Without giving it any thought, Mark automatically got in the driver’s seat of the idling car and drove off into the warm Beverly Hills evening, trying to see through his tears.
JULY 31, 2009
M arilyn Monroe had stayed there, and Liz Taylor, Fred Astaire, Jack Nicholson, Nicole Kidman, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, and others whom he forgot because he wasn’t paying attention to the bellman who could see he wanted to be alone and watched him leave quickly without the customary grand tour.
To the bellman, the guest looked confused and disheveled. His only bag was a briefcase. But they got all types of rich druggies and eccentrics, and for a tip, the mumbling fellow had stripped a hundred off a wad so it was all good.
Mark woke up, disoriented after a deep sleep, but despite the cannon fire in his head, he quickly snapped to reality and closed his eyes again in despair. He was aware of a few sounds: the low hum of an air conditioner, a bird chirping outside the window, his hair rubbing between the cotton sheets and his ear. He felt the downward draft from a ceiling fan. His mouth was so desiccated, there didn’t seem to be a molecule of moisture to lubricate his tongue.
It was the kind of suite that provided guests with quart-sized bottles of premium liquor. On the desk was a half-empty vodka bottle, strong effective medicine for his memory problem-he’d drunk one glass after another until he stopped remembering. Apparently, he undressed and turned off the lights, some basic reflex intact.
The filtered light coming through the living room door was infusing color into the pastel decor. A palette of peach, mauve, and sage came into focus. Kerry would have loved this place, he thought, rolling his face into the down pillow.
He had driven the purloined car only a few blocks when he decided he was too tired to run. He pulled over, parked on a quiet residential stretch of North Crescent, got out and drifted aimlessly without a plan. He was too numb to realize he was more conspicuous in Beverly Hills as a pedestrian than as a driver of a stolen BMW. Some period of time passed. He found himself staring at a chartreuse sign with three-dimensional white script letters popping out.
The Beverly Hills Hotel.
He looked up at a pink confection of a building set back in a verdant garden. He found himself walking up the drive, wandering into Reception, asking what rooms they had, and taking the most expensive, a grand bungalow with a storied history that he paid for with a fistful of cash.
He stumbled out of bed, too dehydrated to urinate, chugged an entire bottle of water then sat back down on the bed to think. His computerlike mind was gooey and overheated. He wasn’t used to struggling to answer a mental problem. This was a decision tree analysis: each action had possible outcomes, each outcome triggered new potential actions.
How hard was it? Concentrate!
He ran the gamut of possibilities from running and hiding, living off his remaining cash for as long as he could, to giving himself up to Frazier immediately. Today wasn’t his day, or tomorrow: he was BTH, so he knew he wasn’t going to be murdered or go off the deep end as a suicide. But that didn’t mean Frazier wouldn’t make good on his threat to hurt him, and best case, he’d spend the rest of his life in a dark solitary hole.
He started to cry again. Was it for Kerry or for fucking up so miserably? Why couldn’t he have been content with things as they were? He held his throbbing temples in his hands and rocked himself. His life hadn’t been that bad, had it? Why did he think he needed money and fame? Here he was in a temple of money and fame, the best bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and big fucking deaclass="underline" it was only a couple of rooms with furniture and some appliances. He had all that stuff already. Mark Shackleton: he wasn’t a bad guy. He had a sense of proportion. It was that fucker, Peter Benedict, that grasping striver, who’d gotten him into trouble. He’s the one who should be punished, not me, Mark thought, taking a small step toward insanity.
He felt compelled to turn on the TV. In a span of five minutes three of the news stories were about him.
An insurance executive had been killed on a Las Vegas golf course by a sniper.
Will Piper, the FBI agent in charge of the Doomsday investigation, remained a fugitive from justice.
In local news, a diner at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant was shot in the head through a window by an unknown assailant still at large.
He started sobbing again at the sight of Kerry’s body, barely filling out a medical examiner’s bag.
He knew he couldn’t let Frazier have him. The chiseled man with dead eyes petrified him. He’d always been scared of the watchers, and that was before he knew they were cold-blooded killers.
He decided only one person could help him.
He needed a pay phone.
It was a task that almost defeated him because twenty-first century Beverly Hills was bereft of public phones and he was on foot. The hotel probably had one but he needed to find a place that wouldn’t lead them right to his door.
He walked for the better part of an hour, getting sweaty, until he finally found one in a sandwich shop on North Beverly. It was in between breakfast and lunch and the place was not crowded. He felt like he was being watched by the few patrons, but it was imaginary. He melted into the drab hall near the restrooms and the back door. He’d changed a twenty back at the hotel, so armed with a pocketful of quarters, he rang the first of his numbers and got voice mail. He hung up without leaving a message.
Then the second-voice mail again.
Finally the last number. He held his breath.
A woman answered on the second ring. “Hello?”
He hesitated before he spoke. “Is this Laura Piper?” Mark asked.
“Yes. Who’s this?” Her apprehension was palpable.
“My name is Mark Shackleton. I’m the man your father is looking for.”
“Omigod, the killer!”
“No! Please, I’m not! You have to tell him that I didn’t kill anybody.”
Nancy was driving John Mueller to Brooklyn to interview one of the bank managers in the borough’s recent robbery spree. There was overwhelming surveillance and eyewitness evidence to indicate that the same two Middle Eastern-looking men were involved in all five jobs, and the Terrorism Task Force was breathing down the neck of the Major Crimes Division to see if there was a terrorism angle.
Nancy was unhappy about the second-guessing, but her partner was undisturbed.
“You can’t take these cases lightly,” he said. “Learn that lesson early in your career. We are in a global war on terror and I think it’s completely appropriate to treat these perps as terrorists till proven otherwise.”
“They’re just bank robbers who happen to look Muslim. There’s nothing to indicate they’re political,” she insisted.
“You’re wrong once, you’ve got the blood of thousands of Americans on your hands. If I had stayed on the Doomsday case, I would have pursued the possibility of terrorism there too.”
“There wasn’t any terror connection, John.”
“You don’t know that. Case isn’t closed, unless I missed something. Is it closed yet?”
She gritted her teeth. “No, John, it’s not closed.”
He hadn’t brought it up yet but this was his opening. “What the heck is Will doing anyway?”
“I believe he thinks he’s doing his job.”
“There’s always one right way to do things and multiple wrong ways-Will consistently finds one of the wrong ways,” he pontificated. “I’m glad I’m here to get your training back on the straight and narrow.”
When he wasn’t looking, she rolled her eyes. She was already agitated, and he was making things worse. The day began with a disturbing news story about the sniper-killing of Nelson Elder, surely a coincidence, but she was powerless to check into it-she was off the case.