King of Diamonds

by Ted Thackrey

  The trouble with sitting in the driver’s seat of a small automobile with the door closed and the window open is that it restricts movement, leaving you at the mercy of unfriendly folk who may be standing outside.

  He found out about that now.

  Leaning forward against the door frame had brought my hands to within an inch or so of two of his most vulnerable nerve centers, and the first thing he noticed was that his left hand was no longer resting lightly on the steering wheel but had somehow turned itself over with the knuckles against the wheel and the middle finger bent backward against it.

  By the time he could register that unhappy development, however, he had other troubles.

  The human body protects itself as well as it can; survival in ages past depended on keeping the most frangible areas under wraps. But there are exceptions, and one of them is located at the bottom of the nose. The feature itself is vulnerable—easily broken and tender to the touch. Far more sensitive, however, are the areas directly below and to the sides of the nares. A moderate blow there can be fatal, and pressure produces the full shrieking spectrum of mortal agony.

  I seized both sides now in firm thumb-forefinger pincers and let the nerves react to five long seconds of double-point compression.

  The car-sitter opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out.

  It hurt too much.

  And besides. I was still smiling at him and I think that fact made it a little difficult for him to accept the reality of what was happening. I waited a moment for the situation to become totally unacceptable, and then made the simple suggestion I’d intended from the first.

  “Maybe you better slide over.” I said. “Into the passenger seat.”

  Sudden white pain is one of the recognized tools of modern psychology, a leveling agent that reduces all other factors, both positive and negative, to their proper level of unimportance. And it has its own logic: Whatever causes the pain to continue is bad. whatever causes it to lessen or abate is good.

  The beer belly bounced a couple of times, sliding crabwise from one bucket seat to the other, but there was no sense of reluctance—and no attempt at retaliation when I relaxed pressure on the nerve center to open the door and slide into the newly vacated space behind the wheel.

  A trickle of blood drooled out of each nostril.

  He didn’t seem to notice.

  “Well, sir, then there, now,” I said when the engine was running and we had moved out of the parking space between the gas station and the store, “seeing how we’ve got to be such good friends in such a short time, what do you say we play that game I was talking about earlier. You want to do that?”

  He didn’t answer at once, so I prodded a little by braking the car to a stop and turning to face him. I was still smiling, but it didn’t seem to cheer him up. He shied back against the passenger door.

  His mouth opened and closed again without audible sound.

  “Can’t hear you.” I said.

  “Yuh . . . ” he said, doing his best. “Yuh!”

  “How’s that again?”

  “Yuh . . . you . . . ”

  I nodded, still smiling.

  “You . . . hurt me!” The complaint was underscored by two fat, ridiculous tears that rolled unnoticed down his cheeks. The shock and the affront to his sense of rightness was still too fresh and unfamiliar. Things weren’t supposed to go this way at all.

  “You’re right about that,” I said, keeping the smile stitched in place on the bottom half of my face. “I did hurt you. But not nearly as much as I can—and will, if I don’t think you’re concentrating. Attending to business.”

  The eyes said he didn’t understand a word of what I had said. But he wanted to. Badly.

  “The game,” I said, reaching out to pat his cheek. “The game. It works this way: I ask questions. You answer them. Truthfully. And at once. You want to play that game with me, don’t you?”

  He shuddered and wanted to shrink away again but retained enough presence of mind to nod at just the right moment. I had a sudden sense of his wa, of the blackness and numbing cold that had suddenly surrounded it and felt a moment of weary sympathy. Edged by guilt.

  But not enough to make any real difference.

  “Okay, then,” I said brightly. “We’ll start. Question number one: Which way do I turn to get to the Palermo Winery?”

  My guide, whose name turned out to be Lafcadeo Tailliafero (pronounced “Tolliver”), seemed to be a lot better informed than the people at the gas station and the store.

  He’d heard of Angela Palermo, was entirely willing to direct me to her door, and didn’t seem to mind a bit when I let him out of the car at the driveway entrance—nearly a mile from town.

  Nice day for a walk.

  Might even rain.

  I wished him Godspeed and twisted the steering wheel hard right.

  The Palermo house was authentic Wine Country California at its best: walls more than a foot thick, with the wide overhang of tile roof that gives shade from the high-angle summer sun while welcoming the flat-slanted rays of winter.

  At a distance the construction material looked like adobe, and I wondered about that. Dried mud is a wonderful material for hot, arid places like Arizona and New Mexico, but a poor choice for any part of the world where the air is moist and annual rainfall is measured in more than one digit.

  Turning the corner to the circle in front of the broad portale, however, I could see that no such error had been made.

  The building material I had mistaken for adobe was really a composition of stream-rounded stones, so carefully matched in size and shape that the mortar seemed almost unnecessary and of a tan color with olive highlights unusual in that part of the country. My respect for the builder—no architect, perhaps, but certainly a person of rare taste—increased further when a change in angle gave me a peek at the south wall. That part and the whole west wing seemed newer—not modern, but of later date than the rest and matched to it with care. There, where the sun would not be a nuisance even in summer, light and life had been invited to fill the house through a small-paned window-wall that bowed to panorama dimensions over a flagged patio semi roofed by grapevines trained around and over a redwood arbor. A good place, I thought, to begin or end the day, overlooking the working parts of the winery in their setting of oak and poplar and pine about two hundred yards beyond.

  I shut off the engine and stepped out into silence.

  And wondered about it.

  Wineries and wine making are no major passion with me. I know a little—just enough to keep from making a total fool of myself—about wines as the grace note to cuisine. For cooking and for adding to enjoyment of the result. But by preference I am, I suppose, a prisoner of my early environment. The 86th meridian from Indiana to Alabama marks a part of the world that grows corn, not grapes, and I was reared by people born to the sledgehammer authority of cask-mellowed triple-run blockader whiskey.

  A crude peasant taste, perhaps. But mine own.

  Nonetheless, it had always been my impression that wineries, while seasonal, were a labor-intensive business requiring the constant effort of at least a skeleton work force, and the absence of human sound or movement around the Palermo establishment brought all of Dom Gianelli’s fears and forebodings to center stage—there to be spotlighted and emphasized by the condition of the house itself.

  Dom had said his brother-in-law spent time and money rebuilding and refurbishing the house, grounds, and winery buildings, and the passage of more than a decade had not totally erased that effort. There were even signs of more recent upgrading: a coat of paint perhaps a year old on the white trim of the stone house, a slightly off-color tile here and there in the roof that gave evidence of conscientious if slightly color-blind maintenance.

  But there were brown-cut tracks of watercourse erosion in the slight downslope of the land from the house to what was probably the main aging barn, and tall weeds between the flagstones of the front walkway showed that the world hadn
’t exactly been beating a path to Angela Palermo’s door of late.

  I wished, momentarily, that I hadn’t let Lafcadeo Tailliafero (pronounced “Tolliver”) out of the car so soon. More questions I should have asked. But he was gone, and the best way I could get answers now was to go to the source. I mounted the single step to the portale, crossed it, and tried to use the outsize iron knocker on the front door.

  It wouldn’t budge at first, but there was no sign of a bell and the solid Spanish walnut timbers of the door didn’t exactly invite knuckle-hammering, so I tried a little leverage and managed to move the big rust-red ring through about thirty degrees of arc . . . and bring it down again into violent contact with the anvil, with results that were far more dramatic than I had intended.

  The knocker worked just fine.

  Iron through-bolts set walnut timber vibrating to a bass note that would have stirred a dead man in the next state—but brought no appreciable response from inside.

  I waited through a slow sixty-count to be sure nothing was going to happen, then raised my hand for another try, but found myself pawing an empty air as the door was abruptly flung open and I found myself facing the full, furious impact of Angela Palermo.

  No possible doubt about identity.

  Dom Gianelli’s face had been rearranged by the wound in Vietnam, and more damage had been done in the following years. But I remembered the original and his sister was simply a distinctly feminine version, dominated by oversize eyes of a brown so deep as to seem black and a floating-cloud texture of dark hair.

  No doubt, either, about gender.

  She was a tall woman, with olive skin of that remarkably fine grain and translucence usually found only in very young children—and I was seeing quite a lot of it at the moment, because she had come to the door clad only in panties and bra of a matching dark blue shade that hammocked but did nothing to hide the womanly swell of breast and rich Mediterranean hip.

  An altogether memorable picture, only slightly marred by the half-empty bottle of red wine clutched in her left hand.

  “Well.” she demanded in a voice that told me the bottle was no mere stage prop, “what the fuck do you . . . oh!”

  Words and breathing seemed to come to an abrupt halt, and the lovely eyes widened to full double-O diameter as they took in the black suit and white shirt and string tie. As with everyone else I’d met in Glen Ellen, they seemed to mean something more to her than they ever had to me.

  “Oh, my . . . God.”

  The voice had firmed and softened, the wine-husk and slur replaced by a clear soprano diction in which the words came with a kind of desperate reluctance, laced with terror.

  “You’re one of them.” she said. “He said he would . . . said he would send one of the angels, and now . . . ”

  But I never got to hear the rest of the sentence or try to unscramble its meaning, as the words trailed into soundlessness and the lovely eyes abruptly lost focus under closing lids.

  The long, elegant legs trembled, refused further support, and I was just quick enough to prevent what might have been violent contact with hardware and woodwork as Angela Palermo collapsed in the front doorway of her beautiful wine country home.

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  The dupes will find themselves poorer, but no happier.

  And their minister will find himself morally bankrupt.

  SIX

  I hadn’t reacted quickly enough to save the bottle or its contents. It bounced on the doorsill and shattered into red ruin on the close-set tiles of the portale—a danger for anyone approaching the door on bare feet, but the hell with it for the moment. First things first: The woman in my arms was deadweight, muscle tonus zero, head lolling, and mouth agape. I carried her inside, reacting with instinctive distaste to the scent of musty decay and illness that seemed to fill the room, and looked for something long and soft enough to be useful.

  An oversize couch in what had probably been intended as an approximation of the Italian Provincial style seemed to fill the bill. I maneuvered her across the room and into position and lowered away, being careful to prop the feet high on one of the upholstered armrests.

  The door was still open and I briefly considered closing it, but the smell around me was too heavy and I turned back to check Angela Palermo for vital signs.

  She had started to snore.

  Well, hell and fireflies . . .

  The pulse seemed strong enough, and breathing was audibly regular. Sudden fainting spells—attacks of the vapors—are all very well for mid-Victorian romance, and a standard plot device for the very worst of daytime television. But they are relatively rare in real life. And almost never accompanied by snores.

  I bent my own head close to hers, took a deep breath, and almost choked.

  Right on, bro!

  The bottle that had shattered outside the door hadn’t been her first for the day, and the sight of me hadn’t really knocked the lady flat. She’d been ready for a long trip down the river of cockeyed dreams before I laid hands on that rusty knocker, and I sincerely hoped the stuff she’d been drinking hadn’t come from her own bottling plant. It had given her a breath like a basilisk and, unless I was mistaken, a running start at what ought to be at least three or four hours of unbroken sleep.

  Angela Palermo hadn’t fainted. She’d just passed out from a self-administered overdose of red wine before nine o’clock in the morning.

  Adjusting pillows to make sure the mouth-to-lung airway was unimpeded—a precaution immediately rewarded by an even more sonorous performance on the glottal calliope—I took a moment to make myself familiar with the interior of the house.

  It was more than nosiness, though that alone would have sent me on the twenty-five-cent tour; I was hoping to find in the rooms and their contents a clearer sense of their owner than I had been able to achieve by talking to Dom. But the detritus of what I took to be recent events kept getting in the way.

  When first built, perhaps a century earlier, the old house had surely never been wired for electricity or piped for heat. Each room had its own fireplace, the inside stones fractured and fire-blackened in a way that no decorator could ever imitate. I guessed that the walls had once been the same inside as out: smooth-laid stone to the eaves, with local tile over redwood beam structure above. But changes had been made over the years and in tune with the times. Now the inner walls were smoothly and professionally plastered, with the electric wires concealed and heating ducts faired unobtrusively from what was probably a heavy-duty central heating and air conditioning unit concealed in one of the attic spaces.

  Wall colors in the old rooms I visited—I filed the new western wing under “later, if ever”—were light and sunstruck, with accents of varnished wood that harmonized comfortably with original oil paintings—about a dozen or so, scattered throughout the rooms—obviously selected by someone with a taste for mid-century French neo-impressionists. Nothing that would cause the gallery owners of the world to blink, perhaps, but no obvious disasters, either. Friendly. And livable.

  But the overall ambience was soured by clutter. Plus the smell.

  The house wasn’t really dirty. There was dust, and the sink was overflowing with dishes that had been sitting there for too long. But woodwork and windows showed the attentions of washrags and detergents within the span of living memory, and even the floors and carpets remained presentable.

  Those rooms I explored, however, were strewn with as motley a collection of discarded clothing, papers, sacks, and even food—the bitten end of a hot dog here, twisted orts of long-dead french fries there—as I have seen since my last visit to a skid-row flophouse. And nothing could have prepared me for the master bedroom.

  A sick, lonely animal had lived there and left its spoor in the form of wine-stained sheets and coverlets tangled to a malodorous heap in the middle of the bed, with little grace notes of torn fabric and down from a long and discolored rent in the side of the mattress. Someone’s piggy bank, no doubt.r />
  But it was the decor of the walls that captured my interest.

  At first I had thought I was looking at wallpaper, and wondered why it was the only room in the house so adorned. All the rest were painted plaster. A second glance explained all. No wallpaper. Those walls had been painted, too, a pale and relaxed off-white, probably intended to show off more paintings or whatever had been displayed on three wall mounts still visible in strategic position. But the artwork, or whatever it had been, was gone now, and the patterns of purple color I had at first mistaken for a kind of psychedelic wallpaper were in fact random splashings of deep purple wine.

  Someone had been having a little problem with the Drunkards’ Halloween, throwing glasses of wine at the bugs, bats, and garnet-eyed gargoyles in a forlorn effort to make them go away.

  Back in the living room, Angela Palermo had shifted to her side—almost rolling off the cushions of the couch—and stopped snoring.

  The bare shoulders were cold to the touch, and after heaving her back into a safe position I thought for a moment of moving her to the bedroom.

  But that would have to wait.

  I set off again in search of the linen closet, found it on the first pass down the hall, and returned with the sole remaining clean blanket. Not much, but it would have to do. I spread it over her, tucking in corners and moving the feet down from the armrest. Then I stood still for a long ten-count. But there was no protest or other sign of returning wakefulness, so I went to work, looking in again from time to time.

  The worst of it seemed to be the mad bedroom, so I began there, stripping sheets and blankets and lugging two untidy bundles to the little spare room I’d spotted just behind the kitchen. The washer-dryer combination was small for the kind of job I needed to do, but there was plenty of time to break the loads into workable installments and I found a good, useful supply of soap and bleach neatly in place behind a sliding door that also concealed brooms, mops, and buckets.

  I set the first load in motion and lugged the kitchen wastebasket into the living room to begin a general cleanup.