The Extinction Event

by David Black

  “He seemed to need the confidence,” Jack said.

  “What he needed,” LeVigne said, “you just gave him. About time someone did. But you could’ve saved yourself a tag or two if you did like I told you and worked on the body.”

  “That’d take five rounds,” Jack said. “I’m impatient.”

  Jack crouched over Hooper, dripping blood on Hooper’s face, his knee on Hooper’s neck.

  “Now, my friend,” Jack said, “we talk…”

  3

  Caroline walked up the flagstone path to the white suburban house in Colonie, outside of Albany, and pressed the bell. She heard a ring, muffled by the door. The air was filled with static electricity, which made her dress cling to her pantyhose. She rang the bell again. The door opened, revealing a man in his early sixties, wearing a blue-and-red Hawaiian shirt outside his gray slacks. He was barefoot and holding a newspaper, the Times-Union, next to his leg, a finger in the pages saving his place.

  “Paul Gaynor?” Caroline asked.

  Gaynor nodded.

  “I’m looking for Jean Gaynor,” Caroline said. Then, guessing, added, “Your daughter.”

  Again, Gaynor nodded.

  “I’m a lawyer,” Caroline said. “My firm is handling some business of hers.”

  “What is it this time?” Gaynor asked. “Prostitution? Or drugs?”

  The small, neat living room was dominated by the huge head of a buck mounted on a walnut panel. A rail like a blackboard chalk tray ran along the bottom of the panel. In it were three arrows, which, Caroline assumed, had been used to bring the buck down.

  Gaynor sank into an easy chair. No socks. His pant cuffs were pulled up over his purple-veined, pale ankles. Caroline sat across from him in the middle of the couch. On the coffee table between them was a clear pitcher of water and a pastel plastic dimpled glasses. Half full.

  “When Jean got into trouble down in the City…,” Paul began.

  “At school?” Caroline asked.

  “Pratt Institute,” Gaynor said. He pointed at a chalk portrait of himself, framed, hanging next to the deer head. “She had some talent. But a few months after she went down there, she came home. Or they sent her home. Do they do that today? Send kids home? When they get into trouble? At school?” He sighed. “I couldn’t control her. In two months, she’s been arrested twice for soliciting in Hudson and once in Mycenae for possession of cocaine.”

  “Your wife?” Caroline asked.

  “Jean’s mother died when Jean was eight,” Gaynor said. “Ever since then, she’s pretty much done what she wanted.”

  “You haven’t heard from the police?” Caroline asked.

  Gaynor shook his head no.

  “Told her last time she got arrested, I was through. No bail. No help. No nothing. Even she could figure that one out. She must’ve called somebody else to spring her.”

  “I’m afraid,” Caroline said, “Jean’s dead.”

  “Maybe,” Gaynor said, “that’s what she wanted.”

  “You don’t seem—”

  “Surprised? A kid like Jean, I been expecting it. The phone rings, I figure…”

  He trailed off.

  “The police should’ve called,” he said. “Maybe they did. I got one of those voice-mail services, but I never check it. What for? Just bill collectors and cold calls. They’ll be by. For whatever it’s worth. I got nothing to tell them. Or you.”

  “Your daughter—”

  “My wife was pregnant when I married her. I knew about it. But, like her daughter, Jean’s mother had a wild streak. I never adopted Jean. Not legally, I mean. But far as she knew, I was her father.”

  “Who was her real father?”

  “A married man.”

  “Local?”

  “Not quite.”

  “You ever find out his name?”

  “I found out all about him. Long time ago. Wasn’t hard. He’s well known. Massachusetts big shot. Keating Flowers.”

  “Keating Flowers?” Caroline said.

  “You know him?” Gaynor asked.

  “I know his son,” Caroline said.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1

  Jack, his face purple and pulpy, right eye swollen to a slit, upper lip crusted with blood and peaked as if he’d been fishhooked, stood in front of Geigerman’s Gym on the corner of Horatio Seymour Avenue and Seventh Street across from Seed’s Autobody, a junkyard, which had painted on its high wooden fence in big, sloppy red letters Save Local Businesses—Fight Prop. 65, a rezoning plan that would close the junkyard on the grounds that it was a blight and allow the adjacent County Hospital complex to expand.

  Two nurses, in their crumpled whites, both in their forties, one tall and blond, carrying a Mexican cloth bag as a purse, and the other short with hennaed hair, clutching a small gold purse, stood at the nearby bus stop, ignoring Jack’s ruined face.

  “Laurie went to Albany Hospital,” the first nurse said.

  “Yeah,” the second nurse said.

  “Gallstones.”

  “Who has gallstones?”

  “Laurie.”

  “No kidding.”

  “From the cesarean.”

  “What cesarean?”

  “Laurie’s.”

  “Laurie had a cesarean?”

  “Yeah. It gave her gallstones.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. She had to go to Albany Hospital.”

  “Who?”

  “Laurie.”

  “The one who had the cesarean?”

  “And the gallstones.”

  Jack’s head throbbed, and he tasted copper, blood in his mouth, and was concentrating on not throwing up when Caroline drove up to where he waited.

  As Jack slipped into the passenger side of her car, Caroline tried not to stare.

  “I found out who sandbagged me the other night,” Jack said.

  “Wasn’t there a less painful way?” Caroline asked.

  “They paid him a dime.”

  “Someone will do that to you for a dime?”

  “A hundred dollars,” Jack explained. “A blond guy with long hair, western boots, and a cowboy hat. Doesn’t know why or who it was.”

  “Or so he claims,” Caroline said.

  “I believe him,” Jack said. When Caroline made a skeptical face, Jack said, “People tend to tell the truth when you’re kneeling on their windpipe.”

  “You wouldn’t have really hurt him?” Caroline asked.

  “Look at my face,” Jack said. “Yeah, I would have hurt him. Gladly. What’d you find out?”

  “The girl with Frank. Jean Gaynor. Turns out to be Robert’s half sister.”

  Even Jack’s swollen eye tried to open with surprise.

  “His father’s indiscretion,” Caroline said. “He’s been supporting her, but apparently not in the style which she felt she deserved.”

  “Not enough to feed her habit?” Jack asked.

  “Either habit,” Caroline said. “Dope. And hooking, which was more than an expedient. She seemed to get off on it. That’s why Robert was handling a speeding ticket for her. One of those little fix-mes you thought didn’t matter. Do you think Robert knows his father is involved in Jean Gaynor’s death? In Frank’s murder?”

  “We don’t know his father is involved, Five Spot.”

  “What else could it be? Her adopted father virtually disowned her. It can’t be him.”

  “We don’t know that either.”

  “Robert’s father is a client.”

  “Was a client. That’s one account Robert took with him.”

  “If Robert’s father found out Jean was having an affair with Frank—”

  “What?” Jack said. “He kills Frank?”

  “Maybe,” Caroline said, “he tried to drag Jean out of the motel?”

  “She resisted,” Jack said.

  “He hit her?” Caroline said.

  “Things get out of control?” Jack said.

  “He keeps hitting her until—” Caro
line stopped. “Frank’s passed out.”

  “Dying from laced blow?”

  “I don’t think Robert’s father would poison Frank’s cocaine.”

  “We don’t know that either, Five Spot.”

  “Do you think Robert’s father is capable of killing Frank?” Caroline asked.

  “Who knows?” Jack said. “I never met the man.”

  2

  Flanking the entrance to Keating Flowers’ place were two stone pillars topped by lion-headed grotesques, half Sphinx and half harpie. The left monster’s face was speckled by what must have been buckshot, courtesy of some passing hunters, tempted by either the target or hostility to the sign of aristocratic pretentions. The right-hand monster’s face, worn by weather, looked sad, its left eye as damaged as Jack’s right.

  Jack and Caroline turned off the road a few miles short of Great Barrington and bumped along the potholed drive, which had been paved in the past but hadn’t been kept up. Overhanging tree branches clawed at the car’s windshield and scraped along the car roof. After a mile or so, the road curved out of the woods and along the near side of a weedy lake. Across the water stood Flower’s Folly, the castle built by Keating Flowers’ maternal grandfather—and Robert’s great-grandfather—Artemis Flower, who had made a fortune in concrete. His great-great-great-grandfather, also named Artemis, had made the original family fortune quarrying Massachusetts marble for the new capital in Washington. He had bought the quarry, which was near Hadley, Massachusetts, thinking that Hadley would be the site of the new government. To this day Hadley, a town between Amherst and Northampton, has a green stretching as long as Pennsylvania Avenue.

  For years, the concrete business chugged along, making sundials and garden trolls and foundations. But, since 9-11, the business had boomed: The company couldn’t keep up with the demand for Jersey barriers to protect government buildings and businesses. Even the Mycenae Town Hall put up a wall of concrete as if expecting a terrorist attack in the Hudson Valley.

  The crenulated towers of the main part of the castle stood shadowed against the twilit sky. To the right, toward a jetty that extended into the water, the castle fell away in ruins. Jack and Caroline could see the fading light through arches and blind windows. As they drove in a long curve around the lake toward the castle, they skirted stone arches that looked like a miniature Roman aqueduct, bearded with ivy, flanked by dead trees. To the left, on a barren rise, a doe stood as still as a stencil. A wild turkey exploded from the underbrush, looking prehistoric, unlike the window cutouts Jack remembered from grade school. Somewhere ahead, they heard the chuck-chuck-chuck followed by an odd sound, almost like someone playing a musical saw, a mechanical noise on the verge of human speech, of some kind of woodpecker.

  “I can’t believe this is where Robert goes home every night,” Caroline said.

  “You ever spend time with him outside of work?” Jack said. “Yeah, I can believe he lives here.” Jack looked around, nearly a three-sixty turn, and said, “A storm’s been coming all week. We should be visiting here in thunder and lightning.”

  They swung into a graveled drive that circled a huge stone wishing well decorated with chipped satyrs and nymphs. The castle loomed above them. Neither immediately opened the car doors.

  “I thought his family still had money,” Jack said.

  “That doesn’t mean they’d spend it,” Caroline said. “You know what it would cost to keep up this pile?”

  “As much as it costs your uncle to keep up Tabletops,” Jack said.

  3

  As they walked up the crumbling steps to the cathedral-size front doors, Jack said, “Ever since I was a kid, I’ve liked places like this. Too many Vincent Price movies.”

  “Vincent who?” Caroline asked.

  The huge doors were unlocked.

  “Why not?” Jack asked about the unlocked doors. “Who’d come here uninvited?”

  “We did,” Caroline said.

  The door creaked.

  “Inner Sanctum,” Jack said in a Boris Karloff voice; and, before Caroline could ask him what Inner Sanctum was, Jack added, “Prehistory. Don’t worry about it.”

  The central hall was stacked like a warehouse with moldy furniture: chairs with torn brocade; a bureau with a clouded and cracked mirror; two refectory tables, one upside down on the other like a mirror image; a forest of standing lamps; a rolled oriental rug, which, furred with dust, looked like a huge cocoon. Naked marble gods and goddesses with hairless pudenda stood like giant chess pieces randomly in the hall, gleaming in the dusty light from high smudged windows. A half-open steamer trunk revealed mildewed drawers. A grand divided staircase rose in front of them, leading to a balcony that ran around the second floor—a second floor thirty feet above the ground floor. The walls were covered in faded green cloth with darker patches where pictures had been removed.

  “Hello?” Jack called. “Robert?”

  His voice was swallowed by the vast space.

  Hesitantly, they wandered through sliding double doors into a library, which smelled like old dog. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Hundreds of books with rotting leather bindings. A mahogany ladder was hooked on to an overhead stained brass bar. Laid out on a long table was a Union uniform: red fez, blue jacket, red pants, New York’s Zouaves. A captured Dufilho Confederate officer sword, unsheathed and gleaming, recently polished, lay across the arms of a tall chair at the head of the table. Logs blazed in a fireplace large enough for half a dozen tall men to stand in.

  “Robert?” Caroline called. She lowered her voice, “Maybe they’re out?”

  “Why are you whispering?” Jack asked.

  Caroline blushed. Or maybe her cheeks reddened from the fireplace heat.

  “Yeah, out,” Jack said. “Probably to Wendy’s for burgers.”

  Caroline opened a door in the far wall. Jack followed her into a glass-ceilinged atrium enclosing a scummy half-filled reflecting pool, flanked by twin gargoyle-faced fountains set into the wall. Coppery stains in the gargoyles’ mouths made the creatures look as if they had just feasted on flesh and blood. Their eyes were blind. Passing clouds shifted shadows across the room. In the corner, in a yellow-and-blue enameled pot, a dead palm rattled.

  “Sounds like bones,” Caroline said.

  “You think we’re scaring the skeleton?” Jack asked.

  “Why not?” Caroline said. “They’re scaring me.”

  “I don’t see any skeletons,” Jack said.

  “The whole house,” Caroline said, “is a skeleton.”

  A cracked glass door opened onto a small back parlor filled with oil portraits, surfaces spidery with cracks, stacked against the peeling wallpaper. Facing a window, which looked out onto an unkempt lawn rolling down to the stagnant lake, its back to Jack and Caroline, was a deep rust-colored upholstered wingback chair. An old man’s bony elbow perched on one of the chair arms, the cloth of a white linen suit hanging from his gaunt frame.

  “I think we found our skeleton,” Jack whispered. To the figure in the chair, louder, Jack said, “Mr. Flowers…” Slowly, he approached. “Sorry to disturb you, sir.…”

  Jack came around the chair and stopped, staring at what looked like Keating Flowers’ mummified corpse, dressed and positioned as if alive.

  “Oh, my God,” Caroline cried.

  “Looks like he’s been dead for years,” Jack said.

  “Dead?” a voice behind them said. “Resin.”

  Jack and Caroline turned. Keating Flowers came through the cracked glass door from the room with the reflecting pool. He was dressed just like the resin-work figure and was almost as bony.

  “Since I live in such Gothic surroundings,” Keating said, “I figure I might as well use the setting to good advantage.”

  “You have an odd sense of humor, sir,” Jack said.

  “I can afford to,” Keating said.

  Jack studied the sculpture and said, “Nice work.”

  “I studied at the Arts Students League,” Keating said.
“A long time ago.” Keating tilted his head as he studied Jack’s bruised face. He asked, “Do you mind if I take a picture?”

  Before Jack could respond, Keating took a compact digital camera from his pocket and snapped. Twice.

  Jack blinked in the flashes.

  “Quite a ruin,” Keating said about Jack’s face, slipping the camera back into his pocket. “I can use the picture for one of my fright masks.”

  Jack scooped a spiderweb away from the sculpture’s face.

  “I know a cheap cleaning woman,” he said.

  “Jack,” Caroline said, putting a restraining hand on his arm.

  “Light dusting,” Jack said. “Vacuuming. I don’t think she does windows.”

  “Pity,” Keating said. “I’d like to let more light in.”

  “I think you need something more than light,” Jack said.

  “Light’s a good start,” Keating said. “Speaking of starts, I’m sorry if my scarecrow gave you one.”

  “The dead don’t scare me,” Jack said. “It’s the living I find frightening.”

  “Do I frighten you,” Keating asked, “Mr.—?”

  “Jack Slidell.” Jack held out his hand, which Keating ignored. “And,” Jack dropped his hand, “I’m not related to any Slidells you’d know.”

  “No doubt.” Keating turned to Caroline. “My dear?”

  “Caroline Wonder.” Having seen Keating snub Jack, Caroline did not hold out her hand. But Keating took it and raised it to his dry, cracked lips.

  “Charmed,” Keating said.

  Jack said, “I’m sure you know her family.”

  “Your friend seems to feel that I’m not being a kind host,” Keating said, “a presumption, considering you’re both housebreakers.”

  “The door was unlocked,” Jack said.

  “Oh,” Keating said, “you’re standing on the letter of the law.”

  “The law’s not a bad place to perch,” Jack said.

  “Commonwealth law.” Keating was dismissive. “I prefer the law of hospitality. Which I extend to invited guests.”

  “Why do I think you’re reluctant to call the cops?” Jack asked.

  “Jack,” Caroline said, “we did trespass.”

  “Forgive me my trespasses—” Jack started.

  “As I forgive those,” Keating said, “I guess that means you two—who trespass against me.”