As he stood at the door with his hand on the knob, a vision came to Timothy, of the door swinging open and Timothy entering … an empty room. Just cement floors and high ceilings. No machines, no computers, no high-technology brain transfer equipment. Just empty space, rented at eleven dollars a square foot, triple net. The cost of the con. Empty office space on Sand Hill. Nothing more. How stupid had he been?
‘Are you in there, Ho?’ Timothy called through the door.
He tried the knob, but it was locked. He took the tire iron, raised it over his head, and brought it crashing down on the laboratory door. Unlike the other doors, this one was metal, and it deflected the blow. Timothy swung again. The door was denting at the point he hammered, but it remained sturdily in the frame.
‘Let me in, Ho!’ Timothy yelled, pounding the metal with his tire iron. ‘Let me in!’
He pounded the metal door, again and again, at the same point, hoping to puncture it, to find a weakness, to work his way inside. But the door met each blow firmly, gave nothing but the smallest dent.
‘Ho!’ Timothy screamed, louder still. ‘Let – me – in!’
He wound up for one final blow, brought the tire iron over his head, stretched back, and then slammed it into the door.
The iron clanged. The door stayed closed.
‘God damn you, Ho,’ Timothy said. But he said it softly. He was deflated. Spent.
He threw down the tire iron. It clattered to the concrete.
Timothy turned and left the office.
He wasn’t sure what to do next, so he drove home. He had been set up by Tricia and the Kid. They had hired Ho, had established him on Sand Hill Road, had bankrolled him like some kind of simulacra of venture capitalists, had bought fake computers and rented empty office space. Now they – like the Chinese man playing Dr. Ho – were surely gone, maybe to New York, but maybe to somewhere else, farther away. The Kid and Tricia would return eventually, to Palo Alto, to collect Timothy’s money, but it was unlikely Timothy would be around to greet them.
He would be in prison, probably, for murdering his wife, or for committing financial fraud. Timothy would rant to the police and to the judge about how he had been set up, about how he had believed his wife Katherine had come back to him, inside the body of his secretary Tricia, and they would roll their eyes and think that he was angling for an insanity defense.
Perhaps the police would return to Sand Hill Road at Timothy’s urging, and find that the space Ho had previously occupied was empty. Maybe even the computers would be gone by then, and the man playing the brilliant Chinese doctor would be whisked off to a safe location where he could enjoy his cut of the four million dollars.
Timothy wanted to sit down and think, to figure everything out, but his mind was buzzing from alcohol and drugs.
He drove the BMW up the quiet Palo Alto streets. The dashboard clock said midnight. The houses on Waverly Drive were dark and shut down for the night. People wouldn’t venture out until the next morning, when the sun rose and it was time to make money again.
He pulled into his driveway and the gravel crackled beneath his tires. He walked up the flagstone path, through the sound of summer crickets, past the ornamental grasses swaying in a gentle breeze, and past the gnarled apricot tree. At his front door, he stopped. The door was slightly ajar – not firmly closed in the frame. He pushed it gently, and it creaked open.
For a moment, he thought that Tricia’s long-haired druggie boyfriend would be in the house, waiting for him with a switchblade. Was the long-haired boy part of Tricia’s plan, too? Was he also an actor hired to play a part, to carefully ratchet up the stress that Timothy felt, to convince him that there was only one way out of his predicament – to be backed up and then restored into someone else’s body? Or was he a loose end, a random mistake, a real boyfriend who intruded on Tricia’s careful plan and forced a quick improvisation?
Timothy walked into the foyer and turned on the light. The hall was empty.
Perhaps there was no one in the house. Perhaps he had raced out of the house earlier that evening and forgotten to close the door firmly. He had been drunk, after all, and excited to put his own plan into effect, to bring the sedated Kid over to Ho’s and begin his transformation.
But there was something wrong. Timothy looked at the black side table near the entrance. It was empty. The abstract white modern sculpture that Katherine had purchased at Big Sur had been there earlier in the evening, but now was gone.
Timothy shut the front door behind himself and locked it. At the end of the hallway a light shone. He followed the hallway, toward the light, into the kitchen.
On the floor, in a pool of blood, lay Tricia, curled on her side in her elegant black cocktail dress. On the ground next to her was the white sculpture, matted with hair and blood. Timothy looked closely at her. The back of her head was dark and wet, and through her clotted hair he saw specks of gray.
Timothy backed up a step. The dizziness that had never left him all evening grabbed hold of him and swung him around the room as if on a string. He stumbled backward, grabbing the kitchen table for support.
This made no sense. Tricia Fountain had set him up, was part of the plot to destroy him. Why was she on his kitchen floor, murdered?
He grabbed his head and tried to think, as if squeezing his forehead would keep the random bits from escaping – the images of the Kid drugged on his couch, and of Timothy and Tricia making love, and of Katherine lying face-down in the tide at Big Sur, with her long hair floating in water, fanned around her head.
At first he didn’t hear her, and thought it was just the buzzing in his skull, but then she said something again. Timothy looked down, and Tricia’s eyes were open, staring glassily, and her lips were moving, and she was saying something, whispering.
He bent down next to her, and his knees planted themselves in her blood, and he felt it soak through his pants and begin to spread up the fabric to his thigh.
‘What?’ he said.
She whispered something again, and he couldn’t hear her. It was all breath, just the dry sound of lips clicking open and closed.
He leaned closer. ‘Timothy,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Who did this?’ he asked. He put his hand on her exposed shoulder, just above the scoop-top of the black satin dress, and he touched her soft skin, the skin he had just caressed the night before, and he was surprised by how cold it felt.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered again.
‘Tricia—’ he said again.
She smiled, a tiny half-smile. ‘Not … Tricia …’
‘Stop,’ Timothy said. ‘Stop already.’
‘I love you, Gimpy.’
‘Who did this to you?’
‘Jay. And …’
But then her jaw slackened and she stopped breathing. Her glassy eyes stared, lifeless, at the blood-covered floor.
Timothy stood up. His pants were stained with her blood now, and he walked across the kitchen, tracking bloody footprints across the floor. He went to the phone and picked it up from the cradle. He was going to dial 911 – to have the police come and help, but then he realized that the moment the police arrived and saw his girlfriend brained to death on the kitchen floor, Timothy’s freedom would come to an end. He replaced the telephone receiver. He saw that he had left bloody fingerprints on the handset, but it no longer mattered. There would be no escape.
He sat down in a chair, the same chair that he had used each night for a dozen years when he and his wife ate dinner together, and tried to think, to cut through the haze in his brain, to figure it all out.
If Tricia was here, dead on his floor, then she was not flying to New York with Jay Strauss. Which could mean only one thing: that she was expendable to the Kid, that the Kid had betrayed her and killed her. It was another loose end tied up elegantly by the Kid’s mathematical mind: more money for him, one less person who knew the truth, one more murder to pin on Timothy Van Bender.
Timothy looked
at Tricia’s lithe body. Even with her terrible injury, she was still beautiful, and he couldn’t help admiring her long, lean legs, shapely under her cocktail dress and splayed across a pool of her own blood.
Part of him felt sorry for her, that she had been taken in by the Kid, that she had trusted him and then been betrayed by him. She was just a young girl. In another place and time, she – like all young girls who are betrayed by men – would have learned from the experience, and grown stronger. But not this time. She would get no second chance to learn life’s heartless lesson.
49
He would turn himself in to the police, he decided, or perhaps go through with his original plan of sitting in the idling BMW with the garage door closed, but first there was one more bit of business he needed to attend to. It was unlikely that he would find him, but Timothy wanted to make sure, to see if the Kid had gotten sloppy and decided to stay around town after all.
He walked out of his kitchen and into his living room, tracking blood as he went, and headed for the alcove that contained his bar. He found the bottle of Dalmore and poured himself a glass and tossed it back. Thank you, Mr. Dalmore. Now he was ready.
He got into the BMW and drove back through Palo Alto, crossed the Caltrain tracks, and headed into Menlo Park. The twenty-four-hour Safeway was open, and he passed the bright florescent parking lot, which was surprisingly busy with teens and college kids stocking up on beer and snack food.
He pulled the BMW down the long driveway that ended in the four-plex he had visited only weeks before. From the right top apartment unit, music blasted out of open balcony doors, and cheap linen curtains, lit from inside, fluttered across the patio. There was laughter, the sound of kids – young people whose only care, Timothy knew, was what might happen tomorrow. What I would give, Timothy thought, to be one of those kids, mindless of the future, devoid of a past …
The Kid’s apartment was directly below the apartment that held the loud party. Timothy walked up the three steps and rang the Kid’s doorbell. He wasn’t expecting an answer, and he didn’t get one.
He knocked, softly at first, and then harder. He gave a quick glance over his shoulder, to make sure that no one from the party upstairs was passing by. He turned the doorknob. The door was unlocked.
He entered Jay’s apartment and shut the door. The sound of the music from upstairs was muted now by cheap drywall and shag carpet. The lights were on.
‘Jay?’ Timothy called out, gently. ‘Kid?’
Timothy looked around. The apartment looked messy and half-emptied, as if someone had raced through it, grabbing some objects and putting them in a suitcase, tossing other objects aside. Timothy walked down a short hall and peeked into a bathroom. The toothbrush stand was wet with white paste residue, but there was no brush. Packed. Gone.
Timothy looked at it again. Two of the slots in the toothbrush holder were wet. Perhaps there had been two brushes there, not long ago.
Timothy thought back to the time he had showed up unannounced at the Kid’s apartment, with a bribe in hand, and the Kid had not let him in. Timothy had thought, vaguely, that there was a woman in the apartment, but it didn’t seem important at the time.
Now he looked around the bathroom, and he saw telltale traces of a woman everywhere – the wide-gripped female disposable razor in the shower, even the feminine mint shampoo that seemed vaguely familiar to him.
Timothy walked down the remainder of the hall, into the bedroom, and here it was even more obvious: two places in the bed, unmade, two sets of indentations in two sets of pillows.
It was clear that Jay had skipped town, and he had taken a woman with him, but Timothy had been wrong about who it was. It wasn’t Tricia. It was Jay’s girlfriend, whoever that was – the woman who was about to enjoy Timothy’s money with her newly rich young boyfriend.
Timothy shook his head. None of it really made sense. Such an elaborate charade, simply to take Timothy’s money and ruin his life. It was as if someone hated him, as if someone loathed him more than anyone else in the world, as if the point of the hoax wasn’t merely to take his cash, but also to humiliate him and betray him and hurt him and make him feel a burning pain.
And as he thought about this, something occurred to him.
That someone really did hate him. That someone who had been close to him had betrayed him. It was someone smart – someone much smarter than he – someone who could plan for years in advance, someone who could go through all the possibilities, see the permutations ahead of time and have a solution for every complication.
It was someone who knew him – knew exactly how he would react to each poke and prod, someone who knew his shortcomings: his overconfidence, his blindness, his ego. It was someone who knew Timothy better than anyone else knew him, better even than he knew himself.
And now he understood why the shampoo in the shower seemed so familiar. It was the same shampoo that Katherine used.
And now he remembered what Neiderhoffer had said, the afternoon he had accused Timothy of murder. There was something that bothered Neiderhoffer, and now, standing in the middle of the Kid’s deserted apartment, it bothered Timothy too. If Katherine had called him from Big Sur and committed suicide there, then where was her cell phone? Why had they not found it on the cliff, where she committed suicide? Why did they not find it in that neat pile of clothes that she had removed before jumping? Why had they not found it in the rocks below? Why had it vanished on the day of her death, along with her body?
He didn’t know why he felt so certain, but he saw the next thirty seconds of his life clearly, as if he sat in the audience of a play, but was reading the script two pages ahead; he knew exactly what would happen next. He reached into his pocket, took out his own cell phone, flipped open the clamshell. Of course he knew what would happen.
He dialed her cell phone number.
How many times had he dialed it in the past? As he was racing to and from his office; as he was driving home to her, or away from her; as he was lying about where he was going or where he had been, or about how hard he was working or about how much he missed her and couldn’t wait to get home. He had dialed the number a thousand times, and each time it had meant nothing to him; but now, it was the most important seven digits he had ever dialed, and he pressed them with his finger shaking as it tapped the keys.
It took a moment for the call to be placed, for the radio signal to find an antenna, and for a computer to begin billing his account, and for another radio signal to go out searching for her phone, to wake it from electronic slumber and make it jingle.
The moment was pregnant and quiet, and at first nothing happened, but then something did.
From the Kid’s living room came a pleasant electronic jingle, a phone ringing – her cell phone ringing. He followed the sound, keeping his own phone open and pressed to his ear. He found it on the edge of the Kid’s coffee table, under a newspaper – the old black analog Motorola she never wanted to part with, and he realized that even that was part of her plan, to keep her old phone, the kind of old-fashioned phone that could make calls that were impossible to locate and trace. How many years ago had she started planning this?
He felt sick now, and thought he needed to sit down, but instead he vomited. The warm fluid – all alcohol and bile – splashed the Kid’s floor.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He shut his cell phone and slid it into his pocket, and after a moment her black Motorola stopped ringing, too.
He sat down on the Kid’s couch and wondered if he would vomit again. Nothing made sense. The only thing he knew with certainty was that he had been betrayed by the woman he loved most in the world.
But why the elaborate hoax? Why the tales of body switching and brain backups and Chinese doctors and suicide and sultry secretaries? Why not just divorce him and try to get the prenuptial agreement thrown out in court? Could she really hate him that much?
And as he sat on the couch, thinking about it, with the taste of vomit on his
lips and Tricia’s blood soaking his pants, he realized that, yes, she hated him that much.
50
Four hours after a gardener, curious about a front door that was ajar, entered the Van Bender house and found the young girl’s body, Detective Neiderhoffer arrived at Wells, on the Big Sur coast.
He pulled his Honda Civic off the dirt road called Mule Canyon, onto a dusty overlook facing the Pacific, and parked next to a police cruiser labeled ‘The Town of Wells Police.’ The stencil on the cruiser door – a weird diction Neiderhoffer had not seen before – suggested the cruiser held the entire Town of Wells police force. He realized after a moment that, in fact, it did.
A detective wearing a tan twill short-sleeve shirt and brown slacks sat on the hood of the cruiser, his eyes closed, his face tilted to the sun. Neiderhoffer got out of his car and approached.
‘Detective Billings?’
The detective opened his eyes and looked annoyed. ‘Yeah.’
‘Ned Neiderhoffer. Palo Alto.’
Billings nodded.
‘You find him?’ Neiderhoffer asked.
The detective pointed. Nestled in a patch of bramble was Timothy Van Bender’s black BMW. The car had been driven off the flat overlook, and its hood had jacked down into a ditch so that its trunk was raised a few inches in the air.
Neiderhoffer walked across to the BMW. The sun was high and bright, but a cold wind snapped off the Pacific. The wind made him nervous about the edge of the overlook. Only a skinny black link chain – knee-high, more a suggestion than a command – kept sightseers and shutterbugs from plummeting off the edge. Neiderhoffer kept his distance as he walked, an arm casually outstretched so that he might grab the chain link if a sudden gust knocked him sideways. He tried peering over the edge. He was a hundred feet up, maybe more. Below were a pile of rocks, jutting out of the water like ten-foot teeth. Waves broke hard against them, and the rocks vanished for a moment, and then reappeared as the sea washed out.
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