Wildest Dreams (6 page)

PART TWO:

SÉANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON

What may this mean,

That thou, dead corpse, again in complete steel

Revisit’st thus
the glimpses of the moon

Making night hideous, and we fools of nature

So horridly to shake our disposition

With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?

—Shakespeare

Hamlet

Act I, Scene IV

1

Cliffside, California was alive, and I didn’t need a medium to tell me that was an unusual occurrence for a tourist town in the middle of the off-season.

But I did need a medium.

A woman of energies named Janice Ravenwood. She was the reason I’d come to Cliffside. I parked the Toyota at a coastal access lot hidden from the main drag, an eight-block strip of tourist traps called Gull Lane. There wasn’t any parking to be had in town anyway. Cliffside’s two motels were quickly filling with assorted rubberneckers, freaks, and reporters in the wake of the grisly events at Circe Whistler’s estate.

Today I planned to keep a lower profile. Completely subterranean was the way I planned to play it. I couldn’t afford to attract the wrong kind of attention, i.e. the attention of pissed off individuals who wore badges and carried guns.

I jammed the dead cop’s pistol under my belt and slipped on a flannel shirt. I left the tail untucked to cover the gun. The K-bar went under my belt on the other side. The other pistol stayed under the seat, but I didn’t lock the truck. If I had to make a quick exit, I didn’t want to be fumbling for my keys while some cop shot me in the back.

The day was overcast. Clouds pumped in from the west, heavy clouds the color of the K-bar blade. A little rain wouldn’t bother me, though. Bad weather would make it tougher on anyone trying to track me down. It’s harder to do anything in the rain.

Walking into town, I only saw one deputy—a young kid. He was talking to a vanload of CNN guys who had parked in a red zone. They were spoon-feeding him a load of shit about freedom of the press and the people’s right to know, and the poor kid was actually going along with it like he figured he’d better be polite or they’d point a camera in his face and make him look like Barney Fife on the evening news.

The deputy didn’t give me a second look as I passed him by. That didn’t surprise me. But the CNN guys didn’t check me out either, and that was a surprise.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Passing muster with CNN’s hounds meant one thing—the odds were good that there wasn’t a description of a suspect in Circe Whistler’s murder.

Not yet, anyway. But life could be fluid, like Janice Whistler said. Circumstances could change awfully quickly. Whether they would or not depended on the real identity of Circe Whistler’s killer. I knew that the killer had tipped off the cops once already. Their appearance at the scene of the crime proved that.

I amused myself by imagining Diabolos Whistler’s head calling 911 and doing the deed. Not fucking likely. Janice Ravenwood and Spider Ripley were another story. If either or both of them wanted to frame me for murder, their silence after the fact would be a surprise.

Not that I couldn’t explain it. If Spider was indeed in San Francisco with Diabolos Whistler’s head, I doubted he’d had an opportunity to talk to the local cops. Then again, I had no real guarantee that Ripley had gone anywhere. The same with the medium—I didn’t have any idea where she might be or who she might be talking to.

There might be other suspects, of course. People I didn’t know. Circe had mentioned a sister, Lethe. But if I remembered Circe’s story correctly, her sister lived the life of a San Francisco club rat. Sure, that was all I knew about Lethe Whistler. Apart from that, the information was secondhand and from an obviously biased source. But if Circe’s description of her sister was accurate, Lethe wouldn’t be my first choice for the brains behind a murder/frame-up scheme.

There was no sense chasing my tail. After all, Circe was a high-ranking priestess in a satanic cult. Who knew what kind of maggots were crawling around under the floorboards of her church.

Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wasn’t the only one. The first newspaper rack I passed flashed a bold headline:
SLAUGHTER AT WHISTLER ESTATE
. I glanced through the glass at the first four paragraphs of the article, reading down to the fold.

Those paragraphs convinced me of one thing—the writer of the article owned a thesaurus. That was the only way to explain the six variants of “bloody” in the lurid come-on. I figured the meat of the piece had to be on the bottom half of the page, so I dropped a couple of quarters into the machine and bought a paper.

I leaned against a lamppost and read the rest of it. Minus the hyperbole, the story went like this: at present, Circe Whistler was “an unidentified female” and there were “no known suspects.” Police were following “a number of leads” …yadda, yadda, yadda…I’d just blown fifty cents.

I’d have to look elsewhere if I wanted more information. The sound of simmering rumor drifted from the open door of a crowded diner, but I already had my eye on a guy with a pay phone growing out of his ear.

He wore earth tones, the kinds of colors that show up best on television. Nothing else about him was particularly photogenic. His skin was fishbelly white, and a cigarette dangled from his lips, and his expression seemed terminally pinched—as if he’d got his nose stuck in a book about ten years ago and had only just managed to extract it.

In other words, the guy practically reeked “media leech.” A couple more sentences out of his mouth and I figured out that he was a writer, one of those guys who hacks out those true crime paperbacks you find at the grocery store just down the aisle from the Kellogg’s Cornflakes.

I eavesdropped while the reporter lied outrageously to his editor, saying that it was raining buckets and he couldn’t get a room at the local Holiday Inn. Then he started bitching about the town’s other motel. “For God’s sake, Simon,” he whined, “it’s a roach’s nest called the Cliffside Motor Court. It’s not even in the AAA book. The place actually advertises
waterbeds…
and you know how bad my back is!”

He huffed and puffed while Simon gave him some obviously bad news. Then he played his trump card.

“Simon, you’re my editor, and I like to think that you’re also my friend. But if I don’t have my rest, I can’t possibly do Larry King tonight.”

I could almost hear good old Simon hyperventilating on the other end of the line. As for the writer, he knew he had the upper hand at last and moved in for the kill. “What happened, Simon, is that I ran into a CNN crew at breakfast. I told their producer that I was doing a book on the Whistler murders for you, and that I’d already created a profile of Whistler’s killer. She called King’s producer, and we’re booked for a remote on tonight’s broadcast.”

He sighed while the editor wedged in a few words. “Of
course
I lied about the profile. This is CNN, Simon! Imagine the advance orders we’ll get! Only this time I want a hardcover. No more paperbacks. I want a jacket photo that I don’t have to pay for and cover approval and a book tour. Get my agent on the phone and hammer out a deal before airtime, and—”

He broke off laughing. “No no no. The profile won’t be a problem at all. These idiots are all the same. This one is a classic publicity hound. He takes too many wild chances. He’s the kind who
wants
to be caught so he can bask in the media spotlight.

“Anyway, once they get him, I’ll have a book for you in a month. Maybe less. You’ll pay for it, sure. You’ll pay for my trip to the maniac’s home town, and you’ll pay for my lunch with his third-grade teacher, and you’ll pay for the photos I swipe from his first girlfriend’s photo album…just like you’ll pay for a fucking chiropractor if I have to sleep on a waterbed in this miserable little shitsplat of a town—”

I’d heard more than enough.

I invaded the writer’s space and glared at him.

He glared back.

I tapped the disconnect and hung him up. As wild chances go, it wasn’t much of one, but it was the best I could do to match my profile on such short notice.

And it did the trick. The guy looked like he was ready to go postal. “Find your own phone, dickhead!” he said. “This one’s going to be tied up for quite a while.”

“I don’t think so.” I smiled. “In fact, I think you’d better get moving, and you’d better do it right now.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I just left the Cliffside Motor Court. They only had two rooms left. I got the one without the waterbed.”

The guy slammed the handset into the cradle, nearly severing a couple of my fingers. He tried to rush past me but I played it slow as molasses, like I couldn’t figure out which way he was going. I stepped in his way and let him eat my shoulder. Then he moved the other way and so did I, stepping on his right foot, and not at all softly.

I apologized, of course. The writer swore magnificently and hurried off.

I watched him go. He was limping a little bit. He brushed one hand through his hair and swore some more, oblivious to the fact that he’d lost something he was going to miss.

His wallet.

I flipped it open and checked it out.

His name was Clifford Rakes. Clifford’s wallet contained a Florida Driver’s License, Visa and Mastercard and American Express, membership cards for seven different writers’ organizations, business cards for three chiropractors and two psychiatrists, a few mysterious 900 numbers scrawled on the back of a napkin, and a plastic insert that held several photos—Clifford Rakes’s own private stroke gallery.

I’d never run across a man with Clifford’s particular kink before—all the photos in his wallet were clipped from the dust jackets of hardcover books.

They were photos of bestselling women authors, each one backed with a series of carefully clipped blurbs that touted their accomplishments.

Jacqueline Susann. Danielle Steel. Jackie Collins.

Even, God help me, Barbara Cartland.

I closed Clifford’s wallet and slipped it into my pocket.

I didn’t like having those women there.

Not at all.

* * *

I tried to forget about Clifford Rakes’s harem and concentrate on the matter at hand. Right now, that meant taking a look at the Cliffside, California phonebook.

There was no listing for a Janice Ravenwood. There was a Ripley, but the first name wasn’t Spider. It was Gilbert.

Gilbert Ripley lived on Surf Glenn Lane, wherever that was. I played around with it. Circe’s bugman bodyguard sure didn’t look like a Gilbert. But I tore out the page just in case, folded it, and tucked it in my shirt pocket. Then I flipped to the yellow pages and checked out the listing for local bookstores.

Cliffside only had one.

The address was on Gull Lane, less than a block away. The place was called Goddess Books. I figured I’d just gotten lucky, twice.

* * *

I was right. I only had to walk about twenty feet to find the store, and the display window featured Janice Ravenwood’s books.

Chimes tinkled. The door opened and disgorged a gaggle of twentysomethings dressed in black. Neon hair and piercings and pupils that gleamed like dark little pills. Smiling, they passed me by without a second glance.

One of the young men laughed. “Man, it’s gonna be some freak show.”

“Yeah,” a woman with studded lips agreed. “The circus is definitely comin’ to town.”

“We’re gonna have front row seats,” the man said. “I can’t wait for the fuckin’
funeral
.”

“Caskets for two and devil worshippers. You just don’t get entertainment like that anymore.”

The sick thing was that they were right. The circus was coming to town. The tribes were gathering. These kids were one harmless faction, but there were others far more dangerous.

Circe Whistler’s true believers, for instance. I wondered what they would be like, the one’s who had taken Diabolos Whistler’s teachings to heart. One thing was clear—if they knew what I’d done to the man they worshipped as Satan’s chosen one, they wouldn’t pass me by with a smile and a laugh.

Armed with another reason to make my visit brief, I entered the bookstore. The clerk rewarded my bravery with a smile. In boots, a long skirt and flowing scarves, she looked like the lone survivor of seventies’ hippie chic. Either that, or she’d stolen Stevie Nicks’s clothes.

“Are you a reporter?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m looking for ghosts.”

“Oh?” She arched an eyebrow, pleased with the news. Not that I was looking for ghosts, but that I wasn’t a reporter.

It was simple, really. A reporter would want information. He wouldn’t buy anything. I might.

“It’s kind of hard for me to talk about,” I explained. “Especially to a stranger. You see, I was born with a caul—”

“A definite sign of spiritual sensitivity,” she interrupted.

“And lately I’ve had the strangest feelings, as if there are others around me when I know I’m all alone. Sometimes it’s as if I actually see someone….” I laughed. “I’m sorry. You probably think I’m crazy.”

“Not at all!”

“Well, it’s just that telling someone that you see ghosts….”

“Around here, it’s the people who don’t see them that I worry about. Cliffside is known in the occult community as a place of dark energies.” She glanced through the window at a passing news van. “It seems that those energies may have gotten a little out of hand last night.”