I reloaded from a crouch, then stood up and surveyed the carnage through both mansion windows. Wallace Simpkins lay dead on John Downey’s Persian carpet, and across the way I saw a banner for the West Adams Democratic Club streaked with blood. When I saw a dead woman spread-eagled on top of an antique table, I screamed myself, elbowed my way into Downey’s den, and picked up the machine gun. The grips burned my hands, but I didn’t care; I saw the faces of every boxer who had ever defeated me and didn’t care; I heard grenades going off in my brain and was glad they were there to kill all the innocent screaming. With the tommy’s muzzle as my directional device, I walked through the house.
All my senses went into my eyes and trigger finger. Wind ruffled a window curtain, and I blew the wall apart; I caught my own image in a gilt-edged mirror and blasted myself into glass shrapnel. Then I heard a woman moaning, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” dropped the tommy, and ran to her.
Cora was on her knees on the entry hall floor, plunging a shiv into a man who had to be her father. The man moaned baritone low and tried to reach up, almost as if to embrace her. Cora’s “Daddy’s” got lower and lower, until the two seemed to be working toward harmony. When she let the dying man hold her, I gave them a moment together, then pulled Cora off of him and dragged her outside. She went limp in my arms, and with lights going on everywhere and sirens converging from all directions, I carried her to my car.
PART III
KILLER VIEWS
THE PEOPLE ACROSS THE CANYON
BY MARGARET MILLAR
L.A. Canyon
(Originally published in 1962)
The first time the Bortons realized that someone had moved into the new house across the canyon was one night in May when they saw the rectangular light of a television set shining in the picture window. Marion Borton knew it had to happen eventually, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept the idea of neighbors in a part of the country she and Paul had come to consider exclusively their own.
They had discovered the site, had bought six acres, and built the house over the objections of the bank, which didn’t like to lend money on unimproved property, and of their friends, who thought the Bortons were foolish to move so far out of town. Now other people were discovering the spot, and here and there through the eucalyptus trees and the live oaks, Marion could see half-finished houses.
But it was the house directly across the canyon that bothered her most; she had been dreading this moment ever since the site had been bulldozed the previous summer.
“There goes our privacy.” Marion went over and snapped off the television set, a sign to Paul that she had something on her mind which she wanted to transfer to his. The transference, intended to halve the problem, often merely doubled it.
“Well, let’s have it,” Paul said, trying to conceal his annoyance.
“Have what?”
“Stop kidding around. You don’t usually cut off Perry Mason in the middle of a sentence.”
“All I said was, there goes our privacy.”
“We have plenty left,” Paul said.
“You know how sounds carry across the canyon.”
“I don’t hear any sounds.”
“You will. They probably have ten or twelve children and a howling dog and a sports car.”
“A couple of children wouldn’t be so bad—at least Cathy would have someone to play with.”
Cathy was eight, in bed now, and ostensibly asleep, with the night light on and her bedroom door open just a crack.
“She has plenty of playmates at school,” Marion said, pulling the drapes across the window so that she wouldn’t have to look at the exasperating rectangle of light across the canyon. “Her teacher tells me Cathy gets along with everyone and never causes any trouble. You talk as if she’s deprived or something.”
“It would be nice if she had more interests, more children of her own age around.”
“A lot of things would be nice if. I’ve done my best.”
Paul knew it was true. He’d heard her issue dozens of weekend invitations to Cathy’s schoolmates. Few of them came to anything. The mothers offered various excuses: poison oak, snakes, mosquitoes in the creek at the bottom of the canyon, the distance of the house from town in case something happened and a doctor was needed in a hurry … these excuses, sincere and valid as they were, embittered Marion. “For heaven’s sake, you’d think we lived on the moon or in the middle of a jungle.”
“I guess a couple of children would be all right,” Marion said. “But please, no sports car.”
“I’m afraid that’s out of our hands.”
“Actually, they might even be quite nice people.”
“Why not? Most people are.”
Both Marion and Paul had the comfortable feeling that something had been settled, though neither was quite sure what. Paul went over and turned the television set back on. As he had suspected, it was the doorman who’d killed the nightclub owner with a baseball bat, not the blonde dancer or her young husband or the jealous singer.
It was the following Monday that Cathy started to run away.
Marion, ironing in the kitchen and watching a quiz program on the portable set Paul had given her for Christmas, heard the school bus groan to a stop at the top of the driveway. She waited for the front door to open and Cathy to announce in her high thin voice, “I’m home, Mommy.”
The door didn’t open.
From the kitchen window Marion saw the yellow bus round the sharp curve of the hill like a circus cage full of wild captive children screaming for release.
Marion waited until the end of the program, trying to convince herself that another bus had been added to the route and would come along shortly, or that Cathy had decided to stop off at a friend’s house and would telephone any minute. But no other bus appeared, and the telephone remained silent.
Marion changed into her hiking boots and started off down the canyon, avoiding the scratchy clumps of chapparal and the creepers of poison oak that looked like loganberry vines.
She found Cathy sitting in the middle of the little bridge that Paul had made across the creek out of two fallen eucalyptus trees. Cathy’s short plump legs hung over the logs until they almost touched the water. She was absolutely motionless, her face hidden by a straw curtain of hair. Then a single frog croaked a warning of Marion’s presence and Cathy responded to the sound as if she was more intimate with nature than adults were, and more alert to its subtle communications of danger.
She stood up quickly, brushing off the back of her dress and drawing aside the curtain of hair to reveal eyes as blue as the periwinkles that hugged the banks of the creek.
“Cathy.”
“I was only counting waterbugs while I was waiting. Forty-one.”
“Waiting for what?”
“The ten or twelve children, and the dog.”
“What ten or twelve chil—” Marion stopped. “I see. You were listening the other night when we thought you were asleep.”
“I wasn’t listening,” Cathy said righteously. “My ears were hearing.”
Marion restrained a smile. “Then I wish you’d tell those ears of yours to hear properly. I didn’t say the new neighbors had ten or twelve children, I said they might have. Actually, it’s very unlikely. Not many families are that big these days.”
“Do you have to be old to have a big family?”