The 5th Witch (6 page)

“I told you. When those quarters came up, I was Saul on the highway to Damascus, or at least Dorothy when she landed in Oz.”

“You
have
to believe in it, Dan, or you’ll never be able to fight it.”

“I’ll tell you something—when I was a kid, I always wanted to believe that my dad actually could produce hard-cooked eggs out of his ears. But I knew in my heart of hearts that it was only a trick. What Michelange DuPriz did to me, though—that couldn’t have been anything but real.”

“I think I can guess why she did it, too.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“It’s simple. She wants you to be scared. She wants to make you realize that she can do anything to you that takes her fancy,
anything
, and there’s nothing you can do to stop her. And she wants you to spread that fear to all your fellow detectives.”

Dan arrived back at police headquarters at 3250 Hollywood Boulevard just after 9:00
P.M
. Ernie Munoz was still at his desk, talking on the telephone to the coroner’s office. He looked tired and sweaty, and his desk was covered in reports and scribbled notes, as well as a box of congealed pepperoni pizza and several Styrofoam cups of cold coffee.

Dan perched on the edge of Ernie’s desk and waited until he had hung up the phone.

“What’s the latest?” he asked.

Ernie lifted out a flaccid triangle of waxy-looking pizza and took a large bite. “The ME still hasn’t finished a full autopsy. All he can tell me so far is that the three bodies were burned very quickly at a very high temperature.”

“What did Kevin Baleno have to say?”

“No trace so far of any accelerants. No cans of gasoline, no Molotov cocktails. No indication that the fire was caused by any kind of electrical fault in the vehicle itself. He’s still analyzing the burn patterns, but it looks pretty certain that his first impression was correct: that the men themselves somehow combusted and that the damage to the vehicle was secondary.”

“Have we found any more witnesses?”

Ernie wiped his mouth with a crumpled paper napkin. “I have to say something,
muchacho
. You don’t seem to be very surprised.”

“What should I be surprised about?”

“Well, maybe you should be surprised that three grown men should spontaneously catch fire and burn so hot that there was nothing left of them but bones and charcoal.”

“Like Kevin said, it’s impossible, but it happened, so it must be possible.”

Ernie looked at him narrowly. “Do you know something about this that I don’t?”

“I can’t be sure yet. But maybe. How about witnesses?”

“I’ve interviewed three more drivers who were passing the scene at the time. None of them has been able to add anything much. A van driver said he definitely saw Michelange DuPriz holding something that was smoking—not a cheroot, more like two sticks. But he said that she never touched the car with them. She didn’t throw them either, and he said that she was too far away to have set the car on fire.”

“Okay. Will you be talking to any of the Narcotics squad tonight?”

“Sure. Sergeant Locatelli, most likely. She’s calling me later for an update.”

“Good. Ask her if she knows of anybody with heavyweight criminal connections who lives on Rosewood Avenue in Silverlake, and on Ocean View Road in Santa Monica.”

“Ocean View Road? I can tell you that one myself. Vasili Krylov, your friendly Russian extortionist and people smuggler. He just moved in a couple of months ago. He’s got himself a fifteen-bedroom antebellum-style mansion, and his own nine-hole golf course.”

“Krylov. Shit. I should have remembered that myself.”

Ernie said, “You
do
know something that I don’t. What the hell is it? Is Krylov involved in this some way?”

“I’ll tell you when you’ve asked Sergeant Locatelli about the other address.”

“Sometimes,
muchacho
, you can be a right royal pain in the ass.”

Dan made himself a messy turkey-and-tomato sandwich, opened a bottle of Goose Island stout, and sprawled on the couch in front of the television. He didn’t feel particularly hungry, especially after bringing up all those quarters, but he always slept badly when his stomach was empty. Either it gurgled, which woke him up, or else he had nightmares.

Unlike Annie’s apartment, with all its mystical clutter and its arcane wall decorations, Dan’s living room was minimalist to the point of being nearly empty. The walls were painted off-white and the floor was pale polished oak. The only pieces of furniture were a black leather couch, two black leather chairs, and a smoked-glass table with stubby chrome legs.

There were just two pictures in the room: a huge silkscreen print of yellow grass blowing in the wind under a thundery sky by the Dutch artist Jan Cremer, and a black-and-white photograph of Gayle, standing on the end of the Municipal Pier at Santa Monica Yacht Harbor in a white yachting cap and a boatneck sweater.

In one corner there was a small stack of books and magazines.
The Yosemite in Winter, Playboy, Guns &
Ammo, 1001 Hot and Spicy Recipes, The Confessions of
Nat Turner
with a bookmark only six or seven pages in, and
The World Almanac
. The library of a man who couldn’t concentrate.

Dan flicked over to the local news on NBC. The top story was the freak hurricane at the garden party held by the new chief of police, Chief O’Malley.

Reporter Wendy Chan said, “The hurricane was highly localized…in fact it affected only Chief O’Malley’s property and was not felt anyplace else. It was so powerful, however, that many of the new police chief’s hundred and twenty guests were momentarily blinded—including this reporter.

“The cause of this temporary loss of sight? According to weather expert John Mezzo from the UCLA Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Westwood, an extreme drop in air pressure. A similar blinding effect can be caused by sudden blizzards.

“The hurricane lasted only minutes, and nobody was seriously hurt. However, damage to the house and garden was widespread, and the party had to be brought to a premature close.”

The second item on the news was the apparent suicide of a twenty-eight-year-old woman, who had fallen from the thirty-fourth floor of Century Park East. “Astrud Mitchell, who worked as a receptionist for the entertainment law firm Peale, Kravitz, and Wolfe, had given her friends and family no indication that she was suffering from depression and was described by her sister Carla as ‘the happiest, best-adjusted person I ever knew.’”

Dan managed to eat half his turkey sandwich. Then, with his mouth still crammed, he went into the kitchen and took another bottle of stout out of the refrigerator.

The phone rang, and it was Ernie. “Dan? I just finished talking to Sergeant Locatelli.”

“How is she?”

“Pretty upset, naturally. Those three guys were the best detectives she had.”

“Anything new from Kevin Baleno?”

“Nope. He told me he’s doing some experiments, trying to set fire to pig carcasses, but he doesn’t sound too confident.”

“Did you ask Locatelli about Rosewood Avenue?”

“Sure. She said that the only serious bad guy who lives in that neighborhood is Orestes Vasquez.”

“The White Ghost?”

“That’s your man. But did you hear about Chief O’Malley’s garden party?”

“Sure. I saw it on the news. Some kind of a hurricane, wasn’t it? Sounded like one of those dust devils you get out in the desert.”

“Maybe,” Ernie said. “But whatever caused it, Orestes Vasquez was there when it happened.”

“You’re kidding me. Vasquez? What was
he
doing there? Don’t tell me he had an invite.”

“I doubt it. But according to Locatelli, he came along with two of his heavies and a weird-looking woman. He was talking to Chief O’Malley when the wind started to blow.”

“A weird-looking woman? Did Locatelli have any idea who she was?”

“Locatelli didn’t attend the party herself, but one of her PR people was there. Apparently the woman was Hispanic looking. Black hair and a silvery dress. Big chested.”

“That’s it. Now I’m sure of it.”

“Sure of what? Come on,
muchacho
, you’re talking in riddles.”

“Think about it. That’s two gang bosses in the same day, both showing up with weird-looking women. One of the women burned three detectives and made
me puke up money, and where the other one appeared there was a freak hurricane. They’re witches, Ernie.”

“Sure they are,” said Ernie, his voice heavy with disbelief.

Dan could see himself in the long gloomy mirror that hung in the hallway. He thought that he looked like his own older brother, not that he had one. He was pale and haggard, and he needed a shave.

“I’m serious, Ernie. I know it’s hard to get your head around it, but the girl who lives downstairs—you remember Annie?—she did a kind of test for me.”

“Yeah, I remember Annie,” said Ernie. He didn’t sound impressed. “She was the one who told me that I should chew chicory because it would make me
look
thinner, even if I wasn’t.”

“Annie says we have at least four witches in the vicinity right now. They’re all powerful, but one of them is extra powerful. She says that they all had to be invited here, and I think that they’ve been invited by gang bosses. For protection, probably, and to keep Narcotics off their backs.”

“Dan, I saw you puke up the money, so I believe that was some kind of paranormal what’s-its-name—but apart from that, where’s your evidence?”

“Don’t you worry about it. I’m going to
find
myself some evidence.”

“Okay. All I can say is, good luck.”

Dan finished two more beers, then went to bed. His bedroom was as sparsely furnished as his living room, with nothing but a king-size bed, two ebony-finish nightstands, and a digital clock.

He lay awake for a while. Someone in another apartment was playing samba music, and occasionally he heard laughter and the sound of a door slamming.

The more he thought about what had happened to him today, the less believable it seemed, as if he had dreamed it. Yet he couldn’t get the image of Cusack, Fusco, and Knudsen out of his mind, like three charred monkeys; and he couldn’t stop thinking about the way Michelange DuPriz had stalked across the sidewalk and then turned to stare at him.

He felt as if she had been able to see right into his soul—as if his whole life had danced in front of her eyes like a flip book. Every aspiration that he had ever had, every weakness, every moment of pride. Nobody had ever looked at him like that before. Nobody had made it so clear that they could see exactly who he was and what it was that haunted him.

Around 1:30
AM
, he fell asleep. Almost immediately, though, he opened his eyes again and sat up. He listened, hard. The samba music had stopped, and the night was hushed. Yet he was sure that he had heard something.

He stayed where he was, still straining his ears. He could just about make out the distant sound of traffic on the freeways. For a moment he thought he heard a small child crying, but then that stopped, too.

You’re overtired, Dan. Go back to sleep
.

He turned over and punched his pillow into shape, but as he did so he glimpsed somebody passing the mirror in the hallway. It happened so quickly that he couldn’t be sure if it was a man or a woman.

“Hey!” he called. “Hey—who’s out there?”

There was no reply. He waited for a moment, and then he opened the drawer of his nightstand and took out his .38 revolver and cocked it.

“You’d better show yourself, whoever you are! Come into the doorway with your hands on top of your head!”

Still no reply. He waited a little longer, then swung his legs off the bed and stood up. “This is your last
warning! I’m an armed police officer, and I will shoot to kill if I have to!”

He crossed the bedroom and looked out into the hallway, holding his revolver in both hands.

It was dark out there, but there was a tall window right at the very end, covered by a white cotton blind. As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, Dan saw that a figure was standing in front of the window, not moving. It was silhouetted against the blind, but he could see that it was dressed in something pale, like a nightgown.

“Hey, put your hands on top of your head where I can see them.”

The figure remained unmoving.

“Did you hear what I said? Put your hands on top of your head, or I’ll shoot you.”

No response, except for the whistle of somebody who was finding it a struggle to breathe and the faintest of bubbling sounds.

“Can you hear me?” said Dan. The figure swayed very slightly, but it still didn’t answer, and it was beginning to make him feel unnerved. He kept his revolver aimed at it and backed down the hallway toward the light switch.

The figure made a whining noise, as if trying to protest, but Dan switched on the light and said, “Okay, friend, let’s see who the hell you are.”

He was so shocked that he shouted out, “
Gahhhh!
” His legs felt as if they were going to buckle underneath him. His heart thumped once, twice, three times—so hard that it hurt his rib cage.

The figure in front of the window was Gayle. His dead fiancée Gayle—not wearing a nightgown but the cream satin dress that she had been wearing to Gus Webber’s wedding. Her blond curls were gingery with blood—but worse than that, she looked exactly as she
had after the accident. The end of one of the scaffolding poles had struck her directly in the face, just below the bridge of her nose, pushing it in. She hadn’t been killed immediately, and the fire department had tried to remove her from the wreck of Dan’s Mustang by sawing through the scaffolding pole about two inches in front of her face.

Her blue eyes were open on each side of the sawn-off pole, like a fish’s eyes. The pole itself formed an O of surprise. Around the pole, her breath was whistling and bubbling with blood.

Dan lowered his gun. He tried to say something, but he couldn’t. Gayle simply stood there staring at him, her eyes occasionally blinking in mute desperation.

This is a nightmare. I’m asleep. I’m dreaming this.
Wake up
.

He couldn’t bring himself to approach her. He could only do what he had done on the night of the accident—stand and stare at her in horror.

I have to find a way to wake up
.

He took two steps in Gayle’s direction, until he reached the bedroom door. She kept on staring at him and swaying slightly, but she didn’t try to approach. He edged his way into the bedroom and climbed back onto his bed.

I’m asleep. If I shut my eyes and open them again, I’ll
wake up, and Gayle will be gone
.

He turned over and closed his eyes for two or three seconds, but he didn’t have the nerve to keep them closed any longer than that.
Supposing she comes into the
bedroom and I don’t see her?
So he propped himself up on the pillow and sat facing the open door, keeping his .38 on top of the nightstand.

Ten minutes went by, and he began to calm down. Maybe he had been hallucinating and Gayle wasn’t really there. After all, he had been through a strange and
highly stressful day, as well as drinking four bottles of Goose Island stout. Maybe his mind was playing tricks on him.

But what if he went out into the hallway to look and she was still there?

She was dead; he had been to her funeral. She couldn’t be there. But what if she was?

Okay—if she
was
there, maybe it was her spirit, looking for some kind of closure. Maybe she wanted to hear him say how sorry he was that he had killed her. Maybe she wanted to show him that he was forgiven.

Or maybe this was another magical stunt by Michelange DuPriz to show him that she knew exactly what cross he was carrying and to warn him to keep his nose out of the Zombie’s personal business.

He picked up his gun and went back to the bedroom door.

“Gayle?” he called. He knew she couldn’t answer, but he wanted to reassure her that it was only him.

He hesitated for a moment, then stepped out into the hallway. Gayle was still standing in front of the window. Now, however, her face was miraculously intact and she was unhurt.

“Gayle? What are you doing here? You’re not alive anymore.”

She was staring at him, but she didn’t appear to see him.

“Gayle?” he said and took a step toward her, holding out his hand. God, he had forgotten how pretty she’d been.

She still didn’t seem to be focusing on him. Her eyes were fixed in the distance, as if she were looking down a long road.

Under her breath, she started to sing, “
When I was a
child I had a fever…my hands felt just like two balloons…eee…eee…eee!
”

“Gayle baby,” said Dan. His eyes filled with tears, and he had to wipe his nose with the back of his hand. “You have to know how sorry I am. I’ve never been able to forget you. I’ve never been able to forget what happened.”

Softly, she carried on singing. But then suddenly she stopped and stared straight ahead of her, along the hallway.

Dan said, “Gayle, listen to me—”

As he took another step forward, however, there was a terrible clanging sound right behind him, like a badly tuned church bell. Instinctively, Dan took a step back, just as a twenty-foot scaffolding pole came hurtling along the hallway and struck Gayle directly in the face. He heard her nose break and her cheekbones smash.

She flew backward into the window, and then she was gone, vanished, and the scaffolding pole vanished, too.

Dan stood in the hallway for a long time, breathing deeply to steady himself. Hallucination, no question about it. But what had made him hallucinate? His own exhaustion, his own drunkenness? Or witchery?