Fear itself: a novel

by Jonathan Lewis Nasaw

  If the coast is clear, he shows up as Bellcock. If it’s not, he moves on to one of the other names on the—

  No! If there are any signs of surveillance or even suspicion, it dawns on Simon, that would mean the whole Arthur Bellcock scenario is blown. Which would mean in turn that Pender knows he is being stalked—Simon would have lost the element of surprise.

  So the question he has to ask himself at this point is, Is it worth it? Is finding out what Pender’s afraid of worth the risk of putting him on his guard?

  Simon fires up the roach again, takes a serious hit, and waits for the answer to come to him.

  The Widow Bird

  1

  “Thank you for another day, O Lord; may I use it to your everlasting glory.”

  And it did look to be a glorious Indian summer Sunday. Sunny, once those high clouds burned off, with highs in the low seventies—about ten degrees higher than normal for Wisconsin, this time of year, but Ida Day would have started her morning with the same prayer of thanks if it had been fifty and raining, or twenty below and snowing. When you were seventy and still had all your faculties and most of your teeth, every day was a good day.

  Mind you, Ida’s idea of how to use a Sunday to the Lord’s glory was not the same as most folks, especially around La Farge. For one thing, it didn’t include church. She and Walt had always distrusted organized religion; the more organized it was, the more they distrusted it. If she wanted the word of God, Ida had only to look up at the sampler hanging over the bureau. Deuteronomy 31:8: “The Lord Himself goes before you and will be with you; He will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.”

  She had stitched it herself, for Walt, to encourage him during those last difficult days. Throat cancer—no goddamn way to go. Ida still had Walt’s old army Colt in the bottom drawer of her bureau; if and when she found herself in a similar situation, she was reasonably confident she’d have the right combination of courage and cowardice to use it.

  But today was not a day for morbid thoughts. Today was a day for, let’s see…for apples! She still had a few bushels left over from the Gays Mills Applefest. Oh, yes—Ida could almost smell it already, the sweet, faintly winey bouquet of autumn apples being cidered.

  Although, come to think of it, cidering was best left for a cool day; not only were you less likely to draw wasps, but you could mull the first gallon to warm you.

  Then Ida remembered the pumpkins sitting on the front porch. She’d told herself she wasn’t going to carve jack-o’-lanterns this year, but yesterday the little Steinmuller boy had come trudging up the sidewalk hauling a rusty red wagon piled high with pumpkins he’d grown himself, a dollar for the big ones, fifty cents for the little ones, two bits for the gourds. It was right off the cover of a Saturday Evening Post; how could she resist?

  Pumpkins, then. After breakfast—two eggs and a rasher of bacon, black coffee, and her first Pall Mall of the day (don’t bother lecturing her: she’s already buried two doctors; three, if you count Walt)—Ida sharpened her carving knife on a Washita stone dampened with vinegar, spread newspapers out on the porch, turned the likeliest looking pumpkin around and around until she discovered its natural face, and had just finished sawing off its cap when the phone rang.

  “It never fails,” she grumbled, hauling herself up from the overturned milk crate she’d been sitting on and hurrying into the house to pick up the phone in the living room before the answering machine in the kitchen got into the act. There was nothing Ida hated more than shouting hold on into the receiver while her own flat Appleknocker voice bleated I’m not here now, leave a message at the tone into her ear.

  “Hello?” She’d made it.

  “Ida Day?”

  “Yes?”

  “Ida Pender Day?”

  “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Day, this is Arthur Bellcock.”

  “The man who’s writing the book about Eddie?”

  “One of the only advantages to a name like mine, Mrs. Day, is you never get confused with any other Arthur Bellcocks.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s true. Eddie told me he’d given you my name and that you’d probably be in touch, but I thought it wasn’t going to be for another month or so.”

  “That was the plan, but due to a scheduling conflict, I’ve had to push things up a few weeks. I was wondering, and I understand if it’s an inconvenience, but I’m actually down in Madison winding up another project, and it would be so helpful if I could drive up tomorrow evening.”

  “Oh, I think I can manage to clear my schedule, Mr. Bellcock. And Eddie did encourage me to tell you anything you wanted to know.”

  “Good. Because I definitely want to capture him, warts and all.”

  “I’ll do the best I can. But you understand, Mr. Bellcock, I was fourteen when Eddie was born, and I moved away from Cortland when he was ten.”

  “I understand. At this early stage, everything I can learn about your brother will be a great help. By the way, will Mr. Day be around?”

  “Only in spirit,” said Ida. “Dr. Day passed away ten years ago.”

  “I’m so sorry. You live alone, then?”

  “Alone, but not lonely, as I like to say.”

  “A laudable attitude. Until tomorrow then, Mrs. Day.”

  “Until tomorrow, Mr. Bellcock.”

  2

  On Sunday, Linda was up at dawn. From her bedroom window she could see the mist rising placidly from the domesticated water of the canal, like steam from a bowl of soup. The autumn colors of the surrounding woods were muted, drenched in the morning dew.

  It occurred to Linda, as she made her way sleepily across the hall to the bathroom, that nobody had told her what hours she was expected to keep. Like today, for instance. Was she supposed to come into the office on Sunday? If so, to do what? Answer the phone? Call forwarding could take care of that. Work on her time line? The Visa and Pac Bell printouts detailing Childs’s credit card purchases and telephone calls wouldn’t be coming in until tomorrow at the earliest. So why go into the office?

  The answer came to her after breakfast, as she was down in the cellar ironing, with the second load of yesterday’s laundry now spinning in the dryer. The BOLO, she thought: a “Be On the Lookout” for Simon Childs was undoubtedly being sent out to every law enforcement agency in the United States. But then, so were dozens of other BOLOs, every day of the week. Go-getters memorized them, doughnut dunkers ignored them, but what about your average cop, overworked, overBOLOed, drowning in a sea of red tape and paperwork? Wouldn’t a call or a fax or a heads-up of some kind from a genuine (well, almost genuine) FBI special agent go a long way toward raising his or her consciousness as to the importance of Being On the Lookout for a particular suspect, at least until the Ten Most Wanted List had been updated to include him?

  More than likely, thought Linda, holding her favorite blouse up to the unshaded bulb hanging from a crossbeam, to examine the results of her ironing. Still a little wrinkled after twenty-four hours in the dryer, but close enough for guvmint work, as they used to say in San Antone; or at any rate, close enough for guvmint work in an empty office on a Sunday morning.

  3

  For Pender and Dorie, Saturday had been a day of rest and recuperation. They never made it out of the house—they barely made it out of bed. Canned soup—Dorie’s cupboard had more Campbell’s than a gathering of the Scottish clans—and sleep had sustained them. For Dorie, who had never married, or even shacked up with a man for an extended stretch, this nonsexual bed sharing was something new. Pender, having endured a twenty-year marriage that had gone sour after the first five, was, of course, familiar with it.

  By Sunday morning, Pender had had two nights to learn that Dorie hadn’t been kidding about her snoring—she was indeed a window rattler. He didn’t mind, though—at least when she was snoring, she wasn’t thrashing, moaning, or crying out in her sleep.

  Not that he blamed her. After what she’d been through, Dorie would be luck
y if sleep disturbances were the worst, or last, of her problems. And awake, despite all she must have gone through in that basement in Berkeley, she never complained, which Pender found extraordinary in a day and age when everybody who’d ever had their fanny patted as a kid called themselves a sexual-abuse survivor, and feeling sorry for yourself was practically a cottage industry. Pender was impressed—he only wished he could somehow rescue her from the psychological and emotional shitstorm as successfully as he had from physical danger.

  He knew, of course, that it was a risky game, this white knight business. The relationship burying ground was littered with the corpses of failed white-knight/damsel-in-distress romances; nowadays they even warned recruits in the Academy about the syndrome.

  But what was a secret sentimentalist to do? Pender was a goner long before the relationship was consummated late Sunday morning. The consummation itself was necessarily gentle. Due to their injuries, they were forced to make love, in Pender’s phrase, like porcupines—very carefully—but perhaps because of the time they’d already spent in bed together, there was little of the awkwardness, emotional discomfort, or uncertainty that so often marked first sexual encounters, even at their age.

  Afterward, Dorie went back to sleep; soon she was tossing and whimpering again. Pender reached across his body with his good arm, patted her shoulder, stroked her side all the way to the swell of her hip, then back again, murmuring that it was all right, that everything was okay now.

  Which was a lie—everything was not okay. Simon Childs, the man who’d done this to Dorie, was still out there somewhere. And if this case had been personal before, it was doubly so now. Pender tiptoed out of bed without waking Dorie this time, and took his cell into the bathroom with him.

  4

  The call came in just as Linda was thinking about knocking off for the day. There had been no developments in the investigation, no Childs sightings, either reported or confirmed. He’d probably gone to ground, was the consensus; if the pressure was kept on, sooner or later he’d have to surface, if only to change holes.

  In the meantime, she’d made her calls, exchanged a little small talk on the order of sucks catchin’ a Sunday shift, whaddaya gonna do? and gotten a few BOLOs posted that might have languished in somebody’s in box. When the phone rang around quarter to three, she thought it might be one of the callbacks she’d left. Instead it was Pender. She tried, she really did: she told him McDougal had handed her the investigation on the express condition that she keep Pender out of it.

  He didn’t sound very impressed. “How long have you been with the Bureau?”

  “Seven years.”

  “And you still can’t tell when your boss is just covering his ass?”

  “He didn’t sound like he was just covering his ass. He sounded concerned.”

  “Yes, kiddo—he’s concerned about covering his ass. Let me ask you two questions. One: What’s the priority here—what’s the job?”

  “That’s a no-brainer. The job is apprehending Childs as quickly as possible. What’s the second question?”

  “Can you do a better job apprehending Childs as quickly as possible with or without the benefit of my twenty years of experience?”

  “Well, with it. But McDougal told me—”

  “Linda, I don’t care what McDougal told you—his priorities are exactly the same as yours. And mine. And anybody else in law enforcement who hasn’t got his head so far up his ass he can count his own fillings. Agreed?” Then, without waiting for an answer: “Attagirl. Now, the first thing you have to understand…”

  So much for McDougal and the hierarchy; so much for going home early. According to the Book of Pender, the first thing Linda had to understand was that the cops on the street, both local and federal, weren’t going to need any help from her when it came to the usual avenues of investigation. With or without Liaison Support, the evidence response techs would hoover up every shred of gross or trace evidence; the Berkeley cops would comb all of Childs’s reported haunts; the so-called suicides in Vegas, Fresno, and Chicago would be reopened as homicide investigations; and every friend, neighbor, or casual acquaintance Childs had ever called or been seen with in public or visited or written a check to in the last year or so would receive at least cursory attention from law enforcement.

  Now, the time line Linda was working on would be lots of help there, Pender assured her (as soon as he mentioned the time line, Linda realized how it had happened that Pool had just sort of magically turned up at the office Saturday afternoon), and sooner or later events would start dictating her course of action. For instance, he could almost promise her more work than she could handle as the ERT in Berkeley continued to unearth the corpses in Childs’s basement.

  But until then, he explained, Linda could basically expect law enforcement to be all over Simon Childs’s recent past and foreseeable future like Yogi Bear on a picnic basket. So what Pender suggested was that as soon as the time line was done, Linda turn her efforts to probing a little deeper into Childs’s past. Were there any childhood friends whom he hadn’t seen in a long time, whom he might be desperate enough to seek out as a fugitive? How about medical records? Not just his current physicians—investigators would be lined up five deep at their doors—but his former doctors, all the way back to his pediatrician. If in addition to being a psychopath, Childs was also a counterphobic phobic, as Sid had suggested, perhaps he’d seen a shrink as a child. That’d really give the profilers something to work with.

  Encouraged and energized, even inspired by Pender’s call, Linda worked what was left of her ass off for the rest of the afternoon (of the twenty pounds she’d lost this year, at least ten had to have come off her rear end), but by eight o’clock, five on the West Coast, everything was done that was going to get done on a Sunday evening, so an exhausted Linda packed it in.

  Basta, as her mother used to say to her father when he worked on Sunday—enough is enough, even God rested on the seventh day. Then, of course, Mom Abruzzi would do a load of ironing, maybe vacuum the curtains, cook a five-course Italian dinner, and mend clothes all through 60 Minutes. After all these years, Mom still had no idea what Mike Wallace looked like, went the family joke, because she never looked up from her sewing basket.

  Thinking about home always made Linda hungry. When she got back to Pender’s, she went straight to the kitchen and opened the fridge before she even took off her coat. The freezer compartment was well stocked—sort of: if somebody had gone through the frozen food section of the supermarket and selected TV dinners solely on the basis of fat grams, the higher the better, they’d have ended up with something very like the contents of Pender’s freezer.

  Linda opted for the Marie Callender’s spaghetti carbonara (what a concept, she thought: some twisted guinea genius had actually looked at a bowl of pasta and said to himself, you know what this needs?—white gravy and bacon), and while it was heating, she made her traditional, not to say mandatory, Sunday night phone call. It went well—Mom didn’t nag her about moving back home. She mentioned it three or four times, but by Italian-mother standards that didn’t count as nagging. Then she’d handed the phone to Dad, who told Linda he couldn’t talk long because The Sopranos was coming on.

  Oh, Dad, she wanted to moan, not you, too. Linda had tried to watch the show once—it was the episode where the bumbling FBI agents tried to plant a bug in Tony’s basement; she’d felt like throwing her shoe through the screen. And Charlie Abruzzi, of all people, should have known better—you didn’t run an Italian butcher shop in the Bronx for forty years without learning what the mob was really like; Big Pussy my ass!

  But at least the Sunday call helped clear the nostalgia out of Linda’s system. After all, she told herself as she climbed into bed that night, home is where you make it. And life is what you make of it. She understood how blessed she was to have a job where she could make a difference.

  It was like her dad said when she told him she wanted to change careers and apply to the FBI. The
secret to happiness, he told her, was to be able to go to bed Sunday night looking forward to getting up and going to work Monday morning.

  “Do you?” she’d asked.

  “Hell no,” he replied. “By the time I figured that out, I already had a wife and three kids to feed.”

  5

  “And how would you like to pay for this tonight, Dr. Keene?” asked the desk clerk at the Holiday Inn Express in Ogallala on Sunday night. (Several of his false identities were doctors—if things had turned out differently, Simon had often thought, he’d have liked to have been a doctor. Of course, he’d have had to finish high school first, but if he had, he could have gone on to specialize in treating Down syndromers—then Missy would have received that heart transplant.)

  Simon was ready for the question—the clerk at the Holiday Inn Express in Winnemucca had phrased it in exactly the same words the night before. “I’d like to pay in peanut shells,” he replied drolly, “but I suppose you had something more like this in mind.” And he slid Andrew Keene’s Visa across the counter.

  The clerk glanced at the card before running it through the machine. Simon experienced a moment of delicious suspense—not quite fear, but definitely a sense of heightened alert until the card was approved. Which it always was—Dr. Keene was Simon’s most reliable alter ego. The condo in Puerto Vallarta was in his name; the bills were paid electronically through a double-blind offshore account in the Caymans that Zap had helped Simon set up years earlier.

  “Thank you, Dr. Keene. This is your room number—” The clerk jotted down 318 on the cardboard envelope containing the room key, then turned the envelope around for Simon to read. Desk clerks never spoke room numbers aloud nowadays, even if there was nobody else within thirty feet of the desk; Simon wondered if at some point in the past there’d been a crime wave involving eavesdropping burglars with supernatural hearing. “—and the elevator’s right around the corner. Enjoy your stay.”