Fear itself elp-2

by Jonathan Nasaw

  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, the 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. Som
etimes 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.

  Like most Navy men, the retired chief petty officer (Cappy was his nickname, not his rank) was prompt. He pulled up in front of Rosie’s apartment building in his ’68 Harley Electra Glide with the fishtail mufflers and the studded cowboy saddle (he could still ride the Hog, he just couldn’t lift it if it spilled), walked it into the vestibule (the bike wasn’t entirely secure even there, and sometimes it leaked a little oil, but he’d be damned if he was going to leave it out on the street in this neighborhood), and rang the buzzer to apartment 5-B at precisely five-fifteen. When Rosie failed to buzz him in, his first thought was that she had fallen asleep on the couch watching her soaps. His second thought was that his hopes for a successful date were probably as doomed as his first ship, the escort carrier Ommaney Bay, which went down off Luzon in January of ’45.

  But it never occurred to Cappy to just turn around and go home. Rosie might need him-she might have passed out, fallen, struck her head on something. You could bleed to death from a scalp laceration-that’s how Bill Holden kicked it. Like they say, it ain’t the fall that kills you, it’s what you hit on the way down.

  So he mashed all fifteen buttons on the wall with the flat of his b
ig hand, waited by the door, and sure enough, somebody buzzed him through. Intercom must still be fubared, he decided, on his way up the stairs. Somebody oughtta call the super.

  A little winded, he stopped to catch his breath at Rosie’s door, then rang the bell. No answer, but he could hear it ringing. He knocked anyway. “Rosie, you okay in there?”

  The peephole darkened. “Go away.” Man’s voice.

  Cappy knew he wasn’t Rosie’s only fella. Hell, she wasn’t his only gal-or hadn’t been, until Helen Breen, Tommy Breen’s widow, finally passed. But Wednesday night was their night, Cappy and Rosie’s, and had been for years. Something wasn’t copacetic around here. “Where’s Rosie?”

  “You Cappy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She doesn’t want to see you.”

  “I’d like her to tell me that.”

  “She told me to tell you.”

  Cappy drew himself to his full height-once, six-two, still close to six-one-and crossed his arms over his chest. “Either I see Rosie or I call the cops.”

  The door opened. Cappy found himself face-to-face with one of the creepiest guys he’d ever seen. And balder than Cappy on his worst day, bald right down to his eyeballs. “C’mon in.”

  Cappy brushed by him-he’d dealt with more desperate characters than this in his thirty years in the Navy; hell, he’d been commanded by more desperate characters than this. Rosie was lying on the Murphy bed, a cold compress over her forehead. She sat up.

  “Cappy, this is my son, Simon,” she said, weakly, but with an undertone of pride in her voice. “Simon, this is my friend Cappy I told you about.”

  Simon stuck his right hand out, reached behind him with his left to close the door. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Didn’t sound that way a minute ago.” But Cappy shook the man’s hand. He knew how big a deal this was for Rosie-she’d often mentioned the children she’d been forced to abandon as infants. “Rosie baby, why don’t we take a rain check on dinner? You probably want to have a little time alone with your boy here.”