Hammett was silent. If he tried to speak, Lynch would stop him anyway. All he’d have to show for it would be a smashed face. He watched his last hope turn and start up the stairs.
‘Better leave me the handcuff key, Dan.’
‘Oh. Sure.’ Laverty tossed down the key. He looked like walking death.
‘Don’t let it bother you, Dan,’ said his friend. ‘I didn’t mean for you actually to shoot Pronzini, but at least it allowed us to unmask this vermin in time.’ He grabbed Hammett by the upper arm. ‘All right, you. Inside.’
Lynch waited until the door at the head of the stairs had slammed behind the departing policeman before he actually opened the door. When he thrust Hammett ahead of him, the lean detective knew why he had waited. This was nothing for straitlaced Dan Laverty to see. It was the damnedest thing Hammett had ever seen, that was sure. A… what?
A bower of carnality.
Huge ornate four-poster, dominating everything. Silken coverlets. Oriental carpets three and four deep on the floor. Rich folds of damask draping the walls. An ornate brass oil lamp that probably heated incense: The faint scent of musk still lingered on the air.
Pictures. Aubrey Beardsleys with their richly embellished decadence. Illustrated scenes from De Sade.
And mirrors. No matter what you were doing on that big four-poster bed, you’d be able to watch yourself doing it.
‘The room tells it all, doesn’t it, Lynch?’
But Lynch seemed untroubled by conscience. He jerked Hammett roughly toward two waist-level brass rings that hung from brackets embedded in the concrete behind a break in the damask. He rammed Hammett face-first against the wall, and kept a shoulder in the small of his back while working.
‘I’m taking off one of the cuffs for a moment. I’d love it if you tried something. You’ve caused me a great deal of trouble.’
Hammett was quiescent. A curious lethargy had seized him. He just wanted it to be over. The open cuff was threaded through the ring so the chain between the bracelets was now through the ring. The steel bit deeply into Hammett’s wrist as the cuff was resnapped.
Lynch stepped back. The gleam in his eye was close to madness. What Hammett couldn’t understand was what had pushed him to the edge, after all the years of seemingly rigid control.
‘I suppose I should say that I’m sorry about what’s going to happen to you.’
‘But you aren’t.’ Hammett found his voice was steady. ‘You’re going to enjoy it.’
‘Yes. I must admit I am.’
‘Quite a lot, up until now, makes a sort of sense. Using the fact that Molly was in trouble as a way to break with the Mulligans and let them go down in the reform committee probe. I finally figured out there had to be someone like you behind them, someone with a subtle mind pulling the strings. The Mulligans were just too crude. But why did you want them to go down? You could have run this town for years yet from behind their-’
‘It was the only way I could be sure Bren would be elected governor. He’ll make a great one. And also, Boyd Mulligan is a fool. He doesn’t know who I am, but he knows there is someone behind his uncle. If Griff should die…’ He shrugged. ‘This way I’m safe.’
‘And God knows it will have made you rich enough, over the years.’ Hammett stood up straighter. His hands were so numb that he couldn’t feel the steel shackles cut into his flesh any longer. ‘And I can understand why Vic had to die. He saw you at Pronzini’s and knew what your being there meant.’
‘Yes.’
‘And Tokzek because with that dead girl in his car he’d have crumbled as soon as police got to him. And Pronzini because you didn’t know how much he knew and how much he’d told me. But where does it stop? Now it’s me…’
‘You were going to the grand jury. If Dan got up and told them the story I’ve given him, they’d see through it instantly. As you did.’
‘As Laverty himself’s going to someday. When he admits to himself that Tokzek didn’t rape and kill that little girl.’
As he spoke, Hammett glanced over at the door by which they had entered. Ajar! Had Lynch left it that way? He couldn’t remember. Or had Laverty…
‘He’s going to realize that kind of murder takes a particular sort of sickness, and then he’s going to realize who it was, and he’s going to come looking. So that makes him expendable too, doesn’t it?’
Lynch’s eyes gleamed. Hammett wondered again what had sent him out of control.
Lynch said, ‘I’ve done all I can for Dan. If he becomes expendable
… well…’
‘Don’t you mean all you can to him? How many years, Lynch? With Heloise and her brother periodically supplying you with girls and making sure they disappeared back east into the whorehouse pipeline once you were through with them? Maybe you didn’t even violate the first ones. But then the raping started. And the beatings. And the beatings got more violent, and finally one of them died. It was inevitable, couldn’t you see that?’ He answered himself. ‘Of course not. You thought it would go on forever.’
‘I had no one…’ Lynch was speaking to himself, his eyes glassy. ‘No one. My wife, gone. No children. Whores sicken me.’
‘But not virgin girls you’ve turned into whores?’
‘I had no one. But now…’
‘Now you can go on with the double life. And when the pressures get too great, you can have another little Chinese girl brought down the back way. Down here where nobody can hear her when she starts screaming-’
‘Oh, stop it,’ snapped Lynch impatiently. ‘It’s over now. Finished. I’m fulfilled. I don’t need any of that any longer. Once you’re dead…’
Hammett shook off that premonition of the evil that should have been unthinkable, and said, ‘ Is my death going to end it, Lynch? What if another one survives everything that’s done to her in the whorehouses and cribs of Chicago, and comes back the way that Crystal did? And calls you up, as Crystal did on that Monday? Calls you with demands you have to meet? What then?’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I know you were horrified when you found out the Mulligans didn’t know where Crystal was. Is that why Heloise died, Lynch? Because Crystal had ended up back with her? After you borrowed the Preacher’s car to go over there, so if anything went wrong he’d take the fall for it?’
Lynch laughed. His laughter was unforced.
‘Well, that’s enough, Hammett. I thought I would hate killing Vic Atkinson. Only I didn’t.’
‘I know,’ said Hammett. ‘I saw his head.’
‘So I think I’ll use the bat on you, too.’
‘As you did in the cemetery. Keeping her alive and screaming while you smashed-’
The door slammed open and Dan Laverty stumbled into the room. He stared about wildly at the bizarre carnal trappings, his face dazed, crumpled, drawn in and down as if he had suffered a stroke while listening outside the door.
‘Owen,’ he said, and even his voice was tortured. ‘Owen. He… I had to come back, had to listen… had to…’
‘Dan, you don’t understand-’
‘I was a straight cop. I… I murdered for you! You… the little girl in the car…’
He left the doorway to start hesitantly toward his friend. Lynch was backing away. ‘And Vic Atkinson? And the girl in the cemetery? You? That filth? That sickness?’
Lynch had backed into the wall beside the ornate bed. He was reflected in a dozen different ways in a dozen different mirrors. He looked from side to side. Laverty was in front of him, crowding him. Hammett could see only Laverty’s massive back, but a mirror gave the policeman’s expression: puzzled, almost frightened.
The black Irish rage. How to trigger in him the…
Lynch did it for Hammett. He broke. He came off the wall in a leap, trying to reach the other, interior door leading up to the main floors of the house. Laverty was on him like a gorilla. Of their own volition those huge hands closed about his windpipe, spun him about, slammed him up against the wall again.
‘Owen!’ cried Laverty in an anguished voice. ‘Don’t run from me. Talk to me. Make me understand.’
