The Rutledge house was one of those big old three-story jobs that seemed ideal for hiding secrets. Shuttered windows hid the interior from scrutiny and the chipped paint and the leaning chimney spoke of tough times. A lean dog that seemed to be all ribs and teeth flung himself at the car like an arrow.
“No way,” Donna said. “I’ll wait here.”
“Hey, detectives and mail carriers aren’t supposed to care. We go anyway.”
“Not me.”
“C’mon.”
I opened the door to show her that I wasn’t afraid. Then the mutt tried to eat my hand. I closed the door instantly. His head came up to the window. He showed me his molars as if I were doing a dental inspection.
“God, look at him,” she said as he drooled all over the window.
His spittle formed clammy puddles on the glass. He was pretty disgusting.
Donna and I sat back and watched the house. The only thing that struck me as odd was the Oldsmobile convertible parked at an angle to the house. Ready for a fast getaway.
“How are we going to get in there?” Donna asked.
“Simple. I’m going to drive right up to the front door and we’re going to make a run for the screened-in porch. We should be able to beat the dog.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope.”
“You’re really crazy. He’ll gnaw my leg off by the time I get to the porch.”
“Lucky dog.” Even given the turmoil of our emotional life, I had hardly forgotten how desirable she was. So far all we’d shared was some relatively chaste kissing.
I started the car again.
“You ready?” I asked.
“Jeez.”
I put the car in gear. Drove up to the porch. My plan was simple. Run for the door. Fling it open. Keep the dog outside.
“Okay,” I said.
And I took off.
The Rutledge house was located on the edge of town. There were no other houses within a half mile.
The dog could eat us and nobody would know. He got close to my heel, but I did a kind of kick—part Kung Fu, part Fred Astaire—and held him off just enough so that I could reach the steps three feet away.
“Shit!” Donna screamed behind me.
She was only two steps behind me. “Hurry up!”
I reached the screen door, ripped it open, and let her run in past me. Then I jerked the door closed and watched the mutt hurl himself against the screening.
He was mad.
Donna was ecstatic. “We showed him.”
“Yeah. We did.”
“He really pisses me off.”
“The dog?” She sounded as if she were describing Richard Speck.
“Who else would I be talking about?”
“Oh.”
The front door led to a venerable vestibule that smelled of old wood, dust, and furniture polish. A different world spun in the molecules of this place—the world of my grandfather. We went inside.
On the right wall were several handmade wooden mailboxes. They stood empty. I glanced inside. Dust had accumulated in them an inch thick. The rooming house had fallen on hard times long ago.
“Mrs. Rutledge?” I called out.
I looked up the winding staircase that disappeared above. No sign of anybody. Nor was there any in the corridor that led to the main part of the house on this floor.
In the lemony-smelling gloom, Donna leaned in and took my hand. “Kind of spooky.”
“Yeah.” I kept thinking about the woman Eve. I also kept thinking about the Oldsmobile parked at such an odd angle outside. “Let’s try the parlor.”
The hallway creaked as we walked. Donna kept glancing up at the ceiling, as if she expected us to be attacked by bats. By the time we reached the parlor the hallway had gotten almost dark.
From beyond the double sliding doors came the faint sound of a radio tuned to a station that still played Mantovani albums. I knocked. Once. Nothing. I tried again. The sound seemed brittle, almost vulnerable in the turn-of-the-century silence. Still nothing.
Donna screamed before I really saw anything. They came out of the gloom near the back. Two of them. Wearing masks.
Wouldn’t you know—Frankenstein and Dracula. They had been hiding in the deep day-end shadows collecting around a walk-in pantry.
They seemed to be wearing the same clothes they had worn the night they’d attacked me outside the bar. Now they’d added guns to their outfits.
“Get in there,” Frankenstein said, waving his weapon.
“God,” Donna whispered. “A criminal.”
“Yeah,” I said, “he probably has a record and everything.”
“Shut up and get in there,” Frankenstein repeated. His mask distorted the true quality of his voice.
I opened the sliding doors. There was a gray-haired woman in a faded housedress tied to a straight-backed chair in the middle of the room. She’d been gagged.
Dracula said, “We warned you, pal. The other night. Now it’s too late.”
“She’ll choke to death,” I said.
The way the woman swallowed, I could see she was having trouble breathing.
“Let me loosen her gag,” I said.
“A fucking boy scout.” Frankenstein laughed.
I went over to the woman. Took the gag off.
She had a fleshy, wrinkled face. Her eyes scanned me in gratitude and terror. “They wanted to know about Eve.”
“Shut up,” Frankenstein said.
The five of us said nothing for a time. I looked around the room. There was a mantel filled with black-and-white framed photographs. Shawls and doilies covered the armchairs and the lumpy couch. Ferns in various stages of dying stood in the northern-light window. The faint radio played Jo Stafford now. We were trapped in a time warp.
Dracula went over and got two more chairs. Donna glanced at me anxiously. I tried to calm her with my expression, but I was anything but calm myself.
Then it was our turn to sit down and be tied to the chairs. They made quick work of it, tying the knots tight enough to cut off the circulation in our wrists and ankles.
But they weren’t through, of course. This was just the beginning.
Dracula went out of the room. You could hear the dog coming back into the house with him. The mutt’s paws scratched on the hardwood floors as he slid around.
Then the animal shot through the doors and crouched in front of us, baring his teeth.
“We ain’t through with the old lady,” Dracula said. “Come on, Samson,” he said, snapping his fingers. He brought the dog over to the old lady and said, apparently to me, “You interrupted us. We gotta finish our business.”
In the dying light the two looked comic—and all the more ominous for the comic aspect—their masks cheap and gaudy and very unreal-looking.
The dog had no problem seeming real. His coat was shaggy and dirty and his breath was bad. His eyes were red, as if he had a hangover, and his snout was slick with snot.
Nothing about him suggested what came next. It happened so quickly I scarcely noticed.
The mutt banged his head against the old woman’s leg and ripped a long, clean gash into the flesh.
The dog started barking and the woman started screaming.
Frankenstein came over and slapped her once, hard, across the mouth.
“Now, I want to know where the strongbox is that Eve gave you.”
But Frankenstein had overplayed his hand. The woman was in such agony that she seemed not to hear him. She moaned, pitching from side to side inside the constraints of the rope.
Donna’s eyes filled. I wanted to hold her. Reassure her. Hard to do with your arms cinched by rope. “The strongbox,” Frankenstein said again.
The mutt had moved back a few feet, waiting his call.
“I don’t have it,” the woman said miserably.
“Bitch,” Dracula said.
He said “Beefsteak” and the dog lunged at the woman. This time he raked his teeth down her other leg. He had begun to smell. A kind of lust.
This time the woman put her head back and started to shake it from side to side. I wondered how long Frankenstein and Dracula had been here. They seemed like patient boys. Maybe a long time.
We sat there twenty more minutes while it went on. The dog had a go at her three more times. The last time he got her hand. He was extremely well trained. He didn’t make a mess. He just inflicted very precise pain, making holes in her skin, blue where puckered, red where the blood came slowly forth. The dog cleared up any doubts I’d had about Frankie and Drac. Not punks at all. Pros.
“Stop it!” Donna screamed at them toward the end. But they were having too much fun with the old woman to pay any attention.
Then above all the noise—the dog growled steadily, like a beast in a slasher movie—and the two thugs kept up steady cursing beneath their masks—I heard the car.
As daylight waned in the parlor, tires crunched on gravel outside. I felt an idiotic relief. A movie formed in my head. The florist back in Tanrow hadn’t trusted us and had sent the local cops to check us out. Here they were now. Boy, were these two bastards going to get theirs.
For what seemed an hour or two there was no further sound from outside.
Had I imagined the car crunching on gravel?
The dog went on snarling, hunching, ready for another lunge; Frankenstein and Dracula kept up their demands; the old woman said “I don’t have it, I don’t have it,” in a kind of rosary of pain; and I let my mind wander to the strongbox and realized that it was probably the key to everything, from the murder of Stephen Elliot to the deaths of the motel clerk and the hooker.
Then I heard footsteps on the front porch and the rusty hinges of the door squeaking open.
The thugs heard the noises too.
They snapped a command to the mutt, “Ease, boy, ease.” He went into a state of suspended animation. The one with the Dracula mask jerked a Luger from the belt inside his jacket and started toward the sliding doors. The other came over to us. We knew better than to talk.
“Shit, it’s you,” Dracula said in the hallway outside. “Scared the shit out of us.”
Frankenstein waved his gun at us, glanced at the mutt crouching by us, then went out into the hallway too. The shots came very quickly.
Four of them.
As abrupt and final as an execution.
Two bodies collided with the floor.
Donna looked over at me as the steps started toward us.
We were next. Or at least I thought we were, but then there was the sound of an oncoming car on the lonely road.
Steps retreated from the hallway. Down the front stairs. A car motor was twisted to life. Tires on gravel. The whine of a transmission in reverse.
Gone.
“My God,” Donna said. “My God.”
There wasn’t much else to say.