Wallflower (21 page)

But Janek was nervous
. Still got time to cancel this madness,
he thought. He was about to call the whole deal off when Aaron gestured toward the corner. Leo Titus was crossing Third Avenue. "Good old Leo," Aaron whispered.

Later Janek would wonder if the reason he didn't cancel then was that he didn't want to cause Aaron to lose face.

Leo didn't even glance at them as he approached the house. And then Janek had to admire the man's cool. Leo walked straight up to Archer's front door, paused briefly, and two seconds later he was in, the door was closed again, and even someone watching would have no reason to suspect that a burglar had just entered the house.

"Guy's got moves," Aaron marveled.

F
ifty minutes passed before Janek became uneasy. Then, when he asked Aaron if Leo wasn't due out pretty soon, Aaron responded with patronizing patience as if Janek were a rookie in need of a steadying hand.

"Keep the faith, Frank. This is our one crack at her. It's gotta be a thorough search. Leo's good. He knows how to look for stuff, and he knows how much time he's got left. Don't worry. If there's something in there, he'll find it."

But that wasn't what Janek was worried about.

T
wenty minutes later Aaron, too, started showing signs of nervousness.

"Class breaks at nine. Takes her a minimum of fifteen minutes
to get home. Point of fact, she usually hangs around a while answering questions, stuff like that. So we're safe for another half hour at least."

"Does Leo think he's got till nine-ten?"

Aaron exploded. "I'm not stupid, Frank! I told him nine max. He's got fifteen more minutes. He'll make it. Trust me—he'll be out of there in time."

At eight fifty-five they turned to each other. "Should have wired him up," Aaron said.

But Aaron knew there was no way they could have wired Leo, though it would have been nice to listen to him as he worked. If they wired him and something went wrong, their role would be exposed.

At nine Aaron smashed his fist against the steering wheel. "That son of a bitch better not try a double cross."

"Could
he?" Janek asked.

"If he found something really valuable—I don't know." Aaron paused. "I can't imagine it. Anyway, we would have seen him come out." He paused. "Unless there's some way he found to sneak out through the back." He hit the wheel again. "But he wouldn't. He wouldn't dare! He knows I'd come after him. I'd never rest!"

Ten minutes later Aaron announced he was going in no matter the risk to the case. Janek gently put his hand on Aaron's arm.

"Yeah, you're right, someone has to go in. But this is my case. If it's going to get screwed up, I'll do the screwing."

"You can't go in there, Frank. You're a lieutenant, for Christ sakes!"

"I'll say I saw a thief enter and followed him in hot pursuit."

"Jesus!"

"They'll believe me."

"Leo's my boy. I feel . . . awful."

"Could be it's not his fault. Maybe he ran into whatever." Janek picked up a radio. "No talking unless you see Archer. Then just one squawk."

I
t was only on the doorstep of Archer's house that he wondered how he was going to get inside. He wasn't one of those detectives who excelled at opening locks. But when he took hold of the doorknob, turned it, and pushed, he was not surprised to find the door opening easily. Somehow he expected it to open, as if he had dreamed of the very sound it would make, as if everything that had happened and would happen on this night was familiar to him in some mysterious way.

The door, of course, was taped. Perhaps Aaron had told him Leo always taped his doors while describing the burglar's technique. Janek closed the door softly behind him, then stood very still. The hallway was dark except for a residual glow from the street that filtered in through the narrow leaded windows on either side of the portal.

The coat closet door was open. Janek glanced inside. A tiny bulb on the burglar alarm keyboard burned red to show that the system was armed up.

But Leo had neutralized it the day before. There was no danger; motion detectors would not set off the siren. Janek listened but heard nothing. Then he thought he felt vibrations, a faint thump on the floor above. He glanced at his watch. Nine-eleven. He had four minutes to find Leo and get out. He headed for the stairs.

They were carpeted. He could barely hear his own footsteps as he crept up to the landing. He paused to listen again. This was the mysterious residential portion of the house he had been thinking about for a week. Janek waited until his eyes adjusted to the darkness, then continued to the second floor. Nine-twelve. Three more minutes. He noticed a reddish glow from an open doorway down the hall.

He passed a closed door, probably a closet, then a door that was partially open. A glimpse of floor tiles suggested a bathroom. He paused.

"Leo," he whispered. When he heard nothing, he whispered the burglar's name again and again heard no response.

He crept farther up the hall to the open doorway where he'd seen the glow. He stood there and peered into a cavernous high-ceilinged room strangely filled, like a photographer's darkroom, with dim red light.

It was a bedroom, but unlike any bedroom he had ever seen except perhaps in a movie. An enormous four-poster stood free, a foot or so from one of the walls. Opposite the bed there was a wide niche which once may have contained a fireplace. In this niche hung a full-length life-size oil portrait of a woman. A light extending from the wall above the painting shed red light upon its surface.

Janek stared at the picture, his eyes riveted to its dominating imagery. The woman depicted wore a low-cut silk scarlet dress and held a microphone in her hand. Posed before a dark velour curtain held open by a gilded rope, she appeared to be singing in a smoky ambience. But what was most striking about her was the halo of thick, glossy red curls that surrounded her head, her hard-edged alabaster white features, and the equally pale, lustrous exposed flesh of her upper bosoms, which swelled within the clinging silk of her dress. The woman made a striking figure, at once carnal and statuesque, sensual and unobtainable. And although the painter had worked in a standard academic style, he had caught something vibrant and alive in his subject, a moment when she projected herself, bursting with life-force, to the viewer.

But even as Janek was awed by the powerful image before him, his head began to whirl with a kaleidoscopic array of other images in the room. Below the portrait, arranged upon an odd piece of furniture set within the niche, he saw a number of anomalous objects he could not make out clearly in the red light. Something about them was important. He wanted to decipher them, and was about to move closer to do so, when his eyes, drawn around the room, fastened onto the curled figure of a man lying on the floor at the foot of the bed in a puddle of dark liquid.

Leo!

The moment it registered on him that Leo Titus was lying there, probably dead in a pool of his own blood, the radio strapped to his belt began to squawk. A second later he heard Aaron's voice.

"Shit, Frank! She's coming now, fast!"

Gotta get out of here!

Hearing a sound behind, Janek turned in time to see a short, slim, bald-headed figure, dressed top to bottom in black, ice pick in hand, poised in the doorway to the room. A second later the figure, weapon raised, was rushing at him through the reddish gloom.

Janek feinted to the left. At the same time he reached for the Colt strapped to his ankle. Too late. Before he could crouch, his attacker was upon him, plunging down the weapon.

He knew he'd been hit. No pain, but he could feel the steel strike the bone of his shoulder and then his right arm hanging limp. His only chance now, he knew, was to get to his gun with his left hand. He knelt and struggled for it even as he saw his assailant step back two paces, produce a second ice pick, raise it, and thrust at him again.

He ripped the Colt from its holster and, hand trembling, fired at the advancing figure. The pain was coming upon him now, a great wave of pain that filled his head with delirium. He fired a second time, directly into his adversary's body. And in that same split second, when he saw the body blasted back across the room and knew for certain that it was a woman, the pain smashed into him; he felt a wave of nausea and understood that on her second foray she had stabbed him in the throat.

He could feel the blood gushing out of him. And then, as his legs collapsed slowly, he was seized with the certainty that he was going to die.

H
e came to in an ambulance. He knew it was an ambulance because there was a white-coated medic leaning over him, working on his throat, a siren was blasting directly above, and Aaron was crouching by his head, whispering encouragement.

"
Hang in there, Frank. Just a block from Lenox Hill Emergency."

"
Aaron .
. .
"

"Frank?" Aaron's face was above him now, slightly blurry but recognizable.

"It was Archer, wasn't it?"

Aaron shook his head. "Wasn't her. But don't worry." Aaron smiled. "You got her. You blew the little bitch away."

"Then who?" But before Aaron could reply, Janek felt himself sinking back into a pit of pain. "Tell Monika—"

Oh-oh—I'm passing out.

W
hen he woke again, he was on
his back, naked beneath a sheet, being wheeled rapidly down a tiled basement corridor. Kit Kopta was by his side.

"Kit . . ."

"Right here, Frank."

"Who?"

"Don't worry about that now. You're going to be all right. The surgeons'll fix you up."

Surgeons. . . . Christ, it hurt!

P
erhaps he dreamed it, though later he would tell people he woke up terrified during the operation, felt the heat of the lights on his face, saw the surgeons and nurses in their pea green smocks and masks, felt the probe of their instruments as they worked on his shoulder and his throat. And then seeing something in their eyes that told him he had a chance to live, he resigned himself and slipped back into a fuzzy chemical-induced sleep.

K
it was beside him when he came to in the recovery room. He could feel the tight grip of her hand.

"
You're going to be okay, Frank. I've got some good news for you, too. Aaron got hold of Monika. She's flying in tonight."

"
Great . . ." he murmured.

"Your arm should be all right. A week here, a week at home, and that should do it. As for your throat—well, another quarter inch and she'd have waxed you. She didn't, thank God!"

"
Who
was
she?" His voice sounded strange to him, raw, hoarse, a mere whimper that sent pulses of pain shooting through his brain. He tried to sit.
"Who?
"
he demanded.

"Take it easy, Frank. Lie back. She was the girl downstairs, the one who rented the basement apartment. She'd been Archer's patient in Connecticut."

Connecticut! What the hell was going on?

"But was she . . . the one? You know. Was she—?"

Kit was nodding.
"
Sure looks that way. I just got off the phone with Aaron. They went through her apartment, found ticket stubs, ice picks, caulking guns, glue. Sullivan's shitting in his pants. Because you solved it, Frank. You did it, you brilliant son of a bitch! You solved Happy Families!"

"Archer, she—"

Kit shook her head. "She didn't know anything. That's what she says. The girl was fixated on her, and . . ."

He felt his eyes starting to close. He struggled but couldn't keep them open. Kit's voice was distant now, as if in the back of a deep cave. "Rest, Frank. We'll talk later. Aaron'll be here soon. He'll explain. . . ."

W
hen he woke nauseated and agitated in a darkened room, there was a moment of clarity. "You solved it." Had Kit actually said that?

Was it possible?

How could he have solved it?

How?

D
iana Proctor, braced like a West Point plebe, stood rigid in the garden just outside the window. Back arched, eyes forward, head straight, chin down—in this exaggerated posture her nose was but inches from the glass.

Beverly Archer, sitting in the consulting room, glanced at her and smiled. The rain, running down Diana's young and ardent face, streaked her cheeks like tears. The girl's hair, cut close and butch, hung limp like wet black yarn. Her gray T-shirt, bearing the word
TRAINING
in small block military letters, clung sopping to her rib cage and chest.

What a sight! You'd think the poor thing would have to move, but there she stood still as stone just as she'd been ordered. She was shivering; no surprise, since she'd been standing out there for
nearly forty minutes and still had twenty more to go. Rain or shine, a sentence was a sentence; an hour had been decreed, and an hour would be served. A fat little alarm clock, standing on tiny feet, was perched upon the windowsill. Diana's eyes were fastened to its taunting face, her features frozen, locked. That, too, had been ordered. If the eyes were permitted to drift, the strings of control would weaken. In a matter of this kind control was everything. Obedience and control.