Winter Tides (38 page)

Mifflin nodded his head, letting it thump against the sheet-covered couch.

“I don’t think you do, Ray. You’re trying too hard. And anything you have to try hard at, you’re not catching on to. But listen to this. Try to grasp the basic concept. There are some objects that are potential energy batteries. Like what, you’re wondering. Take a clipboard, for instance. A man with a clipboard can get away with murder, Ray. He automatically becomes
official
, if you follow me. His line of baloney is suddenly gospel, because he’s carrying a clipboard. Maybe he’s got a pencil behind his ear. He has people sign their name. His clipboard and his pencil give him
power.

“Believe it or not, a uniform works the same way. And I’m not talking about a policeman’s uniform, either. It’s got plenty of power, but it’s dangerous power—too apparent. I’m talking about
any
uniform. A milkman’s uniform, for God’s sake. Have you ever been a Boy Scout leader?”

Mifflin shook his head. He looked confused, which was natural. Probably he had never actually
thought
about anything before. Ray Mifflin was no intellectual.

“Neither have I,” Edmund told him. “But just for fun I bought a scout leader’s uniform once—bought the badges, the epaulets for the shoulder, the belt and buckle, the whole works. I’ll tell you something, Ray, women fell all over me, especially the single moms, and the housewives whose husbands were too weak to keep them happy. A woman will do
anything
you ask her to do if you’ve got a scout leader’s uniform on. That’s a fact, Ray. Somebody probably should have told you this years ago, when it could have done you some good. She’ll climb right into your car, if you want her to. Hell, into your
bed
. Now, some men will tell you that a set of Porsche keys, say, will give you that same kind of power, and that’s not a lie by any means. Porsche keys will kindle her interest. But there’s one thing Porsche keys won’t kindle, and that’s a woman’s trust. A scout uniform will kindle her trust. And once you have a woman’s trust …

“Well, let’s just say that once she’s given you her trust, you can pretty much have her life along with it. Does that appall you, Ray, that kind of talk? Do you begin to understand me?”

Mifflin stared at him.

Edmund shook his head. He was wasting his breath here, talking to a man like Mifflin. His eyes were closed now. Probably his mind was a mile away. Well, you could lead a horse to water, but talking to him wasn’t going to make him drink.

“Listen to that clock ticking, Ray. It says a lot, doesn’t it? Everyone understands the language of time. So tell me something, Ray: it looks like you’ve been carrying around Dave Quinn’s telephone number—the number of the elusive Mr. Jim Jones. Why?” He showed him the number, which he’d found stuffed into Mifflin’s wallet.

“No reason,” Mifflin said weakly, opening his eyes and swallowing hard.

“No
reason? That’s a
good
reason to be carrying it around. Did you call him yesterday?”

“No.”

“Today?”

“No.”

“Are you lying to me, Ray? I think you are.”

“No, hell no,” Mifflin said.

“Because if you are, Ray, I’m going to light this couch on fire right now. I’m going to soak the couch with lamp oil and light it on fire. We’ll have Mifflin on the barby.”

“I didn’t say anything to anybody,” Mifflin gasped. “I just got the hell out. I found out about the car and Mayhew and got out. I just wanted out.”

“I get the point, Ray. You wanted out.” Dalton laughed out loud. He crumpled up the paper with the phone number on it and threw it on the floor. “That was my little IQ test, by the way—giving you the Mastercard and the driver’s license back. I had a
great
deal of fun with that. I followed you all over town, Ray, out to Long Beach, down to Laguna. You were putting the pieces together, puzzling things out like a private eye. You were a busy man, Ray, a
busy
man, you and your handful of weeds. I’ll admit, though, your phone call last night took me by surprise. I had actually come to believe that you were an honest man, and then the phone rang, and there you were trying to extort an extra ten thousand out of me. I said to myself,
‘This
is not the Ray Mifflin I know.’ Greed had worked its magic on you, and I determined right then to plan out a way to undo the damage that the easy money had done.

“Anyway, when you hit the bank this morning, I knew for certain what Ray Mifflin was up to. ‘Ray Mifflin is running,’ I told myself, and I drove right on down here to the Mifflin hacienda to prepare my little surprise. You didn’t give me much time, either. You’ve got a
hell
of a lead foot. I got down here about a half hour earlier than you did. I walked in through the garage and—wham!—something wonderful happened: in the darkness I kicked this full can of lamp oil. I’ve already told you about chance and intuition, Ray. Things come to us out of the darkness when we leave ourselves open to them, and this can of lamp oil was like that. It
spoke
to me, Ray. I had a mental image of a man in flames, and I knew that man was you, and that the flames were in this red-and-white can.

“What I didn’t know was what I was going to do with Mr. Mayhew’s head, which was in need of immediate attention. Mr. Mayhew, as you yourself know, smells even worse dead than alive. Should I put the head in the steamer trunk and hide myself under the bed? Or should I put the head in the bed and hide myself in the trunk? Now, all else being equal, I would favor putting the head in the trunk, because I’ve always liked the idea of leaving little
gifts
for people in clever little ways, and the trunk suggests itself for that, don’t you think? A gift box for Ray Mifflin?”

Mifflin had closed his eyes again, and he had started to sweat profusely. “Nod your head if you’re listening, Ray! Good!” he said, when Mifflin nodded. “Anyway, there you were, coming through the door, and I had to make my decision quick. ‘Head in the bed,’ I thought, and I realized it
rhymed
. It was just like kicking that can in the dark garage. It was
right
. It was artistically copacetic. So I decided that in your case
I’d
be the little gift, Ray. I’m proud of that decision, too. It was extremely effective, I think. Very artistic, the way it was timed. How about you? Did you find it artistic?”

He bent down and flicked Mifflin’s ear hard enough to make the man’s eyes shoot open. Suddenly Mifflin went rigid, arching his back, putting all of his strength into breaking free of the cords that tied him to the couch. The pain in his shoulder contorted his face. Clearly he wasn’t up to breaking anything. Given a little time he might wiggle his way loose, if he had the backbone to see it through.

“By the way, I found out where they buried Hoffa,” Edmund told him, making another slight adjustment to the turkey candle. “It was in New York, in Giants Stadium, under the goal posts. Do you know what they did to him, Ray? What they did to Hoffa?”

He waited patiently now for Mifflin to shake his head. “They cut him into pieces with a chain saw and carried him away in suitcases. Those suitcases became his coffin. This house, quite frankly, might well be
your
coffin, Ray. Before the hour is through, you stand a chance of being consumed by your own birthright. But just between you and me, I haven’t made up my mind about that yet. I
haven’t thought that part through yet. Think of it: your life hangs in the delicate balance at this very moment.”

In the relative silence that followed, the ticking of the clock reminded Edmund that it was getting on toward dusk. The living room was even heavier with gloom now that evening was falling, and in another hour, out here on these lonely bluffs, the interior of the house would be utterly dark. The white sheets draped over the furniture already shone in the waning daylight like pale, hovering ghosts. Edmund felt something uncanny in the still air of the room, and he blinked his eyes slowly, concentrating, focusing. He moved slowly to the camera on the tripod. There was something … a presence in the room, a familiar presence.

He studied the dim room. It seemed to him that there were moth-flutters of movement in the deeper shadows, back amid the heavy wooden furniture, and he moved the camera lens toward it, backing the zoom away to open the lens up full. From the corner of his eye he saw what looked like the brief tremble of a veil blowing across a dark doorway. He tilted his head, searching the edge of his vision, sweeping his mind clear almost without effort now, holding himself utterly still and calling her to him across the infinite dimension of darkness. There was a shimmering motion, almost like falling glitter, near a shuttered window, and then, for a moment, for just the blink of an eye, she moved in the darkness near the fireplace—the Night Girl’s shadowy silhouette against the heavy white plaster of the hearth. He aimed the camera at her, not daring to look through the viewfinder.

He closed his eyes and pictured her face, the curve of her shoulders, her black hair. She was with him again at last, a collaborator, as she had been with him when he had worked with the man who had been Mayhew, who had impersonated his own father. “Yes,” he said out loud, affirming his faith in her, in the two of them. “Come with me…” It was time to decide Ray Mifflin’s fate, time to bring this to a close. He angled the camera toward the couch again, then picked up a book of matches from a ceramic dish on the mantel. The face of the cardboard matchbook was blank; it told him nothing. He looked
around, searching for guidance in the room—a sign, a symbol.

Mifflin was staring at him wide-eyed, shaking his head. Without speaking, Edmund picked up the can of lamp oil and carefully doused the couch and the area rug that the table sat on, then poured a pool of the liquid in the baking dish, dribbling it out onto the coffee table before setting the can down again. The lamp oil had a lemon and kerosene smell that masked the corrupt smell of Mayhew’s head. The five twenties floated on the surface of the oil, miraculously maintaining the precise symmetry of their arrangement. The wick of the candle thrust up out of the middle of the turkey’s back, waiting for the touch of a match. The clock ticked, the minute hand turning toward six o’clock, the day almost exactly three-quarters gone. Edmund Dalton breathed rhythmically, trancelike, clearing his mind of mental debris, feeling the nearness of the Night Girl, her spirit seeping into him, filling him.

“How old are you, Ray Mifflin?” He asked the question in a monotone, careful not to break the springlike tension in the air, staring straight before him, the room having lost dimension, the sound of the clock shutting out all other sound.

He knew that Mifflin was watching him, that the man was lost and waiting, but he didn’t meet Mifflin’s terror-filled eyes. And he wouldn’t meet them—he wanted no distraction, not until he had determined the man’s fate.

He repeated his question—that evening’s key to the puzzle of life and death. “How old are you, Ray Mifflin?”

“Sixty,” Mifflin whispered, heaving an impossibly deep breath.

Sixty. The word was inevitable. Dalton had sensed it. Somehow it had come to him a moment ago, hidden in the ticking of the clock. He focused again on the clock face. The minute hand touched the twelve now; the hour hand rested solidly on the six. So just as three-quarters of the day had passed, three-quarters of Mifflin’s life had gone the same way. There was a perfect parallel, a true synchronicity.

Yes.

He heard the affirming voice in his mind, like the wind whispering.

As the last sibilant fragments of the word faded into the darkness, he stood up slowly, shrugging his shoulders, shaking the trance out of his head. He breathed deeply, looking at Mifflin. Sometimes there was more power in letting a weak man live than in killing a strong man. He held up the matchbook so that Mifflin could see it, and then tossed it down onto the five twenties floating in the tray. The bills drifted apart. The minute hand of the clock jumped forward, time running on into the close of day.

“Bon voyage
, Ray. I wish you a good life down here in Mexico. I think you should stay here. Fm going to let you keep most of your money, by the way, and Fm going to let you keep Mr. Mayhew’s head. It’s served its purpose, and I can’t stand the smell of it. I truly believe that you did not call Mr. Davey Jones. And that means that you didn’t try to betray me, although you could have. You kept the faith, and I appreciate that; I truly do. I appreciate it so much that Fm going to forgive you for trying to take more than your share of the pie. It was a
big
piece of pie, Ray, for a little man like you. But Fm a man of my word. I’m going to let you keep it. Fm not even going to charge you a fee for driving down here, because it really has been fun. And let me tell you one last thing. Money is not the issue with me, Ray. It never has been. Fm an artist. Some artists work on canvas or clay; I work on people. I reshape their lives. Sometimes I reshape their physical forms. You might say that my audience is my medium. It’s the purest form of art, Ray, and you’ve been a part of it.”

He looked around one last time, realizing that the Night Girl was gone. He was through here. He stared out through the shutters at the empty evening. There were lights on in the neighboring house, but it was a quarter mile away; nobody would see him leave. He realized that he felt very damned good, very fit and sharp. The dark shrubbery stood out in perfect clarity beyond the window, and he perceived every leaf and twig and branch as if he were studying an artist’s rendering, as if finally he could truly
see
. The distant lights along the bluffs shone like personal beacons, and he
was brimming with inspiration, with the essential
rightness
that had come into his world. He looked down on Mifflin now as if from an eminence, a height that he had been ascending these last few weeks. He knew that he was nearly, but not quite, to the peak.

Suddenly he thought about the long drive home in the rented car. He had the false I.D. and credit cards in his wallet, and he saw himself driving back up the freeway into southern California, basking in the utter and complete freedom of a man with an assumed identity. He picked up the camera and the tripod and went out through the front door, leaving Ray Mifflin once again the master of his own forever altered fate.