A Time of Predators

Worden nodded. “Sure. Tough man, played it cool right down the line. Three of ’em dead and one crippled for life with a broken back — probably worse than being dead for a simple, gentle guy like him...”

“Did you talk to Barbara Anderson about the gentle phone call he made to her?”

“Okay, okay,” Worden said, irritably brushing it aside. “So maybe this Champ character should have been put in a rubber room years ago. But then what about that Debbie Marsden, huh? Feel good about her?”

Curt felt the sweat start out between his shoulder blades. Poor broken Debbie, used and abused and thrown away. It was so tempting to admit to Worden his stabbing guilt about Debbie; if, after all, he bad quit seeking the predators... But Worden acted as if it was such an admission he sought, and Curt would be damned if he’d give the detective the satisfaction.

“I didn’t know the Los Feliz police blamed me for that.”

“Sure, okay, the punks did it, all right — after her boyfriend handed her over like a fistful of pocket change. But a blue VW was seen in the Gander driveway; and the ambulance was summoned anonymously.”

“What does the girl say?”

“She doesn’t.” Then Worden grunted in disgust. “If the damn doctor hadn’t been so quick with his needle on Friday afternoon, we wouldn’t have been finding corpses on Saturday morning. As for the girl, she’s okay physically — but it’s my bet she’ll be psyched for life. Probably the first guy tries to kiss her will get a hatpin in the chest.” He leered through the smoke of another cigarette. “Not that what happened is your fault, Professor. The D. A. is buying your story, all the way down the line. Self-defense.”

When he stopped, Curt said, “But you disagree.”

“You bet your fanny I do.” He stood up, towered over Curt, his hands fisted in his trouser pockets as if that was the only way he could be sure of not using them. “I think you lured the dummy up on the cliff, and then shoved him off. I think you conned the spic into the knife fight, and then killed him. Slashing his wrist, so he’d die the way your wife did. So damned cute it makes me want to puke.”

Curt stood up also, went to the windows to look unseeingly out over the golf course. The funny thing was that if Worden had come here the day before, Curt would have agreed with him, on all of it. Even the born killer part. Now he wouldn’t. Part of it was the talk with Preston, but more than that...

More than that, mere survival sometimes dictated bloody-mindedness, in the British sense of the word. He turned back to the detective. “And I suppose I pushed the Dean boy in front of the truck?”

“I can’t fit you in there,” Worden admitted grudgingly. “The driver and the time element both exclude you — you were calling our office from the rill-night greasy spoon in San Conrado just about the time he got it. Funny, too — since it was his fingerprints I had lifted off that wall above the couch in the other room.”

Debbie’s boyfriend. It figured. The planner, the one who pushed or conned the others into it. Good family, the newspapers said, the father in insurance, $50,000-a-year class. A persuasive boy, he would have been, and a clever one. But then, if he was clever, what had brought him to the middle of that highway in the shrouding mantle of fog?

“So that just leaves Gander,” said Curt. “The one who’s missing.”

“Missing?” Then Worden nodded again. “Yeah, you would, all right. Only I don’t buy your story about walking all the way to San Conrado. I think you left the cove a lot later than your statement says, and that you hitched a ride with someone we haven’t found yet.”

He stopped, dug in his trouser pocket, and then dropped something on the coffee table. Curt picked it up curiously: a blackened silver skull-and-crossbones ring, very heavy and made for a large finger. He looked up, surprised an almost erotic expression on Worden’s face. “This is supposed to mean something to me?”

“Some fishermen down the coast hooked into a ten-foot white shark yesterday — one of the man-eaters. They sliced him open, just for the hell of it, and found a partially digested human arm in his belly. Wearing this ring on one of the fingers.”

“You mean that Heavy Gander—”

“His old man has identified it. Funny thing, Halstead, tough old guy like that, you’d think he wouldn’t give a damn. But he busted down an’ cried like a baby when we showed him that ring.”

“Yes,” said Curt. “Well.” He felt as if he had been bludgeoned, but he knew now that he would be all right. He realized that Worden had come hoping for a confession, and he knew that Worden wasn’t going to get one. Even if he had been guilty, anyone but Worden. He looked at his watch. “I suppose you’ve got to be going. Sergeant...”