Fear itself: a novel

by Jonathan Lewis Nasaw

  That got his attention. The chutzpah, as Brotsky would have said. The sheer chutzpah.“What?”

  “I need you to write something.”

  “Then you’ll leave me alone?” For some reason, finishing the entire cycle of suites had taken on urgency for Wayne.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Well, yes. But I’ll make you a deal—if you do as I ask, I promise I’ll make it quick and painless.”

  * * *

  In the end, it was neither quick nor painless, though when Simon originally made his promise, he sincerely believed he was telling the truth. In the fear game, the payoff was fear, not pain—there was no advantage to prolonging Wayne’s suffering.

  But while Wayne was writing the note Simon required of him, Simon had a little too much time to think about what a disappointment Wayne had been and to convince himself that he would be entirely justified in making one last attempt to recoup his not inconsiderable investment of time, trouble, and cold, hard cash.

  It was all to no avail, however—the smaller birds might as well have been origami sculptures for all the effect they had on the so-called ornithophobe. Simon went so far as to try stuffing one of the canaries into Wayne’s mouth—no response other than that frenzied twitching of the fingers behind the back. Nor would the owl attack a third time, even after the blood started flowing again.

  How long the beating lasted, Simon couldn’t have said—when he lost his temper, he lost all sense of time. But for several minutes after Simon collapsed on the bloody mattress, sobbing for breath, Wayne’s fingers continued to twitch. It was like a nightmare, something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story—Simon, who thought of himself as fearless, even managed to generate a little pretend terror by playing around with the notion that those blessèd fingers would continue to twitch long after he cut the hands off.

  But to Simon’s mixed relief, the twitching stopped of its own accord after a few more minutes. Then it was over, except for the cleanup, which would have to wait until morning. For one thing, Simon was physically exhausted and emotionally drained; for another, despite all the soundproofing he’d installed in the basement, the noise and vibration from the jackhammer still might leak up through the vents and awaken Missy.

  The Blind Rat

  1

  Tuesday dawned clear and bright in Georgetown, where Linda Abruzzi was staying with her old college roommate Gloria Gee and Gloria’s husband, Jim, until she found her own place. It was the sort of fall morning that made you forget winter was just around the corner. And the commute wasn’t as bad as it had been on Monday—Linda was at her desk by eight, after another thorough vetting at the gate. The first thing she did was go over Dorie Bell’s letter again.

  Dorie Bell

  Box 139

  Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA 93921

  (831) 555–1914

  Oct. 1, 1999

  Dear Agent Pender,

  I don’t know if this letter will even reach you, or if you will pay any attention to it even if it does, but in the article in the Herald last week about the Maxwell case, you talked about how your department helps track down serial killers who move around and kill people in different locations, which is exactly the situation I’m writing about. In any case, I don’t know who else to turn to.

  To begin with, I am not a nut. I know every nut who ever writes you starts out that way, but I can’t help that. And just so you don’t think I’m trying to hide anything I’ll tell you right off the bat that I suffer from a psychiatric condition known as SPD, specific phobia disorder, which means an unreasonable fear of a particular situation or object, severe enough to detrimentally affect your everyday life.

  I know it’s probably hard for someone like you to understand how somebody can know a fear is unreasonable and still be negatively impacted to such a degree anyway, but as any psychiatrist will tell you, that’s what it means to have a phobia.

  In my case, I suffer from prosoponophobia, which means I am afraid of (I have to force myself to even write the word) masks. This probably sounds pretty lame to you, and as phobias go, it’s surely not the worst, but believe me it’s no walk in the park, especially around Halloween.

  But that’s not why I’m writing you. The reason I am writing is that this past spring I attended the PWSPD (Persons with Specific Phobia Disorder) convention in Las Vegas. On the whole, it was one of the most positive experiences in my life. Not only did I pick up many new coping techniques, it was also very empowering to learn how many phobics there are. One speaker said 11 percent of the population.

  And now I’ll get to the point. Over the last six months, at least three people who attended the PWSPD convention have allegedly committed suicide. I say at least, because there may be others I don’t know about, and I say allegedly because I don’t think they committed suicide at all. I think they were murdered—but I’ll just tell you the facts I know and let you decide for yourself. Which I’m sure you would do anyway.

  One: Carl Polander. Las Vegas. Acrophobia. Fear of heights. Jumped or fell or was thrown to his death from a twelfth-story window on April 12th, the last night of the convention. The police say jumped, but those of us who knew him think differently. What would Carl have been doing on the roof of any building, when he couldn’t even bring himself to enter an elevator or climb higher than the second floor?

  Two: Kimberly Rosen. Chicago. Pnigophobia. Fear of suffocation. On June 15th, her mother found her in the bathtub of her apartment with a plastic bag over her head. There was a suicide note, supposedly in her handwriting, but I just don’t buy it.

  Three: Mara Agajanian. Fresno. Hemophobia. Fear of blood. Found in the bathtub on August 17th, with her wrists slit. But a hemophobe would no more have cut her own wrists than a pnigophobe would have tied a plastic bag over her head or an acrophobe would have thrown himself off a roof.

  Agent Pender, something very strange and alarming is going on, but I can’t get anybody to pay any attention. Maybe it’s because I’m a PWSPD that the police in those three cities just won’t take my fears seriously, but let me assure you that just because somebody has SPD does not make them paranoid. SPD and paranoid schizophrenia are two separate and distinct disorders that have no more in common than, for instance, measles and appendicitis.

  I don’t know what else to say, other than please, Agent Pender, won’t you at least look into these cases? Because if you won’t investigate three deaths in three different jurisdictions, I don’t know who will, and if you don’t, I’m afraid more of my friends are going to “commit suicide.”

  Sincerely yours,

  Dorie Bell

  And there it was. Didn’t look like much in the cold, hard light of the morning, without Pender around to encourage her. But it wasn’t as if Linda had anything else going on, so she spent the rest of the morning contacting the Vegas, Fresno, and Chicago PDs in order to verify the facts, then logging on to phobia.com, the PWSPD Association web site, in order to bone up on specific phobia disorders, and just before noon—nine A.M., California time—Linda, as she noted in her log, “initiated telephone contact with correspondent.”

  “Hello?”

  “Dorie Bell?”

  “This is Dorie.”

  “I hope I didn’t wake you, Ms. Bell.”

  “Not at all. Is this about Wayne?”

  “No, this is Linda Abruzzi with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’m calling in response to your letter to Special Agent Pender.”

  “Oh, thank God.”

  Not exactly the kind of response Linda was accustomed to getting when she called somebody at nine in the morning, their time, and identified herself as FBI. Still she stuck to Bureau-cratese: “Special Agent Pender has passed your letter on to me for disposition, and I need to ask you a few—”

  The other woman cut her off in midsentence. “It’s happened again.”

  “What’s happened again, Ms. Bell?”

  “My friend Wayne hasn’t been seen since Sunday night. H
e was supposed to be here last night, only he never—”

  “Wait a minute, slow down there, Ms. Bell—let’s take it from the top.”

  So they did, they took it from the top, and by the time they reached the bottom, Linda was a believer. After promising to call Dorie back as soon as she had any information and deflecting her effusive and prayerful thanks, Linda clicked off the receiver, then called her old friend Bobby Emmett, who was still with the San Francisco field office.

  Linda and Bobby had worked the Polly Klaas kidnapping together back in ’93—what a cluster-fuck that had been. Old FBI truism: the more agents assigned to a kidnapping investigation, the worse the chances for a successful resolution—if by successful you mean finding the victim alive. The FBI’s failures were loud and public, its triumphs often quiet and private—which was the way it had to be, of course.

  And being a low-seniority agent in a high-visibility manpower rollout was no picnic. But if you had to spend eighteen-hour days canvassing neighborhoods, knocking on doors, fielding hot-line calls from wackos and publicity hounds, or, toward the end, cruising up and down Highway 101 looking for unmarked graves, there wasn’t a nicer guy to do it with than Bobby Emmett.

  True to form, Bobby agreed to get in touch with one of his contacts in the SFPD, then get back to Linda. But when he did, not long afterward, the news wasn’t good—not for Wayne Summers, and certainly not for Linda’s first Liaison Support investigation.

  “Turns out Mr. Summers has an uncle pretty high up in the SFPD,” Bobby explained. “They’ve been all over this one, and according to them, it looks like your boy drowned himself. They found his cello case out on Ocean Beach this morning, along with his clothes and a suicide note. Haven’t found the body yet, but you know the riptide out there.”

  “The note—does it look legitimate?”

  “His mother verified the handwriting.”

  “Can you get hold of it for me?”

  “No can do. You’re lucky you even caught me here—I’m off to Seattle in a few hours. Been loaned to Antiterrorism—they’re beefing up for this Y2K deal.”

  “How about this afternoon, then? The fact that it looks like a suicide makes it a better fit for the profile.”

  “Linda, I have to go. If I were you, I wouldn’t put a lot more effort into this one. Coincidences happen, you know? And suicides come in clusters.”

  “You’re probably right,” said Linda distractedly—she was trying to remember Ocean Beach from her San Francisco days. Dog shit, broken glass, murderous riptide, seals by the dozens on the rocks below Cliff House, and seagulls by the hundreds, wheeling and screaming and fighting for garbage and picnic scraps. Western gulls, California gulls, herring gulls, Heermann’s gulls: you could throw a french fry in the air and nine times out of ten it would never hit the ground. “Thanks for the help.”

  But as she prepared herself mentally for the unpleasant task of calling Dorie Bell back and giving her the bad news about her friend Wayne, Linda was still far from convinced. Sure, suicides did sometimes come in clusters, and sure, coincidences did happen. But so did murder. And Ocean Beach was no place for an ornithophobe, thought Linda—especially a suicidal one.

  2

  “Watch out!” called Missy. She knew the man with the hook was hiding behind the door, and that as soon as Audrey Hepburn opened it, he would…

  Ring ring ring ring, Simon, it’s me, call me.

  Missy rarely answered the telephone, partly because Simon didn’t like her to, and partly because it was generally a frustrating experience. But all morning it had been ring ring ring ring Simon it’s Dorie, ring ring ring ring, call me I have news, and finally she couldn’t stand it anymore. She paused Charade and picked up the extension.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Missy. It’s Dorie. Remember me?”

  Of course she did—Dorie gave absolutely the best hugs. “Oh, hi.”

  “Hi. Is Simon there?”

  “In the basement.”

  “What? I’m sorry, honey, he’s what?”

  “Basement. He is in the basement.” But she could have repeated herself all day and not been understood. Stupid tongue. Stupid mouth. “Wait.”

  Even though the basement door was securely locked and bolted, you couldn’t have dragged Missy near it with a team of horses. She beeped Simon with their two-way, then went back to her movie, leaving the receiver off the hook. A few minutes later, a frowning Simon showed up in the doorway wearing his kneepads and his rubber boots, smelling of wet cement. Missy waved the pager in the direction of the phone.

  “Hello?…Oh, hi, Dorie, what’s—…Oh, no. Oh, no…Listen, Dor’, I want to take this in the other room…. Yeah, no sense getting the kid all upset.” He handed the phone to Missy. “I’m gonna take it in my room—would you hang this up for me?”

  And she did. Simon raised his hand as if he were going to strike her; then his mustache twitched; then he laughed. “I meant after I picked up the other phone.”

  “Then why didn’t you say so?” Missy said coolly, without taking her eyes off the television screen, where Cary Grant (who with his silver hair and dimpled chin looked a lot like Simon, at least to Missy’s eyes) was sliding, clackety-clackety-clackety-clack, down Audrey Hepburn’s slippery, steeply sloped tile roof.

  Simon, who’d been up since well before dawn—he’d driven to San Francisco and back to drop off the note and cello case at Ocean Beach, then worked like a galley slave all morning—still hadn’t decided what to do with the birds when Missy summoned him up from the basement to take Dorie’s call.

  And while this afternoon’s news update from the troublesome Ms. Bell wasn’t entirely bad—according to the FBI agent she’d been in touch with, apparently SFPD had bought the suicide note, hook, line, and sinker—it was alarming to learn that she’d gotten the FBI involved in the first place. Simon would have to accelerate his timetable—a road trip was definitely in order.

  But he couldn’t leave Missy alone, and he’d given her attendant the week off in order to have more privacy with Wayne. Now he’d have to get Tasha back, but before he could do that, he’d have to do something about the birds in the basement. All on three hours of sleep. Busy, busy, busy, but at least he wasn’t bored. That was the important thing—Simon had never encountered anyone who suffered from boredom to the extent he did, with the possible exception of Grandfather Childs, who’d known it well enough to have given it its name: the blind rat.

  Only, the way Simon pictured it as a boy, it was more like a grub, a fat, blind, hairless grub gnawing away at him from the inside, robbing him of his peace, of his rest, and if he went too long without sufficient stimulation, of his sanity.

  But with another session of the fear game to look forward to in the near future, the blind rat was not likely to be an immediate problem. And this game would be an easy one to prepare for: all he needed, really, was some Rohypnol, with which he was already well supplied, and a few masks, which shouldn’t be all that difficult to procure, Simon reminded himself, not with Halloween less than two weeks away.

  3

  They got him. They got him good.

  First they tortured him a little. No congratulatory messages at work Monday, no retirement luncheon, no gold watch.

  But Pender had been determined not to let it get to him. On his way home he stopped at the strip mall in Potomac and picked up videos of Guadalcanal Diary, The Sands of Iwo Jima, and The Best of Mimi Miyagi, enough Chinese takeout to feed the Red Army, and to wash it down, a fifth of Jim Beam. He’d left the pint behind in Abruzzi’s desk drawer. She’d insisted she didn’t drink, but Pender suspected it would only be a matter of time.

  Since his divorce ten years earlier, Pender had been living in a ramshackle house on a hillside above Tinsman’s Lock, Lock 22 of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, on federal land originally ground-deeded to former slaves after the Civil War and held now by Pender on a grandfathered National Park Service lease.

  Among the advantages of livin
g at Tinsman’s Lock: a heavily wooded lot, no neighbors, and gorgeous views of the C&O, the Potomac, and the Virginia countryside beyond; it was also cheap. But chief among the disadvantages was the reason it was cheap: according to the terms of the lease, all visible improvements beyond the existing underground power and phone lines had to be period—any time between 1850 and 1890 would do—and not many people, it seemed, were willing to pay Montgomery County prices for a Tobacco Road home.

  As for the interior, in the ten years Pender had lived there, more than one woman had tried her hand at decorating, but none of them had lasted long enough to make much of a dent, domesticity-wise. As his old friend Sid Dolitz once observed, the house was a lot like Pender himself: big, homely, and getting more dilapidated with every passing year.

  So after convincing himself that he hadn’t wanted a damn party anyway, Pender had spent the first evening of his retirement watching videos, pigging down Chinese, and practicing his putting out on the spacious, if rickety, back porch, in preparation for his retirement present from Sid: a trip to California, two days of golf at Pebble Beach, two nights at the Lodge.

  By Tuesday morning, a surprise party was the last thing on Pender’s mind. He slept until ten, drowned his hangover with the hair of the dog (and why not?—he wasn’t working), had leftover Chinese for brunch, and drove off in his jet black pride and joy, a ’64 Barracuda he’d rescued from an abusive living situation and restored to health while drying out after his divorce, to meet Sid Dolitz at Sid’s country club for their veddy civilized one o’clock tee time.

  In many ways, Dolitz was the anti-Pender. Short, slight, a connoisseur of good food and fine wines, a faithful and uxorious husband to his beloved and extremely wealthy Esther until death did them part, and something of a dandy, at least by Bureau standards (even back in the FBI’s mandatory conservative-suit-white-shirt-and-tie days, his suits were natural shoulder, his shirts were Egyptian sharkskin, and his Countess Mara neckties were always accessorized with a complementary pocket handkerchief), Sid had been playing a somewhat bemused Felix to Pender’s Oscar for over twenty years.