Diehl, William - Show of Evil (11 page)

Vail waved Parver into his office and leaned back in his chair.
'Okay,' he said to his two chief investigators, 'let's hear it.'

'He spilled his guts,' St Claire said. 'We had him pegged right on
his wife's murder, Shana, the old lady's hearing was perfect. Thing is,
Rainey never got hold of Darby, so he didn't know we were after his
ass. He thought he was home free except for Poppy Palmer.'

Stenner picked up the story: 'Stretched his luck. Picked her up,
told her he was taking her to the airport, drove to his barn, strangled
her on the spot.'

'Then the miserable son-bitch threw her in the boot and drove around
for the better part of a day with her body,' St Claire continued.
'Spent the night in a motel outside Rockford, and this mornin' he
wrapped her up in an anchor chain and dropped her in the marsh up along
the Pecatonica.'

'Congratulations,' Vail said. 'You two did a great job.'

'We had some luck,' said Stenner. 'We were actually so close to him,
we heard him drop her body in the water.' He turned to Shana Parver.
'But now you've got him.' He held up two fingers. 'Twice.'

'Rainey was waitin' at county jail when we brought him down,' said
St Claire. 'Says he wants't'talk.'

Vail laughed. 'Sure he does. Well, the hell with Rainey, it's too
late now.' He turned to Shana Parver. 'Okay, Shana, you got your way.
Darby's all yours. I assume you'll want to max him out?'

She looked up and smiled, but there was little mirth in the grin.
'Of course

Jane Venable arrived at Vail's office at exactly ten o'clock. The
lift doors parted and she stepped out, decked out in an emerald-green
silk suit that made her red hair look like it was on fire. She had a
tan Coach leather shoulder bag slung over one shoulder. She strode
towards his office with the authority and assurance of a show horse
prancing past the judges' stand. Everyone in the office suddenly found
something to do that would put her directly in their line of sight.
Every eye followed her to Naomi's desk.

'Hi,' she said with a bright smile. 'You must be Naomi. I'm Jane
Venable.' She thrust her hand out.

Vail came out of his office and greeted her, ignoring the momentary
smirk Jane flashed at him, a look Naomi did not miss.
Marty
,
she thought,
you're dead in the water
. Vail had included
Venable in the special meeting because she was an integral part of the
emerging Stampler crisis. They entered his office.

'Last night was the pits,' she said, faking a big smile.

He smiled back. 'I smoked a pack of cigarettes trying to go to
sleep.'

'That'll teach you to take a night off.'

'We're being watched,' he said, flicking his eyes towards the rest
of the staff.

'I know. Isn't it fun?'

'Coffee?'

'Sure.'

'I checked on you last night - to make sure your guardian angels
were there,' Vail said.

'I don't know what my neighbours think,' she said. 'One guy parks in
front of the house all night and the other one parks on my terrace and
cruises the grounds with a flashlight every hour on the hour.'

'Just makes you even more mysterious than you already are.'

'I don't know why I even brought it up, I've never met any of my
neighbours.' Her mood seemed to change suddenly when he turned his back
to her to draw the coffee. He could see her reflection in the
windowpane. She became less ebullient, more introspective, as if she
had very quickly fallen into deep thought.

The Stoddard case was heavy on Venable's mind. The discovery of the
secret compartment in Delaney's apartment presented her with a peculiar
dilemma. As Stoddard's defender, she was not required to tell the
prosecution what she had found. On the other hand, the gun was integral
to the case and she could be accused of concealing evidence. Her
decision had been not to touch anything. She had closed up the secret
room and left; her argument would be that she had not been sure whose
gun was in the closet. And she still had to deal with Edith Stoddard
about her discovery. She decided to put the problem aside for the
moment; obviously Vail's meeting would rule the agenda this morning.
Loosen
up
, she told herself.

Vail poured a spoonful of sugar in her coffee cup. She quickly
brightened again when he returned with her coffee. As she put the cup
on the table in front of her, he said, 'Something bothering you?'

'You haven't known me that long.'

'How long?'

'Long enough to tell if something's got my goat.'

'Ah! So something
has
got your goat,' he said. He walked
around the table and sat down, tilting his chair back with one foot on
the corner of the desk.

She leaned across the table and stared at him through half-closed
eyes and said, with mock sarcasm, 'I don't have a goat, Mr District
Attorney.'

He laughed, and she asked, 'Did you miss me?' looking as if she were
asking the time of day.

'Nah, although it did occur to me that some corporate samurai
warrior might steal your heart away at dinner last night.'

She laughed at him. 'You can't get rid of me that easily, Vail.'

'I don't want to get rid of you at all.'

They were keeping up the facade of two people casually making
conversation, a pantomime for the staff, which was still working very
hard to make it appear as if they were disinterested in the scene
behind the glass partition.

'Good,' she said, shaking her head so her hair flowed down over her
shoulders.

He whistled very low in appreciation of her studied wiles. 'You are
a science unto yourself,' he said.

'I suppose a good-morning kiss would stop traffic up here.'

'It would probably stop traffic in Trafalgar Square.'

'Pity.'

'Let's let the Wild Bunch in and get started. I'm sure they're all
sitting outside this fishbowl reading our lips. Besides, they're all
dying to meet the legendary Jane Venable.'

'Sure.'

'Absolutely. They know all about you. They've all read the
transcript of the Stampler trial.'

'Well, that's just great!' she snapped. 'The one trial where Mr
Wonderful whipped my ass and
that's
what they know about me?'

'Actually twice. I whipped your ass twice. Have you forgotten

'What say, Raymond?' Terry asked. 'Want to go down to the
commissary, eat with the inmates once before you leave?'

'I've gone ten years without eating with them,'

The pilot put the twin-engine plane down on a grass strip in a
little town called Milford in southern Indiana. There was no Tony in a
Cadillac to greet him, so Vail and St Claire rented a car at the small
airport and drove six miles south across the Flatrock River to the
Justine Clinic. The hospital was a pleasant departure from the Daisy.
It was shielded from the highway by a half-mile-deep stand of trees, at
the end of a gravel road. As Vail and St Claire burst out of the
miniforest, Justine spread out before them, looking more like a
collective farm than a mental hospital. A cluster of old brick
buildings surrounded a small lake. A tall, brick silo stood alone and
solitary, like a sentinel in the middle of the sprawling field that
separated the facility from the woods. A tall chain-link fence behind
the buildings on one side of the lake formed what appeared to be an
enormous playground. Several children were hanging on a spinning
whirligig, while a woman in a thick red jacket sat nearby reading a
book. A boat dock with a tin-roofed boathouse at its end stretched out
into the lake and a floating raft drifted forlornly about twenty yards
from the shore. It was a pleasant-seeming place, unlike the cold,
foreboding penal-colony atmosphere of the Daisy.

'Looks like a summer camp I went to once when I was a kid,' St
Claire said.

'Somehow I never thought of you as a kid, Harve,' Vail said.

'I was about nine. Damn, I hated it. We had to swim in this lake,
musta been forty below. M'lips were blue the whole two weeks I was
there.' He paused to spit out the car window. 'What's this guy's name
again?'

'Lowenstein. Dr Fred Lowenstein. He's the director.'

'Sound like a nice-guy?'

'He was very pleasant on the phone.'

'And she wouldn't talk to you, huh?'

'Her secretary said she was in a meeting, so I asked for the
director.'

'He knows what's goin' on?'

'Vaguely.'

They pulled up to what appeared to be the main building, a sprawling
brick barn of a place with a slate roof, and parked beside several
other cars on a gravelled oval in front of the structure. Gusts of wind
whined off the lake and swirled into dancing dust monkeys as they got
out of the car. A young boy in his early teens was hosing down a
battered old pickup truck nearby.

'We're looking for Dr Lowenstein,' Vail said to him. 'Is his office
in here?' The boy nodded and watched them enter.

The lobby of the building was an enormous room with a soaring
ceiling and a great open fireplace surrounded by faded, old, fluffy
sofas and chairs. The receptionist, a chunky woman in her late forties
with wispy blue-grey hair held up by bobby pins, sat behind a scarred
maple desk angled to one side of the entrance. A Waterford drinking
glass sat on one corner of her desk stuffed with a half-dozen straw
flowers. Behind her, a large Audobon print of a cardinal hung slightly
lopsided on the wall. The only thing modern in the entire room was the
switchboard phone.

'Help you?' she asked pleasantly.

'Martin Vail to see Dr Lowenstein. I have an appointment.'

'From Chicago?'

'Right.'

'Boy, didn't take you long't'get here,' she said, lifting the phone
receiver.

'The miracle of flight,' St Claire said, his eyes twinkling.

She looked at him over rimless glasses for a second, then: 'Doc,
your guests are here from the Windy City, Uh-huh, I mentioned that.
It's the miracle of flight. 'Kay.' She cradled the phone. 'First door
on the right,' she said, motioning down a hall towards an open door and
smiling impishly at St Claire.

Lowenstein was a great moose of a man with burly shoulders and
shaggy brown hair that swept over his ears and curled around the collar
of a plaid shirt. The sleeves were turned up halfway to his elbows and
his battered corduroy pants had shiny spots on the knees. He had a
pleasant, ruddy face and warm brown eyes, and there was about him a
pleasant, haphazard attitude unlike the measured mien of the
pipe-smoking Woodward. He was sitting at a roll-top desk, leaning over
a large yellow butterfly mounted on a white square of cardboard,
studying it through a magnifying glass. A cup of tea sat forgotten
among stacks of papers and pamphlets that cluttered the desktop. He
looked up as Vail tapped on the door frame.

'Dr Lowenstein? Martin Vail. This is Harve St Claire.'

'Well, you certainly didn't waste any time getting here,' he said in
a gruff rumble of a voice.

'We have a twin-engine Cessna available when the occasion demands,'
Vail said. 'An hour beats driving for three hours.'

'I would say.' He put down the magnifying glass and offered a
calloused hand that engulfed Vail's.

'Pretty thing,' St Claire said, nodding to the mounted butterfly.

'Just a common monarch,' Lowenstein said. 'Found it on the
windowsill this morning. Thought the kids might enjoy studying it. Can
I get you anything? Tea, coffee?'

'No thanks,' Vail said.

Lowenstein sat back at the desk and swept a large paw towards two
wooden chairs.

'I appreciate your help on this, Doctor,' said Vail. 'I wouldn't
have bothered you except that Molly wouldn't take my call.'

'I understand the nature of your problem, Mr Vail, but I don't know
a hell of a lot about the Stampler case. It's my feeling that you and
Molly need to address the problem. I'm also certain she would have
refused a meeting if you had reached her by phone.'

'Why?'

'Molly had a breakdown four years ago. A combination of exhaustion,
depression, and alcohol. She was a patient here for a year and a half.'

'I'm sorry, I had no idea

In the hazy light of an almost full moon, gargoyles and harpies and
strange mythical creatures lurked in the spires of the Gothic buildings
forming one of the University of Chicago's many quadrangles. Staring up
at them, Naomi Chance felt a sudden thrust of fear, as if they were
harbingers of doom. The medieval beasts seemed to be taunting her. She
quickly shook it off and turned up the collar of her coat against the
brisk wind that funnelled between the buildings, assaulting her as she
left the library and started across the quad towards the parking lot a
block away. The monthly meeting of the Association of Legal Secretaries
had been particularly dull, but she had presided with her usual elan
and kept the proceedings moving as briskly as possible.

As she approached 57th Street, she saw the glow of a cigarette among
the trees and shrubs near the street. A moment later the butt arced to
the ground. A man was huddled in the shadows, his hands buried in his
pockets. A car was parked by the kerb ten or twelve feet away.

She gripped the small can of Mace she always kept handy in her
pocket and subconsciously quickened her pace. Normally, she would not
have noticed him, but tonight was different. Tonight she saw omens
everywhere.
Hell
, she thought,
everybody's jumpy because
of Stampler's release
. As she approached the figure huddled in
the bushes, she gripped the Mace even tighter and steered a course away
from the bushes and trees. But before she got to the street, a voice
said, 'Naomi Chance.'

'Who's that?' she demanded when he said it, increasing the pace.

'Hold up a minute, please.'