"A couple of things," Bekker said. He settled behind the desk, leaned back with the scotch and crossed his legs. They flashed from the folds of the dressing gown like a woman's legs from an evening dress. Deliberately, Lucas thought. He thinks I might be gay, and he's trying to seduce me. He took a sip of the scotch. "A couple of things," Bekker repeated. "Like these."
He picked up a stack of colored cardboard slips, bound together with a rubber band, and tossed them across the desk. Lucas picked them up. They were tickets to shows at the Lost River. He thumbed through: eight of them, in three different colors.
"Notice anything peculiar about them, Lucas?" Bekker asked. Using his first name again.
"They're from the Lost River, of course…" Lucas rolled the rubber band off and looked at the tickets individually. "All for matinees… and there are eight tickets for three different shows. All punched, all different shows."
Bekker mimed applause, then held up his glass to Lucas, as if toasting him. "I knew you were intelligent. Don't you find you can always tell? Anyway, the second woman who was killed worked for the Lost River, correct? I went to a couple of evening performances with Stephanie, but I had no idea she was going in the afternoons. So I began to wonder: Could her lover…?"
"I see," Lucas said. A connection. And it seemed to let Bekker out.
"And I also found this," Bekker said. He leaned forward this time, and handed Lucas several letter-sized sheets of paper. American Express account sheets, with various items underlined in blue ballpoint ink. "The underlined charges are for tickets at the Lost River. Six or seven times over the past few months, on her personal card. A couple of them match with the matinee dates and the charge amount is right. And then, on four of the days, there's a dining charge, and none less than thirty dollars. I'd bet she was taking somebody to dinner. That restaurant, the Tricolor Bar, I've been there once or twice, but not in the afternoons…"
Lucas looked at the papers, then over the top of them at Bekker. "You should have shown these to Swanson."
"I don't like the man," Bekker said, looking at him levelly. "You, I like."
"Well, good," Lucas said. He drank the last of the scotch. "You seem like a pretty reasonable guy yourself. Pathology, right? Maybe I'll call you on one of my games; you could consult."
"Your games?" Bekker glanced at his watch again, then quickly looked away.
What's going on? "Yeah, I invent games. You know, historical strategy games, role-playing games, that sort of thing."
"Hmph. I'd be interested in talking sometime," Bekker said. "Really."
CHAPTER 14
Bekker shut the door behind Lucas and dashed upstairs, leaving the lights out. He went to the window over the porch and split the curtains with an index finger. Davenport was just getting into his Porsche. A moment later the car's lights came on, and in another minute it was gone. Bekker let the curtain fall back into place and hurried to his bedroom. He dressed in dark blue slacks, a gray sweatshirt and navy jacket, loafers. He gobbled a methamphetamine and went out the back, through the garage, and got in the car.
A neighborhood restaurant had a pay phone just inside the door. He stopped, dialed, got the answering machine on the second ring-a message was waiting. He punched in the code, 4384. The machine rewound, paused, then Druze's voice blurted a single syllable.
Druze hunched over the wheel, the weight of the night pressing on him.
Like the tarbaby. One foot stuck, then you have to kick with the other one, then you have to punch him, and your fist gets stuck…
This would be the last for him. He'd talk Bekker out of the third killing. There was no need for a third. Not now. He'd seen them on television, and the cops were convinced: one killer, a psycho.
Druze was orbiting a red-brick university building, Peik Hall, watching. Lots of lights, big orange sodium-vapor anti-crime lights, walk lights, globe lights outside the entrances to the university buildings. Lots of trees and shrubbery, too. Good cover. And nobody around.
The night was cold, with heavy broken clouds darting across the sky, a full moon sailing between them; and it smelled of coming rain. A good night for beer and brats and television in the Riverside Avenue taverns with the theater crowd. Druze could never be one of the happy crowd, throwing darts or chattering, but he could sit on his stool at the end of the bar, feeling a little of the reflected warmth. Anything would be better than this-but he had nobody to blame for this but himself. He should have gone after the fat man…
Druze was wearing the ski jacket again, but this time as much for concealment as for protection from the weather. He wouldn't want George to recognize him prematurely.
George's Cherokee was parked in a small public parking lot tucked behind an older building adjacent to Peik Hall. Pillsbury Drive, a cross-campus road, ran past the end of the lot. After ten o'clock there was little traffic-but there was some. Every few minutes or so, a car went past, and the road was smooth enough that you couldn't hear it coming.
One other car was parked in the lot, across from George's. Druze circled the campus complex as long as he dared, then parked his Dodge wagon beside George's Jeep, leaving a full parking space between them. He sat for a moment, watching, then got out, listened a few seconds more. The lot was poorly lit, with most of the light coming from a bowl-shaped fixture on the back of the building.
No people around, unless they were hiding in the bushes. Druze started toward the sidewalk that led past the building, stopped next to a bush of bridal wreath and listened again, ten seconds, twenty. Nothing. He walked back to the Jeep, squatted, took a tire-pressure gauge out of his pocket, reversed it and used the spike to let the air out of the Cherokee's left rear tire. George had to approach from that side; he should see it.
The hissing air sounded like a train whistle in Druze's ears, and it seemed to go on forever. But it didn't. In less than a minute, the tire was flat. Druze stood, looked around again and wandered away.
The parking meters. Jesus Christ.
He walked back and plugged the university's twenty-four-hour parking meters. He'd have to remember to look for the campus cops. They checked the parking lots once or twice a night. A ticket would be a disaster.
Druze didn't feel anything when he killed-revulsion, sorrow, empathy. He didn't fear much, either. But tonight there was an edge of apprehension: it came as he almost walked away from the meters. Suppose he came back, killed George and only then noticed a ticket on his windshield? They'd have him. Or, like Brer Rabbit with the tarbaby, he'd be chasing around the campus, hunting down the cop with the ticket book. He'd have to kill him to get the book. And then…
That'd be impossible. That was a nightmare, not a rational possibility. Druze shivered and hunched his shoulders. He hadn't expected to get this tangled.
A woman student, carrying books, walked by on the other side of the street, looking resolutely away from him. He went out to University Avenue, keeping an eye on the lighted windows in Peik. Bekker had scouted the building, told him which ones to watch… A black kid in a red jacket hurried by, on the other side of the street. Another kid, white, wearing a white helmet and a daypack, zipped past on Rollerblades.
Druze sauntered now, moving into actor mode, one hand in his pocket, on the handle of the antique German knife-sharpening steel. The steel was as heavy as a fireplace poker, but shorter, eighteen inches long, tapering like a sword, with a smooth hickory handle. He'd shoved the point of the steel right through the bottom of his pocket. The handle was big enough for the steel to hang there on its own, cold down his leg, out of sight. He'd practiced drawing it. It came out smoothly and swung like a pipe wrench, with better balance. It would do the job.
Druze moved off University Avenue and walked across a lawn outside Peik. He was doing a lot for Bekker, he thought, and then: But not only for Bekker. This is for me, I'm the one he'd recognize…