Fear itself: a novel (16 page)

According to the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism, a Down syndrome reincarnation is meant to be a reward, in the form of a short, restful, and relatively stress-free lifetime, for good karma accrued during a meritorious previous incarnation. DSers, or at least well cared for DSers, tend to have loving, caring natures and sunny dispositions, and for the most part spend less time worrying about matters beyond their control than the more able-minded general public—not a bad description of an enlightened being, according to the Tibetans.

From that point of view, Missy Childs, sheltered, pampered, and privately tutored, must have been a veritable saint in her previous lifetime. Saintliness, however, is not exactly a survival skill in the Berkeley flats, and enlightened or not, as a mentally disabled white female, Missy could be said to have been on borrowed time, statistically, from the moment she stepped through Ganny’s front door.

The boys had probably seen her coming a block away. There were three of them, hanging out in front of a mom-and-pop liquor store, decked out in Blood summer wear in honor of the unseasonably warm weather: backward Raiders caps, oversize black polo shirts, baggy-saggy black Ben Davis cutoffs, high black socks, red-trimmed Airs; they also wore red bandannas tucked discreetly into their back pockets—any more obvious gang styling might have gotten them picked up by the Berkeley cops on a loitering-with-intent-to-associate rap.

The two twelve-year-old baby gangstas were cutting school; the thirteen-year-old had already been expelled. They were bored, they were broke, and Missy must have looked like a godsend, waddling up the street in her pigeon-toed gait, with her pink plastic purse over one arm and a birdcage dangling from the other. Simultaneously, as if at some undiscernible signal, the three boys hopped off the low concrete retaining wall next to the sidewalk outside the mom-and-pop (the entrance to which was not only barred, but protected by a pair of concrete pylons to prevent drive-through break-ins) and fell into step behind Missy. “Hey, you a retard?”

“Sticks and stones,” said Missy, without turning around. She was dog-tired already, her feet hurt, she had sweated through her T-shirt, and the cage weighed a ton (she knew by now that it had been a mistake to bring it along—all the water had already sloshed out of the little dish clipped to the bars, and Tweety herself was clinging desperately to her little trapeze as it swung to and fro), but Missy’s instinct told her to keep walking. “Go away. Leave me alone.”

“Hoo hoo ha ha.” The oldest boy mocked her speech. “And what you doin’ wearin’ ’Didas ’round here?” Only Crips and Crip satellites wore Adidas.

The maneuver, when it came, was so slickly executed that to an observer—and fortunately for Missy, there had been an observer—it looked like one of those nature documentaries where a pack of wolves cut off a lame caribou from the herd. As they passed a boarded-up vacant lot, one of the boys darted around to get in front of Missy, slowing his pace to block her way, while the second closed up behind her and the boy to her left eased her to the right, through a gap in the board fence.

And before Missy could even call out, one boy was behind her with one hand pinning both wrists against the small of her back and the other hand across her mouth, the second boy had her purse, and the third had begun twirling the birdcage over his head, preparing to launch it across the weed-strewn lot like an Olympic hammer thrower.

Afterward, she would remember everything about that moment: the heat, the distant traffic, the weeds, the broken glass, the sunbaked earth of the vacant lot, the whirling cage, the crows on the telephone line, the buzzing blue sky, the sweat running down her face, the boy’s tense little body pressing up against her from behind, the salt taste of his hot little hand covering her mouth—it all seemed terribly real and so terribly important that she almost forgot to be afraid.

“Stall it out right there, youngbloods.” A man’s voice, from the other side of the fence.

“Oh, shit, it’s Obie,” whispered the boy holding Missy. The boy holding her purse quickly shifted it behind his back, while the boy swinging Tweety’s cage over his head lurched comically around the lot trying to arrest its momentum as the biggest, second-handsomest black man Missy had ever seen squeezed himself sideways through the gap in the fence.

“Let her go, Jerome.” He was wearing a black sweat suit, his gray hair was cut short and curly like Dennis Richmond’s, and his skin was a deep chocolate brown.

“Yeah, lemme go, you brat,” said Missy, when the hand came off her mouth; her arms were still pinned behind her.

“Naw, Obie, naw, we—”

“Answer up, blood.” The way the man said it—patiently, without raising his voice—reminded Missy of Simon: the quieter he said something, the quicker you’d better mind.

And sure enough, the boy released her. Missy tugged angrily at the neck of her T-shirt, which was all rucked up and twisted around. “Gimme.”

The boys started laughing as she reached for the cage; the man silenced them with a glare. “You heard the lady.”

“I heard
humma humma,”
said the boy holding the cage. “Thass what
I
heard.”

A moment later the cage was on the ground and the soles of the boy’s Airs were dangling a foot above the weeds and the dirt and the broken glass.

“Work the mind before you work the mouth, baby g.” The old lion gave the cub an admonitory shake, then set him down gently.

“We was just—”

“I know what you was just. You a got-damn disgrace to the race, all a you.” He handed the cage to Missy. “You okay, honey?”

Dazed by all the sudden twists and turns her day had been taking, Missy managed a nod. She didn’t feel very okay, though. She couldn’t catch her breath and her heart was beating fast and fluttery in her chest, like Tweety’s heart.

“Okay, you run along, then,” said the man. “I’ll watch your back.”

Missy wasn’t sure why he’d want to watch her back, but she didn’t wait around to ask. She ducked through the hole in the fence and started walking. She walked and walked and walked, and by the time she realized that the nasty little boys had taken her purse—the purse containing not just her twenty-dollar bill and her lucky penny from Cannery Row that Dorie had given her, the one with the otter stamped on it, but also the card she was supposed to show strangers if she was ever lost, the card with her address and her phone number, neither of which she had ever quite managed to commit to memory—she had no idea how to make it back to the vacant lot.

Or to Ganny’s, for that matter. Missy had no idea how long she wandered with that heavy cage before she found herself passing a familiar-looking fence overgrown with purple morning glories. Two, three hours? Missy wasn’t real good with time—but then, she’d never had to be. There’d always been someone to tell her when it was time to do something, or stop doing it. All she knew was that she was tired and sunburned and hungry and thirsty and her feet hurt, but she couldn’t bring herself to go inside that house again and be all alone with Ganny.

She did make it as far as the kitchen, where she leaned over the sink and tilted her head and drank water directly out of the faucet until her tummy felt as if it were going to burst. But when she turned the water off, she heard, or thought she could hear, the flies buzzing in the bedroom, and decided it would be better to take Tweety, who’d been lying motionless on the paper in the bottom of the cage ever since the vacant lot, and go back outside to wait for Simon in the garden. She’d fallen asleep in the shade of the fence, under the sunflowers, and awakened to find Simon kneeling over her, crying with joy.

“I knew you’d come,” she’d whispered through her cracked lips.

And now, she was home again, with sunlight pouring in like gold through the tall windows of the living room. From her nifty new hospital bed she could see most all of Berkeley and, beyond it, the dark, sparkling waters of the bay; that city of white towers gleaming in the distance was San Francisco. It looked like a toy city from way up here; it looked like a whole toy world.

As for the new day nurse, Missy could take her or leave her. She was pretty and she had a funny name—Missy liked that about her—but she was mean about food. When Missy wanted an after-lunch snack, Nurse Apple said she’d already
had
lunch. Well, duh!

Something else Nurse Apple was mean about: she wanted to get rid of poor Tweety’s empty cage—she said it was full of germs. And because of Missy’s speech problems it would have been impossible for Missy to explain to her why she wanted the cage nearby for a while, even if she’d fully understood it herself. As it was, all she knew was that when things die, you have to have something to remember them by, something to touch and smell, or else they disappear and you can’t remember what they were like even if you have a picture—you can only remember the picture.

Like with her mother: all Missy had of her was her hairbrush. It was slender and dainty and had a few silky-soft hairs caught in the bristles, and when Missy held it next to her cheek, even though Simon said it was impossible because she was too little when their mother went away, she remembered not just that Mommy looked like Audrey Hepburn, but that she smelled like powder and her hair was soft and her touch so gentle that when she held Missy in her arms, Missy felt as if she were floating.

And all Missy had left of Tweety was the cage. Even though its emptiness made her a little sad, it helped Missy remember how yellow Tweety had been, and how prettily she sang, and the way she crooked her head sometimes as though she were asking Missy if she still loved her. Which was why, when Nurse Apple tried to take it away, Missy had to throw a royal until they came to what Nurse Apple called an arrangement: Missy could keep the cage by her bed if she let Nurse Apple wash it down real good first.

A few minutes after Nurse Apple took the cage into the downstairs bathroom, the doorbell rang. Missy knew she wasn’t supposed to get out of bed, but she didn’t get to answer the door very often and wasn’t about to let an opportunity like this pass her by. She slipped on her pink chenille robe; the bell rang again as she padded barefoot into the foyer.

“Hold your horses,” she called, fumbling with the lock. “Just hold your horses.”

After Pender’s last physical, his doctor had suggested he take up smoking. Why would I want to do that? Pender asked. You’re a dangerously obese, hypertensive, fifty-five year old man with a drinking problem, the doctor had replied—I just thought you might want to go for the perfecta.

Six weeks later, trudging up a steep blacktop driveway on a warm autumn day, Pender had occasion to remember those words. By the time he reached the top, his yellow Ban Lon polo shirt was clinging like a damp second skin, he could feel his heart pounding, and if a genie had popped out of the azalea bushes lining the driveway and offered him three wishes, the first one would have been for an oxygen mask.

Not that he regretted his decision to ditch Sid at the airport, impulsive though it may have seemed. The trigger had been the telephone call from Linda Abruzzi. Without access to the PWSPD Association, Pender knew, the investigation was back to square one. He’d had a few suggestions for Linda—surely the hotel where the convention had been held would have, if not a list of attendees, then at least a roster of hotel guests for the weekend in question. And with the phobia.com address currently unoccupied, perhaps she could get Thom to arrange some sort of pop-up that would alert visitors or redirect them to an FBI site, while she herself worked the Las Vegas, Fresno, and Chicago police departments to get them to reopen their investigations in light of recent events.

But that was about all Pender could come up with—nothing case-breaking, nothing she wouldn’t have figured out on her own eventually. No, at this point, if the case was going to be broken, it was going to be broken by good old-fashioned police work. The Bureau already had an Evidence Response Team with a good criminalist going over Dorie’s house in Carmel—so the question Pender had asked himself, as he and Sid were waiting in the bar for their flight to be called, was what, if anything, could he bring to the party?

The answer wasn’t long in coming. He’d interviewed Dorie Bell—he had the name of at least one living PWSPD convention attendee. And according to Dorie, that same attendee who lived in nearby Berkeley had helped finance the convention—he had to know more about the PWSPD Association than Dorie had.

Unless of course the association was nothing but an Internet dummy, something the killer had set up in order to provide himself with a pool of victims. Which, Pender realized, would make the man who was financing the operation either a complete sucker, an accomplice, or the killer himself. Which meant in turn that it was high time somebody interviewed Mr. Simon Childs, of Berkeley. Somebody cautious enough to show up on Mr. Childs’s doorstep without advance notice, somebody experienced enough to ascertain what Mr. Childs knew without alerting him to the fact that he was under suspicion.

Pender had nominated himself, of course—and there were no other candidates.

The address had been in the phone book: 2500 Grizzly Rock Road, Berkeley. The house was built of weathered stone and dark timbers. The front door, rough-planed black oak, was opened by a short, fat, balding woman wearing footed pink pajamas under a pink robe. Her complexion was mottled, white as a chronic shut-in around the eyes, brick-red, ointment-smeared patches of sunburn on her cheeks and brow, and she appeared to be almost as out of breath as Pender.

“Heyyo.” Deep voice, unmodulated. Down Syndromer—this would be the sister Dorie had mentioned. Older than Pender had pictured—but then, DSers tended to live a lot longer nowadays. “Hi. Is Simon home?”

And although he couldn’t comprehend all that she said next, thanks to the time he’d spent with his sister Ida’s son, Stan, who’d also survived to middle age but had passed away a few years ago, Pender understood enough of it that when she concluded by pointing downward, he understood. “Simon’s in the basement?”