Double Take

CHAPTER 54

Wednesday evening

Cheney said, “No, Julia, you’re not going anywhere, forget it. You’re only safe here at the Sherlocks’ house. No one knows where you are.”

“Cheney, listen to me. My house is a smoldering ruin. I don’t know what if anything can be salvaged. I’ve got to deal with the insurance people, with the clean-up people, with the arson investigators from the fire department. And I don’t have any clothes to wear.” She looked down at the pair of turquoise blue sweats she was wearing, courtesy of Evelyn Sherlock. The legs ended two inches above her ankles.

Cheney had to admit she looked faintly ridiculous.

Ruth said, “Don’t worry, Julia. I’ll get you some clothes tomorrow. Cheney’s right. You need to stay close.”

Savich walked into the living room, his cell in his hand. He looked at each of them, then asked Sherlock, “You remember how little Alice described a ring on the getaway driver’s marriage finger? And Tuck said she was describing a Masonic ring?”

“Yes, why?”

“The Pacifica police found it on the finger of a dead man who had been garroted and left in a small dark-blue Ford at a beach parking lot outside of Pacifica. The cops picked up on it and called Frank right away. The Ford was all souped up, the detective told Frank—probably the getaway car.

“The guy,” Dix said, “who was he?” He lightly scratched the flesh around the stitches in his arm.

“They identified him as Johnny Booth, not an upstanding citizen, as you’d expect. Two felony counts on him for armed robbery and pimping, served a total of nine years in San Quentin. He was once booked for killing a liquor store clerk, but got off. Vice thought he’d left California because of the three-strikes law.”

Sherlock said, “Makepeace doesn’t like loose ends, does he?”

“Maybe he’s just cheap,” Ruth said. “Didn’t want to pay the guy his fee.”

Cheney’s cell phone rang. He nodded, and walked out of the living room. When he came back, he looked shell-shocked. He said, “Makepeace has been busier than we thought. That was Frank again. He just heard from the police in Atherton that Sol-dan is dead. He was found lying back on the silk pillows in that exotic room of his wearing his red silk robe, a deep gash in his throat where he’d been garroted. Frank said he’d been smoking his hookah and reading Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad. He’d been dead only about an hour, the ME said. Ancilla, his assistant, found him when she got home from an AA meeting.

“Evidently the murderer slipped behind him, looped the wire around his neck, and that was it. Since he’d been smoking all evening, according to Ancilla, it couldn’t have been very hard to sneak up on him.

“But once Makepeace had the wire around his neck, Soldan did fight. The ME says it looks like there’s skin under Soldan’s fingernails, probably from Makepeace.”

Ruth said, “Makepeace has got to be a mess—bullet wounds, a scraped face from that newel post exploding, and Meissen’s fingernails—and the guy’s still going.”

Julia said, “He’s got a powerful need.”

Sherlock said, “I wonder why he didn’t clean Soldan’s hands once he’d killed him. He’s a professional and professionals wouldn’t leave hard evidence like that.”

Dix raised his head. “Who cares? Makepeace certainly doesn’t. We still don’t have him and we don’t have Pallack.” He rose and walked to the front windows and said over his shoulder, “What we’ve got is nothing—no evidence, no witnesses, not a single one of Dr. Ransom’s journals that we all hoped would give us the reasons and the motives—” He faced the windows again. “It has to be Pallack, all of you know it.”

“Yes, I agree,” Ruth said. “I wonder why he had Makepeace kill Meissen.”

Savich said, “For some reason Meissen was a danger to him. Don’t forget, both Ransom and Meissen were his own personal mediums. He’s in the center of all of this, Dix is right about that. We’ll get there, Dix, be patient,” But Savich could tell his words were falling on deaf ears.

“Hey,” Ruth said, “maybe it was Meissen who hired Makepeace to kill August Ransom.”

Cheney said, “Only if he wanted his clients. Sounds nuts to me, but we’re talking woo-woo here so who knows?”

There was a tense silence because no one knew what to do next, when suddenly Savich stood and announced he and Sherlock would be leaving for New York on the red-eye.

They drove to SFO in under twenty minutes and made it to the gate with five minutes to spare.