From the Corner of His Eye (52 page)

Wonderful. Oh, perfect. So Neddy, a friend of Celestina’s, knew that Junior, reputed to be a vicious sadist, had attended this reception
under a false name.
If Junior really was a sleazy pervert of such rococo tastes that he would be shunned even by the scum of the world, even by the deranged mutant offspring of a self-breeding hermaphrodite, then surely he was capable of murder, too.

On hearing of Bartholomew’s—and/or Celestina’s—death, Neddy would be on the phone to the police, pointing them toward Junior, in twelve seconds. Maybe fourteen.

Unobtrusively, Junior followed the musician across the large front room, but by an indirect arc, using the babbling bourgeoisie for cover.

Neddy cooperated by not deigning to look back. Eventually, he stopped a young man who, judging by the name tag on the lapel of his blazer, was a gallery employee. They put their heads together in conversation, and then the musician headed through an archway into the second showroom.

Curious to know what Neddy had said, Junior quickly approached the same gallery staffer. “Excuse me, but I’ve been looking for my friend ever so long in this mob, and then I saw him talking to you—the gentleman in the London Fog and the tux—and now I’ve lost him again. He didn’t say if he was leaving, did he? He’s my ride home.”

The young man raised his voice to be heard above the gobbling of the art turkeys. “No, sir. He just asked where the men’s room was.”

“And where
is
it?”

“At the back of the second gallery, on the left, there’s a corridor. The rest rooms are at the end of it, beyond the offices.”

By the time Junior passed the three offices and found the men’s room, Neddy had occupied it. The door was locked, which must mean this was a single-occupant john.

Junior leaned against the door casing.

The hall was deserted. Then a woman came out of one of the offices and walked toward the gallery, without glancing at him.

The 9-mm pistol rested in the complementary shoulder holster, under Junior’s leather coat. But the sound-suppressor hadn’t been attached; it was in one of his coat pockets. The extended barrel, too long to lay comfortably against his left side, would most likely have hung up on the holster when drawn.

He didn’t want to risk marrying weapon and silencer here in the hall, where he might be seen. Besides, complications could arise from being splattered with Neddy’s blood. Aftermath was disgusting, but it was also highly incriminating. For the same reason, he was loath to use a knife.

A toilet flushed.

For the past two days, Junior had eaten only binding foods, and late this afternoon, he had taken a preventive dose of paregoric, as well.

Through the door came the sound of running water splashing in a sink. Neddy washing his hands.

The hinges weren’t on the outside. The door would open inward.

The water shut off, and Junior heard the ratcheting noise of a paper-towel dispenser.

No one in the hall.

Timing was everything.

Junior no longer leaned casually on the casing. He put both hands flat against the door.

When he heard the
snick
of the lock being disengaged, he rammed into the men’s room.

In a rustle of raincoat, Neddy Gnathic stumbled, off balance and startled.

Before the pianist could cry out, Junior drove him between the toilet and the sink, slamming him against the wall hard enough to knock loose his breath and to cause the water to slosh audibly in the nearby toilet tank.

Behind them, the door rebounded forcefully from a rubber-tipped stopper and closed with a thud. The lock wasn’t engaged, however, and they might be interrupted momentarily.

Neddy possessed all the musical talent, but Junior had the muscle. Pinned against the wall, his throat in the vise of Junior’s hands, Neddy needed a miracle if he were ever again to sweep another glissando from a keyboard.

Up flew his hands, as white as doves, flapping as though trying to escape from the sleeves of his raincoat, as if he were a magician rather than a musician.

Maintaining a brutal strangling pressure, Junior turned his head aside, to protect his eyes. He kneed Neddy in the crotch, crunching the remaining fight out of him.

The dying-dove hands fluttered down Junior’s arms, plucking feebly at his leather coat, and at last hung limp at Neddy’s sides.

The musician’s bird-sharp gaze grew dull. His pink tongue protruded from his mouth, like a half-eaten worm.

Junior released Neddy and, letting him slide down the wall to the floor, returned to the door to lock it. Reaching for the latch, he suddenly expected the door to fly open, revealing Thomas Vanadium, dead and risen. The ghost didn’t appear, but Junior was shaken by the mere thought of such a supernatural confrontation in the middle of this crisis.

From the door to the sink, nervously fishing a plastic pharmacy bottle out of a coat pocket, Junior counseled himself to remain calm. Slow deep breaths. What’s done is done. Live in the future. Act, don’t react. Focus. Look for the bright side.

As yet, he hadn’t taken either an antiemetic or antihistamine to ward off vomiting and hives, because he wanted to medicate against those conditions as shortly before the violence as was practical, to ensure maximum protection. He’d intended to dose himself only after he followed Celestina home from the gallery and could be reasonably certain that he had located the lair of Bartholomew.

He shook so badly that he couldn’t remove the cap from the bottle. He was proud to be more sensitive than most people, to be so full of feeling, but sometimes sensitivity was a curse.

Off with the cap. Yellow capsules in the bottle, also blue. He managed to shake one of each color into the palm of his left hand without spilling the rest on the floor.

The end of his quest was near, so near, the right Bartholomew almost within bullet range. He was furious with Neddy Gnathic for possibly screwing this up.

He capped the bottle, pocketed it, and then kicked the dead man, kicked him again, and spat on him.

Slow deep breaths. Focus.

Maybe the bright side was that the musician hadn’t either wet his pants or taken a dump while in his death throes. Sometimes, during a comparatively slow death like strangulation, the victim lost control of all bodily functions. He’d read it in a novel, something from the Book-of-the-Month Club and therefore both life-enriching and reliable. Probably not Eudora Welty. Maybe Norman Mailer. Anyway, the men’s room didn’t smell as fresh as a flower shop, but it didn’t reek, either.

If that was the bright side, however, it was a piss-poor bright side (no pun intended), because he was still stuck in this men’s room with a corpse, and he couldn’t stay here for the rest of his life, surviving on tap water and paper-towel sandwiches, but he couldn’t leave the body to be found, either, because the police would be all over the gallery before the reception ended, before he had a chance to follow Celestina home.

Another thought: The young gallery employee would remember that Junior had asked after Neddy and had followed him toward the men’s room. He would provide a description, and because he was an art connoisseur, therefore visually oriented, he’d most likely provide a
good
description, and what the police artist drew wouldn’t be some cubist vision in the Picasso mode or a blurry impressionistic sketch, but a portrait filled with vivid and realistic detail, like a Norman Rockwell painting, ensuring apprehension.

Looking earnestly for the bright side, Junior had discovered a darker one.

When his stomach rolled uneasily and his scalp prickled, he was seized by panic, certain that he was going to suffer both violent nervous emesis and severe hives, breaking out and chucking up at the same time. He popped the capsules into his mouth but couldn’t produce enough saliva to swallow them, so he turned on the faucet, filled his cupped hands with water, and drank, dribbling down the front of his jacket and sweater.

Looking up at the mirror above the sink, he saw reflected not the self-improved and fully realized man that he’d worked so hard to become, but the pale, round-eyed little boy who had hidden from his mother when she had been in the deepest and darkest end of one of her cocaine-assisted, amphetamine-spiced mood swings, before she traded cold reality for the warm coziness of the asylum. As if some whirlpool of time was spinning him backward into the hateful past, Junior felt his hard-won defenses being stripped away.

Too much, far too much to contend with, and so unfair: finding the Bartholomew needle in the haystack, hives, seizures of vomiting and diarrhea, losing a toe, losing a beloved wife, wandering alone through a cold and hostile world without a heart mate, humiliated by transvestites, tormented by vengeful spirits, too intense to enjoy the benefits of meditation, Zedd dead, the prospect of prison always looming for one reason or another, unable to find peace in either needlework or sex.

Junior needed something in his life, a missing element without which he could never be complete, something more than a heart mate, more than German or French, or karate, and for as long as he could remember, he’d been searching for this mysterious substance, this enigmatic object, this skill, this thingumajigger, this dowhacky, this flumadiddle, this force or person, this insight, but the problem was that he didn’t know
what
he was searching for, and so often when he seemed to have found it, he hadn’t found it after all, therefore he worried that if ever he
did
find it, then he might throw it away, because he would not realize that it was, in fact, the very jigger or gigamaree that he’d been in search of since childhood.

Zedd endorses self-pity, but only if you learn to use it as a springboard to anger, because anger—like hatred—can be a healthy emotion when properly channeled. Anger can motivate you to heights of achievement you otherwise would never know, even just the simple furious determination to prove wrong the bastards who mocked you, to rub their faces in the fact of your success. Anger and hatred have driven all great political leaders, from Hitler to Stalin to Mao, who wrote their names indelibly across the face of history, and who were—each, in his own way—eaten with self-pity when young.

Gazing into the mirror, which ought to have been clouded with self-pity as though with steam, Junior Cain searched for his anger and found it. This was a black and bitter anger, as poisonous as rattlesnake venom; with little difficulty, his heart was distilling it into purest rage.

Lifted from his despair by this exhilarating wrath, Junior turned away from the mirror, looking for the bright side once more. Perhaps it was the bathroom window.

Chapter 67

AS THE WULFSTAN PARTY
was being seated at a window table, slowly tumbling masses of cottony fog rolled across the black water, as if the bay had awakened and, rising from its bed, had tossed off great mounds of sheets and blankets.

To the waiter, Nolly was Nolly, Kathleen was Mrs. Wulfstan, and Tom Vanadium was sir—though not the usual perfunctorily polite
sir,
but
sir
with deferential emphasis. Tom was unknown to the waiter, but his shattered face gave him gravitas; besides, he possessed a quality, quite separate from carriage and demeanor and attitude, an ineffable
something,
that inspired respect and even trust.

Martinis were ordered all around. None here observed a vow of absolute sobriety.

Tom caused less of a stir in the restaurant than Kathleen had expected. Other diners noticed him, of course, but after one or two looks of shock or pity, they appeared indifferent, though this was undoubtedly the thinnest pretense of indifference. The same quality in him that elicited deferential regard from the waiter apparently ensured that others would be courteous enough to respect his privacy.

“I’m wondering,” Nolly said, “if you’re not an officer of the law anymore, in what capacity are you going to pursue Cain?”

Tom Vanadium merely arched one eyebrow, as if to say that more than a single answer ought to be obvious.

“I wouldn’t have figured you for a vigilante,” Nolly said.

“I’m not. I’m just going to be the conscience that Enoch Cain seems to have been born without.”

“Are you carrying a piece?” Nolly asked.

“I won’t lie to you.”

“So you are. Legal?”

Tom said nothing.

Nolly sighed. “Well, I guess if you were going to just plug him, you could’ve done that already, soon as you got to town.”

“I wouldn’t just whack anyone, not even a worm bucket like Cain, any more than I would commit suicide. Remember, I believe in eternal consequences.”

To Nolly, Kathleen said, “This is why I married you. To be around talk like this.”

“‘Eternal consequences,’ you mean?”

“No, ‘whack.’”

So smoothly did the waiter move, that three martinis on a cork-lined mahogany tray seemed to float across the room in front of him and then hover beside their table while he served the cocktails to the lady first, the guest second, and the host third.

When the waiter had gone, Tom said, “Don’t worry about abetting a crime. If I had to pop Cain to prevent him from hurting someone, I wouldn’t hesitate. But I’d never act as judge and jury otherwise.”

Nudging Nolly, Kathleen said, “‘Pop.’ This is wonderful.”

Nolly raised his glass. “To justice rough or smooth.”

Kathleen savored her martini. “Mmmm…as cold as a hit man’s heart and as crisp as a hundred-dollar bill from the devil’s wallet.”

This encouraged Tom to raise both eyebrows.

“She reads too much hard-boiled detective fiction,” Nolly said. “And lately, she’s talking about writing it.”

“Bet I could, and sell it, too,” she said. “I might not be as good at it as I am at teeth, but I’d be better than some I’ve read.”

“I suspect,” Tom said, “that any job you set your mind to, you’d be as good as you are at teeth.”

“No question about it,” Nolly agreed, flashing his choppers.

“Tom,” Kathleen said, “I know why you became a cop, I guess. St. Anselmo’s Orphanage…the murders of those children.”

He nodded. “I was a doubting Thomas after that.”

“You wonder,” Nolly said, “why God lets the innocent suffer.”

“I doubted myself more than God, though Him, too. I had those boys’ blood on my hands. They were mine to protect, and I failed.”

“You’re too young to have been in charge of the orphanage back then.”

“I was twenty-three. At St. Anselmo’s I was the prefect of one dormitory floor. The floor on which all the murders occurred. After that…I decided maybe I could better protect the innocent if I were a cop. For a while, the law gave me more to hold on to than faith did.”

“It’s easy to see you as a cop,” Kathleen said. “All the ‘whacks,’ ‘pops,’ and ‘worm buckets’ just trip off your tongue, so to speak. But it takes some effort to remember you’re a priest, too.”

“Was a priest,” he corrected. “Might be again. At my request, I’ve been under a dispensation from vows and suspension from duties for twenty-seven years. Ever since those kids were killed.”

“But what made you choose that life? You must have committed to the seminary awfully young.”

“Fourteen. It’s usually the family that’s behind an expression of the calling at such a young age, but in my case, I had to argue my folks into it.”

He stared out at the congregated ghosts of fog, white multitudes that entirely obscured the bay, as if all the sailors ever lost at sea had gathered here, pressing at the window, eyeless forms that nevertheless saw everything.

“Even when I was a young boy,” Tom continued, “the world felt a lot different to me from the way it looked to other people. I don’t mean I was smarter. I’ve got maybe a little better than average IQ, but nothing I could brag about. Flunked geography twice and history once. No one would ever confuse me and Einstein. It’s just, I felt…such complexity and mystery that other people didn’t appreciate, such layered beauty, layers upon layers like phyllo pastry, each new layer more amazing than the last. I can’t explain it to you without sounding like a holy fool, but even as a boy, I wanted to serve the God who had created so much wonder, regardless of how strange and perhaps even beyond all understanding He might be.”

Kathleen had never heard a religious calling described in such odd words as these, and she was surprised, indeed, to hear a priest refer to God as “strange.”

Turning away from the window, Tom met her gaze. His smoke-gray eyes looked frosted, as though the fog ghosts had passed through the window and possessed him. But then the flame on the table candle flared in a draft; lambent light melted the chill from his eyes, and she saw again the warmth and the beautiful sorrow that had impressed her before.

“I’m a less philosophical sort than Kathleen,” Nolly said, “so what
I’ve
been wondering is where you learned the tricks with the quarter. How is it you’re priest, cop—and amateur magician?”

“Well, there was this magician—”

Tom pointed to the nearly finished martini that stood on the table before him. Balanced on the thin rim of the glass: impossibly, precariously—the coin.

“—called himself King Obadiah, Pharaoh of the Fantastic. He traveled all over the country playing nightclubs—”

Tom plucked the quarter off the glass, folded it into his right fist, and then at once opened his hand, which was now empty.

“—and wherever he went, between his shows, he always gave free performances at nursing homes, schools for the deaf—”

Kathleen and Nolly shifted their attention to Tom’s clenched left hand, although the quarter could not possibly have traveled from one fist to the other.

“—and whenever the good Pharaoh was here in San Francisco, a few times each year, he always stopped by St. Anselmo’s to entertain the boys—”

Instead of opening his left fist, Tom lifted his martini with his right, and on the tablecloth under the glass lay the coin.

“—so I persuaded him to teach me a few simple tricks.”

Finally his left hand sprang open, palm up, revealing two dimes and a nickel.

“Simple, my ass,” said Nolly.

Tom smiled. “I’ve practiced a lot over the years.”

He briefly closed his hand around the three coins, then with a snap of his wrist, flung them at Nolly, who flinched. But either the coins were never flung or they vanished in midair—and his hand was empty.

Kathleen hadn’t noticed Tom replace his glass on the table, over the quarter. When he lifted it to drain the last of the martini, two dimes and a nickel glittered on the tablecloth, where previously the quarter had been.

After staring at the coins for a long moment, Kathleen said, “I don’t think any mystery writer has ever done a series of novels about a priest-detective who’s
also
a magician.”

Lifting his martini, theatrically gesturing to the tablecloth where the glass had stood, as though the lack of coins proved that he, too, had sorcerous power, Nolly said, “Another round of this magical concoction?”

Everyone agreed, and the order was placed when their waiter brought appetizers: crab cakes for Nolly, scampi for Kathleen, and calamari for Tom.

“You know,” Tom said when the second round of drinks arrived, “hard as it is to believe, some places never heard of martinis.”

Nolly shuddered. “The wilds of Oregon. I don’t intend ever to go there until it’s civilized.”

“Not just Oregon. Even San Francisco, some places.”

“May God keep us,” Nolly said, “from such blighted neighborhoods as those.”

They clinked their glasses in a toast.