Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

by Strangers(Lit)

  I got investments. Whores don't have investments, honey. Alan wasn't

  my pimp. He was my manager. In fact, he managed a couple of my

  girlfriends, too. I fixed him up with them because, at first, before he

  started getting strange, he was the best."

  Dazzled by the woman's self-delusion, Jorja said, "And Alan took a

  managerial fee for handling your career-and theirs?"

  Her scowl fading, somewhat placated by Jorja's willingness to use

  euphemisms, Pepper said, "No. That was one of the best things about our

  arrangement with him. He was still a blackjack dealer, see; that's

  where he made his money. He had all the contacts needed to manage us,

  but all he wanted for his trouble was free trade. I never knew a man

  who needed so much pussy. He couldn't get enough. In fact, the last

  couple of months, he seemed obsessed with pussy. Was he like that with

  you, honey?". Repulsed by this sudden intimacy, Jorja tried to stop the

  woman, but Pepper would not be quiet. "In fact, the last few weeks he

  was so horny all the time that I started to think maybe I should dump

  him. I mean, there was something a little crazy about it. He'd do it

  and do it and do it until he just couldn't get his pecker up to do it

  any more, and then he'd want to watch X-rated videotapes."

  Jorja was suddenly angry that Alan had made her executor, forcing her to

  witness the moral squalor in which he had passed the last year of his

  life. And she was angry because she would have to find a way to explain

  his death to Marcie, who was already treading a psychological tightrope.

  But she was not really angry with Pepper Carrafield; not angry but

  appalled, yes, because even Alan deserved a little mourning and respect

  from his live-in lover, more than this shark could ever give him. But

  there was no point in blaming the shark for being a shark.

  One of the elevators opened, disgorging uniformed policemen, morgue

  employees, and a gurney bearing a corpse in an opaque plastic body bag.

  Jorja and Pepper rose from the sofa.

  Even as the stretcher was being rolled out of the first elevator, the

  doors of the second opened, and four more cops appeared, two in uniform

  plus a team of plainclothes detectives. A detective came to Pepper

  Carrafield and asked a few final questions.

  No one asked any questions of Jorja. She stood rigid and suddenly numb,

  staring at the body bag that contained her ex-husband.

  They rolled the gurney across the travertine. The wheels squeaked.

  Jorja watched it moving away.

  Two cops held the lobby doors while the morgue attendants pushed the

  gurney outside. It moved past the lobby windows. Jorja turned to

  observe its progress. She still felt no grief, but she was swept by a

  powerful wave of melancholy, a profound sadness at what might have been.

  From the nearest of the elevators, where she was holding a door open,

  Pepper said, "Let's go up to my place."

  Outside, they closed the doors of the coroner's van.

  In the elevator on the way up, and in a discreet whisper in the

  fourteenth-floor hallway, then continuing in a normal tone of voice as

  they entered her big living room, Pepper insisted on describing Alan's

  peculiar sexual hunger. He had always had the carnal appetite of a

  gourmand, but apparently sex had become a sick obsession with him as his

  life had wound down through its last couple months.

  Jorja did not want to hear about it, but stopping the hooker seemed more

  difficult than simply enduring her chatter.

  In recent weeks, Alan's days had been devoted to erotic pursuits, though

  it all sounded feverish and desperate rather than pleasurable. He had

  used sick leave and vacation time to spend long-often frantic-hours in

  bed with Pepper or others whose "careers" he managed, and there was no

  variation or perversion that he failed to explore to excess. The hooker

  chattered on: Alan had developed a fascination with lascivious

  substances, devices, appliances, and clothing-dildos, penis rings,

  spike-heeled shoes, vibrators, cocaine ointment handcuffs. . . .

  Jorja, already weak-kneed and dizzy since seeing the body bag, grew

  queasy. "Please stop. What's the point? He's dead, for God's sake."

  Pepper shrugged. "I thought you'd want to know. He threw away a lot of

  his money on this . . . this sex thing. Since you're the executor of

  the estate, I thought you'd want to know."

  The last will and testament of Alan Arthur Rykoff, which he had left

  with Pepper for safekeeping, was a simple preprinted one-page form of

  the type obtainable at any business supply store.

  Jorja sat on a cobalt-blue Ultrasuede chair beside a lacquered black

  Tavola table, quickly scanning the will in the light from a high-tech,

  burnished-steel, cone-shaped lamp. The most surprising thing was not

  that Alan had named Jorja as executor, but that he had left what he

  owned to Marcie, whose fatherhood he had been prepared to deny.

  Pepper sat on a black lacquered chair with white upholstery, near a wall

  of windows. "I don't figure it's much of an estate. He spent money

  pretty freely. But there's his car, some jewelry."

  Jorja noticed that Alan's will had been notarized just four days ago,

  and she shivered. "He must've been considering suicide when he had this

  notarized; otherwise, he wouldn't have felt the need for it."

  Pepper shrugged. "I guess."

  "But didn't you see the danger? Didn't you see he was troubled?"

  "Like I told you, honey, he'd been weird for a couple months."

  "Yes, but there must've been a noticeable change in him during the last

  few days, something different from that other strangeness. When he told

  you he'd made out a will and asked you to put it in that lockbox of

  yours, didn't you wonder?

  Wasn't there anything about him-his manner, his look, his state of

  mind-that worried you?"

  Pepper stood up impatiently. "I'm no psychologist, honey. His stuff's

  in the bedroom. If you want to give his clothes to Goodwill, I'll call

  them. But his other stuff-jewelry, personal things-you can get them out

  of here right now. I'll show you where everything is."

  Jorja was sickened by the moral squalor into which Alan had sunk, but

  she also felt a measure of guilt for his death. Could she have done

  something to save him? By leaving his few possessions to Marcie and by

  naming Jorja executor of his will, he seemed to have reached out to them

  in his last days, and although that gesture was pathetic and inadequate,

  it touched Jorja. She tried to remember how he had sounded on the

  telephone before Christmas, when she had last spoken with him. She

  remembered his coldness, arrogance, and selfishness, but perhaps there

  had been other more subtle things that she should have heard beneath the

  surface cruelty and bravado: distress, confusion, loneliness, fear.

  Brooding on that, she followed Pepper toward the bed room. She loathed

  this task, pawing through Alan's things, but it had to be done.

  Halfway down a long hall, Pepper stopped at a door, pushed it inward.

  "Oh, shit. I can't believe the damned cops left it like this."

  Jorja
looked in the open door before she realized that this was the

  bathroom in which Alan had killed himself. Blood was all over the beige

  tile floor. More blood was spattered over the glass door of the shower

  stall, sink, towels, wastecan, and toilet. The wall behind the toilet

  was stained with dried blood in a macabre pattern resembling a Rorschach

  blot, as if Alan's psychological condition and the meaning of his death

  were there to be read by anyone with sufficient insight.

  "Shot himself twice," Pepper said, supplying details Jorja did not want

  to hear. "First in the crotch. Is that queer or what? Then he put the

  gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger."

  Jorja could smell the vague coppery scent of blood.

  "The damned cops should've cleaned up the worst of it," Pepper said, as

  if she thought policemen ought to be armed not only with guns but with

  scrub brushes and soap. "My housekeeper doesn't come until Monday. And

  she's not going to want to deal with this disgusting mess."

  Jorja broke the bloody bathroom's hypnotic hold on her and stumbled

  blindly a few steps along the hall.

  "Hey," Pepper Carrafield said, "you okay?"

  Jorja gagged, clenched her teeth, moved quickly along the hall, and

  leaned against the jamb of another doorway.

  "Hey, honey, you were still carrying a torch for him, weren't you?"

  "No," Jorja said softly.

  Pepper moved closer, too close, putting an unwanted consoling hand upon

  her shoulder. "Sure, you were. Jesus, I'm sorry." Pepper oozed

  unctuous sympathy, and Jorja wondered if the woman was capable of any

  genuine emotion that did not have its roots in self-interest. "You said

  you were burnt out on him, but I should've seen."

  Jorja wanted to shout: You stupid bitch, I'm not carrying a torch for

  him, but he was still a human being, for Christ's sake. How can you be

  so callous? What's wrong with you? Is something migsing in you?

  But she only said, "I'm all right. I'm all right. Where are his

  things? I want to sort through them and get out of here."

  Pepper ushered Jorja through the doorway in which she had been leaning,

  into a bedroom. "He had the bottom drawers of the highboy, plus the

  left side of the dresser, and that half of the closet. I'll help." She

  pulled out the lowest drawer of the highboy.

  For Jorja, the room suddenly was as eerie and unreal as a place in a

  dream. Her heart began to pound, and she moved around the bed toward

  the first of three things that had filled her with fear. Books. Half a

  dozen books were stacked on the nightstand. She had seen the word

  "moon" on the spines of two of them. With trembling hands, she sorted

  through them and found that all six dealt with the same subject.

  "Something wrong?" Pepper asked.

  Jorja moved to the dresser, on which stood a globe the size of a

  basketball. A cord trailed from it. She clicked a switch on the cord

  and found the globe was opaque with a light inside. It was not a globe

  of the earth but of the moon, with geological features-craters, ridges,

  plains-clearly named. She gave the glowing sphere a spin.

  The third thing that frightened her was a telescope on a tripod beside

  the dresser, in front of a window. Nothing about the instrument was

  different from other amateur telescopes, but to Jorja it seemed ominous,

  even dangerous, with dark and unknowable associations.

  "Those're Alan's things," Pepper said.

  "He was interested in astronomy? Since when?"

  "For the past couple months," Pepper said.

  The similarities between Alan's and Marcie's conditions troubled Jorja.

  Marcie's irrational fear of doctors. Alan's compulsive sex drive. Those

  were different psychological problems-obsessive fear in one case,

  obsessive attraction in the other-but they shared the element of

  obsession. Apparently, Marcie had been cured of her phobia. Alan was

  not as fortunate. He'd had no one to help him, and he had snapped,

  shooting off the genitals that had come to control him, putting a bullet

  in his brain. Jorja shuddered. It was too coincidental that father and

  daughter had been stricken by psychological problems simultaneously, but

  what made it more than coincidence was the other strangeness they

  shared: their interest in the moon. Alan had not seen Marcie in six

  months, and their most recent phone conversation had been in September,

  weeks before either had become fascinated by the moon. There had been

  no contact by which either could have transmitted that fascination to

  the other; it appeared to have sprung up spontaneously in each of them.

  Remembering Marcie's moon-troubled sleep, Jorja said, "Do you know if he

  was having unusual dreams? About the moon?"

  "Yeah. How'd you figure that? He was having them, but he could never

  remember any details when he woke up. They started . . . back in

  late October, I think it was. Why? What's it matter?"

  "These dreams-were they nightmares?"

  Pepper shook her head. "Not exactly. I'd hear him talking in his

  sleep. Sometimes he sounded afraid, but lots of times he'd smile, too."

  Jorja felt as if ice had formed in her marrow.

  She turned to look at the lighted globe of the moon.

  What in the hell is going on? she wondered. A shared dream? Is that

  possible? How? Why?

  Behind her, Pepper said, "Are you okay?"

  Something had driven Alan to suicide.

  What might happen to Marcie?

  8.

  Saturday, January 11

  Boston, Massachusetts.

  The memorial service for Pablo Jackson was held at eleven o'clock

  Saturday morning, January 11, in a nondenominational chapel on the

  grounds of the cemetery where he was to be buried. The coroner and

  police pathologists had not been finished with the body until Thursday,

  so five days had passed between Pablo's murder and his funeral.

  When the last eulogy was delivered, the mourners adjourned to the grave,

  where the casket waited. Snow had been cleared around Pablo's plot, but

  the space was insufficient. Scores of people stood outside the prepared

  area, some in snow deeper than their boots. Others remained on the

  sidewalks that crisscrossed the memorial park, watching from a distance.

  Three hundred had come to pay their last respects

  to the old magician. The chilly air steamed with the breath of the rich

  and the poor, the famous and the unknown, Boston socialites, magicians.

  Ginger Weiss and Rita Hannaby stood in the first circle around the

  gravesite. Since Monday, Ginger had not had much of an appetite and had

  gotten little sleep. She was pale, nervous, and very tired.

  Both Rita and George had argued against Ginger's attendance at the

  services. They were concerned that such a wrenchingly emotional

  experience would trigger a fugue. But the police had encouraged her,

  hoping she might see Pablo's killer at the services. In self-defense

  she'd hidden the truth from the cops, leading them to believe that the

  killer was an ordinary burglar, and sometimes burglars were driven by

  such sick compulsions. But she knew that he was no mere burglar and

  that he would not risk arrest by com
ing to the cemetery.

  Ginger wept during the eulogies, and by the time she walked from the

  chapel to the grave, her grief was a vise squeezing her heart. But she

  did not lose control. She was determined not to make a circus of this

  solemn occasion, determined to pay her respects with dignity.

  Besides, she had come with a second purpose that could not be fulfilled

  if she spiraled down into a fugue or suffered an emotional collapse. She

  was sure that Alexander Christophson-former Ambassador to Great Britain,

  former United States Senator, and former Director of the CIA-would be at

  the funeral of his old friend, and she wanted very much to speak with

  him. It was to Christophson, on Christmas Day, that Pablo had turned

  for advice about Ginger's problems. And it was Alex Christophson who had

  told him about the Azrael Block. She had an important question to ask

  Christophson, though she dreaded the answer.

  She had seen him in the chapel, recognized him from his days in public

  life, when he had been on television and in newspapers. He was a

  striking figure, tall, thin, white-haired, unmistakable. Now, they

  stood on opposite sides of the grave, the draped casket between them. He

  had glanced at her a couple times, though without recognition.

  The minister said a brief final prayer. After a moment, some of the

  mourners greeted one another, formed small groups to talk. Others,