“Lieutenant?” Simms called.
“Coming.” But he waited a little longer, because he wasn’t ready to face Simms yet. He’d lost Bunner yesterday, her today. It was time to crawl into a back booth at The Loft and get plastered.
Simms waited without calling again, and Latovsky finally straightened up and slammed the car door.
They walked around the house, past a courtyard with brick paving and a six-car garage and out across the acres of Tilden land. There wasn’t another house in sight and Latovsky muttered, “Big place.”
“Six hundred acres, Lieutenant. And in case you ever wonder, which you might someday, land around here goes for about eighty thou an acre. A developer from Hartford once offered them twenty million for a piece of it and they turned him down. Can you imagine turning down twenty million?”
“No.”
“Me either. But they’re rich, Lieutenant. Can’t say to the penny how rich, but I know old man Tilden left his daughters in the neighborhood of a hundred million each thirty years ago. It’s doubled... maybe trebled by now. Eve’s got her mother’s portion; she’ll have her aunt’s too someday.”
Four hundred million, give or take, Latovsky thought, and smothered a giggle he knew would come out sounding screechy and nuts.
They came to a stand of gnarled, ancient-looking fruit trees in bloom with benches under them.
“Let’s sit,” Simms said.
They faced each other, knees almost touching. Petals blew around like pink snow, caught in the men’s hair and clothes and perfumed the air.
“The old cherry orchard,” Simms explained. “Most of the trees are past bearing in spite of the blossoms, but we still get enough for a few pies and jars of jam. It’s always a little cooler here—must be an underground spring or something.”
“We doing the tour?”
“No need to get snotty, Lieutenant. We’ve got to talk and this is a pleasant place to do it.”
“Talk about what?”
“Whoever Eve saw in that ‘mirror. ’ I gather he took a tape with Eve’s voice on it.”
“Yes.”
“Saying what?”
“That she could ... see... things.”
“That no one else could.”
Latovsky nodded.
“Okay, what about him?”
“I don’t know about him or I’d get him and she’d never have to worn’.”
“Get him? For stealing a tape?”
Latovsky gave a small, cruel grin. “For killing six people, Mr. Simms.”
Simms jerked back, rocking the bench on its wrought-iron legs. “Holy shit.”
“Yeah. One of the six was my best friend. That was his recorder... he made the tape.”
“Tell me,” Simms said softly.
“What for?”
“Because you’re outta here in a couple of minutes and I’m all that stands between him and her. Tell me.”
Latovsky said, “Five were women he slit open in the woods and watched die by moonlight.”
“Jesus.”
“The sixth was my friend; he shot him in the face with a Magnum or some comparable piece. And that’s about all I know except what you’ve already heard—that he has light brown hair and light brown eyes; cold, dead, empty doll’s eyes.” Latovsky laughed mirthlessly.
“The bartender where the killer picked up the last woman looks like a white Mike Tyson and has a snake tattooed on his forearm. I can imagine asking him if he remembers some fucker with ‘doll’s eyes. ’”
“Six...”
“That we know of. Could be more we haven’t found and never will.”
“We can’t let him anywhere near her.”
“No.”
“You’ve got to keep your word, Latovsky.”
“I gave it, I’ll keep it,” Latovsky said tightly.
“Sure, sure. A man of honor. Only time’s got this way of eating away at ‘honor,’ until the day comes, maybe only a couple of weeks from now, when you remember how useful she could be and forget all that honor bullshit. Especially if this bastard makes it seven people... or eight. Then I can see you telling yourself that a vow made under duress in a rich lady’s drawing room means zip compared to saving a life. That’s not such an outlandish scenario, is it?”
Latovsky didn’t answer. Simms brushed some of the petals out of his close-cropped gray-and-brown hair and went on. “Two reasons you can’t let that happen, Lieutenant. One, if you ever come through those gates uninvited... if you call or write or send her a singing telegram... I’ll break you in two.”
Fuck this, Latovsky thought and tensed to show Simms-the-butler a thing or two. He sat up rigidly and gave the other man the look that had terrified a few killers and rapists and a lot more lesser perps, but Simms just looked back mildly. The forearms leaning on his thighs were the size of wet-cured hams, and his neck looked like a tree trunk. He could do exactly what he’d said without winding himself. Latovsky sagged back on the bench and looked down at the petals littering the ground around his feet. “And the second reason?” he mumbled.
“Good on ya, Lieutenant,” Simms said, “good on ya! I was afraid we’d have to go through a lot ot macho shit about who can do what to who. Maybe even have to have a little demonstration.” Simms stuck his hand out. “I’m Larry Simms by the way. Simms in public, Larry in private. Please call me Larry.”
They shook, and Simms sat back and looked past Latovsky at the behemoth of a house about five acres away.
“Reason two’s a lot more complicated,” he said. “See, Eve really can do what she says. Oh, I know you think you believe it, or you wouldn’t be here. But I’m sure there’s a whole list of reservations in the back of your mind and some of them probably apply. For instance, she can’t necessarily see what she wants to when she wants to, or tells herself she can’t. She also says she can’t get names and I guess she can’t. But in one regard, she is infallible and that is, if she does see it, it will happen—just like her mother.”
“Her mother!”
“Yeah. Ellen Dodd Tilden Leigh. These people give themselves a lot of last names, don’t they? Ellen had it—that’s the best I can come up with as a name for the fucker. I tried out psychic power—only to myself, of course—and that sounded like something at the other end of a nine hundred number.
“Ellen Leigh had it, as did her mother, the lady in the picture in the drawing room. It did her in, by the way; she came down late one night, locked herself in the garage, stuffed blankets in the cracks, and started a couple of the cars. Gorgeous woman from the portrait and all accounts. Famously gorgeous in these parts, for all the good it did her.
“After that it was her daughter Ellen’s turn. Don’t know how it passes from one to the other, or why it skipped Frances. Guess you’d need a Nobel laureate geneticist to figure it out... or maybe it’s just one of those family proclivities like making a lot of dough. In any case it went from Olivia to Ellen and Ellen tried to pretend it hadn’t and she was just a nice, normal, pretty rich girl. For a while, it looked like she’d pull it off. She went to dances, had beaus, and came out the way girls did in those days. She got married, then she had Eve, and it all fell apart because she couldn’t touch her own daughter for fear of what she’d see. Imagine, Dave. Imagine hugging your little girl when she’s six and seeing her with a brain tumor at twelve; imagine what the next six years would be like for both of you.”
Latovsky felt his imagination slip in that direction and pulled it back because he didn’t want to know what that would be like.