The Winter Beach Read online

  “He meant it,” Carmen said “It's been a good evening for both of us.”

  “I enjoyed it too,” she said, staring ahead at the rain-blurred world. The drive was very curvy; it wound around trees, downward to the road, and only the last twenty-five feet or so straightened out. It would be very dangerous if the rain froze. Down this last straightaway, then onto the highway, across it and over the cliff to the rocks below. She shivered. Carmen had the car in low gear, and had no trouble at all in coming to a stop at the highway.

  “Is he a doctor?” she asked. “Something he said tonight made me think he might be or has been a doctor.” She shook her head in annoyance; she could not remember why she thought that.

  “I think he studied medicine a while back, maybe even practiced. I don't know.”

  Of course, Carmen probably knew as little about his employer as she did. They had an easy relationship, and Carmen certainly had shown no fear or anxiety of any sort, but he was a hired man, hired to drive, to cook, to do odd jobs. They had arrived at her door.

  “I'll come in and fix your fire,” Carmen said, in exactly the same tone he had used to indicate that dinner was ready. There was nothing obsequious or subservient in him.

  He added wood to the fire, brought in a few pieces from the porch, and then left, and she went to bed immediately and dreamed.

  She was in a class, listening to a lecture. The professor was writing on the blackboard as he talked, and she was taking notes. She could not quite make out his diagrams, and she hitched her chair closer to the front of the room, but the other students hissed angrily at her and the teacher turned around to scowl. She squinted trying to see, but it was no use. And now she no longer could hear his words, the hissing still buzzed around her ears. The professor came to her chair and picked up her notebook; he looked at her notes, nodded, and patted her on the back. When he touched her, she screamed and fled.

  She was on a narrow beach with a black shiny cliff behind her. She knew the tide had turned because the hissing had become a roar. She hurried toward a trail and stopped because Lasater was standing at the end of the beach where the rocks led upward like steps. She looked the opposite way and stopped again. Werther was there, dressed in tails and striped trousers, with a pale gray top hat on. She heard a guitar and, looking up, she saw Carmen on a ledge playing. Help me, she cried to him. He smiled at her and continued to play. She raised her arms pleading for him to give her a hand, and an eagle swooped low and caught her wrists in its talons and lifted her just as the first wave crashed into the black cliff. The eagle carried her higher and higher until she no longer could see Werther or Lasater or the beach, the road, anything at all recognizable. Then the eagle let go and she fell.

  * * * *

  Hugh Lasater waited until the Volvo came out of Werther's drive and turned north, heading for town, before he went up Lyle's driveway. There was a heavy fog that morning, but the air was still and not very cold. The front of her house had a view of the ocean that must be magnificent when the weather was clear, and no doubt you had to be quick or you might miss it, he thought, gazing into the sea of fog, waiting for her to answer his knock.

  Lyle was dressed to go out, boots, sweater, heavy slacks. She had cut her hair even shorter than it had been before. Now it was like a fuzzy cap on her head. He wondered if it was as soft as it looked. Silently she opened the door wider and moved aside for him to enter.

  “How's it going?” he asked, surveying the room quickly, memorizing it in that one fast glance about. A real pig, he thought with a touch of satisfaction. It figured.

  “Fine. I've found the nest.”

  He laughed and pulled a chair out from the table and sat down. “Got any coffee?”

  She poured a cup for him; there was another cup on the table still half-filled. She sat opposite him now, pushed a map out of the way, closed a notebook. Her camera gear was on the table, as if she had been checking it out before leaving with it.

  “Pretty lousy weather for someone who has to get out and work in it every day,” he said. “Your face is really raw.”

  She shrugged and began to put the lenses in pockets of the camera bag. Her hands were very steady. She could keep the tension way down where it couldn't interfere with appearances. Lasater admired that. But the tension was there, he could feel it; it was revealed in the way that she had not looked at him once since opening the door. She had looked at the coffee cup, at the pot, at her stuff on the table. Now she was concentrating on packing her camera bag.

  “Met Werther yet?” he asked casually.

  “Yes. Once.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing.”

  “Tell me about him.” The coffee was surprisingly good. He got up and refilled his cup.

  “You know more about him than I do.”

  “Not what he's like; how he talks, what he likes, what he's like inside. You know what I mean.”

  “He's educated, cultured, a scholar. He's gentle and kind.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  He caught a momentary expression that flitted rapidly across her face. Something there, but what? He saved it for later.

  “Ancient Greece.”

  “Lyle, loosen up, baby. I'm not going to bite or do anything nasty. Open up a little. Tell me something about the time you spent with him.”

  She shook her head. “I'm not working for you, or with you. I'm here doing a job for a magazine, and for my publisher. That's all.”

  “Uh-huh. It was the cover story, wasn't it? You don't buy it.” He sighed and finished the last of the coffee. “Don't blame you. After seeing that state park I don't blame you a bit. Have to be an idiot to try to smuggle anything into that cove. Who would have thought there'd be dopes camping out all winter. It's February for Christ sake!”

  “You admit you lied to me?” She knew he was playing with her, keeping her off guard, but she could not suppress the note of incredulity that entered her voice. She knew he was a master at this game, also, and she was so naive that she didn't even know when the play started, or what the goals were.

  “What did you talk about?”

  She started again. There was more than a touch of confusion in her mind about what they had talked about for nearly five hours, and somehow she had revealed something to Hugh Lasater. Almost sullenly she said, “Philosophy, cuisines, the coast, geology. Nothing. It was nothing of any importance.” She finished packing heir camera case and stood up. “I have to go out now. I'm sorry I can't help you.”

  “Oh, you'll help,” he said almost absently, thinking about the changes in her voice, subtle as they were. Although she had learned to step back, her voice was revealing in the way it changed timbre, the quickness of her words. He had it now, the cue to watch for.

  “Have you read your contracts for the article and the book?”

  She became silent again, frozen, waiting.

  “You should. If you didn't bring copies with you, I have some. I'll drop them off later today, or send someone else with them.”

  “What are you threatening now?”

  “You've got no job, kiddo, and the contracts have clauses in them that I doubt you'll be able to fulfill. I doubt seriously that you can get your story together within ninety days, starting nearly a month ago. And I doubt that you really meant you'd be willing to pay half your royalties to a ghostwriter. But you signed them, both of them. Honey, don't you ever read contracts before you sign them?”

  “Get out of here,” she said. “Just get out and leave me alone.”

  “People like you,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “You are so ignorant it's painful. You don't know what's going on in the world you live in. You feel safe and secure, but, honey, you can feel safe and secure only because people like me are doing their jobs.”

  “Blackmailing others to do your jobs.”

  “But sometimes that's part of the job,” he protested. “Look, Lyle, you must guess that this is an important piece of work, no matter what else y
ou think. I mean, would anyone invest the kind of effort we've already put into it if it weren't important? We're counting on your loyalty—”

  “Don't,” she snapped. “Loyalty to what, to whom? In the Middle Ages the nobility all across Europe was loyal to nobility. The guilds were loyal to guilds. Peasants to peasants. Where's the loyalty of a multinational corporation executive? or the Mafia? Loyal to what? What makes you think there's anything at all you can tell me that I'd believe?”

  “I'm not telling you anything,” he said. “I know you won't believe me. Except this. He's a killer, Lyle, I didn't want to scare you off before....”

  She pressed her hands over her ears. “So let the police arrest him and take him in for fingerprinting and questioning, the way they do other suspects.”

  “Can't. He has something stashed away somewhere and we want it. We want him to lead us to it, if he's our man. First that. Is he our man? We can't go inside his house for prints. There are dozens of ways of booby-trapping a place to let you know if someone has entered. A hair in a door that falls when the door's opened. A bit of fluff that blows away if someone moves near it. An ash on a door handle. A spiderweb across a porch. He'd know. And he'd bolt, or kill himself. That's what we want to avoid. A dive off a cliff. A bullet through his brain. A lethal pill. We want him very badly. Alive, healthy, and in his own house where he keeps his stuff. We'll put a hundred agents on him, follow him ten years if it takes that long. If he's our man. And we expect you to furnish something that'll let us find out if he is our man. Soon, Lyle.” He paused, and when she did not respond he said, “So you like the old fart. So what? Even the devil has admirers. There's never been a monster who didn't have someone appear as a character witness. You see it every day, the neighbors describing a homicidal psychopath as a nice, quiet, charming man, so kind to the children. Balls! Your pal is a killer resting between jobs. Period. You're in no danger, unless you blow it all in front of him. But I'll tell you this, I wouldn't under-write life insurance on the kid with him.”

  She regarded him bitterly, not speaking. He got up and went to the door. “I know, you're thinking why you? You didn't ask to get mixed up in something like this. Hell, I don't know why you. You were there. And you are mixed up in it. And I tell you this, Lyle baby. When it gets as big as this is, there's no middle ground. You're for us or against us. That simple. Be seeing you.”

  Hugh Lasater had known Werther/Rechetnik would turn up at the most recent molecular biologists’ conference at U.C.L.A. this past fall. He had counted on it the way he counted on Christmas or income tax day. And Werther had not let him down any more than Santa had done when he was a kid. Werther had been there and left in his white Volvo with the kid driving him as if he were a president or something. Since that day in November he had been under surveillance constantly. Twice they had tried ploys designed to get positive identification, and each time they had failed. The kid paid the bills, did the shopping, drove the car. Werther wore gloves when he went out, and the house was booby-trapped. Turk had spotted a silk thread across the porch the first day Werther had left, and Turk had backed off exactly as he had been ordered.

  The first time they tried to get his prints indirectly, it had been through the old dog of a routine telephone maintenance visit. The kid had refused the man admittance, said they didn't want the phone in the first place and didn't care if it was out. Period. No one insisted. The next time a young woman had run into Werther on the beach. She had been wearing a vinyl cape, pristine, spotless, ready to receive prints. Werther had caught her reflexively, steadied her, then had gone on his way, and Milton Follett had received the cape. Nothing. Smudges. Just as reflexive as his catching the girl had been, his other act of smearing the prints must have been also.

  There were two men in the Lagoon state park at all times, one of them on high enough ground to keep the driveway under observation through daylight hours, and close enough at night to see a mouse scamper across the drive. Farther south there were two more men in the next state park. He was bottled up tight, and they still did not have positive identification.

  They could have picked him up on suspicion of murder, staging the arrest, mug shots, prints, interrogation, everything, but Mr. Forbisher had explained patiently that Werther without his papers was simply another lunatic killer. He would surely suicide if cornered. They wanted it all in a neat package undamaged by rough handling. They wanted his papers. It irked him that no one would lay it all out, explain exactly what it was that Werther had. But Christ, he thought, it had to be big. Bigger than a new headache capsule. He suspected it was a cancer cure; the Nazis had used Werther's/Rechetaik's mother for cancer experiments, and he was getting his revenge. It had to be that, he sometimes thought, because what could be bigger than that? The pharmaceutical company that owned that secret would move right into the castle and be top of the heap for a long time to come. When he thought of the money they were already spending to get this thing, that they were willing to keep spending, it made his palms sweat. He did not really blame them for not telling him all of it; that was not how the game was played. All he needed to know, Mr. Forbisher had said primly, was that they wanted Werther, if he was actually Rechetnik; they wanted him intact with his papers. And Hugh Lasater had gone off looking for exactly the right person to put inside the house next door. Step one. He had come up with Lyle Taney.

  * * * *

  She sat with her knees drawn to her chin, staring moodily at the nest. She did not believe Lasater and she knew it didn't matter if she did or not. She never would know the truth, and that didn't matter either. How many people ever learned truth in a single lifetime? she asked herself, still bitter and angry with Lasater, with herself for stepping into this affair.

  She had read the contracts, and she had asked Bobby about the time, about other things Lasater hadn't brought up yet, but no doubt would if he felt he had to. Formalities, Bobby had said, don't worry about them. Basically, he had said, it was the same contract as her first one, with a few changes because the work was not even started yet. And she had signed. She was dipping into her savings to pay for this trip, for the three months’ rental on the house, for the car she had leased. It takes a month to six weeks to get money loose from the company, Mal had said. You know how bureaucracies are. And she did know.

  They must have investigated her thoroughly. They knew her financial situation, the bills she had accumulated during those wasted, lost years; they knew about Mike; they knew she would be willing and even eager to leave her job. She remembered one thing Werther had said, about historians losing faith in what they thought. He was perceptive, Lasater was perceptive, only she had been blind. She put her forehead down on her knees and pressed hard. She wanted to weep. Furiously she lifted her head and stared at the nest again.

  The sun had come out and the day was still and warm. Down on the beach there would be a breeze, but up here, sheltered by hills and trees, the air was calm and so clear she could see the bark on the pine spur that bore the eagles’ nest.

  “Mrs. Taney?” It was Carmen's voice in a hushed whisper.

  She looked for him; he was standing near a tree as if ready to duck behind it quickly. “It's all right,” she said. “The nest is still empty.”

  He climbed the rest of the way up and sat down by her, not all the way under the tarp. The sun lightened his hair, made it look russet. “You said last night that I could join you, see the nest. I hope you meant now, today. I brought you some coffee.”

  She thanked him as he took off a small pack and pulled a thermos from it. The coffee was steaming. He wore binoculars around his neck. She pointed and he aimed them at the nest and studied it for the next few minutes.

  She had forgotten that he had asked if he could join her. She frowned at the coffee, trying to remember more of the conversation. Nothing more came.

  “It's big, isn't it? How soon do you expect the eagles to come?”

  “I'm not sure. They'll hang around, fixing up the nest, just fooling ar
ound for several weeks before they mate. Sometime in the next week or two, I should think.”

  He nodded. “Mr. Werther asked if you have to stay up here this afternoon. There's a place down the beach a few miles he'd like to show you. Beach-combing's great after a storm, and there's gold dust on the beach there.”

  She laughed. “I don't have to stay at all. I took a few pictures, I was just ... thinking.” She started to check around her to make sure she had everything. “Have you been with him long?”

  “Sometimes it seems a lifetime, then again like no time at all. Why do you ask?”

  “Curious. You seem to understand him rather well.”

  “Yes. He's like a father. Someone you understand and accept and even love without questioning it or how you know so much about him. You know what I mean?”

  “I think so. It's a package deal. You accept all or nothing.”

  “He's very wise,” Carmen said, standing, reaching out to pull her to her feet. He was much stronger than his slender figure indicated. He looked at her and said, “I would trust him with my life, my honor, my future without any hesitation.” Then he turned and started down the hillside before her.

  Just like Werther, she thought, following him down. He sidestepped questions just as Werther did, making it seem momentarily that he was answering, but giving nothing with any substance.

  Lyle left her camera bag at Werther's house; they all got in the Volvo and Carmen drove down the coast a few miles. Here the road was nearly at sea level; water had covered it during the storm and there was still a mud slick on the surface. Carmen parked on a gravel turn-off, and they walked to the sandy beach. In some places the beach on this section of the coast was half a mile wide with pale soft sand, then again it was covered with smooth round black rocks, or a sliver of sand gave way to the bony skeleton of ancient mountains; here the beach was wide and level, and it was littered with storm refuse.

  “We'll make our way toward those rocks,” Werther said, pointing south. The outline of the rocks was softened by mist, making it hard to tell how far away they were.