Scattershot nd-8 Read online

Hornback went through half the figure eight from east to west, driving without hurry. Once I saw the brief faint flare of a match as he lit another cigarette. When he came out on the far edge of the park he surprised me again: instead of continuing down the hill he slowed and turned to the right, onto a short, hooked spur road where there was another of the lookouts.

  I tapped my brakes as I neared the turn, trying to decide what to do. The spur was a dead end; I could follow him around it or I could pull off the road and wait for him to come out again. The latter seemed to be the better choice, and I cut my headlights and started to glide off onto a turnaround. But then, over on the spur, Hornback swung past a row of cypress that lined the near edge of the lookout. The Dodge’s brake lights flashed through the screen of trees; then his headlights also winked out.

  I kept on going, made the turn and drifted onto a second, tree-shadowed turnaround just beyond the intersection. Diagonally in front of me I could see Hornback ease the Dodge across the flat surface of the lookout, bring it to a stop nose-up against a perimeter guardrail. The distance between us was maybe seventy-five yards.

  What’s he up to now? I thought. Well, he had probably stopped over there to take in the view and maybe do a little brooding. The other possibility was that he was waiting for someone. A late-evening rendezvous with the alleged girl friend? but the police patrol Twin Peaks Park at regular intervals, because adventuresome kids had been known to use it as a lovers’ lane and because there had been trouble in the past with youth gangs attacking parkers. It was hardly the kind of place two adults would pick for an assignation. Why meet up here when the city was full of hotels and motels?

  The Dodge gleamed a dullish black in the starlight; there was no moon. From where I was I could see all of the passenger side and the rear third of the driver’s side. The interior was shrouded in darkness. Pretty soon another match flamed, smearing the gloom for an instant with dim yellow light. Hornback was not quite a chain-smoker, but he was the next thing to it-at least a three-pack-a-day man. I felt a little sorry for him, considering my own bout with the specter of lung cancer.

  I slouched down behind the wheel, tried to make myself comfortable. Five minutes passed. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Behind me, half a dozen sets of headlights came up or went down the hill on Twin Peaks Boulevard; none of them turned in where we were. And nothing moved that I could see in or around the Dodge.

  I occupied my mind by speculating again about Hornback. He was a puzzle, all right. Maybe a cheating husband; maybe a thief; maybe an innocent husband and an innocent man-the victim of a loveless marriage and a shrewish wife. He had not done anything of a guilty or furtive nature tonight, and yet here he was, parked alone at 11:10 P.M. on a lookout in Twin Peaks Park. It could go either way. So which was it going to go?

  Twenty minutes.

  And I began to feel just a little uneasy. You get intimations like that when you’ve been a cop as long as I have, vague flickers of wrongness. The feeling made me fidgety, — I sat up and rolled down my window and peered across at the Dodge. Stillness. Darkness. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  Twenty-five minutes.

  The wind was chill against my face, and I rolled the window back up. But the coldness had got into the car; I drew my coat tight around my neck. And kept staring at the Dodge and the bright mosaic of lights beyond, like luminous spangles on the black-velvet sky.

  Thirty minutes.

  The uneasiness grew, became acute. Something wrong over there. A half-hour was a long time for a man to sit alone on a lookout, whether he was brooding or not; it was even a long time to wait for a rendezvous. But that was only part of the sense of wrongness. Something else …

  Hornback had not lighted another cigarette since that one nearly a half-hour ago.

  The realization made me sit up again. He had been smoking steadily all night long, even during his walk along Upper Grant after dinner. When I was a heavy smoker I could not have gone thirty minutes without lighting up; it seemed funny that Hornback could or would, considering where he was and that there was nothing else for him to do in there. He might have run out, of course- but I remembered seeing a full pack in front of him at Dewey’s Place.

  What could be wrong over there? He was alone in the car, alone up here except for my watching eyes. Nothing could have happened to him. Unless-

  Suicide?

  The word popped into my mind and made me feel even colder. Suppose Hornback wasn’t playing around and suppose he was also despondent over the state of his marriage, maybe over his alleged theft. Suppose all the aimless wandering tonight had been a prelude to an attempt on his own life- a man trying to work up enough courage to kill himself on a lonely road high above the city. It was possible; I didn’t know enough about Hornback to be able to judge his mental stability.

  I wrapped both hands around the wheel, debat ing with myself. If I went over and checked on him, and he was all right, I would have blown not only the tail but the job itself. But if I stayed here, and Hornback had taken pills or done Christ knew what to himself, I might be sitting passively by while a man died.

  Headlights appeared on Twin Peaks Boulevard behind me. Swung in a slow arc onto the spur road. I drifted lower on the seat and waited for them to pass by.

  Only they didn’t pass by, — the car drew abreast of mine and came to a halt. Police patrol-I sensed that even before I saw the darkened dome flasher on the roof. The passenger window was down, and the cop on that side extended a flashlight through the opening and flicked it on. The light pinned me for three or four seconds, bright enough to make me squint; then it shut off. The patrolman motioned for me to roll down my window.

  I glanced past the cruiser at Hornback’s Dodge. It remained dark, and there was still no movement anywhere in the vicinity. Well, the decision on whether or not to check on him was out of my hands now, — the cops would want to have a look at the Dodge in any case. And in any case the job was blown.

  I let out a breath, wound down the glass. The patrolman-a young guy wearing a Prussian mustache-said, “What’s going on here, fella?”

  So I told him, keeping it brief, and let him have a look at the photostat of my investigator’s li cense. He seemed half-skeptical, half-uncertain; he had me get out and stand to one side while he talked things over with his partner, a heavyset older man with a beer belly larger than mine. After which the partner took out a second flashlight and trotted across the lookout to the Dodge.

  The younger cop asked me some questions and I answered them. But my attention was on the older guy. I watched him reach the driver’s door and shine his light through the window. A moment later he appeared to reach down for the door handle, but it must have been locked because I didn’t see the door open or him lean inside. Instead he put his light up to the window again. Slid it over to the window on the rear door. And then turned abruptly to make an urgent semaphoring gesture.

  “Sam!” he shouted. “Get over here, on the double!”

  The young patrolman, Sam, had his right hand on the butt of his service revolver as we ran ahead to the Dodge. I was expecting the worst by this time, only I was not at all prepared for what I saw inside that car. I just stood there gawking while the cops’ lights crawled through the interior.

  There were spots of drying blood across the front seat.

  But the seat was empty, and so was the backseat and so were the floorboards.

  Lewis Hornback had disappeared.

  FIVE

  One of the two inspectors who arrived on the scene a half-hour later was Ben Klein, an old-timer and a casual acquaintance from my own years on the force. I had asked the patrolmen to call in Lieutenant Eberhardt, who was probably my closest friend on or off the cops, because I wanted an ally in case matters became dicey; Eb, though, was evidently still on day shift. I had not asked for Klein, but I felt a little better when he showed up.

  When he finished checking over the Dodge we went off to one side of it, near the guardrail. From there I could look down a ste
ep slope dotted with stunted trees and underbrush. Search teams were moving along it with flashlights, looking for some sign of Hornback; so far they didn’t seem to be having any luck. Up here, the area was swarming with men and vehicles, most but not all of them official. The usual rubberneckers and media types were in evidence along the spur and back on Twin Peaks Boulevard.

  Let me get this straight,” Klein said, frowning, when I was through with my story. He had his hands jammed into his coat pockets and his body hunched against the wind; the night had turned bitter cold now. “You followed Hornback here around ten-forty, and you were in a position to watch his car from the time he parked it to the time the two patrolmen showed up.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You were on that turnaround?”

  “Yes. The whole time.”

  “And you didn’t see anything unusual.”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Could you see inside the car?”

  “No-too many shadows.”

  “But you could see most of the area around it.”

  “Yes.”

  “You take your eyes off it for any length of time?”

  “A few seconds now and then, no more.”

  “Were all four doors visible?”

  “Three of the four. Not the driver’s door.”

  “That’s how he disappeared, then.”

  I nodded. “But what about the dome light? Why didn’t I see it go on?”

  “It’s not working,” Klein said. “Bulb’s defective. That was one of the first things I checked after we wired up the door lock.”

  “I also didn’t see the door open,” I said. “I might have missed that, I’ll admit-but it’s the kind of movement that should have attracted my atten tion.” I paused, working my memory. “Hornback couldn’t have gone away toward the road or down the embankment to the east or back into those trees over there; I would have seen him if he had The only other direction is down this slope, right in front of his car. But if that’s it, why didn’t i notice movement when he climbed over the guardrail?”

  “Maybe he didn’t climb over it.”

  “Crawled under it?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why would he have done that?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Well, I can think of one possibility.”

  “Which is?”

  “The suicide angle,” I said. “I told you I was worried about that. What if Hornback decided to do the Dutch, and while he was sitting in the car he used a pocketknife or something else sharp to slash his wrists? That would explain the blood on the front seat. Only he lost his nerve at the last second, panicked, opened the door and fell out of the car and crawled under the guardrail-”

  I stopped. The idea was no good; I had realized that even as I laid it out.

  Klein knew it, too. He was shaking his head. “No blood outside the driver’s door or along the side of the car or anywhere under the guardrail; a man with slashed wrists bleeds pretty heavily. Besides, if he’d cut his wrists and had second thoughts, why leave the car at all? Why not just start it up and drive to the nearest hospital?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “There’s another funny angle-the locked doors. Who locked them? Hornback? His attacker, if there was an attacker? Why lock them at all?”

  I had no answers for him. I stood brooding out at the city lights.

  “Assume he was attacked,” Klein said. “By a mugger, say, who’s decided to work up here because of the isolation. The attacker would have had to get to the car with you watching, which means coming up this slope, along the side of the car, and in through the driver’s door.”

  “And the door would have had to be unlocked when he did it,” I said.

  “Yeah. Do you buy any of that?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I. It’s TV commando stuff-too farfetched.”

  “There’s another explanation,” I said musingly.

  “What’s that?”

  “The attacker was in the car all along.”

  “Not a mugger, you mean?”

  “Right. Somebody who had it in for Hornback.”

  Klein scowled; he had heavy jowls, and the scowl made him look like a bulldog. “I thought you said Hornback was alone the whole night. Didn’t meet anybody.”

  “He didn’t. But suppose he was in the habit of frequenting Dewey’s Place, and this somebody knew it. Suppose he-or she-was waiting in the parking lot, slipped inside the Dodge while Hornback and I we’re in the tavern, hid on the floor in back, and stayed hidden until Hornback came up here and parked. Then maybe stuck a knife in him.”

  “Also melodramatic, seems to me.”

  “Me too. But it is possible.”

  “What kind of motive fits that explanation?”

  “How about the money Hornback’s wife claims he stole from their firm?”

  “You’re not thinking the wife attacked him?”

  “No. If she was going to do him in, it doesn’t make sense she’d hire me to tail him around.”

  “The alleged girl friend?”

  “Could be.”

  “You said yourself the girl friend might be a figment of the wife’s imagination.”

  I nodded. “But assume she does exist. She could have had a falling-out with Hornback and decided to keep all the money for herself. That kind of thing happens all the time.”

  “Sure, it does,” Klein said, but he sounded dubious. “The main trouble with that idea is, what happened to Hornback’s body? The attacker, male or female, would’ve had to get both himself and Hornback out of the car, then drag the body down the slope. Now, why in hell would somebody kill a man way up here, with nobody around as far as he knew, and take the corpse away with him instead of just leaving it in the car?”

  I spread my hands, palms up. “I just can’t figure it any other way,” I said.

  “Neither can I-for now. Let’s see what the search teams and the forensic boys turn up.”

  What the searchers and the lab crew turned up, however, was nothing: no sign of Hornback dead or alive, no sign of anybody else in the area, no bloodstains except for those inside the car, no other evidence of any kind. Hornback-or his body, and maybe an attacker as well-had not only vanished from the Dodge while I was watching it; he had vanished completely and without a trace. As if into thin air.

  It was close to 2:00 A.M. before Klein let me go home. He asked me to stop in later at the Hall of Justice to sign a statement, but aside from that he seemed satisfied that I had given him all the facts as I knew them. But I was not quite off the hook yet, nor would I be until Hornback turned up. If he turned up. My word was all the police had for what had happened on the lookout, and I was the first to admit that it was a pretty bizarre story.

  When I came into my flat I thought about calling Mrs. Hornback. But on consideration, I saw no point or advantage in phoning a report at this time of night; the police would already have told her about her husband’s disappearance. Besides which, I just did not want to talk to the woman or listen to her read me the riot act.

  It was too late to call Kerry, too. And even if it wasn’t, I was not up to relating the night’s events another time to anybody, not without some sleep first.

  I drank a glass of milk and crawled into bed and tried to sort things into some kind of order. How had Hornback vanished? Why? Was he dead or alive? An innocent man or as guilty as his wife claimed? The victim of suicidal depression, or of circumstance, or of premeditated violence …?

  No good. I was too tired to come up with fresh speculations on any of those questions.

  After a while I slept and dreamed a lot of crap about people dematerializing inside locked cars, vanishing in little puffs of smoke. A long time later the telephone woke me up. I keep the thing in the bedroom, and it went off six inches from my ear and sat me up in bed, grumbling. Outside the window, the sky was beginning to lighten, as if blue dye were slowly being added to gray cloth; the nightstand clock said th
at the time was 6:55. Four hours’ sleep and a new day dawning.

  The caller, not surprisingly, was Mrs. Hornback. She launched into an immediate harangue, berating me for not getting in touch with her last night; then she demanded my version of what had happened in Twin Peaks Park. I gave it to her.

  “I don’t believe a word of it,” she said.

  “That’s your privilege, ma’am,” I said. “But it happens to be the truth.”

  “We’ll see about that.” She sounded even more angry and vituperative than she had in my office yesterday; her voice dripped venom. There was no compassion in the woman, not a whisper of it. “How could you let something like that happen? What kind of detective are you?”

  A poor tired one, I thought. “I did what you asked me to, Mrs. Hornback.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes, What took place on the lookout was beyond my control.”

  “You just sat there and did nothing,” she said. “That’s what the police told me.”

  “If I’d known something was going on-”

  “I don’t want excuses. I want to know what happened to Lewis; I want the money he stole from me.”

  “I can’t help you on either score,” I said. “If I could, I would.”

  “That bitch of his is mixed up in this,” she said. “He was up on Twin Peaks to meet her; he must have been.”

  “I can’t confirm that, Mrs. Hornback. He didn’t meet any woman while I was following him-”

  “That what you say. You’re so observant, you let something happen to him right under your nose.” She took a deep breath and let me have her best shot. “This is all your fault, you bum.”

  “Look, Mrs. Hornback-”

  “If my husband isn’t found, and if I don’t recover my money, you’ll hear from my attorney. You can count on that.” There was a clattering sound, and the line began to buzz.

  Nice lady. A real princess.

  I lay back down. I was still half groggy, and pretty soon I went back to sleep. And then the damned phone went off again, sat me up the way it had before. I focused on the clock: 7:40. Conspiracy against my sleep, I thought, not altogether coherently, and fumbled up the handset.