“Some are,” he said. “And some are scary. Bored and listless kids
who’ve tried everything. They either become amoral sociopaths as
dangerous as rattlesnakes-or they become easy prey. I gather you’re
telling me that Cindy Wasloff was easy prey and that Eric swept her in
out of the gutter for some fun and games.”
“And apparently she wasn’t the first.”
“He had a thing for teenage girls, huh?”
Rachael said, “What he had a thing about was getting old. It terrified
him. He was only forty-one when I left him, still a young man, but
every year when his birthday rolled around he was crazier about it than
the year before, as if at any moment he’d blink and find himself in a
nursing home, decrepit and senile. He had an irrational fear of growing
old and dying, and the fear expressed itself in all sorts of ways. For
one thing, year by year, newness in everything became increasingly
important to him, new cars every year, as if a twelve-month-old Mercedes
was ready for the scrap heap, a constant chang,e, of wardrobe, out with
the old and in with the new…
“And the modern art, modern architecture, all the ultramodern
furniture.”
“Yes. And the latest electronic gadgetry. And I guess teenage girls
were just another part of his obsession with staying young and…
cheating death. I guess, in his twisted mind, being with young girls
kept him young, too. When I learned about Cindy Wasloff and this house
in Palm Springs, I realized that one of the main reasons he’d married me
was because I was twelve years younger than him, twenty-three to his
thirty-five.
I was just one more means of slowing down the flow of time for him, and
when I started to get into my late twenties, when he could see me
getting a little older, then I no longer served that purpose quite as
well for him, so he needed younger flesh like Cindy.” She opened her
door and got out of the car, and Benny got out on his side. He said,
“So exactly what’re we looking for here? Not just his current mistress,
you wouldn’t have rocketed out here like a race-car driver just to get a
peek at his latest bimbo.”
Closing her door, withdrawing the thirty-two pistol from her purse, and
heading toward the house, Rachael did notould not-answer.
The night was warm and dry. The vault of the clear desert sky was
spangled with an incredibility of stars. The air was still, and all was
silent but for crickets singing in the shrubbery.
Too much shrubbery. She looked around nervously at all the looming dark
forms and black spaces beyond the glow of the Malibu lights. Lots of
hiding places. She shivered.
The door was ajar, which seemed an ominous sign.
She rang the bell, waited, rang again, waited, rang and rang, but no one
responded.
At her side, Benny said, “It’s probably your house now. You inherited
it with everything else, so I don’t think you need an invitation to go
in.”
The door, ajar as it was, provided more invitation than she would have
liked. It looked as if it were the open door on a trap. If she went
inside in search of the bait, the trap might be sprung, and the door
might slam behind her.
Rachael took a step back, kicked out with one foot, knocking the door
inward. It swung back hard against the wall of the foyer with a
shuddering crash.
“So you don’t expect to be welcomed with open arms,” Benny said.
The exterior light above the door shed pale beams a few feet into the
foyer, though not as far as she had hoped. She could see that no one
lurked in the first six or eight feet, but beyond lay darkness that
might shelter an assailant.
Because he didn’t know everything she knew and therefore didn’t
appreciate the true extent of the danger, because he expected nothing
worse than another Vincent Baresco with another revolver, Benny was
bolder than Rachael. He stepped past her into the house, found the wall
switch in the foyer, and snapped on the lights.
Rachael went inside and moved past him. “Damn it, Benny, don’t be so