Norman Partridge - Wildest Dreams

Cliffside, California was alive, and I didn’t need a medium to tell me that was an unusual occurrence for a tourist town in the middle of the off-season.

But I did need a medium.

A woman of energies named Janice Ravenwood. She was the reason I’d come to Cliffside. I parked the Toyota at a coastal access lot hidden from the main drag, an eight-block strip of tourist traps called Gull Lane. There wasn’t any parking to be had in town anyway. Cliffside’s two motels were quickly filling with assorted rubberneckers, freaks, and reporters in the wake of the grisly events at Circe Whistler’s estate.

Today I planned to keep a lower profile. Completely subterranean was the way I planned to play it. I couldn’t afford to attract the wrong kind of attention, i.e. the attention of pissed off individuals who wore badges and carried guns.

I jammed the dead cop’s pistol under my belt and slipped on a flannel shirt. I left the tail untucked to cover the gun. The K-bar went under my belt on the other side. The other pistol stayed under the seat, but I didn’t lock the truck. If I had to make a quick exit, I didn’t want to be fumbling for my keys while some cop shot me in the back.

The day was overcast. Clouds pumped in from the west, heavy clouds the color of the K-bar blade. A little rain wouldn’t bother me, though. Bad weather would make it tougher on anyone trying to track me down. It’s harder to do anything in the rain.

Walking into town, I only saw one deputy-a young kid. He was talking to a vanload of CNN guys who had parked in a red zone. They were spoon-feeding him a load of shit about freedom of the press and the people’s right to know, and the poor kid was actually going along with it like he figured he’d better be polite or they’d point a camera in his face and make him look like Barney Fife on the evening news.

The deputy didn’t give me a second look as I passed him by. That didn’t surprise me. But the CNN guys didn’t check me out either, and that was a surprise.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Passing muster with CNN’s hounds meant one thing-the odds were good that there wasn’t a description of a suspect in Circe Whistler’s murder.

Not yet, anyway. But life could be fluid, like Janice Whistler said. Circumstances could change awfully quickly. Whether they would or not depended on the real identity of Circe Whistler’s killer. I knew that the killer had tipped off the cops once already. Their appearance at the scene of the crime proved that.

I amused myself by imagining Diabolos Whistler’s head calling 911 and doing the deed. Not fucking likely. Janice Ravenwood and Spider Ripley were another story. If either or both of them wanted to frame me for murder, their silence after the fact would be a surprise.

Not that I couldn’t explain it. If Spider was indeed in San Francisco with Diabolos Whistler’s head, I doubted he’d had an opportunity to talk to the local cops. Then again, I had no real guarantee that Ripley had gone anywhere. The same with the medium-I didn’t have any idea where she might be or who she might be talking to.

There might be other suspects, of course. People I didn’t know. Circe had mentioned a sister, Lethe. But if I remembered Circe’s story correctly, her sister lived the life of a San Francisco club rat. Sure, that was all I knew about Lethe Whistler. Apart from that, the information was secondhand and from an obviously biased source. But if Circe’s description of her sister was accurate, Lethe wouldn’t be my first choice for the brains behind a murder/frame-up scheme.

There was no sense chasing my tail. After all, Circe was a high-ranking priestess in a satanic cult. Who knew what kind of maggots were crawling around under the floorboards of her church.

Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wasn’t the only one. The first newspaper rack I passed flashed a bold headline: SLAUGHTER AT WHISTLER ESTATE. I glanced through the glass at the first four paragraphs of the article, reading down to the fold.

Those paragraphs convinced me of one thing-the writer of the article owned a thesaurus. That was the only way to explain the six variants of “bloody” in the lurid come-on. I figured the meat of the piece had to be on the bottom half of the page, so I dropped a couple of quarters into the machine and bought a paper.

I leaned against a lamppost and read the rest of it. Minus the hyperbole, the story went like this: at present, Circe Whistler was “an unidentified female” and there were “no known suspects.” Police were following “a number of leads”…yadda, yadda, yadda…I’d just blown fifty cents.

I’d have to look elsewhere if I wanted more information. The sound of simmering rumor drifted from the open door of a crowded diner, but I already had my eye on a guy with a pay phone growing out of his ear.

He wore earth tones, the kinds of colors that show up best on television. Nothing else about him was particularly photogenic. His skin was fishbelly white, and a cigarette dangled from his lips, and his expression seemed terminally pinched-as if he’d got his nose stuck in a book about ten years ago and had only just managed to extract it.

In other words, the guy practically reeked “media leech.” A couple more sentences out of his mouth and I figured out that he was a writer, one of those guys who hacks out those true crime paperbacks you find at the grocery store just down the aisle from the Kellogg’s Cornflakes.

I eavesdropped while the reporter lied outrageously to his editor, saying that it was raining buckets and he couldn’t get a room at the local Holiday Inn. Then he started bitching about the town’s other motel. “For God’s sake, Simon,” he whined, “it’s a roach’s nest called the Cliffside Motor Court. It’s not even in the AAA book. The place actually advertises waterbeds… and you know how bad my back is!”

He huffed and puffed while Simon gave him some obviously bad news. Then he played his trump card.

“Simon, you’re my editor, and I like to think that you’re also my friend. But if I don’t have my rest, I can’t possibly do Larry King tonight.”

I could almost hear good old Simon hyperventilating on the other end of the line. As for the writer, he knew he had the upper hand at last and moved in for the kill. “What happened, Simon, is that I ran into a CNN crew at breakfast. I told their producer that I was doing a book on the Whistler murders for you, and that I’d already created a profile of Whistler’s killer. She called King’s producer, and we’re booked for a remote on tonight’s broadcast.”

He sighed while the editor wedged in a few words. “Of course I lied about the profile. This is CNN, Simon! Imagine the advance orders we’ll get! Only this time I want a hardcover. No more paperbacks. I want a jacket photo that I don’t have to pay for and cover approval and a book tour. Get my agent on the phone and hammer out a deal before airtime, and-”

He broke off laughing. “No no no. The profile won’t be a problem at all. These idiots are all the same. This one is a classic publicity hound. He takes too many wild chances. He’s the kind who wants to be caught so he can bask in the media spotlight.

“Anyway, once they get him, I’ll have a book for you in a month. Maybe less. You’ll pay for it, sure. You’ll pay for my trip to the maniac’s home town, and you’ll pay for my lunch with his third-grade teacher, and you’ll pay for the photos I swipe from his first girlfriend’s photo album…just like you’ll pay for a fucking chiropractor if I have to sleep on a waterbed in this miserable little shitsplat of a town-”

I’d heard more than enough.

I invaded the writer’s space and glared at him.