A Grave Talent Page 4

  As if he had heard her thoughts Hawkin appeared at her elbow.

  “As I said, a nice straightforward investigation. I’m going to talk with them, and I want you with me. Over at the fireplace.” Within two steps he had disappeared, and Kate pushed through the throng in his wake, wishing that her mother had married a taller man. At the massive stone fireplace, beneath a display of broadswords that fanned out in a sunburst, they stepped up onto the high hearthstones and stood looking out over the sea of heads.

  “May I have your attention, please? Please, may I have your attention, there are a few things I need to say.” He was not shouting, but he pitched his gravelly voice with a sharp volume that filled the room and reached into the adjoining doorways, and gradually faces turned in their direction and the battering pandemonium began to die down. Children were hushed, kitchen pans stopped crashing, and the assembled residents of Tyler’s Road turned to hear what this necessary evil, this representative of oppression, wanted of them.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Alonzo Hawkin. This is Casey Martinelli. As I’m sure you all know by now, we were sent down from San Francisco to coordinate the investigation into the murders of the three little girls whose bodies have been found in this area. I’d like to thank you all for coming down to Tyler’s. I know—I have seen—what an inconvenience it is for some of you to get down here, but it is saving us a great deal of time, and after all, time saved may mean a life saved.”

  He had their full attention now. A small baby began to whine, and the mother settled it to her breast without taking her eyes off Hawkin.

  “We are here to take statements from you in hopes that the pieces of information you give us can be put together and lead us to the killer. I don’t need to tell you that the murderer is somehow connected with your Road. You all know that, and I expect that’s why a lot of you are here. It is not nice to think that one of your neighbors might be linked to the murder of three children. Might even be that murderer.” Eyes dropped, lips smiled nervously, and fear turned a crowded room into a lot of people trying not to edge away from each other.

  “We are not here, I will say now, to worry about drugs, housing code violations, or who is sleeping in whose bed, unless of course any of those things are related to the murders. We may ask you about drugs or violations, but it’s not what we’re after. Any of you are free to choose the police officer you want to take your statement. Because there are so many of you to keep straight we’d like to take your photograph with an instant camera and attach it to your statement. This is only to make things run more smoothly. You will be asked a series of questions, some of which may sound unnecessary or rude or just plain silly. Please answer them. None of us are playing games, and we’re every bit as anxious to finish here as you are. From the looks of it,” he added with a smile, “perhaps more so.”

  There was a mild commotion in one corner, and a little voice piped up, “—to have games, Mama? Is that what he said?” Grateful, nervous laughter skittered through the room, and Hawkin’s smile broadened.

  “That reminds me, you see that little man in the corner over there?” Heads craned, and an enormous man with extremely black skin and an inadequate uniform lifted an identifying hand. More laughter, now uncertain. “That’s Sergeant Fischer. Bob Fischer hasn’t seen his own kids for two whole days now, and if you want to send your kids to talk to him while you’re giving your statements, he’d be absolutely overjoyed. He’ll show them all his walkie-talkie and his handcuffs, but, uh, Bob? Try not to lose the keys this time, okay?” Relaxed laughter now, which Hawkin gathered up in his final words.

  “One last thing. I know it’s a bit late for saying this, but I’d appreciate it if you’d not talk to each other about what you may have seen, or what someone else thinks they saw. Your statement needs to be yours, and yours alone. We’ll sift it over, and if we need further information about something, we’ll come and find you. There are seven of us here to take your statements, if you would please begin at that end of the room, take one set of forms for each adult. We’d better get started.” He held them for a moment with his eyes. “Thank you for your assistance. There’s some bastard out there murdering babies. I think you can help us find who it is. Thank you.”

  “Ever coach a football team, Al?” Kate murmured in his ear as the meeting broke up.

  “What do you think I was doing just then?” he replied. “Take a desk. I’ll let you know when I’m going to talk with Tyler.”

  The morning wore on, with the painstaking business of names and numbers, photographs with the instant camera, locations on the map, questions: Where do you work? Have you ever been arrested? Where were you on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving, on the twenty-fourth of January, yesterday afternoon? Did you see anyone yesterday afternoon? Did anyone see you yesterday afternoon? Did you see or hear a car on the Road yesterday evening? Do you smoke anything, use matches, go into bars, own a car, drive a car, have any other pieces of information that might possibly be related? On, and on, and on.

  Answers were recorded, reactions to certain questions were noted, voices dropped, and tempers flared. Hawkin moved in and out of the rooms, chatting, encouraging, defusing hot spots, disappearing to walk through the mud to speak with the newsmen. Gallons of coffee and herbal tea were drunk, children were laid down for naps, a hugely pregnant woman began to look pale and was sent off to an upstairs room. At one point a plate of vegetarian spaghetti and hot bread appeared in front of Kate, and she and her interviewee slurped at each other and got sauce on the forms.

  At one o’clock Kate found herself in one of the more difficult interviews of the day. Not that Flower Underwood wasn’t cooperative—she was, and friendly and intelligent besides. It was her child who created the problems.

  The child was a boy, or at least Kate assumed it was a boy, for the woman didn’t correct her when she asked how old he was. He was an utterly irrepressible two-year-old who took her pens apart, ate one of the forms, emptied her purse three times (wallet and keys went into her pocket after she pried them from his inquisitive fingers), and climbed up onto his mother’s lap to nurse five times, the last time squirting Kate with milk from the unoccupied breast. Deliberately. Into this stepped Hawkin, who put his hand on her shoulder as she was writing.

  “Pardon me, Casey, but when you’re finished you might like to join Tyler and me upstairs. All the way to the top of the stairs, third door on your left.”

  Kate nodded her agreement and looked up to catch the tail end of an extremely odd expression on the woman’s face.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing, really.” She was stifling amusement.

  “Something about upstairs? Was that it?”

  Flower Underwood’s lips twitched, and finally she burst out laughing, which caused her son to pull back and stare at her, milky mouth agape.

  “Well, you know,” she said helpfully, “the downstairs of this place is pretty public. Everyone on the Road uses it like a living room.”

  “And upstairs—the top floor—is not public, you mean? Quite private, in fact?” The woman’s eyes were sparkling, those of her son drooping as she caressed his back. “By private invitation only, that sort of thing, yes?”

  “That sort of thing,” she agreed.

  “Have you been up there, to the top of the stairs?”

  “Not in quite a while, though I don’t imagine it’s changed much. Or Tyler either, for that matter.” It seemed a good memory, thought Kate, judging from the face across from her.

  “Would you say that many of the women on the Road have ‘been upstairs’?”

  “A fair number. Probably most of the single women at one time or another, maybe, oh, a third of the attached ones.”

  “I would have thought that would cause a lot of trouble.”

  “Not here. In suburbia, perhaps, but not here. And Tyler’s very careful not to get too close if there’s another man involved who would object. He’s a good man, very caring, very gene
rous.”

  “With money?”

  “With everything.” Again the amused, fond smile crossed her face.

  “He only invites women upstairs?”

  “Oh, no, men too. Not to bed, of course.” She giggled at the absurdity of the thought, and Kate was struck dumb by this outcrop of conventionality. “He takes guys up there to play chess, I know, or just to have a drink or a smoke if something’s happening down here and he wants some quiet.”

  “But you’re sure it’s no more than that?” Kate persisted.

  That gave her pause, and Kate had her turn to be amused, to see that Flower Underwood was troubled by this idea, whereas Tyler’s wholesale hetero relationships had fazed her not at all.

  “No, he invites a lot of people up to his rooms, not just to sleep with them. I’ve never heard of him sleeping with a man. I’m sure I would have. There’s no hiding anything on the Road, not for long. No, I’m sure Tyler’s a normal man,” she said, firmly rejecting the possibility.

  “‘Normal.’”

  “Well, straight, anyway. At any rate, he is very sweet. In bed, I mean.”

  This interview is getting out of hand, thought Kate, and tried to pull it back to earth.

  “Does he have any children?”

  “A couple for sure. He has a wife, or an ex-wife, I guess, who lives in L.A. with their daughter, who’s ten or eleven. There’s also a little boy here on the Road who’s probably his, though it’s hard to be sure because he’s only three. There’s a couple other possibilities, but the mothers aren’t sure.”

  Kate’s eyes involuntarily strayed to the sleeping blond terror, and the mother’s eyes followed.

  “No, not this one. You’d only have to see my old man to be sure about that. She looks just like him. Say, if you want to know what the men do….” Her voice faltered as a thought struck her and strengthened again as she pushed it away. “If you want to hear about Tyler’s rooms from a man, you could talk to Charlie. Charlie Waters is my old man. He’s down here all the time, playing chess with Tyler.” Her voice trailed off and her eyes rose to search the room beyond, and Kate thought it a good time to call the session to a halt.

  “Thank you very much for your time, Ms. Underwood. I really appreciate your coming down today,” but the woman had already risen with her groggy burden and headed for the hallway.

  Kate scribbled her signature and dropped the papers on the next table—where Bob Fischer was talking to a man, with three peaceful children distributed over their two laps—and sprinted for the stairs.

  5

  The stairway was lined with odd bits of old weaponry, a small tapestry, a cloak pinned out fully to show off its thick embroidery, several framed photographs of castles and people in colorful medieval costume, and similar elements of Tyler’s passion. At the top landing a full set of armor, with both arms and its helm in place, stood guard over a locked glass case that held numerous small objects, bottles and combs and such, which Kate did not pause to examine. Voices came from the third door on the left, so she knocked lightly and opened it.

  “…decided on a maximum of a hundred and fifty. Ah, come in, Inspector Martinelli. We were just getting started. What will you have to drink?” Tyler stood up and moved to a tall, glossy cabinet made of several kinds of wood, and Kate allowed herself to be talked into a glass of soda water. Tyler presented it with a flourish and went to stand by the open fire, his back to the stones and the heavy mantelpiece.

  His air of jovial goodwill seemed somewhat strained, and Kate soon diagnosed that the source of his nervousness was Hawkin, who was sitting comfortably back into a leather chair with a somnolent expression on his face and a glass of amber liquid on his knee. Tyler’s eyes kept glancing off the relaxed figure, as if by avoiding eye contact he might escape a blow. It was a reaction Kate had seen many times before, but she was a bit surprised to see it in Tyler.

  Hawkin picked up the conversation again, continuing where it had been left, and with half an ear Kate listened to Tyler’s plans for his land, proposals for a grant and tax-free status, the balance between convenience and freedom from gadgets. She listened, but she also studied the man’s surroundings, the room at the top of the house.

  The room was magnificent, wrapped in glass on three sides, with the tiers of hills soaring up at one end and the fields across the Road flowing down to the sea at the other; from the middle the owner could survey the graveled triangle and the comings and goings of his tenants. From the fourth wall jutted an open-sided granite fireplace, dividing the space in half visually. This was a lordly tower, and even if Flower Underwood had not said as much, Kate would have known immediately that this was where Tyler lived, not in the casual funk of the ground floor or in the relatively impersonal hallways Kate had glimpsed from the middle landing. Here Tyler had no need to bolt a broadsword down for fear of accident or theft, no need to limit the furnishings to sturdy dark chairs that would neither intimidate the residents nor show the effects of their children’s heels. Here John Tyler could be what he was: the sole heir to three generations of money. In California, three generations is a long time.

  The room was not flagrant in its opulence. The walls were smooth redwood, the floor polished oak with an inlaid pattern of some darker wood running around the edges. The intricate carpet underfoot was wool, not silk; the buttery leather of the chairs and sofa showed signs of long use; the beams and mantelpiece were of the same unadorned redwood as the walls. The solid wall to Kate’s left held a cluster of watercolors on this side of the fireplace. The other wall was hidden from where Kate sat, but she could see another group of chairs at the other end of the room around a low table with a chess set. Her attention was caught by a change in Tyler’s voice.

  “…wine, Inspector Martinelli? No? Very abstemious of you. Inspector Hawkin? You don’t mind if I do?” He limped over to the cabinet again and poured more of the amber liquid into his squat glass, then put the bottle with the unpronounceable name back on the shelf. A smoky fume rose from the glass, and he returned to put his back to the fireplace before he sipped from it. At bay, thought Kate, though Hawkin looked less like a pursuer than he did an old, well-fed hound drowsing in front of the fire. It was an odd way to question someone, she thought, and waited impatiently for him to get on with it. Soft voices drifted up the stairs, distant pans rattled, a child cried, and raised voices from the road outside reminded her of the gathered media. Finally she couldn’t stand it.

  “When you say ‘we decided,’ Mr. Tyler, just who do you mean?”

  Tyler looked relieved at the question, and Hawkin shot her a quick glance.

  “You’re looking at him. I get in the habit of saying ‘we’ because I do consult the people who live here, and my various money men, but ultimately I decide. I still find it faintly ludicrous to think of one person ‘owning’ a stretch of forest, but it’s mine in the eyes of the law. I prefer to think of myself as the landlord, keeping out undesirables and maintaining the road. If anything it owns me, not I it.”

  “The land lord,” said Hawkin, making it two words. “A nice feudal concept.”

  The oblique accusation seemed only to relax Tyler, as if he were settling into an old, familiar argument.

  “There’s nothing wrong with a feudal system,” he began, “not if it retains the key element of responsibility. It’s popular to think of the lord of the manor as a parasite who drained the peasants of their hard-earned products and spent all his time drinking and hunting deer—”

  “And screwing wenches,” contributed Kate unexpectedly. Tyler looked at her cautiously until he decided that she didn’t mean anything by it. Hawkin raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes, that too, but it was his responsibility to protect the people from invaders, to make judgment in a dispute, to provide for the old and widows and orphans, so they wouldn’t go hungry. The deer hunting and the riding to hounds were not just sport—deer ate crops, and foxes killed farm animals if they weren’t kept down. The whole idea of hierarchy and autho
rity is bound up, in the feudal system, with responsibility. The peasant had few rights and privileges, but then he was only responsible for producing a certain amount more than his family needed. The greater the rank, the greater the accountability. Why, do you know,” he said, warming to his argument and the whiskey, “in ancient days the king was seen as being responsible for the life of the land itself? He was cheered and begrudged nothing when food was plentiful and the people healthy, but if the crops failed or there was a drought or a plague, he was seen to be the cause of it, and the people would slit his throat to restore the land to fresh life. ‘That’s the real origin of The king is dead; long live the king.’”

  He was totally caught up in the thought of this anachronistic threat to himself, and his eyes gleamed with the relish of it.

  Without raising his eyes from the contemplation of his glass, Hawkin placed a gentle question into the room.

  “What do you think of human sacrifice, Mr. Tyler?”

  Kate felt the hairs on her arms rise and her head snapped around, but Tyler had not yet realized that the old hound was no longer drowsing.

  “Human sacrifice—any sacrifice, for that matter—is a means of feeling in control of one’s fate by giving the gods what they want before they can take it. By offering them the best, the purest, the newest—” The words strangled in his throat as he saw what he had been led to say. His eyes flew to Hawkin, who looked back at him with the patient air of an old hunter waiting for his prey to panic, watching neither in triumph nor in glee, but certain of the outcome. Tyler’s face drained bloodless above the dark fringe of his beard, his knuckles showed white around the glass he held. The room’s only movement was the slow dip and rise of the whiskey in Hawkin’s glass as he swirled it around and around and around, waiting.