A sunburst of pain swirled fear and anger together, dizzied his thoughts, distorted his hearing so that Vorhees’ voice saying, “Get up, you’re not hurt,” seemed to come humming from a distance. It was his hands and fingers that reacted, without conscious will, as if they were independent entities: shoving the chair off, reaching upward to clutch and hang onto the edge of the desk and lift himself onto his feet.
“‘She’s yours, Andy, all yours.’” Vorhees’ voice was clearer now, the words arrogant, commanding. “‘I’ll never go near her again.’”
Chaleen leaned shakily on the desktop. He heard himself say in a cracked voice, “Get away, get out.”
“‘She’s yours, Andy, all yours.’”
“Get out, get out!”
Through a haze of pain and sweat he saw Vorhees come toward him, felt a handful of his shirt caught and bunched and his body jerked close. “Say it, you piece of shit!”
Again it was the fingers of his right hand that reacted without conscious thought. Scrabbled forward, touched the coldness of the heavy rose quartz paperweight, gathered it into his palm-
“Say it!”
– and blindly, then, his arm swung up and swept around, and he heard the crunch of stone meeting flesh and bone, felt warm wet droplets spatter his face, felt the grip on his shirtfront release. His fingers went nerveless; the paperweight bounced, rolled on the desktop. Shock waves rolled through him. Clearly, then, he saw Vorhees still standing, a look of disbelief on his face, the extended hand fluttering as if with sudden palsy, a crimson and bone-white hole in his forehead where the left eyebrow had been.
“No,” Chaleen said, “no, I didn’t mean-”
Vorhees’ eyes glazed over and he collapsed into a loose bundle on the carpet.
Numbly, Chaleen stared down at him. It seemed like a long time before he could make his legs carry him forward. In what felt like slow-motion movements, he lowered himself to one knee beside Vorhees, fumbled for a pulse that wasn’t there.
Dead.
Dead!
Nausea churned in his stomach, funneled bile into his throat. He lurched to his feet, stumbled around the couch into the bathroom, reached the toilet just as the scotch came boiling and burning out of him. He hung there, retching, until there was nothing left. At the sink then, not looking into the mirror before or after, he scrubbed the blood spatters off his face. His hands still shook badly when he was done; his breathing was erratic, he couldn’t seem to get enough oxygen into his lungs.
In his office again, not looking at what lay on the carpet, he took two long pulls from the bottle of Glenlivet. The whiskey burned like fire, stayed down, but did little to quiet his screaming nerves or ease the feeling of suffocation. Unsteadily, he went through the front office, opened the outer door, stepped outside to suck in deep breaths of the cold night air-
Christ! Vorhees had left the gates standing wide open.
The thought that somebody, one of the homeless that hung around the area, might’ve come wandering in ran a shudder through Chaleen. No cars on the street now, nobody in sight, but he ran across the night-lit yard anyway, closed the gate, snapped the padlock. His chest heaved like a bellows on the way back.
Inside again, he locked the outer door. Sat down at Abby’s desk to try to get his breathing under control, try to think.
What was he going to do?
Dead man in his office. Bastard deserved to die, but not like this, not here. The other night with Margaret had been bad enough, but all he’d had to do then was make sure she drank enough to pass out, then carry her out to the garage and fire up her Mercedes. No blood, no violence, no body to worry about. And he hadn’t had to watch her die.
But it wasn’t a detached murder this time, wasn’t murder at all. Vorhees had hit him, knocked him down, grabbed him, threatened him… he’d acted in self-defense. Call the police? Tell them how Vorhees had bulled in here, but not the reason, and then the rest of it just as it had happened. They’d believe him. Wouldn’t they?
Maybe they wouldn’t. No marks on him to show that he’d been attacked; he felt his head and neck to be sure. Common knowledge that he and Vorhees had had trouble before. There’d be an investigation and the cops would find out about him and Cory from those two private dicks. And what if they got it in their heads to question Margaret’s death despite the accident verdict, somehow managed to tie him to it? He wasn’t sure he was in any shape to stand up to police questioning tonight, or at any time. Calling the law was out, it would only make things worse.
Get rid of the body. That was what he had to do. Take it somewhere and hide it, bury it, or at least make it look like Vorhees was killed someplace else by somebody else. But what about Vorhees’ car? That damn Aston was parked right out front. He couldn’t leave it there, and he couldn’t drive two cars. Didn’t dare run the risk of ditching the Aston after ditching the body and then taking a taxi or public transportation to come back for his Caddy-
Cory!
She’d know what to do, she’d help him. Call her, explain what had happened, tell her-
Tell her he’d just killed her future husband, the man who was going to make her rich? Tell her all her carefully laid plans had been for nothing and both of them might be up shit creek now? She wouldn’t care that it had been self-defense, she’d blame him for letting it happen. Never forgive him, never let him near her again. He’d lose her for good.
No, he couldn’t ask her for help, couldn’t ever tell her what had happened here tonight. Didn’t make any difference whether Vorhees was found dead or just disappeared without a trace; either way, Chaleen’s only hope of keeping her was to plead ignorance and make her believe it.
The body, the car… he’d have to get rid of them by himself. No other choice. But how?
Think, think!
He went back into his office for another jolt of Glenlivet. This one steadied him, helped him focus. And pretty soon an idea began to form. He clung to it, shaped it until it was complete. Or almost complete. There was still the problem of the two cars, getting back here to claim his own after he got rid of the body and Vorhees’ Aston…
One more drink, a small one this time, and he had the answer. George Petrie. Old George, factory foreman at Chaleen Manufacturing from the day the old man opened the plant. Loyal as they come. Do any favor he was asked to, even after business hours, and without asking questions of his own. And he was guaranteed reachable by phone; a widower, old George never went out on weeknights by his own admission.
Chaleen made himself go look at the body. The way Vorhees had fallen, half over on his left side, most of the blood from the wound glistened on his face and shirt and coat. Not much on the carpet, just a few spots. More spots on the desktop, smeared on the paperweight. The clean-up wouldn’t be too bad. But he’d have to get that started first, before the blood dried. Then he’d get a tarp from the factory and roll the body into it before he carried it out to the Aston.
All right. Now that Chaleen had a plan in place he was steady-handed again, his control regained. When the salvage job was finished, there’d be nothing to tie Vorhees’ death to him. He’d still have Cory, and before long they’d figure a way, or she would, to get their hands on the kind of money she coveted and he needed.
It could, it would work out that way. It had to!
22
Tamara and Runyon were discussing Andrew Vorhees’ no-show when I came into the agency. Vorhees still seemed to be missing this morning; there’d been no word from him, and when Tamara called his office, she got the kind of tight-lipped runaround that indicates something amiss.
“Something’s happened to him,” she said ominously, “and you can bet Cory Beckett had a hand in it.”