Devil's Redhead

by David Corbett

  “You can’t blame me for this. Get serious.”

  He rewound his film and headed downhill. His legs shook so badly he nearly fell with every step. Over his shoulder he called out, “That explosion was heard for miles. We’ll be tied up all night explaining things if we don’t leave now.”

  Waxman stood rooted to his spot. He looked as if he was searching for something to say. The proper thing. The flames had reached a stack of hay bales inside the shed, the fire was burning hot and high. He turned and followed Abatangelo down the hill to the car.

  “I intend to call this in as soon as possible,” he said, getting in on the passenger side. “We’ll tell them who it is up there.”

  “Fine,” Abatangelo said. Sitting down behind the wheel, he became aware at last just how badly he was shaking. “I’ll stop. But I’m not stopping long. They can place where you’re calling from.”

  “I’m having difficulty reconciling your concerns with mine.”

  “My concerns will get us out of here.”

  “Exactly my point.”

  Abatangelo decided against heading back the same direction they’d come. It seemed likely sightseers would gather there soonest. He pointed the car in the opposite direction, heading for the center of the Akers’ property, not sure where the narrow mud lane came out, or even if it did. He’d drive across virgin pasture if he had to, just to put some distance between him and Frank’s body.

  “One thing you need to understand,” he told Waxman. “I can’t stay back there. I stay, it’s prison. They don’t need any more reason than that I’m standing there when it happened.” He shook his head. “I won’t go. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I don’t share your confidence in that regard,” Waxman muttered. “God forgive me.”

  “No, Wax. No. Damn it, listen to me. It was his bomb. He knew it was there. He set the whole thing up. You see that, right? What did we have to offer him? Three thousand dollars. Witness protection, which is living death, and we couldn’t even guarantee that. This was his only real way out. He was busted, jilted, haunted by ghosts. He’d boxed himself in, he had people who wanted to hang him on every side. You get pressed up to a cliff, sometimes that’s the best way to turn. He looked down, he liked what he saw, he jumped. End of story.”

  Waxman regarded Abatangelo with an expression that suggested alarmed fascination. “You beat him into a wreck,” he said finally.

  “No, Wax. No. I hit him, yes. I didn’t beat him to where—”

  “I met him first, remember? He was in bad shape, I admit. But he wasn’t to the point that being blown to pieces was his only out.”

  “Yeah, right, at that point he figured he could still con you out of the money.”

  “I should be grateful.”

  “Wax, what is this? Weren’t you paying attention? He’s the one who set it up. He’s the one led us out here.”

  Waxman sighed and looked away. “Argument of convenience.”

  “No. No, Wax.”

  Abatangelo began pounding the steering wheel. To the right he saw through a walnut orchard what he believed was the barbed-wire fence surrounding the Akers’ stockade. It encouraged him. They were on their way out.

  “So it’s on my head, then,” he said. “I might as well have shoved him through the door. Is that what you’re going to say?”

  “Say to whom?”

  “To your public. To the guys in Homicide you enjoyed so much last night.”

  “Is that what you think? I’m in league with those detectives?”

  “You know what Tony Cohn told me? He said you’d betray me the first chance you get.” He turned to Waxman, glaring. “Well? How about it?”

  “If I was going to betray you,” Waxman responded, “I would not be in this car.”

  Abatangelo turned back to look out through the windshield. They entered a clearing beyond which he spotted the ranch house.

  “I appreciate that,” he said finally.

  “I know you do.”

  As they came abreast of the outbuildings, Waxman pointed to the house and said, “Pull up at the gate. I’ll use the phone in the kitchen.”

  Abatangelo’s jaw dropped. “Here?”

  “Why not?” Waxman buttoned his coat in preparation for the cold outside. “Even if they trace the call we’ll be gone by the time they get a car out here. Besides, I know where the phone is.”

  Waxman opened his door and got out. Abatangelo, deciding to follow, put the car in park and left it idling. They hurried toward the back porch through the growing wind and a faint mist. They ducked under the yellow crime scene ribbon draped across the stair. Abatangelo reached inside the door pane he’d shattered the night before and threw the lock.

  The tape outlines of where the bodies of Rowena and her son Duval had been discovered remained from the night before. The bloodstains seemed to have aged considerably in just the few hours they’d been there. The door frames and cabinet edges and countertops all wore the coarse black dust left by the fingerprint examiner. There were pencil markings left here and there on the walls, the tabletop, the floor, with the initials of the trace specialist circled alongside. For all that, the room seemed as utterly indifferent to human concern as a raided tomb.

  Waxman made his way along the wall to the phone. He lifted the receiver and dialed 911. As he waited for the operator his eyes rose to the message left in red on the wall: FRANCISCO. THE LADY WAITS. COME SEE.

  The operator answered finally, a woman, and Waxman said, “I’m sure you’ve heard by now. There’s been an explosion out near the Akers’ property.”

  The operator responded, “Who is this calling, please.”

  “There’s a man at the scene,” Waxman continued, ignoring her. “He’s dead. His name is Frank Maas. He’s a suspect in the murder of the Briscoe twins. He was going to retrieve something. That’s what he said, at any rate. Something hidden out in an abandoned building. But when we got there he broke and ran. The door was rigged. A bomb of some sort.”

  The operator broke in, “I need to have your name, sir.”

  Waxman returned the receiver to its cradle. Unable to move at first, he stood in place, rereading the message above the phone, written to a dead man. Finally, taking the same path along the edge of the room as before, he joined Abatangelo at the far side as they headed together back out to the car.

  Abatangelo got behind the wheel. “Frank said he thought Shel might be out at this Mexican’s hotel.” He put the car in gear. “Let’s find ourselves a place to clean up a little.”

  CHAPTER

  21

  They took a room in the first motel they found along the freeway. Waxman went to hunt up some clothes while Abatangelo stayed behind to shower. Too tired to stand, he sat in the tub, lathering himself, the shower spray pattering against his skin. As he sat there, the scene came back to him, the dash uphill, the look in Frank’s eyes—vacant, terrified, ecstatic—as he brought the rock down. The crash of pain and then Frank’s silhouette scurrying on. The sudden wash of light. The terrifying instant of pressurized silence.

  The more he revisited it, the more certain he felt that Frank’s suicide was not the result of some random impulse. It was an act of atonement. He found himself envying that.

  The worst of it was, the whole thing just kept shifting on him. Every fact came freighted with a counter-fact. Every insight emerged with its opposite in tow. It was maddening, like a sudden loss of gravity. And in that weightless derangement the one phrase that kept coming back to haunt him was Cohn’s: Do you have any idea how many guys come out of the joint totally fixated on doing damage to the clown who shacked up with the little woman?

  He put his head in his hands. It wasn’t that he thought it was true, he just couldn’t convince himself it wasn’t true, and that felt close enough to guilt to settle the point. Regardless, he had a pretty fair idea that Shel would never forgive him. Not completely. There’d always be that doubt—You wanted it. Sure, he could tell her, tell himself
, that he was only keen to save her, he was desperate, his intentions were, if not entirely pure, at least clear. But that didn’t explain the vaguely sadistic relief he’d felt, the satisfaction flickering at the edge of his horror as he’d snapped picture after picture of Frank’s smoldering, piecemeal remains. I wouldn’t cry too hard if he ended up on the bloody end of a stick.

  So this is the way one learns, he thought—like Faust, like Bluebeard’s bride—there is no greater curse on earth than a gratified wish.

  He increased the hot water, edging back the cold, until his skin scalded red and it hurt to sit there. He lifted his head back. The guilty are so sentimental, he thought, fingering his scapular. He pictured Shel as he’d last seen her and shortly he was unable to breathe. He put his face in his hand and the fingers came away with a melting thread of blood. He pulled himself up, stumbled, turned the water off and listened to the drain.

  Yes indeed, atonement would most definitely be preferable to this.

  In the mirror his eyes seemed fathomless points. On the way to the motel, he and Waxman had stopped at a drugstore to buy a tube of Unguentine. The name reminded him of a high school algebra teacher, Sister Norbertine. Named for the patron saint of soothing ointments. His hand trembled as he put the stuff to his skin.

  Waxman returned with a sack of clothes and some toiletries. As Abatangelo pulled the fresh shirt and trousers from the sack, Waxman spread out on the bed a local newspaper and a map of Solano County he’d bought. He sat there staring at them, then said, “While I was out, I made another call to the police.”

  Abatangelo froze. “And?”

  “I had to, you realize. It was wrong, my just leaving the scene like that.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed, hands clenched in his lap.

  “You told them it was a suicide.”

  “I gave them my name. I confirmed I was the one who’d called earlier, and said I would be contacting them later tonight or early tomorrow with a lawyer to discuss at length what happened out there. But yes, I also told them it was a suicide. I verified that.”

  He looked up, his eyes a misery.

  Abatangelo said, “Thank you.” Nodding toward the maps and newspaper, he added, “What’s the reading material?”

  “That party I mentioned,” Waxman said, turning to open the paper, “the one for Moreira’s daughter. Turns out it’s tonight. There’s a little piece about it here in the Socials. It’s called a quinceañera, a sort of coming-out party for Mexican debutantes.” He checked the map. “From the description they give of this place, it looks like we cut through farmland, then turn south around here, near a place called Bird’s Landing.”

  Abatangelo, removing pins from the shirt Waxman had bought, said, “Call your editor, Wax. You’re going to want someone to know where you are, why you’re there, and what to think if you don’t come back.”

  Waxman looked up from the map. “If your intent is to frighten me, consider your work well done.”

  “No,” Abatangelo said, putting his new shirt on. Stiff from sizing, it felt like butcher paper against his skin. “That’s not my intent.”

  Waxman nodded. He went to the phone, called his editor, left a VoiceMail message and returned to the bed. He sat there looking toward the window. The curtains were drawn; there was no view to invite his gaze.

  “This is going to sound odd,” he said finally, not turning around. “But ever since the explosion, and our walking around the flames and the debris? I’ve been unable to keep this image out of my head. It’s a schoolbook illustration, from some reader I had in grade school. It’s a picture of Icarus. He’s fallen in flames from the sky.” Waxman chuckled disconsolately. “I can’t seem to chase it from my mind.”

  Abatangelo regarded him for a moment, then said, “That wasn’t a fable out there.”

  Waxman looked at him finally. “Do you actually believe that these people are going to go ahead with this bizarre exchange? I mean, what has Felix Randall got to trade now?”

  “It’s not about that,” Abatangelo said, pulling on his trousers. “I doubt it ever was.”

  Waxman turned around to face him squarely, hands folded in his lap. “Then explain it to me.”

  Abatangelo sighed. “The trick, Wax, is not to think too hard. God knows they don’t. Just a bunch of hoods, out to save their reputations.” Buckling his belt, he added, “Christ, we were fluff compared to these guys.”

  “One would suppose,” Waxman said, “that no one knows that better than they do.”

  “I wasn’t trying to claim privilege. Okay? I simply meant, as I recall, it was decidedly not the issue to kill anyone.”

  “I think it reasonable to conclude that matters have gotten out of hand.”

  Abatangelo laughed. “You’re a big help.”

  “What do you want me to say? We were the blissful children of Aquarius? We were hippies and humanists, we got suckered into the concept of progress on the one hand and noble savagery on the other. Didn’t dawn on us the two conflicted just a bit. History was one grand push toward our own irrefutable excellence, except we were excellent to begin with before progress got in the way. That and a few other snags fucked up an otherwise nifty philosophy. Ergo, we learned the usual way, the ugly way, that life indeed is nasty, brutish and short, human nature is in a rut, and noble it ain’t. Basically, we’re pigs.”

  Abatangelo sat down beside him on the bed, pulling on his socks. “I remember not feeling like a pig,” he said.

  “Absent the grace of God,” Waxman intoned, “we are the scum of the universe. Satan’s little chancres. And, from all available evidence, God has been stingy with the grace of late.”

  “Echo,” Abatangelo said.

  Waxman regarded him quizzically. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Echo. It’s Kierkegaard’s term for grace. Men of virtue perform good acts, it creates an echo of grace upon them and other men who follow their example.”

  Waxman grimaced. “Metaphors do not constitute theology.”

  Abatangelo stood up. “Yeah, well, back to your point about pigs. I gotta tell you, Wax. I’ll cop to what I’ve done. But the first time I came close to wanting to kill somebody was the past few days. And it had nothing to do with business.”

  Waxman reflected on this and after a moment offered a diffident shrug. “The drugs are different. I’ll grant you that.”

  Abatangelo shook his head. “There’ve been treacherous assholes all along. If you were smart, they were no big problem. They could be fooled, or avoided. Or bought off. But there’s a different wind these days. Maybe it’s all the crank, the crack, the nasty edgy shit they make people want. Maybe it’s just the money, I don’t know. But there’s so much blood in the air it’s almost sacrificial.”

  Waxman rubbed his knees. “There are those who would consider your nostalgia for innocence wildly self-deluded.”

  “‘Innocent’ isn’t the term I used. I never said ‘innocent.’”

  “Not explicitly, no,” Waxman conceded. “But crank didn’t show up yesterday. When I was in high school I prowled the Haight for acid like a crazed lab rat. I was a poster child for the scene. But then all that bad product hit the street. They laced the tabs with speed, whoever ‘they’ were, and there were delicious rumors over that, too. Things turned very nasty almost overnight. Even an idiot could have predicted it, given what freaks like me were ingesting.”

  Abatangelo studied him. Crazed lab rat, he thought. Freaks like me. “Getting kinda chatty there, Wax.”

  Waxman nodded, staring at the curtains again. “I’m frightened.”

  Abatangelo went over and placed his hand on Waxman’s shoulder. “Me too. That any consolation?”

  Waxman looked up at him. “No.”

  They laughed uneasily.

  “Anyway,” Abatangelo said, searching for his shoes, “bad acid, speed. What’s your point?”

  “My point,” Waxman said, “is that was all a quarter of a century ago. It’s not a question of where hav
e all the flowers gone. The question is, how did characters like you, the ones out to prove what a joke it all was, how did you outlast the scene as long as you did?”

  Abatangelo shrugged. “Steered clear of bad acid.”

  “No. Be serious. How did you drag out that ridiculous dream for so many more years?”

  “What dream? Wax, come down out of your tree, will you? I was a pig, remember? I was venal. I had larceny in my heart. I suffered from bad genes.”

  “What charm did you think protected you?”

  “Wax, I was lucky. That’s it.”

  “You enjoyed the mysterious good fortune of the blind,” Waxman countered. From the sound of the phrase, he’d been working up to it all along. He got up from the bed, went to the sink, unwrapped the cellophane from a plastic drinking cup and drew himself a glass of tapwater. He drank the whole glass down and then another. Avoiding his reflection in the mirror above the sink, he turned around and said, “You are an incredibly proud man, do you realize that? It’s not a criticism. Just an observation. But I’ll tell you a little something I’ve learned, all right? Pride is just a way of thinking you deserve what you want. And in that regard, pride is a sort of cowardice. It takes a lot of courage to simply want something.”

  His eyes were strangely kind. Forgiving.

  “So tell me what I want, Wax.”

  “You want to be with the woman you love,” Waxman said. “But the more I think it through, the less confidence I have she is alive, or will remain alive, no matter what we accomplish by going out there tonight. I wish that weren’t true.”

  “Then stop talking about it,” Abatangelo said. He collected his jacket, wallet and keys. “You ready?” Not waiting for an answer, he went to the door, calling out over his shoulder, “Bring the map.”

  Abatangelo headed out to the car and checked the trunk. He still had all of Mannion’s equipment with him from the night before. There were two spare cameras, stocked with both infrared film and 3200 black and white. There were flash guns, two tripods, the Passive Light Intensifier, and an infrared focus beam, not to mention a canvas bag to carry it all. He closed the trunk and told Waxman, “All aboard.”