Lynch laughed. His laughter was unforced.
‘Well, that’s enough, Hammett. I thought I would hate killing Vic Atkinson. Only I didn’t.’
‘I know,’ said Hammett. ‘I saw his head.’
‘So I think I’ll use the bat on you, too.’
‘As you did in the cemetery. Keeping her alive and screaming while you smashed-’
The door slammed open and Dan Laverty stumbled into the room. He stared about wildly at the bizarre carnal trappings, his face dazed, crumpled, drawn in and down as if he had suffered a stroke while listening outside the door.
‘Owen,’ he said, and even his voice was tortured. ‘Owen. He… I had to come back, had to listen… had to…’
‘Dan, you don’t understand-’
‘I was a straight cop. I… I murdered for you! You… the little girl in the car…’
He left the doorway to start hesitantly toward his friend. Lynch was backing away. ‘And Vic Atkinson? And the girl in the cemetery? You? That filth? That sickness?’
Lynch had backed into the wall beside the ornate bed. He was reflected in a dozen different ways in a dozen different mirrors. He looked from side to side. Laverty was in front of him, crowding him. Hammett could see only Laverty’s massive back, but a mirror gave the policeman’s expression: puzzled, almost frightened.
The black Irish rage. How to trigger in him the…
Lynch did it for Hammett. He broke. He came off the wall in a leap, trying to reach the other, interior door leading up to the main floors of the house. Laverty was on him like a gorilla. Of their own volition those huge hands closed about his windpipe, spun him about, slammed him up against the wall again.
‘Owen!’ cried Laverty in an anguished voice. ‘Don’t run from me. Talk to me. Make me understand.’
With a convulsive movement, Lynch tried to tear free. The thick back and shoulders hunched and tensed to pour their strength into the fingers. Past that back and shoulders, Hammett could see Lynch’s bulging scarlet face.
Lynch swung a fist without effect. He tried to ram his locked hands up between the iron arms.
Laverty’s right knee pumped, twice, up between Lynch’s spraddled legs. The horror of it was that Laverty himself cried out each time, as if he were taking rather than giving the rupturing blows.
The knee pistoned twice again. It moved of its own volition.
The shoulders hunched further, writhed with effort. A muted pop. Another. A muted tearing noise. The calloused fingers were sunk almost out of sight in the corded neck. Laverty’s body began to shake and buffet with its own sustained and total effort. There was a sharp snapping sound.
Lynch’s heavy handsome head dipped sideways against the clutching fingers. The fingers began unburying themselves from the ravaged throat. They opened. Moved away. Only their purple shadows remained embedded there.
Laverty turned slowly away. The blind look was dying from his eyes. Behind him, the body slid down the wall like a collapsing puppet. It ended in a heap on the floor. Laverty didn’t look back.
‘Forty years I knew him. Forty years I loved him. He was closer than any brother could have been. Do you understand that? Do you?’
‘I understand.’
‘You wanted me to come back and hear. You.’
With a sleepwalker’s movements he took out the long-barreled police positive with which he had shattered Egan Tokzek’s spine. He thumbed back the hammer.
His mad eyes glared into Hammett’s.
‘You,’ he said.
He rammed the muzzle of the revolver, upside down, into his own mouth and blew the top of his head up against the ceiling.
Hammett sagged against the shackles. He squeezed his eyes tight shut so only the pink nothingness of the lids moved against his pupils. But when he opened his eyes again, nothing had changed. Nobody had gone away. And it was still there. The blackness he had first glimpsed in the cemetery, the blackness he had fought by telling himself it was the result of eight years as a detective, eight callous years of brutality and cynicism. And of the years since, writing about that brutality and cynicism.
But it was no good.
Too many indications, too many clues for a good detective to ignore. And goddammit, he’d been a good detective.
Like, why had Crystal suddenly begun dutiful visits to the parents she had previously ignored? Could it have had something to do with Heloise finding it more difficult — and dangerous — to procure girls who wouldn’t be missed?
And why had Crystal told Hammett that Tokzek broke her in, four years ago, when the man already had been a hopeless junkie, incapable of even normal sex, let alone the determined sexual effort necessary to rape and condition a child?
And how had she known who Lynch was and where he could be reached on that Monday she had disappeared?
And why had she called Lynch to come and remove her from the Weller Hotel, where she was safe?
And finally, why had the fat woman and her son died, unless to protect — and perhaps delight — someone? And why with their faces blown away in Marin, unless to insure that no one would question a Chinese girl’s face being blown away in San Francisco?
He was not even surprised when the interior door across the room swung open. He merely said, ‘Hello, Crystal.’
33
‘How did you know?’ cried the Chinese girl in great delight. With a joyous laugh she stepped over the policeman’s exploded head as if it were a section of curb. ‘How did you figure it out?’
For one of the few times in his life, Hammett was speechless. He was looking at eviclass="underline" sprightly, beautiful, and totally corrupt. She was dressed in a spun jersey bloomer dress, hand-embroidered around the collar and cuffs, with sweet little pearl buckles on each side of the front pleats. It was the outfit a girl of nine or ten might wear, with bloomers of lustrous sateen just peeking out from beneath the hem of the childishly short skirt.
Crystal pirouetted slowly in front of him, then curtsied like a child completing her number at the school recital.
‘Do you like it?’
Her lispy little-girl voice literally raised the hairs on the back of Hammett’s neck. The voice, the slight body in the child’s dress, even the curtsy — these all belonged to a little girl. But beneath the bodice were a woman’s breasts, beneath the sateen bloomers a woman’s hips. And the naked pale legs were a woman’s, beautifully rounded.
The face, framed in its gleaming mane of ebony hair, was a child’s face. But it was made up as a woman’s — and had a look of innocent depravity that was terrifying.
Crystal batted her eyes and stuck out her tongue at him.
‘Mean Mr Hammett doesn’t like little Crystal’s dress!’
She darted to Lynch’s body, and swooped over it to take the handcuff keys from his pocket. In the process, she gave Hammet a flashing look at the tautened shiny bloomers. She looked back at him with childish delight as she did.
‘ Daddy liked my dress.’ She straightened. ‘Daddy liked to take my dress off me. I was Daddy’s little girl. ’ She kicked the dead man in the temple. She smiled sweetly at Hammett. ‘Daddy wasn’t a very nice man.’
‘Daddy’s little girl isn’t a very nice little girl.’ It was the first thing he had said since she entered the room. He felt only that same odd, debilitating lassitude he had felt ever since Lynch had chained him there.
‘Well, she’s had a lot of lessons, hasn’t she?’ The lisp was gone.
‘Not from me.’
‘No. Not from you.’ She sat down on the edge of the bed, her hands clasped between her thighs, just as she had sat on her bed at the Weller a couple of lifetimes ago. He recognized it as a habitual pose. ‘How did you guess? What did I do wrong?’
Hammett yawned, hugely and involuntarily. He could almost welcome death, he thought. Then at least he could quit talking. He had talked the night and two lives away. Three, counting his own.