There was a long silence. Bellstrom’s eyes wandered over to the window that separated his office from the now deserted newsreserted oom. “You could mislead us more easily from the inside; use us to your advantage.”
“That’s a risk. But it’s a risk all the time anyway.”
“I can handle that,” Katz muttered.
I fought down a smile. I could feel the Pulitzer bug chewing at Katz’s mind.
Bellstrom looked at him, mild surprise on his face. “You like this?”
“I don’t see any problems with it. It’s only three days. A trade-off sounds good. Like he said, it worked last time.”
Bellstrom checked his watch. “The principle stinks, if you ask me. I’ve said it before-I don’t like sleeping with tigers; it’s not natural and it’s not healthy. I’m not even sure it’s ethical.”
“But it might make for a hell of a story,” Katz added.
The phone rang. Bellstrom picked it up, listened for a moment, said “I’m on my way,” hung up, and got to his feet. “I’ve got to go… All right. I think it stinks, but I won’t fight it. But,” and he stuck his finger at Kunkle and me, “if there’s any show of something screwy, we’re out of it.” He looked hard at Katz. “Stan, I know you want more out of life than this paper. But if you sell me out on this, if you give them more than just silence during these next three days, your ass is grass. Is that understood?”
Katz nodded. Bellstrom looked at us all as if we’d just emerged from a swamp, and walked out of the office to lock horns with his sister-in-law.
I turned to the other two. “Well. Now that everybody’s happy, I suggest some shut-eye. It might be the last we’ll get for quite some time. We’ll reconvene at headquarters at 6:00 A.M.”
· · ·
Gail’s driveway had been plowed and sanded, for which I was extremely grateful. Where my old car had usually given up halfway up the hill, I doubted Leo’s could have climbed ten feet. I walked up to her sliding glass door and knocked.
I was a little surprised she hadn’t beaten me there, standing lookout to see how I fared on the slope. I slid open the door and called out her name. She answered from the kitchen.
I closed the door behind me and hung up my coat. I heard her walk into the room. “Hi, Joe.” The terror in her voice made me whirl around. She was standing in the kitchen door, wide-eyed and pale. Behind her, holding a gun, was Henry Stark. “Yeah. Hi, Joe.”
For a split second, I was frozen still, my heart hammering. Pictures flashed in my mind-of Jamie Phillips, Wendy Stiller, Ted Haffner, Lew Hill, and all the others this man had mentally or physically maimed. And now Gail. I fought back an explosive surge of absolute rage-something so violent, I had to reach back to Korea to remember its predecessor.
Stark smiled and pushed her gently toward the living room sofa. “Strong, silent type, huh? Why don’t you follow your girlfriend after depositing your gun gently on the floor? I hate the way they throw guns around in the movies.” He shook his head, “Dangerou, “Dans.”
I did as I was told, thinking he sounded a lot like a movie himself. Gail and I sat side by side on the sofa.
“That’s right. Lean way back. Put your feet up on the table and keep your hands folded in your laps.” He sat comfortably in an armchair opposite. He was dressed neatly in the dark blue jumpsuit and paratrooper boots I’d seen him in earlier. His face looked just as it did in his photo, except in person he positively oozed graceful menace. I had seen that once before, in a National Geographic, looking at a straight-on close-up of a panther in the wild. Even the pale, inert eyes looked the same.
“I felt I ought to introduce myself personally, since you now know who I am. I also wanted to thank you for having done such a good job, albeit with some prodding. I have the definite feeling we won’t be at this too much longer. We’re getting very close, don’t you agree?”
I was so roiled up inside I was having a hard time breathing, much less coming up with pleasantries to exchange with a psychopath. In the abstract, I’d had the leisure to deal with this man’s actions, to think about them one by one. Sitting here facing him, I just wanted him to go away. It was as if all he’d done-to his wife and daughter, to almost everyone I’d had to deal with for weeks-was suffocating me.
“If you hadn’t been such a screwup as a father, none of this would have happened.”
He tightened his mouth slightly, but that was all. “Aren’t we judgmental.”
“Your daughter was an accident waiting to happen. If you want to find out who really raped and strangled her, look in the mirror.”
He remained outwardly impassive, but he also stayed silent. I felt Gail’s eyes boring holes into the side of my head. She was evidently unhappy with my approach.
But I’ll grant Stark this much: he had more self-control than I. After a long sixty-second count, he resumed in the same tone as before. “If you were actually trained by someone to talk like that to a man holding a gun on you, I suggest you report back that the method needs revision.”
I heard Gail let out her breath softly. Stark rearranged himself in the chair, stretching his legs in the process. It seemed to relax him a bit. He smiled again. “Whether you admire me as a father or not, we’re stuck together on this thing, so we might as well get it over with quickly.”
“You’ve got to be out of your mind if you think I’m going to cooperate with you. I fully intend to stop you long before I nail whoever it was who killed your daughter.”
“Utter crap and you know it. The only case you have is the one we’re on together. You’re no closer to catching me than you were the night Thelma Reitz turned Phillips into Alpo, which, by the way, wasn’t my fault.”
“Wasn’t your fault? Who the hell’s fault was it then?”
“I had no idea she had a shotgun in the house. Not that I really minded-the results were satisfactory.”
“Phillips was the only guy who tried to stop this whole mess.”
“Oh, come, come. His actions are what count. The jury was unanimous-he just tried to get the best of both worlds. Pure hypocrisy.”
I knew I wasn’t doing this right-that I should be conversational and supportive, trying to get as much out of him as I could. But I was both angry-at him and at myself-and nervous. With everybody poised to move on Gorham in the next few hours, I was now chatting with the one man I wanted kept in the dark. I felt everything I knew was printed across my forehead. “Why the hell didn’t you come to us in the first place and ask us to reopen the case?”
That brought a chuckle. “Would it have worked?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. Stranger things have happened. You never gave it a thought, did you?”
He waved his hand. “Water under the dam.”
Another blast of anger made me struggle to get up and lunge at him. He placed his pistol barrel against my forehead so fast I barely saw him move. “Sit back.” He pushed lightly with the gun, and I fell back against the pillows. Gail instinctively reached for my hand. Stark didn’t stop her.
“Who killed Frank?”
He looked at me for a long moment and then smiled and rose. “That’s enough for now. I merely dropped by to say hi. Perhaps we’ll meet again later.”
“When we do, you’ll be in jail.”
He slowly raised his pistol to where it was pointing at my right eye. “I want you to understand something here, Joe. You are not in control. You are my stalking horse. I put you in place and you’ve done your job. In a short while, the quarry will be exposed and you’ll be expendable.”
His arm moved slightly to where the gun was pointed at Gail’s head. “But in the meantime, you had better remember: you people live at my discretion. That includes Miss Zigman, your mother, Leo, Martha Murphy, and all the other people you’d better place above your moral outrage. Because if you don’t, I’ll have to remind you how responsible you are for their safety.”