At the front door, Cassie whispered, 'Thanks. Davis can be an asshole. I'm at the bottom of the heap here.'
'No problem,' Lucas said, grinning. 'And I appreciate the tip on the guest list. It really could turn into something.'
'You gonna ask me out?' she asked.
She'd surprised him again. 'Mmm. Maybe,' he said, smiling. 'But why…'
'Well, if you're going to, don't wait too goddamned long, okay? I can't stand the suspense.'
Lucas laughed. 'All right,' he said. As he stepped out on the sidewalk, the door clicked shut behind him. He took another step away, toward the car, when he heard a rapping on the door glass. He turned around and Cassie lifted the front of her T-shirt, just for an instant, just a flash.
Long enough: She looked very nice, he thought. Very nice, pink and pale…
And she was gone.
CHAPTER 11
Bekker walked in circles on the Heriz carpet, orbiting the Rococo revival sofa, watching cuts from the press conference on the noon news. He'd heard shorter cuts on his car radio on the way to the hospital, and had gone back home to see it on television. Most of the press conference was nonsense: the police had nothing at all. But the appeal to Stephanie's lover could be dangerous.
'We believe the man who called nine-one-one is telling the truth. We believe that he is innocent of the murder of Mrs. Bekker, especially in light of this second murder,' the cop, Lester, was saying into the microphones. He was sweating under the lights, patting his forehead with a folded white handkerchief. 'After discussions with the county attorney, we have agreed that should Mrs. Bekker's friend come forward, Hennepin County would be willing to discuss a guarantee of immunity from prosecution in return for testimony, provided that he was not involved in the crime…'
Lester went on, but Bekker wasn't listening anymore. He paced, gnawing on a thumbnail, spitting the pieces onto the carpet.
The police were all over the neighborhood. They weren't hiding. They were, in fact, deliberately provocative. Stephanie's idiot cop cousin, the doper, had been going door to door around the neighborhood, soliciting information. That angered him, but his anger was for another time. He had other problems now.
'Loverboy,' they called him on TV. Who was it? Who was the lover? It had to be somebody in their circle. Somebody with easy access to Stephanie. He had exhausted himself, tearing at the problem.
Fuckin' Druze, he thought. Couldn't find the face. The face had to be there, somewhere, in the photographs. Stephanie took photographs of everybody, could never leave anybody alone, always had that fuckin' camera in somebody's face, taking snapshots. She had boxes, cartons, baskets full of photos, all those beefy blond Scandinavian males…
Could Druze be wrong? It was possible, but, Bekker admitted to himself uncomfortably, he probably wasn't. He didn't seem unsure of himself. He didn't equivocate. He'd looked at the photos, studied them and said no.
'Bitch,' Bekker said aloud to Stephanie's house. 'Who were you fucking?'
He looked back at the television, at Lester yammering at the cameras. Anger surged in him: it was unfair, they had twenty men, a hundred, and he had only himself and Druze. And Druze couldn't really look, because if he was seen first…
'Bitch,' he said again, and gripped by the anger, he pounded out of the parlor, up the stairs, into the bedroom. The cigarette case was with his keys and a pile of change, and he snapped it open, popped two amphetamines and a sliver of windowpane, and closed his eyes, waiting for Beauty.
There. The bed moved for him, melted, the closet opened like a mouth, a cave, a warm place to huddle. His clothes: they gripped him, and he fought the panic. He had felt it before, the shirt tightening around his throat, the sleeves gripping his arms like sandpaper, tightening… He fought the panic and stripped off the constricting shirt, slipped out of his pants and underwear, and threw them out into the room. The closet called, and he dropped to his knees and crawled inside. Warm and safe, with the musty smell of the shoes… comfortable.
He sat for a minute, for five minutes, letting the speed run through his veins and the acid through his brain. Fire, he thought. He needed fire. The realization came on him suddenly and he bolted from the cave, still on his hands and knees, suddenly afraid. He crawled to the dresser and reached over it, groping, found the book of matches and scuttled back to the closet, his eyes cranked wide, not handsome now, something else… In the semi-dark of the closet, he struck a match and stared into the flame…
Safe. With the fire. His anger grew and darkened. Bitch. Her face flashed, and melted. Pain flared in his hand, and suddenly he was in darkness. Match gone. He struck another one. Bitch. A bed popped up, not their bed, and strange wallpaper, with fleur-de-lis, where was that? The hotel in New York. With the acid singing through him, Bekker saw himself come out of the bathroom, naked, holding a towel, Stephanie on the phone… Pain in his hand again. Darkness. He dropped the match, struck a third. Bitch. Step into the bathroom to shower; when I come out, she's already on the phone, calling her paint stripper or someone…
His mind stretched and snapped, stretched and snapped, cooled, chilled. Pain. Darkness. Another match. He wiped spittle from his chin, staring at the guttering flame. Pain. Darkness. He crawled out of the closet, the first rush going now, leaving him with the power of ice, of a glacier…
And the answer was there, in the acid flash to New York. He stood up, his mind chilled, precise. Pain in his hand. 'Am I stupid?'
Bekker walked out of the bedroom, still nude but unaware of it, down to the study, where he settled behind the big oak desk. He opened a deep drawer and took out a gray plastic box. The tape on the front said 'Bills: Paid, Current.'
'New York, January…' He dumped the box on the desk and combed through the stack of paper, receipts and stubs of paid bills. After a minute he said, 'Here…'
The phone bill. He hadn't called anyone, but there were six calls on the bill, New York to Minneapolis, four of them to a university extension. He didn't know the number…
Mind like ice. Riding the speed, now. He punched the number into the desk phone. A moment later, a woman answered. 'Professor George's office, can I help you?'
Bekker dropped the phone back on the hook, heat flushing the ice from his head. 'Philip George,' he crowed. 'Philip George…'
There was work to do, but the drugs had him again and he sat for half an hour, rocking in the chair behind the big desk. Time was nothing in the grip of the acid…
Pain. He looked at his hand. A huge blister bubbled from the tip of his index finger. The ball of his thumb was raw, a patch of burned skin. How had he burned himself? Had there been a fire?
He went to the kitchen, pierced the blister with a needle, smeared both the finger and the thumb with a disinfectant and covered the burns with Band-Aids. A mystery… And Philip George.
Bekker pawed through the library, searching for the book. No. No. Where? Must be in the junk, must be in the keepsakes, where could she… Ah. Here: Faculty and Staff, University of Minnesota.
His own face flashed up at him as he flipped through the pages, then the face of Philip George. Bland. Slightly stupid, somewhat officious, he thought. Large. Blond. Fleshy. How could she? The pain bit into his hand, and confused, he looked at his finger again. How…? • • • 'Carlo?'
'God damn, I thought…' Druze was shocked.
'I'm sorry, but this is an absolute emergency…'
'Have you seen the television?' Druze asked.
'Yes. And nobody has even begun to look at you. Yet. That's why I'm calling. I found our man.'
'Who?' Druze blurted.
'A law professor named Philip George. We've got to move-you've seen the television.'
'Yes, yes, where are you?' Druze asked impatiently. 'Are you okay?'
'I'm a block down the street, in the VGA supermarket,' Bekker said. He was using a convenience phone at the news-rack, and a woman customer was heading toward him with a shopping list in her hand. She'd want the
