some—” He stopped suddenly.

Wager could see Bennett’s pale eyes now, and their pupils were as wide and dark as two holes in the earth. “Let’s see those other pictures, Bennett.”

H
E HELD HIMSELF
poised for whatever Bennett might do. The photographer still gazed at Wager; his mind was working again—Wager could see that in the pale eyes—but what it was saying to the man, he couldn’t tell. Bennett slowly turned toward a column of filing cabinets with stacked flat, wide drawers halfway up the wall. “In here,” he said hoarsely.

Wager stepped quickly to the hand that reached for a drawer. “I’ll do it. You stand right there.”

A pile of large color prints lay on the shallow metal tray. The top one was of Rebecca Crowell’s face. It was different from any of her that Wager had seen before; the girl’s eyes and mouth were less posed, more living: even in the photograph he could almost hear her speak, and the expression called an answering warmth from the heart. Surrounding the face, a green halo of palm fronds, tendrils, broad succulent leaves formed a lush setting that faded into the tangled shadows of a lightless jungle. Both men knew where the pictures had been taken.

“Suppose you tell me about these, Bennett.” Wager’s voice seemed suddenly to slice some kind of leash; the photographer lunged at the light switch and the room fell black as Wager, dropping to hands and knees, tumbled to the right. His last glimpse of Bennett showed the man reaching for something bulky on a shelf near the door. Holding his breath and himself motionless on the cold concrete, Wager listened for a gasp, for a footstep, a scrape—anything. But only silence. Bennett was at home in the darkroom and he was in no hurry. Wager eased to a crouching position that he hoped faced the killer and tried silently to slip his hand beneath his coat to the pistol waiting there.

Then he heard something: a murmur. “What’d you say, Bennett?”

“You want to hurt me.”

“No.” It came from just over there, near the door, near the light switch. His eyes watered slightly as they strained to see through the dull red of the blackout light. Perhaps that shadow, the low bulky one… . “Bennett?”

He was hit from the side by something heavy and metal, the blow splitting through the red in a flash of yellow and knocking him flat against the gritty floor. A numbness lay against skull and shoulder, and in his ears was that high-pitched buzz that comes with being hit hard. Rolling over frantically, he dug at the holster with his left hand but the pistol was gone, fallen from his numb fingers. A shadow moved at the edge of vision and he kicked a heel into the swirling red and felt the solid jar of contact, heard a wheezing grunt from somewhere under the looming tower of the enlarger as Bennett swore and dropped the metal thing he had used as a weapon. A second later, fingers jabbed at Wager’s face, ripping down his ear and slicing toward his eyes. Wager twisted back and away, rolling out of the grip and clubbing wildly at the figure blotting the red light, missing, twisting to pull his useless arm away from the grunting swarm of darkness leaping at him.

Bennett hit at him again, the red bulb sparkling on the cluster of tripod legs that whistled slightly as they whipped toward him. Wager kicked once more, able to see the man’s outline now, able to make out arms and legs and crotch, able to aim his heel and drive his whole weight behind the shaft of his leg.

Bennett’s shriek covered the splintering bottles knocked tumbling from a cabinet and Wager grasped in the dark beneath the workbench for the writhing man, pulling him across the glass and concrete into the faint red glow, grabbing his hair to smack his head solidly against the floor and then straddle the bucking, twisting chest of the photographer.

“You’re hurting me! You want to kill me!”

“You’re goddamned right I do!” Wager smacked the skull once more. “And I sure as shit will if you don’t lay still!”

Wager used his car radio to send the 10-95—subject in custody. It crossed his mind to go past Denver General Hospital and have the bloody-headed photographer checked over; but the son of a bitch didn’t hurt any more than he did, and only now could Wager move his right arm enough to shift gears. In the rear seat, handcuffs looped beneath the back of his fashionably wide leather belt, Bennett grunted and sat doubled, pressing his sore testicles between clamped legs. At the end of the sidewalk, the secretary, Alice, held both fists over her mouth and stared silently at them with eyes enormous behind her thick lenses.

Wager pulled into traffic and gave the grunting man his rights as he steered with one hand and squinted through the throb of his skull. The numbness was wearing off to leave an aching pulse at the juncture of his neck and shoulder, and a tingling that was almost painful down the outside of his hand. “You hear what I just said, Bennett?” He gingerly twisted the rear-view mirror so it showed the photographer’s pale face and blood-matted cap of black hair.

“Yes.”

“Now you tell me about Rebecca Crowell.”

“… Yes.”

They reached the police building a little before noon; homicide’s day shift was on the street, and Wager and Bennett had the office to themselves. He marched the stiff-legged photographer to a desk just out of sight of the busy corridor and unlocked the cuffs. “You sit here and don’t try no more shit on me.” He pulled a legal tablet out of a drawer and pushed it and a ball-point pen at Bennett. “You write what I tell you.” He dictated the first couple of sentences. “You understand that?”

The grunting had stopped and now the voice was just weary. “Yes.”

“Good. Now you write down everything you told me on the way over here.”

Detectives from the other divisions of the bureau, following the whisper that somehow spreads whenever a homicide suspect confesses, stuck their heads in to glance at Bennett and raise their eyebrows at Wager.

“That’s him?” one muttered.

“Yes.”

“Looks like you dropped the hammer on him.”

“He didn’t feel like coming in.”

The detective’s eyes followed something along Wager’s cheek. “You better get that looked at—it’s deep.”

The whisper finally reached Doyle. He stood silently in the doorway and looked at the man who slowly wrote on the pad of lined yellow paper. “I want to talk to you, Wager. In the hall.” The bulldog’s jaw shoved toward him. “What the hell did you do to that prisoner?”

“He resisted arrest.”

“You got any witnesses?”

“Only the scars.” Wager pointed to his cheek. “And one damned bad headache, Chief Doyle.”

The bulldog shook his head. “It still stinks. Did you call for a doctor to look at him?”

“Not yet.”

“I’ll do it.” Doyle went to his own office.

Wager drew a cup of water from the cooler and took one to Bennett, who now sat without writing. “You finished already?”

“Yes.” The man’s narrow shoulders sloped even more and he looked at the cut on Wager’s face. “You know—I don’t even remember fighting with you. It was just like Tommie… . I don’t really remember.” The pale eyes were wide with innocence.

Sure he didn’t remember. Wager spun the pad to read over the short passage of shaky handwriting. The confession began with the familiar dictated sentences: “I have been advised of my rights and warned that anything I say might be used against me in a court of law. I make the following statement in my own hand and of my own free will.” Then Bennett’s words started: he and Tommie Lee had a photography session around noon on October 19th. They argued about her leaving, and nothing he said could make her change her mind. He wasn’t sure what happened next. He remembered seeing the knife beside the platform in the studio; he kept it around for cutting heavy paper. He remembered setting his camera down and grabbing the knife. He must have stabbed her, but he did not remember much until he kind of woke up in the darkroom and saw what he had done.

“This is all you want to say?”

The narrow shoulders lifted once and fell. “What more is there?”

There wasn’t much more that was needed, but a lot more that Wager wanted. “Sign here and put today’s date—November 3rd.” Bennett signed; then Wager signed and dated it as witness. “Was she wearing a nightgown when you stabbed her?”

Through the lines of weariness and lingering nausea, Bennett was surprised. “Yes. She bought it for that session.” He massaged his crotch. “God, she was beautiful—not like that broad you saw today, but beautiful!” His gaze shifted to the brown wall of the office. “It was like that session in the conservatory. I made her beautiful. I knew it was there, and I found it.”

“What did you do with the clothes and the knife?”

“I buried them in the trash can in the alley after dark. I was scared by then. I knew what I’d done by then.”

“Why’d you put her head in the conservatory?”

Bennett’s pale eyes swiveled his way, but Wager could not tell what the photographer was looking at. “I brought her to life there. That was where I made her live!”

“You took her head to the conservatory at about two in the morning, is that right?”

The pale eyes blinked and Bennett was back now to gaze at Wager. “I don’t remember cutting it off. I just sort of woke up and looked down and she was … in the sink. So I took her to the spot where she was beautiful. I was sorry. I told her I was sorry.”

“You had a duplicate of Mauro’s key?”

“Mauro? That’s the name of the guy at the conservatory? Yes. I had one made so Tommie and I could go back… . ” He sighed. “You want all that written down, too?”

A deal was a deal, even with Mauro. “No. Why’d you dump her body in that car?”

The question took a second or two to work through Bennett’s thoughts; then his eyes turned milky with the haze of pure hate. “What fucking good was it any more!”

Doyle came in and muttered that the doctor would be by in a while.

“Were you lovers? Bennett—were you and Tommie lovers?” asked Wager.

He focused his gaze like a stiletto point on him. “What?”

“Were you and Rebecca Crowell lovers?”

“Yeah.” The photographer blinked two or three times and sucked in a deep breath. “That’s kind of funny.”

“How, funny?”

“She wasn’t worth a shit in bed. I’ve had a lot better.” Another deep breath and he turned to Doyle, explaining. “It was more than screwing. Nobody knew what she had but me. I found it—I made her live! And then she said she didn’t want to waste any more time in this town.”

“Or with you?” asked Doyle.

“She didn’t say that. But that’s what she meant.”

“Haven’t you ever left anybody?” asked Wager.

“
I
left
them
. There’s a big difference.”

Wager leaned forward, his hand rubbing gently at the hot swelling of bruised muscle in his neck. “What did she say that made you do it?”

Bennett, too, was tired and hurt. He straightened and winced against the pull of his sore groin. “You figured that out, too, didn’t you? Yeah.” He shook his head. “After all that—after that wonderful birth of life in all that greenness and heat of the garden, and then being able to re-create the same thing right there in the studio… . You really know what it was? I wanted so much for her to stay—I never before asked anybody to stay. I even begged!” Another shake of the head. “She just told me to finish the session. She said she wanted the proofs ready before she left town. And then that bitch smiled for the camera!”

Doyle grunted. “And that’s when you did it.”

Bennett looked at him and then at Wager and then at a corner of the office floor where someone had kicked a mashed cigarette butt. His voice rose in pitch and the jive talk returned. “I don’t remember exactly, man. Like I said, things got pretty fuzzy in my head about that time.” Bennett’s face lost a few of the lines that had been there a moment ago. “I must of flipped out, you know? The next thing I remember is being in the darkroom after it was all over.” He shook his head. “Man, I must of blown so far out I was in orbit!”

Innocent by reason of insanity. Wager could hear a lawyer’s voice make that plea: “Your honor, my client has freely confessed to the crime, but the evidence clearly demonstrated that the act was not premeditated, and that at the time of committing said act, Mr. Bennett was not of sound mind. Surely, your honor, the subsequent mutilation of the victim is prima facie evidence of an unbalanced state of mind.” Surely.