Spellbinder (28 page)

Speaking quietly, in a low, tired-sounding voice, the detective said, “You know Denise, then. Miss Holloway.” Once again, he hadn’t asked a question. He’d stated a fact.

“That’s right. I know her.”

“Have you seen her today, by any chance?”

“Look—” He stepped closer to the other man: a taut, purposeful movement. “Look, it just so happens that I’m a friend of Denise’s. A
good
friend. So I’d like to know—right now—why you’re looking for her. And I’d also like to know who your friends are, and what interest they have in Denise’s whereabouts.”

Utterly unintimidated, the detective was calmly staring him straight in the eye. Finally, moving his chin toward the blue sedan and speaking in the same low, tired voice, he said, “Those men—the three of them—they work for Austin Holloway. Denise’s father. They’re—concerned about Denise. They want to know where she is, so they can tell her father. The three of them, they’ve flown up here, just today, to see about it. So you can see it’s important.”

“I can see they
think
it’s important.”

The detective shrugged his bony shoulders.

“Who’re you, anyhow?”

“I’m Harold Granbeck. Lloyd Mitchell—he’s in charge of security for Austin Holloway—he retained me.”

“Why?”

“Because I know the territory.” Once more, the thin shoulders lifted. “It’s the usual thing to do. It saves time and trouble.”

“Why is this Mitchell concerned about Denise? What’s happened, anyhow?”

“Listen, mister, I don’t have the answers. I’m just a hired hand. And, even if I had the answers—which I don’t—it wouldn’t be my place to give them to you. Now—” He lifted a long, scarecrow arm. “Now, why don’t you go inside, and I’ll ask them to come inside and fill you in. You can decide for yourself how much you want to tell them. What do you say?”

For a long, hard moment he stared at the other man. Then, gracelessly, he nodded abrupt agreement.

He looked at the three men sitting side by side on the couch: three blue-suited clones by Hart Schaffner and Marx, out of IBM, each one dressed alike—yet with differences, as befitted their rank and station. Flournoy, the leader—Holloway’s hatchet man, apparently—was dressed like a Wall Street broker. With his narrow, cruel face and his cold, calculating eyes, Flournoy could have been a reincarnation of Iago, or Machiavelli, or Himmler.

With his dark, dead eyes, his implacable mouth and his strangler’s hands—with his big, burly plowman’s body stuffed into a blue suit with padded shoulders—Mitchell could have been a medieval hangman. Or, in later years, a dark, ominous presence in the back halls of Hoover’s FBI—or Nixon’s White House. Mitchell was a true believer. Whatever he was told to do, he would do.

The third man, named Calloway, was the least of the lot: a mere look-alike, along to provide ballast, to give an appearance of substance to the mission. Calloway was a lightweight—a hanger-on.

Of the four men—the four intruders into what should have been his tender, passionate homecoming—only Harold Granbeck was credible. Sitting slumped in his chair, occasionally scratching reflectively at his crotch, Harold Granbeck was doing a job—earning his hourly wage.

Flournoy was speaking again. His voice, like his persona, was both calculating and thinly abrasive:

“The first thing we’ve got to do, Mr. Giannini, is find her. That is, we’ve got to determine whether, in fact, James Carson has her. That, I’d think, should be obvious. And it also should be obvious, I’d think, that the sooner we get to it, the better.”

“I agree. Which is exactly—” He pointed to the phone, beside his chair. “Which is exactly why I say we should call the police. We should call the Mendocino sheriff’s department. Now. Right now.”

Flournoy’s thin lips drew together in an expression of pained disapproval. “I’ve already tried to explain to you, Mr. Giannini, that Mr. Holloway—her father—doesn’t want it handled like that.” He, too, pointed to the phone. “You heard me call Mr. Holloway, just now. You heard the conversation. I purposely repeated his instructions, so you’d understand.”

“But—Christ—we’re talking about her
safety.
Her
life.
You—Christ—what you’re proposing would take
hours.
She could
die
, in the time it’ll take us to get up there.”

“Mr. Holloway doesn’t think so.”

“Oh. I see. Well, Mr. Flournoy, frankly I find Mr. Holloway’s attitude very hard to understand. It seems to me that he’s more concerned about his reputation—his image—than he is about his daughter’s well-being. Christ, if this—this creep has her, which seems likely, there’s no telling
what
he could be doing to her, right this minute. And, more to the point, there’s no telling what he could be doing in the next four hours, which is the time it’ll take us to get up there.”

Flournoy consulted a wafer-thin gold watch. “We’ve already been here for a half hour, Mr. Giannini.”

“That’s true. But—”

“Why don’t we get in the car, and drive to your cabin? It’s the logical first step. Let’s find out whether he’s there. As you describe it, we should be able to determine that without any risk whatever—to anyone. Without doing more than driving past the cabin. If we see a car—or two cars—we’ll know where we stand.”

“And then what? Suppose they
are
there. Then we’ve still got to call the police.”

“Agreed. The point is, Mr. Holloway doesn’t want to call the police until it’s absolutely necessary. For reasons I’ve already explained to you.”

“And which reasons I find—incredible.”

Sighing, Flournoy didn’t reply, but instead glanced pointedly at his watch.

“Well—” He gestured again to the phone. “There’s nothing to prevent me calling the police. Which is precisely what I intend to do.”

Harold Granbeck cleared his throat, speaking for the first time: “It won’t do you any good, Mr. Giannini. What we’ve got here is essentially a missing-person situation. The police get thousands every month. Which is the reason-they don’t even act on a complaint for forty-eight hours. That’s because, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the cases are domestic beefs that ended with someone running off. And, when the police
do
act, they only do it on information supplied by next of kin.”

“Bullshit.”

Granbeck shrugged. “It’s not bullshit, Mr. Giannini. If you were the young lady’s husband, that’s something else. But the way it is now, when you tell them the situation, the first thing they’d want to do is talk to Mr. Holloway. So you’re right back to where you started. Except that, in the process, you’d’ve gone against Mr. Holloway’s wishes. And, after all, he’s got some rights here. You might not agree with the way he wants to handle the situation. But, still, he
is
her father.”

As if speaking on cue, counterpointing Granbeck’s slurred, slovenly style, Flournoy spoke quietly, in his dry, precise voice: “If Mr. Holloway weren’t deeply concerned for his daughter, Mr. Giannini, we wouldn’t be here. Would we?”

“He doesn’t give a damn about Denise. He’s worried about his own skin. Period.”

Flournoy didn’t reply—only stared, reproachfully.

“Oh,
shit
.” He got to his feet, and reached for his jacket. Lying beside him, startled, Pepper barked.

S
HE WATCHED HIM GET
up from the room’s only armchair—Peter’s chair—and cross to the fireplace. Inexorably, her eyes moved to the hunting rifle, propped in a far corner of the room. Twice during the last hours he’d gone to a position in the room that put them at equal distances from the gun. It had been, almost certainly, a ruse to test her—or to tempt her. Did he hope that she would make a try for the gun, giving him an excuse to begin struggling with her? Rapists, she’d heard, got their kicks from the fight women put up, not from the actual sex act.

At the fireplace, he raised the hunting knife and drove it down into the redwood mantel. Then he took an oak log and threw it carelessly on the fire. A shower of sparks erupted, some of them falling on the rug beside the stone hearth. Smiling slightly, he looked at her—then looked down at the rug, already smouldering. Finally—languidly—he stepped on the rug, grinding out the sparks.

“When we leave,” he said, “maybe I’ll set it on fire. But not now. Not tonight. We need a place to sleep. Right?”

She didn’t answer.

“
Right?
”

In reply, she sighed. It was, she hoped a bored-sounding sigh, projecting long-suffering impatience, rather than the sick, empty fear she felt, almost a physical sensation centered in the pit of her stomach.

He levered the hunting knife from the mantel. Holding the knife loosely in his right hand, delicately balanced, he came toward her.

“You’re not talking much.” He stood over her, still toying idly with the broad-bladed knife. He’d told her how he’d gotten the knife and the rifle. Last night, he said, hidden in the undergrowth beside the road, he’d seen her lights go out. He’d let another hour pass, making sure she’d gone to sleep. Then he’d gone into town, and gotten a room. This morning, he’d bought the gun and the knife and the chains, then returned to resume his vigil, this time parked in his car on the county road close beside the turnoff to the access road. He’d told his story in great detail, plainly for the purpose of impressing her with his planning, his prowess. His whole life had come down to a sharp, single focus: the humiliation and destruction of Austin Holloway. With that done—with the million dollars to prove it—he would be transformed. Austin Holloway’s power would become his power. He would be invincible: a superior being, capable of anything. Nietzsche’s superman.

All of it calculated, subconsciously, to conceal from himself the terrible truth: that he was just another strutting, posturing punk who fondled his gun and his knife as if they were phallic extensions of himself—and who cowered among his own fantasies, too frightened to come out and face reality.

“I said, you’re not talking much.” He spoke softly, insinuatingly, with a different, more sensual inflection. His expression was different, too: suggestive, subtly lascivious. He was thinking of bed—thinking of her. During all their time together—from noon until now, eleven o’clock—he hadn’t touched her, hadn’t spoken of sex. Instead, he’d talked of his megalomaniacal plans. But she’d seen him watching her—seen him run his eyes over her body—slowly, deliberately, speculatively.

How would it begin? Would he hold the knife to her throat while he forced her to undress?

Would she do it?

Could
she do it?

Should
she do it?

He took one last step. Sitting on a straightback chair, she was forced to look up at an uncomfortably sharp angle to see his face. The point of the knife was less than a foot from her face. He meant for her to look at the knife—meant for her to tremble at the sight, to mutely beg him for mercy.

So she mustn’t look at the knife.

She must continue to look up into the face, staring straight into his dull, deadman’s eyes. She mustn’t let him see that, yes, she was terrified of the knife gleaming like burnished silver in the soft light from the two kerosene lamps.

“What’re you thinking about?” he asked softly.

What should she say? How should she say it? Words were her only weapons—her only hope. She must try to manipulate him, confuse him, keep him off balance—all without antagonizing him.

But how? With which words?

“I was just thinking,” she said, “that I wish I was home.”

Why had she said it.
Why?
To what purpose—what possible advantage?

“So you can go to sleep in your own little bed. Is that it?”

“It’s something like that.”

“With your man. With Peter.” He spoke in a flat, hostile voice, as if he were pronouncing an obscenity. Earlier in the day, when he’d asked her whether she was married, she’d told him about Peter. She’d done it without thinking, without calculating the consequences.

Now, watching him and listening to him, she realized that Peter had become yet another focus for his hatred.

“Where is he now?” he asked finally. “Right now?”

“He’s in—” She broke off.
Where?
“He’s in Los Angeles,” she finished. “He writes movie scripts, and he’s down there talking about one. It’s a TV script, actually.”

Mincingly—furiously—he mimicked her: “‘It’s a TV script, actually.’” Saying it, his mouth twisted into a savage rictus. “Is that what they taught you in your college?”

“I—I don’t know what you mean.”

“‘It’s a TV script, actually,’” he repeated. “Is that how you talk when you’re raised in Beverly Hills? They tell you to use words like ‘actually,’ that don’t mean a goddamn thing. Right?”

“It’s—it’s just a manner of speech.”

“Oh. I see.” Wickedly mocking, he nodded. Once more mimicking: “‘Just a manner of speech.’ Oh, how fancy it all is. How terribly, terribly fancy.”

“It’s not fancy. It’s just—” She spread her hands. “It’s just the way I talk.”

“Does Peter talk like that, too?”

She hesitated, and then decided to say, “No. Peter talks more plainly than I do, I guess you’d say.”

“How long have you lived together?”

“Not quite two years.”

“How many times a week do you and Peter screw?”

She didn’t answer. But, still, she must keep her eyes fixed on his. She mustn’t cower—mustn’t turn away. She mustn’t show uneasiness, or fear.

“How does Peter’s cock feel inside you? Is it big? Is it hard?”

Still desperately holding his gaze, she didn’t reply. Now she saw his expression go blank, as if he was listening to some small, obscene inner voice. He still held the knife in his right hand, as before. But now his left hand was straying across his thigh. Slowly—perhaps unconsciously—he was stroking the bulge of his genitals. Momentarily his eyes lost focus. When he finally spoke, his voice was husky: “Are you getting sleepy?” Asking the question, he moved the knife in the direction of the bedroom, invitingly.

“No.”

“I am.” His voice was still husky—still slightly slurred.

“Then go to sleep.”

“What would you do?” he asked lazily, “If I went to sleep?” As he said it, he continued the slow, erotic caress of his swelling genitalia.