Frenzy Read online

  They had VIP treatment ready for him at the airport and a car waiting; standard. Two street cops had been with the liaison guy and they took him to Studio City first, so the cops could walk him through the most recent crime scene on busy Ventura Boulevard. It was one in a series of what happened to be three gangland whacks, not enough to qualify as serial kills, but to prompt reaching for Jack because of the attendant notoriety. He found the LAPD people crisp, flawlessly groomed, hip, very smart, and insincere. Again, it was the movie business. All of California seemed to have it, a contagious virus of the ethics or something. It depressed him.

  It depressed him that he was a star. He was welcomed as if he was somebody out here to plug a movie instead of to work on a murder investigation. He'd been on talk shows. "Very hip," somebody told him. He could sense there was nothing he could do here. It was all too sprawling, too mobile, too California. It was nobody's fault, it was San Andreas' fault. It was just Lala Land.

  They took him through the Studio City thing, jerked him around for a couple of hours, and coming back, took him to lunch; not so standard. The meal had to have set somebody back two bills for the four of them, had there been a check presented at the end of it. Waiters hovering around threatening to burst into flame at the very suggestion of a cigarette — one of those kinds of meals. The food adequate and unspectacular. Eichord conscious of his out-of-style threads and aloneness in this crushingly strange place.

  "Have you ever seen the Pink Pussycat?" Questions about what was on his agenda for the night. Never mind the investigation. That told him everything he wanted to know right there. They were as thrilled to have him as he was to be here. It would be one of those things where "a special agent of the Major Crimes Task Force aided in the investigation —" They would feed him to media if he didn't watch them tomorrow.

  "Want to see the town tonight?" The liaison man said, resplendent in a blazer sweater and gray slacks, the two blue-suited cops and old Jack looking absurdly out of place in the fancy eatery. Eichord sipping chilled chablis like an idiot, feeling sorry for himself. He'd seen the town, thanks.

  He'd begged off the Strip and the rest of it, and hoped for a quiet motel room, but someone he knew slightly had insisted in no uncertain terms that he be fed a home-cooked meal, and he let himself be more or less led by the hand to this darkening, alien California suburb, where he was overwhelmed by the déjà vu of feeling himself in the grip of forces over which he had no control.

  Eichord, who seldom had either the time or the temperament to sit motionless in front of a television in prime time (he was an addict of ancient Late Show whodunits), was in someone's home half-watching a set and waiting to be called to dinner, watching a show that was supposed to be a "roast" of some elderly comedian, and the comic called upon to make the keynote speech began by spitting pea soup out in a mock-vomit. When the shocked laughter of the grossed-out audience subsided, the comic smiled innocently and said, "It just seemed like the right thing to do."

  Eichord leaned back and shut his eyes for a moment, thinking about all the awful, gross, inane, fatuous, imbecilic, terrible, and stupid things that Eichord the man, as opposed to Eichord the cop, had lived to later regret. Burning humiliations and prickling embarrassments that had proved to be mercilessly unforgettable.

  Always when he asked himself. Why — the same answer. Because it seemed like the thing to do at the time.

  Eichord sat with his eyes and mind squeezed tight to shut out the memories as the television set of a relative stranger roared in his ears, and he felt a momentary icicle of fear for his own mortality jab him with a cold point, and suddenly he was overwhelmed with sadness and self-pity. He had to laugh at himself.

  He was laughing at the absurdity of his thoughts. Feeling so fucking sorry for himself — so sorry that he had to die one day. Feeling so sad about the way everything had gone, about the way his life had gone, about the way Edie's life had gone. He wished he could call her right now.

  And this is what his host saw when he walked into the room to ask about salad dressing. Did Jack want vinegar-and-oil or Thousand Island? There was Jack watching a has-been comedian whose toupee appeared to have been spray-painted in place, laughing and enjoying the television show.

  His host was heartbroken Jack wouldn't accept a ride back to his motel. Never mind that it was forty minutes away and that at 90 miles an hour, bumper to bumper, traffic moving at its usual mad pace. But Jack was adamant, and after profuse thanks for the home-cooked chow, he was in a Los Angeles cab and headed for nowhere or oblivion or neither of the above, whichever they hit first.

  The cabbie intruded on his thoughts with sudden silence. He realized the driver must have paused in his monologue and asked him something.

  "Pardon me?" he said.

  "The Springs. You ever been to Palm Springs?"

  "Not for years."

  "Yeah, well, my brother-in-law and me did some work on Frank's home there. We're in the pool business too, see. And we did a job on his pool. He was doing a picture for the director John Frankenheimer. It was the one where he costarred with Janet Leigh, who I had in the cab once. Anyway, this was at Frank's house in Palm Springs and ..."

  Christ in heaven. Even the fucking cabdrivers out here were in show biz.

  Dinner had turned into another family fiasco. Inside his head the man was Frank Spain, contract executioner. But to the girl at the dinner table he was only "Dad."

  "Dad," she whined, giving it two syllables.

  "Tiff, don't whine," he said as he chewed.

  "You know I'm no whiner."

  "No. You're no whiner. So please don't start now, okay?"

  "Dad, why can't you like Greg? You didn't like Jeff. You don't like any boy I like."

  "I like him fine."

  "Come on, Dad. You know you hate Greg. And he's a good guy and all. He's from a nice family. How come you don't like him?"

  "I like him already. Give it a rest, please. Let's eat in peace, can't we?"

  "It's the only time I have you let me talk to you anymore. You won't ever talk to me. Dad. Please. I just want to go with him to games and shows and stuff like that. It's not like we'd be going out on real dates or, you know, staying out late and stuff." She was fourteen and flowering and he didn't know what to do.

  "Do we have to think about it right this second while I'm trying to eat?"

  "Can I see Greg, then?"

  "When you're fifteen you can see Greg or any other nice boys just like we discussed. But until then I don't want to keep hearing about it, Tiff. Now that's it. Eat you dinner. Please."

  She sulked in silence. This girl who was neither a whiner nor a sulker. And she wondered what would become of them.

  The Archilochus colubris had not yet joined the avian migration southward. The young girl who was the daughter of the one who called himself Spain stared out through the elegant curtains where a pair of brightly iridescent hummingbirds darted and soared and dove in an incredible air ballet. The female was airborne, zooming up and out of sight, and the tired male stopped to refill from the nearly empty feeder outside the window. As he began to drink, the female sped down from out of nowhere driving him away from his hovering feed-position and they began their elaborate aerobatics again. But the girl saw none of this as her unfocused eyes welled up with tears.

  She paid little attention to the splendor of her surroundings as she sat perched on a love seat in her expensively furnished bedroom. Her parents' house was a fine home, and their exclusive residential area was beautifully maintained, free of any offensive ugliness, a haven for the local wildlife, almost a miniature park. But having known nothing but the finest, she had little frame of reference with which to appreciate the elegance of her environment. Nor would she have cared.

  Her eyes filled with tears and overflowed in a salty trickle blurring her vision and dripping down her tanned cheek, and she wiped at the little flood with the back of her hand and snuffled into a tissue. She wept in sadness and hurt and anger at her mo
ther, who had abandoned them, and wept for her father, who was so devastated by what had happened and who, grief-stricken, had closed out everything else in his life-including his daughter. And yes, she wept for herself, at the shame and the bitter unfairness of it all. And as she sobbed she thought how ridiculous she must appear right now, curled up on the love seat wallowing in self-pity.

  Outwardly she was a lithe, tanned, attractive teenager with long legs and the soft, lovely curves of womanhood beginning to flower and envelop the angular planes, and a stranger would believe her to be sixteen perhaps, and not fourteen. But she was a troubled fourteen-year-old, Spain's daughter. And as she sat oblivious to her richly decorated room, not seeing the courting dance of the hummingbirds, she felt an ancient fourteen. Ancient and lonely.

  She snuffled and wiped her eyes and blew her reddened nose again and uncurled the long, tan legs from the cushions, got up, walked out of her bedroom, and went downstairs. Her dad's office door was not completely shut, and she pushed the door open soundlessly and peered in at him sitting at his desk, unmoving. She nearly jumped out of her skin at the sound of the phone ringing upstairs, and she ran back up and snatched it off the hook on the fourth ring.

  "Hello."

  "Tiff."

  "Oh, hi." It was Greg. She'd been hoping he'd phone her all day. She felt her breath catch a little as she said, "I've missed you."

  "Same here. I wish I could see you right now."

  "Me too."

  "Touch you. Just hold you. I could cuddle you for hours and never get tired of just holding you. You know that?" She loved his voice.

  "Greg. I wish we were together right now too."

  "Well, why can't you meet me somewhere? Can't you get out of the house?"

  "Dad doesn't want me going out anywhere, you know, with boys. He says not till I'm fifteen."

  "Oh, wow. Well, can I come over there?"

  "Um. I guess you'd better not. He just doesn't understand that I'm grown up. I can't do anything. It's like being in prison since Mom . . . left. I miss you so much."

  "Go over to Amber's and I'll pick you up over there. I got Roger's car, man, come on. He'll never find out. No way." Roger was an older boy who let Greg drive sometimes.

  "Well, I guess I could get Amber to go with us and we could let her out at Herman's."

  "Yeah, okay, let's go. Okay?"

  "I'm so lonesome for you. I . . . Oh, all right. I'll be over there about three."

  "See ya."

  " 'Bye." She hung up and realized there was a thin sheen of perspiration under her hairline. She got all hot and flustered talking to Greg. He was so beautiful, like a movie star, with all that unruly hair and those eyes like two little blue pools. He belonged in Hollywood. Greg always reminded her of the one on that soap she used to watch. What was his name — the one with the unruly, curly hair? Except Greg was a whole lot better-looking.

  She wished she could talk to her dad about him, but when she tried, he got furious with her. And Greg was so great. He was gentle. Soft-spoken. A well-educated boy from a nice home. Everything you could ask for.

  She was not pretty in the conventional sense but was the sort of girl who would grow into a woman that other women would describe with envy. Eyes were just a bit too far apart. Nose not quite delicately enough shaped, chin just a bit too square to be pretty ever, but an interesting-looking girl with the beginnings of a great body. She wore her hair in a kind of sleek, feathery cap that she spent hours and hours working on to get it just so — and once someone had told her that her hair and eyes made her look like a cat.

  She liked cats and had since she was a little girl. In fact, she had copied her current hairstyle out of a magazine because she had misread the caption under the picture. She'd thought it said "Layered Cat" style, when it had been "Layered Cap," and she'd copied it and then later read it correctly, liking it better when it had said cat. She did have a little of the feline look about her, and she knew it and saw it as a strength, rightfully enough, and played to it a little. This kitten was a pretty good cat. A nice kid. And she was going through a very tough time.

  She still couldn't believe her mother had actually run off with that . . . that thing . . . and left them. She'd refused to talk to her on the phone each time she'd called the house to talk to Tiff. She despised her mom for what she'd done to them. Especially to Dad. He was ruined by her leaving them like that. She wanted to help somehow, to come to his rescue. It had brought out all of her latent maternal instincts and she'd tried to comfort him, to do things around the house to help him and she couldn't reach him. It's like he was in shock.

  "Dad?" she said, sticking her head in the door of his study. "I'm going over to Amber's. I'll be home early. Okay?" He looked up with heavily lidded eyes and nodded yes, and she took off.

  She remembered back about a couple of years or so ago, one day her mother had been brushing her hair and they'd started talking about that time of the month, and her mom was talking about why you bleed when you become sexually mature, and she'd said, just kidding around with her mother, "I don't see why we were made like that down there. Why would God want you to bleed every month?"

  And her mom had been real serious and she goes, "God made us different from man so we could procreate, and make love, and have babies. And someday you'll be with your husband and you will conceive a baby together, and then in nine months your little newborn child will come out down there."

  And Tiff had gone, "Down here? Oh, sorry. No way."

  And her mother had been so amused by that. She'd laughed real hard. She thought that was really funny.

  Back inside the study, the one called Spain felt the fog lift from his thoughts for a fraction of a second and he absentmindedly realized that his daughter had just stuck her head in the door and spoken to him, and he had looked up from his preoccupied stupor and seen her oval face in the doorway, framed there like a madonna, and the sunlight through the blinds had just for that instant settled around her head like a golden halo.

  She knew she was going to let Greg go all the way with her the day they were washing the Trans-Am and Roger left them alone to go riding with some girl who had honked at him as she cruised by. Roger's folks were gone, as always, and she almost went for it right then but she had enough sense to hold him off until she could get The Pill. They'd been fooling around while they were soaping off the car and she was in real short cutoffs and a little T-shirt knotted in front and bare over her midriff, leaning way out over the hood with the shorts hiked way up on her butt and Greg came up behind her,

  "AHHH!" She jumped when he pushed into the back of her. "You rat, you're getting me wet."

  "Is that right," he said, letting her savor the double entendre as he reached around and cupped her breasts.

  "I'm soaking."

  "I'd like to soak you good, you know." He was pressed into her and she could feel him hard and insistent,

  "OOOOHHHHH, shit?" She nipped the hose back and squirted him with it and they wrestled around, drenching each other in soapy water as they slid over the car's slick surface.

  "I'll get you for that." He was nuzzling her gently now and she stopped struggling a little and enjoyed his embrace, and they laughed.

  "You're a maniac," she said.

  "Yeah, Absolutely," he whispered behind her, his lips in her hair.

  "That feels good," she said.

  "That does?" He was making little circles with his fingertips, little feathery circles, barely brushing his fingers up against the wet shirt.

  "I like the look of your ass like that," he told her, his hand moving down and cupping her right cheek.

  "Wet, you mean."

  "Ummmm."

  "If you're trying to poke a hole through me, you're doing a pretty good jo —" She was turning and his lips shut hers with a soft, velvety kiss.

  "Who do you love?"

  "Ummff."

  "What?" He let her answer.

  "You know who."

  "Say it." He kissed her
and pulled her close again.

  "You."

  "Yes?" Kissing her so gently.

  "Yes."

  "YES."

  "Ummm."

  "You taste good."

  "Let's go inside."

  "We'll get everything wet."

  "Not if we leave our clothes in the kitchen."

  "That's an idea."

  They went in, shedding wet shirts and shorts and kissing some more, and with their arms around each other they tumbled onto the sofa in the Nunnalys' living room, still moist. And he began his usual ritual that was the next step whenever he got Tiff to undress with him.

  "I do love you so, you know that?" Had she been older or wiser, with some mileage, she might have seen through the practiced, toothy artifice as the bogus, manipulative con that it was. But she was fourteen and experienced not at all. And when he opened his mouth and those full, seductive lips of his smiled at her, she could feel her heart miss a beat and her breath caught as she was dazzled by the white smile and perfect mouth — blinded by the light, you could say.

  "I love you too, Greg," she said as they kissed. She saw what she wanted to see when she gazed deeply into those pretty-boy Hollywood blues, and she would sort of let herself go and feel her insides falling into the depth of them, splashing down into those sexy, delicious pools.

  "Do you really love me?" he'd ask.

  So desperately did Tiff love the idea, so total was her commitment to the concept of romance in general, hers in particular, that she began to give herself to him in direct proportion to her desire to be loved in return. And that is a dangerous mistake when you're dealing with a slick little stud like Greg Dawkins. An only child who'd been spoiled rotten, fussed over and pampered, made to feel he was better than everyone else, given too many compliments and too much spending money, and too few rules. A kid with good looks and too much time on his hands and a wide and nasty mean streak.