The Door to December
Page 17

'You must've been working around the clock if you were at that house in Studio City last night,' Padrakis said.
'Pretty nearly around the clock.
'So what're you doing here?'
'Heard there was free popcorn.'
'You should be home, having a beer, your feet up. That's where I'd be.'
'I'm out of beer. Besides, I'm dedicated,' Dan said. 'They leave you with a key, George?'
'You're a workaholic, from what I hear.'
'You going to psychoanalyze me first, or can you tell me did they leave you with a key?'
'Yeah. But I don't know I should let you have it.'
'It's my case.'
'But the place has already been tossed.'
'Not by me.'
'Wexlersh and Manuello.'
'Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Come on, George, why're you being such a pain in the ass?'
Reluctantly, Padrakis fumbled in a coat pocket for the key to Ned Rink's house. 'From what I hear, Mondale wants to talk to you real bad.'
Dan nodded. 'That's because I'm a brilliant conversationalist. You should hear me discuss ballet.'
Padrakis found the key but didn't hand it over right away. 'He's been trying to track you down all day.'
'And he calls himself a detective?' Dan said, holding his hand out for the key.
'He's been looking for you all day, and then you waltz in here instead of going back to the station like you promised him, and I just give you the key ... he won't be happy about that.'
Dan sighed. 'You think he'll be any happier if you refuse to give me the key and then I have to go smash a window to get in that house?'
'You wouldn't.'
'Pick a window.'
'This is stupid.'
'Any window.'
Finally, Padrakis gave him the key. Dan went down the sidewalk, through the gate, to the front door, favoring his weak knee. They must be in for more rain; the knee knew. He unlocked the door and stepped inside.
He was in a tiny foyer. The living room on his right was dark except for the pale-grayish glow that came through the windows from the distant streetlights. To his left, back through a narrow hall, a lamp was on in a bedroom or study. It hadn't been visible from the street. Wexlersh and Manuello had apparently forgotten to switch it off when they'd finished, which was just like them: They were sloppy.
He snapped on the hall light, stepped into the darkness on his right, found a lamp, and had a look at the living room first. It was startling. This was a modest house in a modest neighborhood, but it was furnished as though it served as a secret retreat for one of the Rockefellers. The centerpiece of the living room was a gorgeous, twelve-foot-by-twelve foot, three-inch-deep Chinese carpet with a pattern of dragons and cherry blossoms. There were midnineteenthcentury French chairs with hand-carved legs and feet, a matching sofa upholstered in a lush off-white fabric that exactly matched the color of the unpatterned sections of the carpet. Two bronze lamps with intricately worked bases had shades of crystal beads. The large coffee table was unlike anything Dan had seen before: It seemed to be entirely bronze and pewter, with a superbly etched Oriental scene on the top; the upper surface curved around to form the sides, and the sides curved under to form the legs, so that the entire piece seemed fashioned from a single flowing slab. On the walls, the landscape paintings, each ornately framed, looked like the work of a master. In the farthest corner, a period French tagre held a collection of crystal—figures, vases, bowls—and each piece was more beautiful than the one before it.
The living-room furnishings alone had cost more than the entire modest house. Clearly, Ned Rink had been making a good living as a hired murderer. And he knew just where to put his money. If he had bought a big house in the best neighborhood, the IRS might eventually have noticed and asked how he could afford it, but here he could appear to be in modest circumstances while living in splendor.
Dan tried to picture Rink in this room. The man had been squat and decidedly ugly. Rink's desire to surround himself with beautiful things was understandable, but sitting here, he would have looked like a roach on a birthday cake.
Dan noticed there were no mirrors in the living room, remembered there had been none in the foyer, and suspected there would be none anywhere in the house except, of necessity, in the bathroom. He almost felt sorry for Rink, the lover of beauty who couldn't stand to look at himself.
Fascinated, he went back down the hall to have a look at the rest of the place, heading first for the room where Wexlersh and Manuello had left a light burning. As he stepped through the door, it suddenly occurred to him that maybe the light couldn't be blamed on Wexlersh and Manuello, that maybe someone else was in the house right now, that maybe someone was there illegally in spite of the fact that George Padrakis was watching the front entrance, and at the same time he glimpsed movement out of the corner of his eye as he went through the doorway, but it was too late. He turned and saw the butt of a pistol swinging at him. Because he turned into the blow, he took it square on the forehead instead of alongside his skull.
He went down.
Hard.
The overhead light went out.
He felt as if his skull had been half crushed, but he wasn't unconscious.
Hearing movement, he realized his assailant was stepping past him toward the door. There was light in the hall, but Dan's vision was blurred, and all he could see was a shapeless form silhouetted by the glow. That silhouette seemed to be gliding up and down and going around in circles at the same time, like a figure on a carousel, and Dan knew his grip on consciousness was tenuous.
Nevertheless, he heaved forward on the floor, gasping as the pain in his head lanced all the way down into his shoulders and back, and he grabbed tenaciously at the fleeing phantom. He caught a fistful of material, a leg of the man's trousers, and jerked as hard as he could.
The stranger staggered, collided with the door frame, and said, 'Shit!'
Dan held on.
Cursing, the intruder kicked him in the shoulder.
Then again.
Dan had both hands on the guy's leg now and was trying to pull him down on the floor, where they would be more evenly matched, but the guy was holding on to the door frame and trying to shake him loose. He felt as though he were a dog attacking a mailman.
The intruder kicked him again, in the right arm this time, and his right hand went numb. He lost half his grip on the perp's leg. His vision blurred further, and the light seemed to dim. His eyes stung. He gritted his teeth as if to bite into consciousness and hold on to it with his jaws.
The stranger, still a black shape against the vague hall light, bent toward him and clubbed him again with the butt of the gun. On the shoulder this time. Then in the middle of his back. Then in the shoulder again.
Blinking, fighting to clear his burning eyes, Dan let go of the guy's leg but whipped his good left hand up and tried to grab the bastard's throat or face. He got hold of an ear and tore at it.
The stranger squealed.
Dan's hand slipped off the blood-slick ear, but he hooked his fingers in the perp's shirt collar.
The intruder hammered Dan's arm, trying to make him let go.
Dan held fast.
Some of the numbness seeped out of his right arm, and he was able to push himself up with that hand while he pulled himself up with the hand that was hooked in his adversary's shirt. Onto his knees. Then one foot on the floor. Thrusting up, shoving the guy backward. Into the hall. They staggered two or three steps, turning as they moved, like a pair of clumsy dancers. They crashed to the floor, both of them this time.
He was right on top of the guy now, but he still couldn't see what his adversary looked like. His vision wouldn't clear, and the hall light was still dimmer than it should have been. His eyes burned as if acid had gotten into them, and he figured it must be sweat and blood pouring down from the gash in his forehead.
He reached inside his coat and pulled his .38 Police Special out of his shoulder holster, but he couldn't see the other guy swinging at his hand and couldn't duck the blow that came. Something hard whacked his knuckles, and the gun flew out of his grasp.
Grappling, they rolled against the wall, and Dan tried to drive his good knee into the stranger's crotch, but the bastard blocked him. Worse, the guy either kicked or struck Dan's other knee, the bum knee, which was his weak spot. A reptile-quick flash of pain slithered up his thigh and chased its tail around and around in his stomach. Being hit on that knee could sometimes be like taking a kick in the balls; it knocked all the wind out of him, and he almost let go.
Almost.
The guy clambered over him and tried to scramble away, toward the kitchen, but Dan held on to the scumbag's jacket. The perp crawled, and Dan half crawled and was half dragged along behind him.
It might have been funny if they hadn't both been hurting and breathing like well-run horses. And if they hadn't been deadly serious.
Vision swimming and dimming, Dan launched himself forward in one last desperate effort, trying to lever himself on top of the intruder and pin him. But the perp apparently decided that the best defense was a good offense, so he stopped trying to get away and turned back on Dan, cursing so hard he sprayed spittle, pounding and flailing with what felt like four or five arms. They rolled back down the hall a few feet before finally coming to a stop with the intruder on top.
Something cold and hard poked against Dan's teeth. He knew what it was. The barrel of a gun.
'Stop this crap now!' the stranger said.
With the muzzle vibrating against his teeth, Dan said, 'If you were gonna kill me, you'd have done it already.'
'Push your luck,' the intruder said, and he sounded just angry enough to pull the trigger whether he wanted to or not. Blinking furiously, Dan cleared his vision slightly, not much, just enough so he could see the weapon, blurry, huge as a cannon, jammed into his face. He saw the man beyond the piece too, although not distinctly. The ceiling light in the hall was above and behind the son of a bitch, so his face was still pretty much in shadows. His left ear hung in an odd way, dripping blood.
Dan realized that his own eyelashes were gummed with blood. Blood was still seeping into his eyes along with copious streams of salty sweat, which was half the reason he couldn't clear them.
He stopped struggling.
'Let go ... you ... bulldog ... bastard!' the intruder said, kneeling on top of him, heaving each word out with a new breath, as if the words were lead ingots that had to be cast off with great effort.
'Okay,' Dan said, letting go of him.
'You crazy, man?'
'All right,' Dan said.
'You half tore my fuckin' ear off!'
'All right, okay,' Dan said.
'Don't you know when you're supposed to stay down, you stupid son of a bitch?'
'Now?'
'Yeah, now!'
'Okay.'
'Stay down!'
'All right.'
The intruder eased back, still pointing the gun at him but no longer holding it against his teeth. He studied Dan warily for a moment, then stood up. Shakily.
Now Dan could see him better, but it didn't much matter, because it was no one he remembered seeing before.
The guy backed off, toward the kitchen. He held the gun with one hand and his bleeding ear with the other. Defenseless, not daring to move lest he be shot, Dan lay on his back on the hall floor, head raised, blood trickling into his eyes, smelling blood, tasting blood, heart hammering, wanting to go for it, wanting to rush the bastard in spite of the gun, having to control himself, able to do nothing but just watch the guy escape. It made him mad as hell.
The perp reached the kitchen. The back of the house was open, and he reversed through it, hesitated, then ran.
Dan scrambled after his own piece, which was on the floor by the doorway of the room where he'd been ambushed. He snatched up the revolver, heaved and stumbled to his feet, cried out as a grenade of pain went off in his bum knee, somehow shoved the pain down into a little box in his mind and clamped a lid on it, and plunged toward the kitchen.
By the time he reached the back door and stepped out into the cool night air, the intruder was gone. He had no way of knowing which side of the redwood fence the perp had jumped.
*  *  *
Dan washed his face in Rink's bathroom. His forehead was bruised and abraded,
His vision had drifted back into focus and had locked there. Although his head felt as though it had been used as a blacksmith's forge, he knew he wasn't suffering from concussion.
His head was not the only thing that ached. His neck, his shoulders, his back, and his left knee throbbed.
In the medicine cabinet above the bathroom sink, he found a package of gauze, made a compress out of it, and set it aside. He discovered some Bactine too, and he sprayed the scraped flesh of his forehead, blotted it gingerly, sprayed it again. He picked up the gauze compress and held it firmly against his forehead with his right hand, hoping to stop the bleeding altogether, while he prowled around the house.
He went to the room where he had been ambushed, and he switched on the light. It was a study, less elegantly but just as expensively furnished as the living room. One entire wall of bookshelves was built around a television and VCR. Half the shelves were used for books; the other half were filled with videotapes.
He looked at the tapes first and saw some familiar motion-picture titles: Silver Streak, Arthur, all the Abbott-and-Costello pictures, Tootsie, The Goodbye Girl, Groundhog Day, Foul Play, Mrs. Doubtfire, several Charlie Chaplin films, two Marx Brothers pictures. All the legit movies were comedies, and it figured a professional hit man might need to laugh a little when he came home from a hard day of blowing people's brains out. But most of the movies weren't legit. Most of them were pornographic, with titles like Debbie Does Dallas and The Sperminator. There must have been two to three hundred porno titles.
The books were of more interest because that was what the intruder apparently had been after. A cardboard carton stood on the floor in front of the bookcases; several volumes had been plucked off the shelves and piled in the box. First, Dan examined the collection and saw that every one of the books was a nonfiction study of one branch of the occult or another. Then, still holding the gauze to his forehead with one hand, he pawed through the seven volumes in the carton and saw they were all by the same author, Albert Uhlander.
Uhlander?
He reached into an inner jacket pocket and pulled out the small address book that he had taken from the Studio City house last night, from Dylan McCaffrey's wrecked office. He paged to the U listings and found only one.
Uhlander.
McCaffrey, who was interested in the occult, had known Uhlander. Rink, who was interested in the occult, had at least read Uhlander; maybe he had known Uhlander too. This was a link between McCaffrey and Ned Rink. But were they on the same side, or were they enemies? And what did the occult have to do with this?