Inside, he faced a large, hotel-style desk, behind which an elderly woman sat knitting. Not far in front of her was a television set with the volume turned up. She looked at him through thick glasses, put down her needles and yarn, and stood up. Her badge said Claire Bailey.
“Miss Bailey, I’m Tom Shephard. I’d like to see Francis Rubio.”
The woman turned down the volume on the TV, and when the music dissipated, Ross Manor lapsed into silence.
“I’m the director,” she said, pulling a sweater around her thin neck. “Francis Rubio?”
“Please.”
She checked a ledger of some kind. “The former judge is with his attorney right now,” she said with polite firmness. “He asked me to let them conduct some personal business undisturbed.”
There was a giddy swirl in Shephard’s stomach. Business at nine o’clock?
“Mr. Rubio asked you, or the attorney?” He smiled, praying it didn’t look false, as he scanned the ledger for a room number. Nothing but orange yarn and blue needles; Claire Bailey had set her knitting on the book.
“The attorney,” she said. “His new attorney, in fact.”
To hell with the Santa Ana police, Shephard thought. He brought out his badge. “Claire, I’m a policeman and I must see Francis immediately. Please, it’s extremely important.” When she hesitated, he lifted his coat away and exposed the Python. Her eyes widened and she stepped back.
“Two-oh-six.”
Shephard looked to his right, then to his left: two stairways leading up in Victorian symmetry.
“It’s in the middle of floor two,” she said hurriedly. “Take either one. The room is right in the middle of the hallway.”
Shephard chose the right. His footsteps echoed in the silence of Ross Manor, the click of shoes on wood. Halfway up, he heard a door close. Then footsteps away from his direction, deliberate, unhurried. They found the stairs and began down.
A faded green runner split the hallway in half. The narrow passage was lit by a lamp fastened to the ceiling midway, emitting a dull yellow glow that seemed to come more from the polished wood of the hallway than the bulb. There was a smell of disinfectant and old bedding. Odd numbers on his left and even on his right. Somewhere, a TV droned. Outside 206, he tried the knob and found it locked. Downstairs, a door slammed.
Then a muffled thrashing from inside the room, followed by muted groans, as if someone were screaming from under water.
Shephard pushed off from the wall behind him, aiming his shoulder at the door. He smashed against the old wood, a solid, bone-jarring collision that sent a wide throb of pain through his back and stopped him as decisively as if he had hit cement. The door shuddered and held. He charged again, this time with his other side, and again the thick wood punished him. Inside he could hear a high-pitched popping noise, then a hiss followed by splattering. The muffled groans had turned to thick, choked yelps. Against the wall again, Shephard pushed off and hurled himself again. He hit, rebounded in a shudder of pain, and watched the door swing open slowly before him.
Smoke and water pelted him from inside. Flames ate upward from the bed, growing from the white blanket toward the ceiling. A sprinkler showered the room, the water hissing violently as it streamed down on the fiery bed. He picked up a chair and threw it through the window. Under the flaming cover Shephard saw movement, a stifled struggling that sent sparks popping to the floor. The yelping sounded desperate, abandoned. With one quick movement that sent a puff of heat into his face, Shephard grabbed the end of the bedspread and flung it into the middle of the floor. The covers below, body-shaped, shook and trembled. He gathered them up and caught a glimpse of the man bundled underneath as he threw them down with the bedspread and trampled the heap. The sprinkler began to do its work. The sparks popped up, the water showered down with a fierce hissing. Shephard stuck his foot into the cooling stream.
When the fire on the floor seemed dead, he moved to the bed and looked down on the man whose quivering legs and arms were tied snugly to the railings with the strings built into his pajamas. The white feet continued to thud against the mattress. His arms were tied in place, but his hands clutched at the side of the bed, the knuckles purple with blood. And above the wide strips of tape that mummified the lower half of his face, two terrified eyes stared upward. Droplets of water splattered onto his head. Shephard moved his hands over the body, and his voice sounded high and foreign as he told the man that he was all right, buddy, chum, you’re going to be all right, Mr. Rubio, you’re going to be all right. Under his hands, Rubio’s withered body was miraculously cool.
Heads appeared in the doorway. Shephard stripped open the pajamas and looked down with almost tearful relief at the unburned chest and stomach of Francis Rubio.
Murmuring from the doorway was a small crowd of old people — one man adjusting his hearing aid, a woman in curlers, the horrified face of Claire Bailey as she struggled to get in. Water pelted down from the sprinkler. Through it all, Rubio’s eyes never strayed from Shephard.
Claire Bailey stood beside him. She had already called the fire department and the police, she said. In the quiet that followed, the sprinkler overhead shut off and Claire Bailey started weeping. She helped Shephard peel the tape from Rubio’s face. When they lifted the first wide white strip from his mouth, the man’s heels began pounding the bed again, his hands opened and closed around nothing, and he bellowed into the silence of Ross Manor.
Shephard eased his way through the people outside the door, looking them in the eyes and telling them that everything was okay now, just a little trouble with Mr. Rubio’s new lawyer. One man said that attorneys were always a pain. He broke into a run when he reached the hall, and headed for the stairs. As he clambered down the stairway, two sounds echoed in his ears, even through the din of Rubio’s wailing. One was the sound of footsteps going down the stairs when he had first climbed them, the other was the slamming door he had heard as he stood outside room 206. He reached the lobby, panting. On the porch, both of the men had risen from their rockers to stare at the overstuffed chair that had landed, as if dropped from heaven, on the lawn. Shephard ran to the LaVerda and was about to jump onto the seat — the key already in his hand — when he saw the spark plug cables, neatly severed, lying across the leather. He cursed and looked up Ross Street, where less than a block away a convertible red Cadillac and its gray-haired driver lurched around a corner and out of sight.
Twenty-four
The cops were waiting for him when he finally came home that night, as he knew they would be. Benson from Newport Beach and Hudson from Santa Ana. They stared at him appraisingly as Little Theodore delivered him on the back of his Harley-Davidson.
“Little trouble in Newport I’d like to talk to you about,” Benson said with a crooked smile. He was short, with a combative face, and looked younger than Shephard.
Hudson was bulky and unshaven, and apparently not a talker. “Ditto in Santa Ana,” he said, as if it were an effort. “At Ross Manor.”
They came upstairs, surveyed his stripped apartment, and asked their questions. He modified the truth for Benson, saying only that he had waited for Helene Lang to meet him, then gone upstairs to find the door open, and let himself in.
It was news to Benson that her name wasn’t Dorothy Edmond. He made a note of this, then sat stroking Cal. “If the door was open when you found her, how come it was locked when we got there?” he asked.