77 Shadow Street (22 page)

Vernon Klick

Vernon was so intent on watching the third floor for old saggy-assed Logan Spangler to stagger out of Senator Foghorn Leghorn’s apartment that the knock on the door startled him up from his chair. Before he could say “Come in,” the door opened, and Bailey Hawks entered as if he owned the room and was here to collect the rent.

Vernon disliked Hawks as much as anyone in the Pendleton and more than some of them. Logan Spangler, in his best bootlicking mode, said Hawks was a hero, apparently just because he was a marine and went to war and was given a chestful of stupid medals, which were probably awards for things like killing ten thousand innocent civilians and straddling a thousand third-world whores and torching orphanages.
Real
heroes were men like Vernon, who dared to reveal the private lives and sick secrets of holier-than-thou greed demons like the parasites who lived in this building.

During his search of Hawks’s apartment, Vernon had not been able to find any shockingly sick secrets of the kind that would help put his book at the top of best-seller lists and make his subscription website, when he created it,
the
place on the Internet. But just because he failed to find scandalous material about Hawks didn’t mean that such secrets did not exist. It meant that the orphan killer was extraordinarily clever at concealing evidence of his vicious crimes and disgusting perversities.

Anyway, Vernon
did
find lots of circumstantial evidence that Hawks was far from the hero old Logan Spangler thought he was. For one thing, Hawks subscribed to
nine
financial publications, which revealed a demented obsession with making money. He had a wine cooler full of high-dollar Cabernets, several expensive tailor-made suits, each of which cost six times as much as a perfectly serviceable
off-the-rack garment, plus a collection of rare Bakelite radios from the Art Deco period. A decent man would not have spent all that money so selfishly or on such frivolous items. Although Vernon knew a lot about safes and how to crack them, Hawks’s free-standing model proved to be impenetrable, which must mean it contained scandalous material. And although Vernon knew a lot about computer hacking, he couldn’t get at Hawks’s client files because they were so well protected; he even began to think they were kept on a separate computer that was locked in the safe each night, no doubt because Hawks and his clients were engaged in stock fraud, commodities manipulation, and worse.

As Hawks came into the security room, he said, “Mr. Klick, I just now saw someone in the north stairwell who I don’t think lives here.”

Sitting down once more, peeved that he was called
mister
instead of
officer
, Vernon said, “Someone who?”

“I don’t know who she was. But I wonder if you could check your video record to see if she left the stairs on the first floor or the basement. She passed me going down when I was at the second-floor landing.”

“If she does live here, letting you track her movement would be a violation of her privacy.”

“I don’t think she lives here.”

“But you don’t know for sure.”

“Listen, something’s wrong here.” Hawks hesitated. His eyes were shifty, just like you’d expect a crooked financial adviser’s eyes to be. “These odd things have been happening. This one happened like three or four minutes ago, but maybe she won’t appear on the video. That wouldn’t surprise me.”

Frowning, Vernon said, “So Spangler told you about the missing twenty-three seconds. Well,
I’m
the one said there must’ve been a
heist or maybe somebody killed somebody. If that’s the way it turns out, he’ll say he suspected as much from the start, but it was
me
, not him, who did all the suspecting. If you’re saying there’s another intruder and maybe more funny stuff with the security video, they’re not going to get away with it on
my
watch. Let’s have a look.”

Vernon opted out of real-time images on the center screen and accessed archived video. As there were no cameras in the stairwells, he first called up the basement hall outside the north stairs, going back five minutes to watch for someone to come out of that door. If there was a heist going on, or a murder, or
another
murder, or some other kind of sick criminal shenanigans among the privileged vermin of the Pendleton, his book was going to be not just a hit but also a
huge
best-seller. A juicy
multiple
murder would be wonderful, especially if it involved sexual mutilation or cannibalism, which was probably asking too much, but on the other hand, you never knew what depravity these moneyed elites might indulge in next.

Mickey Dime

In the study, blanket-wrapped dead Jerry stood on the cargo ledge of the hand truck. Three tightly pulled straps bound him to the frame and held him erect.

Mickey considered the corpse from different angles. From every perspective it looked like a stiff in a blanket.

He retrieved two spare pillows from the linen closet. He kept them in a plastic bag with a lemon-scented sachet. He paused to bury his face in each pillow, savoring the fragrance of lemony goose down.

Using duct tape, he fixed the pillows to the microfiber blanket in the area of the dead man’s lower legs to disguise the limbs. He liked the strength, flexibility, and feel of duct tape. Duct tape was sexy.

From a cabinet under the kitchen sink, he fetched a bucket. He jammed the bucket over Jerry’s head and secured it with the tape.

In his bedroom closet were several book boxes containing his beloved mother’s correspondence with other famous intellectuals. Mickey was going to put them in order and donate them to Harvard, where she would be immortalized.

One of the boxes was only a third full. He tenderly removed the letters—which carried a vague trace of her signature perfume, Nightshade—and set them aside. He took the empty carton into the study, where he duct-taped it to Jerry’s chest.

He got another microfiber blanket from the closet. He draped it loosely over the bundled corpse and all of its taped-on accessories. Now dead Jerry looked like nothing more than a precarious stack of junk.

Mickey tipped the hand truck backward, onto its wheels. He rolled it out of the study and through the living room. In the foyer, he parked it near the front door.

In the bedroom, Mickey shrugged into a shoulder holster. He tucked the .32 pistol, with its sound suppressor, into the rig and put on a sport coat tailored to conceal a weapon. He studied himself in the full-length mirror. He looked sexy.

He looked so good, in fact, that he thought he might not have to confine his erotic encounters with Sparkle Sykes to his imagination. If he came on to her, she might find him irresistible. Many women found him irresistible and not because he paid them. They often said that with him it wasn’t only about money, and he knew they were telling the truth. The risk was rejection, which he didn’t handle well. If she turned him down without being polite about it, he would as a matter of pride take what he wanted and clean up afterward. Better to restrain his affair with Sparkle to his imagination.

Mickey left Jerry on the hand truck, in the foyer. He stepped into
the hall, locked the apartment, and set out to kill the guard in the security room.

Logan Spangler

In the kitchen of Earl Blandon’s apartment, Logan gargled repeatedly with some of the senator’s whiskey supply and spat it in the sink, hoping that it would destroy—or at least wash out—any spores that might have gotten into his mouth and throat. He blew his nose so often and so hard that he risked rupturing a blood vessel, hoping to purge most of the tiny seeds from his tingling nasal passages and sinuses.

Logan worried that the spores might be toxic. Perhaps not a lethal poison, but in some way disabling. There were fungi that, when eaten, produced hallucinations and even lasting psychological damage. The bizarre fungi in the half bath seemed like something Alice might have found if she went through a looking glass so dark that the land beyond was nearer to Hell than to Wonderland, and it was difficult to imagine that they might be benign.

He wondered if contact with the spores caused the visions of abandoned and ruined rooms, but that made no sense because the fungi and their spores were
part of
those visions, not of the real world. Nevertheless, the thought persisted. He didn’t consciously summon them, yet images of the pale-green, black-mottled organisms rose in his mind’s eye, though they were not strictly memories of what he’d seen in the half bath because they were in motion. Not merely the swallowing reflex, the peristalsis. Flexing. Coiling. Writhing over and under one another, twining in excited, sinuous abandon. He could not drive the apparitions out of his mind. They became more real than the kitchen in which he stood, as he imagined an LSD experience might press aside reality, though he had never taken hallucinogens. On the clusters of mushrooms, around which serpentine fungi
squirmed, the puckered skin of the caps peeled back, as they had in the half bath, but this time no clouds of spores burst from them. Instead, in this exotic mind movie, from some of the caps rose what appeared to be gray tongues, and from still others ascended yellow eyes on fibrous stalks, as if plants and animals had conjugated, producing demonic children. Abruptly—impossibly—the point of view changed within this delirium, and he found himself not staring at the fungi but peering out from within them, as if the eyes on stalks were his eyes, and he saw himself in his uniform, his face pale and sweaty, his eyes as bleak as an arctic dawn.

He realized that he had returned to the half bath, although he had not been aware of leaving the kitchen. He stood at the sink, gripping the marble countertop with both hands, as if to anchor himself in a turbulence, gazing at the mirror. The wall behind him crawled with repulsive fungi, but the light wasn’t dim like before, and when he turned from the mirror to confront the slithering colony, it wasn’t there in reality. It existed only in the reflection. The looking glass showed Logan as he was now but presented the wall behind him as it had been earlier. The mirror was not the problem. Something had gone wrong with Logan.

A tingling sensation drew his attention to his hands, with which he gripped the countertop. His fingernails were black.

Martha Cupp

By the time Martha entered the living room close on the heels of her sister, Smoke and Ashes had stopped squalling. Although the cats seldom did any climbing, both were atop an étagère filled with porcelain birds. They peeked around the pediment of that cabinet, their orange eyes wide. They were usually as self-satisfied and confident as any cats, but now they appeared to be alarmed.

Addressing the high-placed pair, Martha said, “What’s frightened you?”

“What do you think?” The tone of Edna’s question suggested that they both knew the answer.

“Not Satan,” Martha said impatiently. “With a world to corrupt, why would the prince of Hell be wasting so much time spooking around here—because we make good cakes?”