6
As Pender crossed the living room, heading for the vestibule—the bags were still out on the front doorstep—he saw the basket of mail on the table beside the answering machine. The letter on top caught his eye. Noble J. Heinz—Ida’s lawyer. The Judge, everybody in La Farge called him. An imposing, wintry man with arctic blue eyes and a mane of snowy hair. Always wore Clarence Darrow galluses and navy serge suits as dark as blue can be, and still be blue. But why would the Judge be writing him? He decided the baggage could wait.
“Where’s the bathroom?”
Pender glanced up from opening the envelope. It was good to see Dorie standing in his living room. She was looking mighty fine, too. Her cheeks were rosy from the nippy air, the discoloration around her eyes had faded to a faint yellowish green, and the blue eyes themselves were as bright as if she were high. Maybe she was, thought Pender—maybe landscapes were her drug of choice. “First door on the right or third door on the left.”
Inside Judge Heinz’s envelope was a second envelope, with Pender’s name written in Ida’s Palmer Method handwriting. He opened it with a sharp pang of dread and unfolded a sheet of her familiar lavender stationery, so thin it was almost transparent.
May 29, 1997
Dear Eddie,
If you’re reading this, that means I’m gone.
I’ve arranged to have some things sent on to you. The family papers and photo albums, Mom’s jewelry, a few knickknacks from the Cortland house, et cetera.
Everything else has been left to the Down Syndrome Foundation. Judge Heinz is handling the estate, which he says is an attorney’s dream. Most of my assets, including the title to the house, have already been transferred into a trust for the DSF, so Uncle Sam is going to reap precious little out of the transaction, which warms the cockles.
Cleland’s is handling the auction, and Seland’s Funeral Home will haul my carcass up to the crematorium in La Crosse. They have strict instructions not to bring anything back. No tarted-up corpse in an overpriced casket for me, no cremains in an overpriced urn. Ashes are ashes and dust is dust, and it is ghoulish superstition to treat them as if they were anything else.
As for a funeral or memorial service, you know how I feel about that sort of thing. I didn’t bury Walt, I didn’t bury Stanley, and I won’t have you burying me. If you want to, you can raise a glass in my memory, but don’t go off on a bender on my account.
I guess that’s about it, except to tell you that I love you dearly, as did Walt and Stanley, and that no big sister was ever prouder of her little brother than I am of you.
Your Loving Sister,
Ida
Pender was still trying to digest all that—in fact, he was still trying to digest the first sentence—when Dorie appeared in the doorway leading to the bedroom wing. “Pen?”
He looked up. The high color of a moment ago was gone, leached from her face. “Dorie, what—”
As Dorie shuffled reluctantly into the room, chin in the air, hands in the air, Pender saw first a pistol barrel against the back of her neck, then a hand yanking her tightly by the roots of her braid, then a bald Simon Childs behind her, turning her, angling her body toward Pender, to keep it between Pender and himself.
“You move, she dies,” said Childs.
Everybody dies, thought Pender, letting Ida’s letter slip from his fingers; the flimsy lavender sheet fluttered slowly to the floor.
Twelve steep wooden steps, each with a lip that overhung the step below. Wall and railing on the left, ascending; sheer drop to the cellar floor on the right. Holding the thrashing coral aloft in her right hand, Linda grabbed the railing with her damaged left hand and hauled herself to a standing position. The pain shooting up her arm was…excellent. First rate.
By raising her left knee, she managed to lift her floppy left foot high enough to clear the first tread. When the sole was planted firmly on the bottommost step she leaned forward, put her weight on it, and by straightening the left leg she managed to drag the trailing right foot up to the step, though not without banging her toes on the overhanging lip.
One down, eleven to go.
Simon was feeling pretty good about himself. Large and in charge. This was going to be the best game ever, he told himself. Early as it was, he was already feeling connected with Pender—merely by looking at him, Simon could tell he’d just learned about his sister’s death.
He knew better than to take the credit for it right away, however. Simon didn’t want to drive the hulking Pender into a rage—not until he had him secured, anyway. But first he needed to take care of the superfluous Miss Bell. Having her around was making him too self-conscious—it was like having a ghost at your elbow.
No good—it was no good, trying to climb the stairs standing. Linda’s left hand had lost most of its gripping strength, her fingers were too numb to feel the rail, and the pain traveling up her left arm made her pay dearly when she tried to raise the arm above her shoulder. Every time her hand slipped from the rail, she flailed the other hand to keep her balance, further inflaming the already infuriated coral.
She dropped to her knees on the third stair; three down, nine to go.
Childs marched the two of them back into the bedroom where he’d first surprised Dorie, ordered her onto the bed with her hands on either side of the centermost vertical rail of the brass headboard, then ordered Pender to cuff her wrists behind it.
Yes, thought Pender, trying to hide his eagerness. Perfect. His last girlfriend had been a DEA agent, somewhat unstable, like most DEA, and a hellcat in the sack. She liked to play mild bondage games, with herself as dominatrix—that’s what the cuffs were doing under the bed in the first place. Pender didn’t mind—at least that way she did all the work—but he didn’t trust her as far as he could throw her. Which was why he had stashed a spare key under the mattress, at the head of the bed, where he could reach it even while cuffed to the headboard.
But how to let Dorie know, with Childs standing over them? Pender leaned across her body, fumbling one-handed with the cuffs. “Under the mattress,” he whispered. Probably not loud enough, but Childs was leaning closer; Pender could smell his own aftershave on the man. Sensing his chance, he whirled around, trying to club Childs with the elbow of his cast.
Childs jumped back; the blow missed. Dorie saw the barrel of the Colt come crashing down across the back of Pender’s neck. Pender’s hat went flying; he fell limply across her, knocking the wind out of her. With his weight across her chest, she couldn’t draw a breath. She started seeing stars; the white hat was a pinwheel, rolling on its brim across the floor. Then, as her consciousness began slipping away to a pinpoint of light, the crushing weight came off her; she sucked in a great gulping breath.
Pender lay on the floor, unmoving; Simon was stretched out across Dorie, clicking the handcuffs into place behind the rail. She tried to knee him. He avoided her easily, then knelt painfully across her thighs while he gagged her with one of Pender’s garish neckties.
This is the last time I’ll ever see him, thought Dorie, as Simon dragged Pender out of the bedroom by the ankles. By him, she meant Pender—she was pretty sure she’d be seeing Simon again.
To keep from toppling backward as she knee-walked up the stairs, Linda had to lean forward, bending at the waist (she hadn’t forgotten her old friend Lhermitte and his lightning bolt), and leaning awkwardly on her left elbow to keep from falling onto her face.
By the sixth step—fuck this excellent pain, fuck this excellent, first-rate pain, was her mantra—her knees were killing her, and both insteps were bruised from banging against the overhanging tread, but she could hear Childs and Pender talking in the kitchen. At least when she reached the top, it would be over, she told herself: she wouldn’t have to drag her sorry ass the rest of the way across the house.
Eight down, four to go.
7
A sense of rising, of swimming upward through blackness, shedding dreams as he rose to the surface. The swimmer, the dreamer
—he had no sense of himself as himself yet—heard a voice, echoic and distorted. For a moment he was a boy again, playing a joke on his mother, holding his breath at the bottom of Little York Lake to frighten her.
With the memory came identity; when Pender knew who he was, the rest came flooding back. It was the second time in four months he had been separated from his senses. Back in July, a blow to the head had launched him on one of those so-called near-death experiences, white light, tunnel, a visit from his dad in dress blues—the whole nine yards. This time, there’d been only chaos, and his dreams were not so much dreams as swirling fragments.
Pender opened his eyes, found himself lying in a contorted position on his side on the kitchen floor, with his left arm drawn painfully behind his back and cuffed at the wrist to his right ankle. Looking up sideways, he saw Childs sitting on a straight-backed kitchen chair.
“Sorry about your sister,” Childs said in a conversational tone.
Pender assumed he’d read the letter; he mirrored Childs’s tone—stay calm, keep the hostage-taker calm. “She had a good life.”
“I didn’t mean I was sorry she was dead—I meant I was sorry I had to kill her.”
“No shit? Did you off Judge Crater and the Ramsey girl, too?”
“No—neither of them had killed my sister.”
“I didn’t kill your sister. The doctor said she died of a congenital heart condition.”
“Congenital—that means she had it for forty-nine years. Why is it, do you think, that her heart gave out while she was struggling with you?”
“Struggling? She was trying to save me from getting my brains bashed out by you.”
Simon let it pass—he wasn’t here to argue. “Almost biblical, don’t you think? The retribution, I mean—my killing your sister in return for your killing mine. I have to tell you, though, I didn’t really want to kill Ida, fitting as it might have been. I thought she was a very nice lady, right up until the moment I broke that blue capsule into her hot toddy. If it’s any consolation to you—it was to me—she was dead by the time she hit the floor. As I say, I didn’t want to do it—but I couldn’t take a chance on her telling you about our conversation. Would you like to hear about our conversation, Eddie? Or should I call you Pen, like that hooer waiting for me in the bedroom?”
Pender wanted to kill Childs of course—he wanted to kill him as badly as he’d ever wanted anything in his life. Instead, he reminded himself that the most important thing he could do at the moment was to work the problem.
And the problem—how to get loose, at least long enough to dial 911 on the phone in his pants pocket—was in the present. If Childs had killed Ida, that was in the past—nothing he could do would bring her back. And Childs’s threat about Dorie belonged to the future, and was of no account. When your enemy threatens you, he’s either lying, which means he’s scared, or he’s stating his intentions, which gives you more data to work with. The more data, the more better. “Call me anything you want. And, yes, I’d like to hear about your conversation.”
Childs leaned back, laced his arms behind his head, and crossed his legs casually at the ankle—not an easy thing to do in a straight-backed chair. “It was very illuminating. For some reason, Ida was under the assumption that my name was Bellcock.”
The name hit Pender like a slap. Ida had been a tough old bird—she wouldn’t have told Childs squat, no matter how much he’d threatened or cajoled or even tortured her. But Pender himself had given her permission to talk to Bellcock—maybe Childs wasn’t bullshitting about killing her after all.
“She told me all about Stanley, and Dr. Walt—this is Dr. Walt’s gun I’m holding now,” Childs continued. “She also told me all about what a naughty boy her little brother Eddie was. How he threw a firecracker down the chimney and nearly blinded himself. How he never got over it. How as a boy, he wouldn’t let himself be blindfolded for a game of pin the tail on the donkey. And even at Stanley’s birthday party, grown man, big-shot G-man, he wouldn’t even play bust the piñata.”
You wanted data, you got it, thought Pender, as Childs began removing an assortment of implements from the drawer next to him, and showing each one to Pender with a stage magician’s flourish before setting it down carefully on the table—folding Buck knife, which he ostentatiously unfolded, apple corer, box cutter.
More data, Pender told himself. Keep working the problem. So Childs knows. About your fear. So what? Pain, darkness, death—one way or another it was going to be pain, darkness, death. Nothing else has changed. The phone is still in your pocket. Six inches away—might as well be six feet.
But there was still the possibility that Dorie had heard him and found the handcuff key under the mattress. If she’d already freed herself and called 911 or gone for help, all Pender had to do was hang on awhile longer. Just hang on. And stall like a mo-fo. A fearless mo-fo from the Eff Bee Fucking Eye. And keep on collecting data: “What have you done with Abruzzi?”
Skairdykat! Thanks for reminding me, thought Simon, as he tested the point of the Buck knife on his thumb—he’d been so caught up in the moment, so dialed in to Pender, that he’d almost forgotten Skairdykat. He’d also almost forgotten that the game, the doubleheader, would have to take place in the cellar, where no one would hear them scream—no one except Dorie, that is. “Nothing, yet. Would you like to see her?”
“Yes—yes, I would.”
“She’s in the cellar—all you have to do is hump your way across the floor and down the stairs. I’ll hold the door for you.”
Dorie had rattled the headboard until her wrists were sore. Leave it to Pender, she thought. The house looks like it’s going to fall down any minute, but the bedstead couldn’t be sturdier. She kept picturing Childs coming through the door, covered in Pender’s blood, and throwing himself on top of her. Horrible as the image was, she knew that would be her best—and last—chance to kill him before he killed her.
But this time, Dorie promised herself—and Pender, and all the others—if she did through some miracle survive this second attack, there would never be a third. She’d kill him first, with her bare hands if necessary.
And as she waited on the bed to kill or be killed, with absolutely no idea that the key to her survival was only inches away, under the mattress beneath her head, Dorie found herself thinking back to the first time she had met Simon Childs. It was at the convention, in the welcoming suite of the Olde Chicago. The name tags had been specially prepared: a blank space for your name on the first line, the printed words A Person With on the second, and on the bottom line you were supposed to print the name of your phobia, using the -ia suffix, not the -ic. Like the name PWSPD, this was all in line with current thinking: a phobia was something you had, not something you were.
And although romance was the last thing Dorie’d had in mind when she got up the courage to leave the central coast for the first time in three years, the moment she saw the tall, handsome, silver-haired man standing behind the registration table, she was prepared to revise her expectations.
Simon Childs
a person with
Katapontismophobia
read his name tag.
“That’s a new one on me,” said Dorie.
“Fear of drowning,” he explained. “The verb katapontidzo means ‘to hurl into the sea.’ The noun katapontidzes means ‘pirate,’ but I guess there were more people who were afraid of drowning than of pirates.”
“I like pirates,” Dorie declared.
“Aargh,” said the handsome Mr. Childs, squinching up one eye. It was the worst Long John Silver impression Dorie had ever seen, but hilarious in context—she’d laughed so hard her boobs bounced. And it turned out, when he saw her name tag, that Simon was the first person she’d ever met, not excluding her current therapist, who knew what prosoponophobia meant without having to be told. She thought she might have found a lover; she knew she’d found a friend.
Honey, you sure can pick ’em, Dorie told herself; a moment later a
shot rang out, and the screaming began.
Eleven down, one to go. Linda heard Childs tell Pender he’d hold the door. She was still on her knees—no time to stand up, even if she’d had the strength; as it was, she barely had time to hide the coral behind her back before the door opened.
Childs looked down at her in surprise; behind him, through his legs, she could see Pender on his side on the kitchen floor. “Well, would you look at that, Eddie Pen,” said Childs. “Would you look what gnawed itself loose?” He raised one foot as if to shove her back down the stairs.
Linda flinched but remained upright. She would take the leg if necessary, but she wanted the face, or at least the neck.
“And what’s that behind your back, Skairdykat? Biiiig scairdykat knife? It’s not a gun—I know, I searched the cellar.” He knelt, extended a hand; the gun was in his other hand, out of reach. “C’mon, fork it over.”
Closer, thought Linda, as the coral thrashed frantically behind her back; the face—I want the face.
“C’mon, Skairdykat, give it to Simon before he has to take it away from you and stick it where the sun don’t—”
Close enough.
8
One thing all criminal defense attorneys (along with a majority of cops and the few prosecuting attorneys who are willing to admit it) will tell you is that the only thing most eyewitnesses are good for is impressing juries. The truth is usually quicker than the eye, and the assumption is quicker than either, even for a trained observer like Pender.
He didn’t know, for instance, that Linda was on her knees—he’d seen her through Childs’s legs from the torso up and assumed she was standing on a lower step. He saw Childs kneel, heard him taunting her, heard the word knife, and assumed that’s what she had for a weapon. He saw Linda lunge, heard the gun go off, saw her topple forward, and assumed she’d been shot. When Childs rocked backward and the Colt went flying, Pender continued to assume that Abruzzi had somehow slashed him, and it wasn’t until Childs, still on his knees, turned blindly toward Pender, that Pender began to understand what had happened.
Fear itself: a novel Page 33
