Mandy answered on the third ring.
“Don't open your door for anyone,” I said, still panting, perspiring heavily. Had this really happened? Had Henri just threatened to kill me and Mandy if I didn't write his book?
“Ben?”
“Don't answer the door for a neighbor or a Girl Scout or the cable guy, or anyone, okay, Mandy? Don't open it for the police.”
“Ben, you're scaring me to death! Seriously, honey. What's going on?”
“I'll tell you when I see you. I'm leaving now.”
I staggered back to the living room, pocketed the items Henri had left behind, and headed out the door, still seeing Henri's face and hearing his threat.
That's just a way of? getting Amanda killed? I'll have to exercise the termination clause? Understand?
I think I did.
Traction Avenue was dark now, but alive with honking horns, tourists buying goods from racks, gathering around a one-man band on the sidewalk.
I got into my ancient Beemer, headed for the 10 Freeway, worried about Amanda as I drove. Where was Henri now?
Henri was good-looking enough to pass as a solid citizen, his features bland enough to take on any kind of disguise. I imagined him as Charlie Rollins, saw a camera in his hand, taking pictures of me and Amanda.
His camera could just as easily have been a gun.
I thought about the people who'd been murdered in Hawaii. Kim, Rosa, Julia, my friends Levon and Barbara, all tortured and so skillfully dispatched. Not a fingerprint or a trace had been left behind for the cops.
This wasn't the work of a beginner.
How many other people had Henri killed?
The freeway tailed off onto 4th and Main. I turned onto Pico, passed the diners and car repair shops, the two-level crappy apartments, the big clown on Main and Rose – and I was in a different world, Venice Beach, both a playground for the young and carefree and a refuge for the homeless.
It took me another few minutes to circle around Speedway until I found a spot a block from Amanda's place, a former one-family home now split into three apartments.
I walked up the street listening for the approach of a car or the sound of Italian loafers slapping the pavement.
Maybe Henri was watching me now, disguised as a vagrant, or maybe he was that bearded guy parking his car. I walked past Amanda's house, looked up to the third floor, saw the light on in her kitchen.
I walked another block before doubling back. I rang the doorbell, muttered, “Please, Mandy, please,” until I heard her voice behind the door.
“What's the password?”
“ 'Cheese sandwich.' Let me in.”
Chapter 69
Amanda opened the door, and I grabbed her, kicked the door closed behind me, and held her tight.
“What is it, Ben? What happened? Please tell me what's going on.”
She freed herself from my arms, grabbed my shoulders, and inventoried my face.
“Your collar is bloody. You're bleeding. Ben, were you mugged?”
I threw the bolts on Amanda's front door, put my hand at her back, and walked her to the small living room. I sat her down in the easy chair, took the rocker a few feet away.
“Start talking, okay?”
I didn't know how to soften it, so I just told it plain and simple. “A guy came to my door with a gun. Said he's a contract killer.”
“What?”
“He led me to believe that he killed all those people in Hawaii. Remember when I asked you to help me find Charlie Rollins from Talk Weekly magazine?”
“The Charlie Rollins who was the last one to see Julia Winkler? That's who came to see you?”
I told Amanda about Henri's other names and disguises, how I had met him not only as Rollins, but that he'd also masqueraded as the McDanielses' driver, calling himself Marco Benevenuto.
I told her that he'd been sitting on my couch and pointing a gun, telling me that he was a professional assassin for hire and had killed many, many times.
“He wants me to write his autobiography. Wants Raven-Wofford to publish it.”
“This is unbelievable,” Amanda said.
“I know.”
“No, I mean, it's really unbelievable. Who would confess to murders like that? You've got to call the police, Ben,” she said. “You know that, don't you?”
“He warned me not to.”
I handed Mandy the packet of pictures and watched the disbelief on her face change to shock and then anger.
“Okay, the bastard has a zoom lens,” she said, her mouth clamped into a straight line. “He took some pictures. Proves nothing.”
I took the flash drive out of my pocket, dangled it by the cord. “He gave me this. Said it's a sales tool and that it will inspire me.”
Chapter 70
Amanda left the living room, then came back with her laptop under her arm and holding two glasses and a bottle of Pinot. She booted up while I poured, and when her laptop was humming, I inserted Henri's flash drive into the port.
A video started to roll.
For the next minute and a half, Amanda and I were in the grip of the most horrific and obscene images either of us had ever seen. Amanda clutched my arm so hard that she left bruises, and when it was finally over she threw herself back into the chair, tears flowing, sobbing.
“Oh, my God, Amanda, what an ass I am. I'm so sorry. I should have looked at it first.”
“You couldn't have known. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it.”
“That goes for me, too.”
I put the media card into my back pocket and went down the hall to the bathroom, sluiced cold water over my face and the back of my scalp. When I looked up, Amanda was standing in the doorway. She said, “Take it all off.”
She helped me with my bloody shirt, undressed herself, and turned on the shower. I got into the tub and she got in behind me, put her arms around me as the hot water beat down on us both.
“Go to New York and talk to Zagami,” she said. “Do what Henri says. Zagami can't turn this down.”
“You're sure about that?”
“Yeah, I'm sure. The thing to do is keep Henri happy while we figure out what to do.”
I turned to face her. “I'm not leaving you here alone.”
“I can take care of myself. I know, I know, famous last words. But really, I can.”
Mandy got out of the shower and disappeared for long enough that I turned off the water, wrapped myself in a bath towel, and went looking for her.
I found her in the bedroom, on her tiptoes, reaching up to the top shelf of her closet. She pulled down a shotgun and showed it to me.
I looked at her stupidly.
“Yeah,” she said. “I know how to use it.”
“And you're going to carry it around with you in your purse?”
I took her shotgun and put it under the bed.
Then I used her phone.
I didn't call the cops, because I knew that they couldn't protect us. I had no fingerprint evidence, and my description of Henri would be useless. Six foot, brown hair, gray eyes, could be anyone.
After the cops watched my place and Mandy's for a week or so, we'd be on our own again, vulnerable to a sniper's bullet – or whatever Henri would or could use to silence us.
I saw him in my mind, crouched behind a car, or standing behind me at Starbucks, or watching Amanda's apartment through a gun sight.
Mandy was right. We needed time to make a plan. If I worked with Henri, if he got comfortable with me, maybe he'd slip, give me convictable evidence, something the cops or the Feds could use to lock him up.
I left a voice-mail message for Leonard Zagami, saying it was urgent that we meet. Then I booked tickets for me and Mandy, round trip, Los Angeles to New York.
Chapter 71
When Leonard Zagami took me on as one of his authors, I was twenty-five, he was forty, and Raven House was a high-class specialty press that put out a couple dozen books a year. Since then, Raven had merged with the gigantic Wofford Publishing, and the new Raven-Wofford had taken over the top six floors of a skyscraper overlooking Bloomingdale's.