Maybe, she’d often reflected, it was his passion for control that made him play tricks on her, in order to keep her off balance, dependent on his whim. Maybe—she didn’t care for this thought, but it sometimes came unbidden, especially late at night when she was alone—maybe that was the only reason he’d ever gone out with her. Maybe he liked the way he could dominate her, control the course of any conversation, hold court with no fear of being challenged by a stronger personality with an opinion of its own. Yes. Just maybe.
Their drinks arrived. Jeffrey made an elaborate show of testing the beer with a connoisseur’s wariness, then pronounced it acceptable. The waiter took their order. Wendy asked for an egg roll as an appetizer, followed by won ton soup and almond chicken. Jeffrey chose pan-fried dumplings, hot and sour soup, and of course, shrimp with lobster sauce.
The waiter returned to the kitchen, vanishing through a swinging door into a haze of steam and a clatter of pans. Jeffrey resumed his monologue as if there had been no interruption, describing in considerable detail the specific lenses and filters he’d used, even though he must have known that the technical jargon meant nothing to her. Wendy found herself tuning him out. She didn’t think she was being rude; as far as he knew, she was still listening in rapt attention. Anyway, he mainly wanted to hear himself talk. She was merely the wall off which his voice was bounced.
Still pretending to listen, occasionally prompting him with a word or two—“Yes.” “Uh-huh.” “Really?” “Did you?”—she let her thoughts drift back to the gourmet cooking class where she and Jeffrey had met three months ago. Even signing up for the class had been a major accomplishment. She remembered how she procrastinated about sending in her check, desperate to escape the prison of her loneliness even if only for one night a week, yet afraid to commit herself to the unknown. Finally she went through with it. She was proud of herself, although as things turned out she was too much of a klutz in the kitchen to learn much of value.
Jeffrey, on the other hand, mastered each new recipe with ease. He began showing her how it was done; looking back, she supposed he must have enjoyed playing the part of teacher, master, guru, with Wendy herself safely relegated to the supporting role of the humble apprentice at his side.
At the time, she’d been both astonished and flattered by his attention, while the other single women in the class were clearly envious. Jeffrey was trim, tall, certainly good-looking enough. His eyes, half-concealed behind wire-frame glasses, were a pleasing shade of blue-gray. He wore his sandy blond hair in deliberate disarray, as if stressing his indifference to the superficialities of grooming. His wardrobe consisted mainly of dusty jeans and white shirts, often with a sport jacket tossed on, seemingly at the last minute, to suggest the hurried, harried elegance of a successful man on the move.
And beyond all that, he was a gentleman. He opened doors for her, he always picked up the tab, and he had never gotten fresh, had never pressured her to go further than the brief parting kiss they shared at the end of most of their dates. Perhaps he sensed that if he tried coming on to her, if he even suggested the possibility of greater closeness between them, she would be frightened away like a bird launched into flight by a clap of hands.
And it was true. She would fly from him. She might not want to, but she would. Intimacy scared her, any sort of intimacy, and physical intimacy most of all.
Jeffrey was still detailing the difficulties posed by the photo session when the waiter delivered the appetizers and soup. Cutting into her egg roll, Wendy squinted at the jet of escaping steam. She blew on forkfuls of food to cool them, wary of burning her tongue.
She told herself she ought to quit grousing about Jeffrey’s inattentiveness, ought to be happy he’d taken an interest in her. Certainly it was an interest no one else had ever shown. In high school, in college, in L.A., she’d had no boyfriends, no dates. She’d never imagined that anyone of the opposite sex could be attracted to her—and certainly not a successful photographer, handsome, confident, worldly. When Jeffrey asked her out for the first time, she was stunned, simply amazed, then so excited she kept fearing she would throw up, literally throw up, during their evening together. But gradually her excitement turned to disappointment as he realized that Jeffrey was not aware of her as a person, that he never saw or heard her, that he merely wanted a silent respectful audience, a role she played so well.
After disappointment came self-reproach. She asked herself how she ever could have thought Jeffrey would be interested in her anyway. Was she good at conversation? Was she worth listening to at all? Did she have anything worthwhile to say, to give, to share? The silent questions, asked and answered on many sleepless nights, were like hammers, padded in soft velvet, striking again and again at her face, leaving no visible scars, but numbing her; in that numbness she found an odd sense of relief.
A few minutes before seven o’clock the main course was served. Wendy spooned steaming white rice onto her plate, then piled on a hot mixture of skinless chicken chunks and chopped almonds, water chestnuts and sliced carrots, celery and onion, in a mildly spicy sauce. She ate slowly, appreciating the taste and texture of the food, the pleasing contrast of the stir-fried chicken and the crunchy nuts and vegetables.
“How’s yours?” Jeffrey asked.
“Really good.”
“Mine too. I’m glad I found this place.” Jeffrey always treated the Mandarin House as his personal discovery, even though he’d once let it slip that he learned of the restaurant’s existence through a favorable review in the L.A.
Times
. “I like it, tacky dragon and all.”
“Hey”—she attempted a joke—“the tacky dragon is what makes it work.”
The line fell flat as predictably as any of her occasional stabs at humor. She wished she’d kept quiet. It was always safer to—
“You know,” Jeffrey said suddenly through a mouthful of shrimp, “that necklace is really something.”
Her heart was ice, her breath frozen. She stared at him.
“You ... you noticed?”
“Sure.” He smiled. It was the same smile she’d seen through the car window. “I could hardly miss it, could I? You’ve been fiddling with the darn thing all night.”
“I have?” She hadn’t realized she’d been doing that.
“Uh-huh. Anyway, I saw it right off. As soon as you got out of the car. Must be brand new.”
“Yes. It is. I bought it today. I went shopping. Well, not really shopping. I was just out for a walk. At lunch time. I went into the department store, and there it was. It wasn’t cheap. But I figured, you know, you’ve got to splurge once in a while …”
The words came in fits and starts, barely coherent, while a confusion of feelings whirled inside her. Of course she was glad Jeffrey had noticed the necklace, glad he’d asked her about it and given her tacit permission to talk about the one big event of her day. Yes, thrilled about all that. Except ... except ...
I saw it right off, he’d told her. As soon as you got out of the car.
So why hadn’t he said anything then? Why had he strung her along for more than half an hour, chatting about his f-stops and exposure times, while she waited in an agony of suspense for some word of acknowledgment?
She thought she knew the answer. It was simply one more tactic he employed to maintain control, He’d known what she wanted him to say, and he’d found pleasure in withholding that small gift as long as possible, like a sadist who dangles a morsel of food near his starving victim, just out of reach.
In that moment Wendy hated the man across the table from her. Yet in a strange way she loved him too. Because at least he
had
noticed, and now he was letting her talk, and—oh, God—did she ever need to talk. She needed it badly enough even to put up with his manipulations and smiling lies.
She went on talking and talking and talking, telling him every detail of her purchase. Probably she was boring him or making a complete fool of herself or doing something else that was utterly wrong; but for once, she didn’t care.
8
At six o’clock, having finished his dinner, Rood set about making his preparations for the night’s work.
From his bookshelf he pulled out a copy of the 1990 Thomas Guide for Los Angeles County, a spiral-bound map-book with an alphabetized directory covering every street in the county. He pinpointed Miss Wendy Alden’s address—9741 Palm Vista Avenue—and marked it in red ink.
Then he peered into the large canvas drawstring bag he used for carrying his tools and trophies, taking inventory of its contents.
The hacksaw, fitted with a fresh tungsten-carbide blade. Two spare blades, in case the first one broke; bone was tough. The clay gryphon, carefully wrapped in plastic. His Toshiba tape recorder with a built-in omnidirectional microphone, loaded with a blank thirty-minute cassette; he would clip the tape recorder to his belt before the kill. A jumbo two-gallon Baggie, in which Miss Alden’s head would be sealed. A wire twist tie for the Baggie. Saran Wrap for the hacksaw, which would be bloody, dripping; no use getting the bag soiled. A metal loid and wire tool for opening locked doors. A roll of electrician’s tape and a hammer, useful for breaking windows with a minimum of noise; he’d tried that technique for the first time at Miss Osborn’s place, and it had worked wonderfully well. A Tekna Micro-Lite miniature flashlight, four inches long. A pair of night-vision binoculars for scoping his victim from the street.
His weapon and his leather gloves were tucked in the side pockets of his black winter coat, which he now shrugged on.
Yes, he decided as he reviewed a mental checklist. He had everything.
He left his apartment, shut and locked the front door, and let the screen door bang shut. In the newly fallen darkness he crossed the courtyard, a patchwork of cracked concrete and rectangular grass strips. From the apartment across the way came the steady barking of Mrs. Weiman’s German shepherd, Sherlock. The dog was often allowed to wander the courtyard, and Rood invariably stopped to scratch him behind the ears. He loved animals. In truth, he vastly preferred them to human beings. He had never been what one might call a “people” person.
His car was parked on the street. It was a 1963 Ford Falcon, the Futura Sports Coupe model, a white two-door hardtop with a tan interior. When viewed from the front, the Falcon looked squarish, almost boxy, but in profile its lines were as sleek and streamlined as a Fifties rocketship, the kind that was always setting down on a planet of nubile young women and enlarged iguanas, amid the alien vegetation of Griffith Park.
The word FORD was emblazoned in silver capitals across the hood, above the chrome grillwork and the huge round glassy headlights. Under the hood, a V-8 engine lay concealed, quiet now, like a somnolent animal, but poised to awaken with a growl at the turning of a key. More bold silver spelled out FALCON across the rear end of the trunk lid; below it gleamed the taillights, each one a red circle of molded plastic with a plastic knob embedded in its center, looking uncannily like a nipple. Arrowlike strips of chrome had once graced the sides of the car, but these had fallen off, leaving empty grooves in the metal.
Rood had bought the Falcon in Idaho a month before his move to L.A. two years ago. He was not a connoisseur of classic cars, but he appreciated old-fashioned workmanship, the solidity of a thing made to last. At the time of his purchase, the Falcon’s odometer had registered eighty-six thousand miles; he’d realized, of course, that the car must have clocked far more mileage than that, with the odometer resetting to zero every hundred thousand miles. Yet even after the decades of hard service the car had delivered, it remained dependable; never once had it broken down.
What had drawn him to the car most of all, however, had been neither its design nor its durability, but that name: Falcon. The bird of prey, riding the high thermals, quartering the land below, then swooping out of the sun, its shadow the black shape of death, claws extended to snatch up the squeaking innocent, and rising, wings spread, talons strewed with blood. Falcon. Yes. Rood liked the sound of that.
Unlocking the door. Rood placed his canvas bag carefully on the floor of the backseat, then slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine. When he closed his fists over the simulated wood-grain steering wheel, he smiled, pleased with the hard smoothness of it.
He turned the key in the ignition, switched on the headlights to cut the night, and motored south for a few blocks, hooking east on Olympic Boulevard. As he drove, he tuned the radio to a pop-music station. Rood liked songs, nice songs, not this modern rap garbage or this heavy-metal ugliness.
“Desperado” came on. The song was one of his favorites. He admired the romanticized portrait of the outlaw, the loner, the man who refused to play by the rules. Of course the message of the song was that the loner was wrong, that he should give up his life and settle down, become ordinary. But Rood was sure that the message had been inserted only to appeal to the gutter filth who bought popular records; their mean prejudices and narrow outlook must be appeased.
The same cowardly appeasement could be seen in Hollywood movies. At the end of nearly every one, the villain got killed in some messy and horrible way, and the audience clapped their hooves and baaed and bleated in satisfaction. But, in truth, the villains were the real heroes, because they stepped outside society’s boundaries, they dared for greatness, they endured the loneliness of the outcast, just as the musical desperado did; and though their lives ended in blood and fury, they died as martyrs to a great cause, the cause of superiority to the mundane.