Fear itself: a novel

by Jonathan Lewis Nasaw

  But it was a good sadness, a sweet, loving sadness welling up inside him, filling the emptiness like a big warm golden marshmallow. Then he caught a blur of movement in his lower peripheral vision and looked down in time to see a banded snake slithering out of the canvas bag—God bless it, he’d left it slightly open. A second serpentine head emerged from the bag, testing the air with its tongue. This second snout was black, thank goodness—Simon snatched up a hairbrush and forced the coral back into the bag.

  “No big deal,” he muttered to himself, zipping up the bag again—the scarlet king snake was only an enhancement. He’d planned to use it to deliver a few practice bites first—something that was not, of course, feasible with the coral—so he could watch Skairdykat’s panic slowly build as she waited for the venom to take effect. And as soon as it began to dawn on her that the king snake was harmless, it would be time to bring out the real deal.

  That had been the plan, anyway. But as long as he still had the coral, he reminded himself, Skairdykat’s game would not be seriously compromised. And after Skairdykat, Pender: the plans for that game had been hatching ever since La Farge, as the eyeless corpse on the living room couch mutely attested.

  And yet, under the enforced calm of the Ecstasy, Simon was vaguely aware of a budding anxiety. Somehow it seemed that the closer he got to Pender’s game, the less anxious he was to have it over with. That was probably why he’d driven east after La Farge, instead of south to Maryland, he was beginning to understand, why he’d detoured through Allenwood and Georgetown, risking life and liberty for a game with Skairdykat. It had been Pender’s game that had been driving him ever since Missy died, but thinking about what came after Pender was like speculating on what came after infinity, what lay beyond the borders of the universe.

  A fellow could hurt himself, trying to wrap his mind around a paradox like that—especially a fellow as stoned and as constitutionally unable to contemplate the possibility of his impending nonexistence as Simon Childs. So what Simon asked himself instead was whether he had any unfinished business here in the east. And when the answer came up yes, he knew what his next move had to be.

  5

  Dorie steered the Toyota through the wide, empty suburban streets of Rancho del Vista, past cookie-cutter colonials with wide, empty suburban lawns.

  “Speaking as a plein air painter, if I lived around here, I’d starve,” she said. “No damn ranchos, no damn vistas.”

  “Yeah, but at least there’s plenty of parking.” Pender was navigating with the aid of a point-to-point map Dorie had printed out from MapQuest.com, which had recently been voted one of the top ten “Sites That Don’t Suck” on the Internet. “Okay, left on Guerrero…right on Oaxaca…” The streets were all named for Mexican states—so the gardeners would feel at home, according to the local wits. “And…here we go, twelve-eleven Baja Way.”

  The driveway was empty, but Pender had Dorie drive past and park on the street, two houses down. She started to scoff. “C’mon, Pen. What are the chances he was even here in the first place, much less—?”

  He cut her off long before she got to the second place. “You painter, me FBI,” he said, unbuckling his seat belt and donning his new Panama, which he had to take off in the car—insufficient headroom. “Until I’ve established with one hundred percent confidence that he’s not in there, I’ll run the show. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  “Good. Wait here.”

  “Yes, sir!” replied Dorie, who was not entirely unfamiliar with the better-to-ask-forgiveness-than-permission theory herself.

  Mailbox stuffed. Driveway empty. Blinds drawn, upstairs and down. Front door locked; garage door locked. Pender walked around back. The landscaping was minimal, the fences low—not much privacy here at Rancho del Vista, despite the spacious lots. There was a patio, backed by a floor-to-ceiling picture window, but the curtains were drawn. He put his ear to the glass: not a sound inside the house.

  Nobody home, thought Pender, trying the patio door, which was also locked. It happens—that’s the drawback of dropping by unannounced. But he continued his circumambulation, and when he came around the front of the house again, he saw Dorie at the end of the driveway, chatting with the mailman. She waved him over.

  “Ted, tell Special Agent Pender what you just told me.”

  “FBI, hunh? What I told your partner, I was off Monday, but I come back yesterday, Saturday is still in the box, along with Monday. Now, this guy Carpenter, he’s kinda weird, doesn’t like to answer the door, keeps it on the chain if I need a signature or something, but I’ve been on this route five years now, and in all that time he has never not emptied his mailbox. I was gonna give it one more day, then report it in. We’re supposed to report stuff like that—you’d be surprised how many dead people get found that way.”

  “A sad comment on our times,” said Pender. “Thanks for keeping your eyes open.”

  “I don’t need to report it, then?” asked the letter carrier.

  “Not necessary,” Pender replied. “My partner and I can take it from here.”

  Pender jimmied the patio door with the lockpick he’d been carrying in his wallet since his days as a Cortland County sheriff’s deputy. In another five days, after his retirement had officially taken effect, carrying it would be at least a misdemeanor bust in most states. Not that entering the house on Baja Way without a warrant wasn’t, he thought, sliding the door open.

  But in a quarter century with the FBI, Pender had never willingly turned his back on a virgin crime scene—if this even was a crime scene. If it wasn’t, he could be in and out in five minutes, no harm done and nobody the wiser. As for Dorie, if she wasn’t going to follow instructions, it would obviously be better to have her where he could keep an eye on her. “Stick close, walk in my footsteps, and don’t touch anything.”

  “Can do.” Without being consciously aware of it, until a week ago Dorie had had her life arranged so that she’d rarely had to walk into a strange house or an unfamiliar room until someone had vetted it first (you never know, could be a mask on the wall: booga booga!). Now she was starting to regret her newfound boldness. It wasn’t just the musty smell of the soaked carpet that had her spooked, it was Pender’s manner, the hushed but commanding tone of his voice, the grim set to his jaw, the wary tilt of his head as he started up the carpeted stairs, which were also squishing underfoot—somehow Dorie’s affable, comfortable, slow-moving Pen had turned into an FBI agent before her very eyes.

  “Wait here,” he told her when he reached the top of the stairs.

  “Pen, what’s that smell?” Stuffy, as if the rooms hadn’t been aired out in months. Or, no, not stuffy, more like sickly sweet, like old melon rinds in the garbage.

  But he’d already disappeared into one of the bedrooms. Wait here? thought Dorie. Alone? You’d have to handcuff me to the banister. She followed him through the door, saw him standing in an open doorway on the far side of a bedroom. When he turned around, Dorie could tell from the look on his face that for a moment there, he’d forgotten she was even in the house. She started toward him—he met her in the middle of the room and put his arms around her to stop her from going any farther.

  “You don’t need to see what’s in there,” he said softly.

  “Is it Nelson?”

  “It was.”

  6

  The seventy-six-year-old woman watching her soaps in a studio apartment in a deteriorating, if not blighted, neighborhood on the outskirts of Atlantic City had been born Rose Ella Moore and passed her happiest years as Rosella Childs, so it sometimes seemed strange to her to look back and realize that she’d spent a larger portion of her life as Rosie Delamour, a name she’d adopted half in jest and three-quarters stoned, than she had as Rose Moore and Rosella Childs combined.

  Rosie’s drug of choice back when she’d first adopted her name was Moroccan hash—which was appropriate, as she was living in Tangier at the time. More recently, her drug of choice had been vodka, th
e cheaper the better—store brand would do nicely, thank you. If you asked her, she’d have admitted to being, if not a drunk, then a binge drinker; if you pressed her, though, she’d have had to admit that her current binge had begun last February, after the fiasco on Missy’s birthday.

  The kids’ birthdays were always a hard time for Rosie, and when she’d finally worked up the nerve (okay—gotten drunk enough) to actually make the call after all those years and all those halfhearted attempts (calls she’d abandoned in mid-dial or mid-ring; answering machines she’d hung up on), only to have Simon hang up on her, there just didn’t seem to be much point in sobering up anymore.

  But like many alcoholics, it gave Rosie a feeling of control to discipline her drinking. Her allotted intake was determined by her shows. One vodka tonic apiece during the morning soaps, a can of Ensure for lunch, then another vodka tonic with each of the afternoon soaps. In the evening, she would either dine out with one of her gentlemen or dine in with Dinty Moore—the beef stew, not one of her dust bowl relations, she liked to joke. In either case, her nightly allotment was determined not by television but by how much vodka remained in the bottle, because her iron rule was never to open two in one day.

  Of course, if one of her gentlemen had the funds to purchase adult beverages with dinner, or bring a flask back to Rosie’s apartment afterward, that didn’t count against her quota.

  Last night had been a Dinty Moore evening. This morning Rosie had awakened with a menacing hangover and a vague memory of having spoken to someone about Simon over the phone. The who and the why of it had vanished into the mist of memory, however, and Rosie knew better than to try to go into the mist after them—the only thing she’d ever found there was frustration.

  But whether it was the call or something else, Rosie’s schedule had definitely been thrown off. By the end of General Hospital, the last soap of the day, less than three inches remained in the red-labeled fifth of Select Choice vodka; by the time Oprah was over, less than two. That was going to make for a difficult evening, unless of course it was Wednesday. Wednesdays, Rosie could count on Cappy Kaplan springing for a bottle of wine.

  And, Rosie told herself, she might even be able to persuade Cappy to stop off at the corner liquor store on the way back to the apartment. True, it was a little late in the month for those on fixed incomes, but Cappy’s circumstances weren’t as straitened as hers, on account of his VA benefits.

  But was it in fact Wednesday? Rosie was working that one out by dead reckoning—she remembered Monday for sure, because Ralph Rosen, her Monday gentleman, had taken her to the buffet at one of the casinos; so if yesterday was Dinty Moore, then today had to be Wednesday—when the doorbell rang. Rosie checked the time on the cable box: 5:05. She rolled her eyes: Cappy and his twilight/senior discount dinners.

  The intercom hadn’t worked for months. Rosie buzzed Cappy up, then unbolted the door and retired to the bathroom to freshen up. Cappy was among the spryest of Rosie’s beaux—he even rode a motorcycle—but it still took him a few minutes to climb the four flights of stairs to her fifth-floor walk-up. Sometimes she would wait for her gentlemen in the lobby to save them making the climb twice in an evening, but they certainly couldn’t expect that courtesy if they insisted on showing up in the middle of the afternoon.

  “You’re early,” she called from the bathroom when she heard the apartment door open. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “Take your time.”

  It didn’t sound like Cappy—maybe he had a cold. Rosie splashed a little water on her face, freshened her lipstick, opened the bathroom door.

  Her first reaction was the same as Nelson Carpenter’s—or that of anyone who’s ever seen a ghost made flesh. If something can’t be, but is, then it is the nature of that is-ness, of reality, of the universe itself, that will seem to have shifted.

  Unless of course it was only the d.t.’s. Rosie snatched at that explanation like a drowning woman at a piece of driftwood. Some people get pink elephants, she tried to tell herself—I get Marcus Childs sitting on my bed.

  In her heart, though, she knew he was no hallucination, and when he looked up from the bed with a strange, imploring look, as if he were begging for her to recognize him, it was in her heart that the recognition of his true identity first blossomed.

  7

  “How are you feeling, hon?” Miss Pool asked from the doorway. She already had her coat on.

  “Like death warmed over,” replied Linda. The sluggish, leaden feeling had persisted all day. No real symptoms had popped up, which made her think she might indeed be having a Betaseron reaction—but if so, it had lasted longer than it ever had before.

  “Why don’t we call it a day?”

  Linda looked up at the clock: 5:10. “You go on home—I’ll lock up.” A little joke: the office locked itself, of course.

  “What are you working on?”

  Linda held up a faxed death certificate. “Elaine Ferry, Petaluma. She was a pharmacophobe—terrified of taking drugs, even prescribed medicine. They found her at the bottom of her swimming pool twelve years ago, wearing an overcoat with the pockets stuffed with rocks.”

  “Virginia Woolf,” said Pool.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “That’s how Virginia Woolf drowned herself.”

  “Yes, well, the thing is, the SF field office got a call from Elaine Ferry’s mother yesterday—she recognized Simon Childs as a friend of her daughter’s. They got permission for an exhumation and necropsy, to run some toxicology exams on the bones, teeth, hair if any, for traces of parent drugs or metabolites.”

  “Are they likely to find anything after all this time?”

  Linda shrugged. “It’s like that joke about the guy who lost his watch on Forty-second Street but looked for it on Forty-third because the light there was better—you can only do what you can do. And who knows, maybe they’ll find a note tucked between her ribs: ‘I did it, Love Simon.’”

  “Which reminds me,” said Pool. “Do you have any plans for Halloween?”

  “Is it that time already?”

  “This coming Sunday. The reason I asked, we always have a costume party and put together a haunted house for the trick-or-treaters. Why don’t you come by—we’d love to have you.”

  It occurred to Linda that after working with Pool for a week and a half, she still had no idea who that “we” represented. Husband, girlfriend, aged parent? “I don’t know—I don’t have a costume or anything.”

  “We’ll fix you up—you can be a bloody corpse in the haunted house.”

  “Somehow, being a bloody corpse has never been one of my ambitions,” remarked Linda, as the phone rang. Pool started back to her desk to answer it—Linda gave her a g’wan-g’home-getouttaheah wave and picked it up herself.

  It was Pender. “Got any red pins on that map yet, kiddo?”

  “Just the one in San Francisco.”

  “Stick another one in Concord.” He told her about finding Nelson Carpenter in the bathtub.

  “Homicide?”

  “Unless he glued himself to the enamel.”

  Linda winced. “Any estimate as to the time of death?”

  “The M.E. hasn’t gotten here yet. From the looks of it, I’d say around a week.”

  “Oh, jeez.”

  “Oh, jeez is right.” But Pender spared her the worst of the details: the floating, gas-bloated corpse, the sloughed skin. “And guess what we found in the garage?”

  “Silver Mercedes convertible.”

  “And guess what we didn’t find?”

  “Whatever Carpenter drives.”

  “Late-model white Volvo sedan, according to the mailman. I’ll call you back as soon as the plate numbers come in from the DMV.”

  “I’ll get the BOLO updated. Do we want to notify the public?”

  “No—hold that back. If he knows we’re looking for the Volvo, there goes any chance of catching him in it. As it is, we’ll probably find it abandoned some—Whoops, here comes Erickson
. Gotta go. I’ll call you back with the plates and the VIN.”

  Pender broke off the connection. Linda opened her desk drawer and took out the box of flag pins, then scooted her chair all the way over to the left of the big map behind her desk. But when she tried to insert a red one into the dot marking Concord with her left hand, it slipped from her fingers, the tips of which seemed to have fallen asleep.

  Must have been leaning on it funny, she told herself, bending to pick it up. Next thing she knew she was on the floor—the flexion of her neck had sent a bone-jarring jolt of electricity shooting down her spine and fanning out across her entire neural network.

  It was like being hit by a bolt of lightning, was how Linda described it to the nurse over the telephone, when she was able to use the telephone.

  “Give me your number,” said the nurse. “I’ll have the doctor call you back.”

  At five o’clock? thought Linda. And do you have a nice bridge in Brooklyn to sell me? “You promise?”

  “I promise. Just stay where you are.”

  “No problem,” said Linda wryly.

  8

  For Cappy Kaplan, the key to enjoying a successful date with Rosie Delamour—and make no mistake, at seventy-four, Cappy’s idea of a successful date was about the same as any male over the age of thirteen and under the age of dead—was to time your move to her consumption.

  To begin with, you had to pick her up early—if left to her own devices, by the time the sun was under the yardarm, so, generally, was Rosie. But with dinner, he’d buy a bottle of wine, which Cappy could afford only because the early start enabled him to take advantage of the discounted senior menus offered at the eating establishments frequented by the social security set in Atlantic City. After dinner, back at her place, was where it got tricky. Once Rosie started knocking back the store-brand vodka she favored, there was a very small window of opportunity between hotto and blotto, as they said in Cappy’s day.