Bekker took a turn around the rug, thinking. "Listen. If this man, Stephanie's friend, turns himself in to the police, they'll tell me, one way or another. I wouldn't be surprised if they have him come look at me, just to make sure I didn't pull something out in San Francisco. Make sure I wasn't the killer and somebody else was out there… Anyway, if I can find out who he is, before he has a chance to see you, we can take him. So if we take Armistead, and you stay out of sight, except when you're working…"
"And then I'll stay in makeup…"
"Yeah."
"That's what we ought to do," Druze said. "Maybe we can smoke the cocksucker out. If we can't, we can keep working on it…"
"I'll figure him out, sooner or later," Bekker said. "It's only a matter of time."
"How are we going to talk, if the cops stay on you?"
"I've worked that out."
Bekker's neighbor in the pathology department was working in England. Just before he had left, he and Bekker had chatted about their work and Bekker had noticed, idly at the time, that the other man had an answering machine in his bottom desk drawer, an operation manual peeking from beneath it. Late one night, when the office was empty, Bekker had slipped the old-fashioned lock on his neighbor's door, turned the answering machine on and used the instruction manual to work out new access codes for the memo option. He now gave the touch-tone codes to Druze.
"You can call from any touch-tone phone, leave a message. I can do the same to get the message, or leave one for you. You should check every few hours to see if I've left anything."
"Good," Druze said. "But make sure you clean up the tapes…"
"You can erase them remotely, too," Bekker said, and explained.
Druze jotted the code numbers in an address book. "Then we're all set," he said.
"Yes. We should probably stay away from each other for a while."
"And we're gonna do Armistead like we planned?"
Bekker looked at the troll, and a smile touched his face. Druze thought it might be simple joy. "Yes," he said. "We'll do Armistead. We'll do her tonight."
The stained-glass windows in Bekker's parlor came from a North Dakota Lutheran church that had lost its congregation to the attractions of warmer climates and better jobs. Stephanie had bought the windows from the church trustees, trucked them back to the Twin Cities and learned how to work in lead. The restored windows hung above him, dark in the night, ignored. Bekker focused instead on the coil that was unwinding in his stomach.
A dark exhilaration: but too soon.
He suppressed it and sat on a warm wine-and-saffron Oriental carpet with a wet clawhammer and the pile of paper towels. He'd bought the hammer months before and never used it. He'd kept it in the basement, hidden in a drawer. Bekker knew just enough about crime laboratories to fear the possibility that a chemical analysis would pick up something unique to the house-Stephanie's refinishing chemicals, glass dust or lead deposits. There was no point in taking chances. He washed it with dishwashing detergent, then sat on the rug and patted it dry with the paper towels. From now on, he would handle it only wearing gloves. He wrapped the hammer in extra towels and left it on the rug.
Plenty of time, he thought. His eyes skittered around the room and found his sport coat hanging on a chair. He got the pill case from its breast pocket and peered inside, calculating. No Beauty tonight. This needed a cold power. He put a tab of PCP on his tongue, tantalized himself with the bite, then swallowed. And a methamphetamine, for the action; usually the amphetamines were Beauty's ride, but not on top of the other… • • • Elizabeth Armistead was an actress and a member of the board of directors of the Lost River Theater. She'd once played on Broadway.
"Bitch'll never give me a part." Druze had been drunk and raving, the night six months earlier when the deal had occurred to Bekker. "Just like that movie-what was the name? On the train…? She's gonna dump me. She's got the pretty boys lined up. She likes pretty boys. With this face…"
"What happened?"
"The company voted to do Cyrano. Who gets the lead? Gerrold. The pretty boy. They made him ugly and I'll carry a goddamn pike in the battle scenes. Before this bitch joined up-she supposedly played on Broadway, big deal, but that's why they took her, she can't act-I used to be something. The next thing I know, I'm carrying fuckin' pikes."
"What're you going to do?"
Druze had shaken his head. "I don't know. Finding a job is tough. Up on the stage, with the lights, with makeup, this face is okay. But getting in the door-people look at me, theater people, and they say, Whoa, you're ugly. Theater people don't like ugly. They like pretty."
Bekker had asked, "What if Elizabeth Armistead went away?"
"What do you mean?" But Bekker had caught the quick, feral glint when Druze looked toward him, and he knew the idea was there in the back of Druze's head. If Armistead went away, things would be different. Just like they would be for him, if Stephanie went away…
Bekker had kept the coveralls in a sack at the back of his chest of drawers since he bought them, at a Sears, three months earlier. They were blue, the kind a mechanic might wear. He pulled them over his jeans and sweatshirt, found the matching hat in the closet and put it on. Druze knew about costumes and had put it together for him. This costume said service. Nobody would look at him twice.
Bekker glanced at his watch, and the first dislocation occurred, thrilling him: the watch elongated, a Dali watch, draped over his wrist like a sausage. Wonderful. And the power was coming, darkening his vision, shifting everything to the ultraviolet end. He groped in his pocket for the cigarette case, found a tab of the speed and swallowed it.
So good… He staggered through the room, feeling it, the power surging along his veins, a nicotine rush times two hundred. He pushed the power back in a corner, held it there, felt the tension.
The time was getting tighter. He hurried down the steps, checked a window to see how dark it was, then carefully picked up the hammer and slid it into his right-hand pocket. The rest of his equipment, the clipboard, the meter and the identification tag, were piled on Stephanie's desk.
The clipboard, with the paper clipped to it, went with the service costume. So did the meter. Druze had found the meter in an electronics junk store and bought it for almost nothing: it was obsolete, with a big analog dial on top, originally made for checking magnetic fields around power lines. The identification tag was Bekker's old hospital ID. He'd laminated it and punched a hole in one end, and hung it from his neck by an elastic string.
He took a breath, did a mental checklist, walked out through the breezeway to the car and used the automatic garage-door opener to lift the door. He drove the long way out of the alley, then continued through the next alley, watching his mirror. Nobody.
Traveling by back streets, he made it to Elizabeth Armistead's house in a little over eight minutes. He would have to remember that. If Druze was suspected, he should know the time of his arrival. He just hoped she would be there.
"She does one half-hour of meditation, then drinks an herb tea, then comes down for the warm-ups," Druze said, prepping him. "She's fussy about it. She missed her meditation once and spent the whole show dropping lines."
Druze… The original plan had called for Bekker to phone Druze just before he left the house on the way to Armistead's. As soon as Druze got the call, at a remote phone in the theater's control booth, he would call the ticket office with his best California-cool accent. My name is Donaldson Whitney. Elizabeth Armistead said that she would put me on the guest list for two tickets. I'm in a rush through town, but I have time for her play. Could you call her and confirm?
They would call and confirm. They always did. Too many bullshitters trying to get in free. Donaldson Whitney, though, was a theater critic from Los Angeles. Armistead would gush… and the ticket people would remember. That was the point of the exercise: to create a last man to talk to the dead woman, with Druze already in makeup, onstage, warming up… alibied. Druze had suggested it and Bekker had found no way to demur.