From the Corner of His Eye (22 page)

If the directory proved to be of no help, Junior would proceed next to the registry office at the county courthouse, to review the records of births going back to the turn of the century if necessary. Bartholomew, of course, might not have been born in the county, might have moved here as a child or an adult. If he owned property, he’d show up on the register of deeds. Whether a landowner or not, if he did his civic duty every two years, he would appear on the voter rolls.

Junior no longer had a job, but he had a
mission.

Saturday and Sunday, between sessions with the directory, Junior cruised around the county on a series of pleasure drives—testing the theory that the maniac cop was no longer following him. Apparently, Simon Magusson was correct: The case had been closed.

As woebegone a widower as anyone could expect, Junior spent every night home alone. By Sunday, he’d slept without companionship eight nights since being discharged from the hospital.

He was a virile young man, desired by many, and life was short. Poor Naomi, her lovely face and her look of shock still fresh in his memory, was a constant reminder of how suddenly the end could come. No one was guaranteed tomorrow. Seize the day.

Caesar Zedd recommended not merely seizing the day but
devouring
it. Chew it up,
feed
on the day, swallow the day whole. Feast, said Zedd,
feast,
approach life as a gourmet and as a glutton, because he who practices restraint will have stored up no sustaining memories when famine inevitably comes.

By Sunday evening, a combination of factors—deep commitment to the philosophy of Zedd, explosive testosterone levels, boredom, self-pity, and a desire to be a risk-taking man of action once more—motivated Junior to splash a little Hai Karate behind each ear and go courting. Shortly after sunset, with a single red rose and a bottle of Merlot, he set off for Victoria Bressler’s place.

He phoned her before leaving, to be sure she was home. She didn’t work weekend shifts at the hospital; but maybe she would have gone out on this night off. When she answered, he recognized her seductive voice—and devilishly muttered, “Wrong number.”

Ever the romantic, he wanted to surprise her. Voilà! Flowers, wine, and
moi.
Since their electrifying connection in the hospital, she had been yearning for him; but she wouldn’t expect a visit for a few weeks yet. He was eager to see her face brighten with delight.

During the past week, he had ferreted out what he could about the nurse. She was thirty, divorced, without kids, and lived alone.

He had been surprised to learn her age. She didn’t appear to be that old. Thirty or not, Victoria was unusually attractive.

Charmed by the vulnerability of the young, he’d never slept with an older woman. The prospect intrigued him. She would have tricks in her repertoire that younger women were too inexperienced to know.

Junior could only imagine how flattered Victoria would be to receive the attentions of a twenty-three-year-old stud, flattered and
grateful.
When he contemplated all the ways she could express that gratitude, there was barely enough room behind the wheel of the Suburban for him
and
his manhood.

In spite of the urgency of his desire, he followed a circuitous route to Victoria’s, doubling back on himself twice, watching for surveillance as he drove. If he were being followed, his tail was an invisible man in a ghost car.

Nevertheless, being cautious even as he seized the day—or the night, in this case—he parked a short distance from his destination, on a parallel street. He walked the last three blocks.

The January air was crisp, fragrant with evergreens and with the faint salty scent of the distant sea. A curiously yellow moon glowered like a malevolent eye, studying him from between ragged ravelings of dirty clouds.

Victoria lived on the northeast edge of Spruce Hills, where streets petered into country lanes. Here the houses tended to be more rustic, built on larger and less formally landscaped lots than those closer to the center of town, and set back farther from the street.

During Junior’s brief stroll, the sidewalk ended, giving way to the graveled shoulder of the road. He saw no one on foot, and no vehicles passed him.

At this extreme end of town, no streetlamps lit the pavement. With only moonlight to reveal him, he wasn’t likely to be recognized if anyone happened to glance out a window.

If Junior was not discreet, and if gossip about the widower Cain and the sexy nurse began to circulate, Vanadium would be on the case again even if it had been closed. The cop was sick, hateful, driven by unknowable inner demons. Although he might for the moment have been reined in by those in higher office, mere gossip of a spicy nature would be excuse enough for him to open the file again, which he’d surely do without informing his superiors.

Victoria lived in a narrow two-story clapboard residence with a steeply pitched roof. A pair of overlarge dormers, projecting to an unusual degree, beetled over the front porch. The place belonged in a block of row homes in a working-class neighborhood in some drab eastern city, not here.

Golden lamplight gilded the front windows downstairs. He would sit with Victoria on the living-room sofa, sipping wine as they got to know each other. She might tell him to call her Vicky, and maybe he’d ask her to call him Eenie, the affectionate name Naomi had given him when he wouldn’t tolerate Enoch. Soon, they would be necking like two crazy kids. Junior would disrobe her on the sofa, caressing her smooth pliant body, her skin buttery in the lamplight, and then he would carry her, naked, to the dark bedroom upstairs.

Avoiding the graveled driveway, on which he was more likely to scuff his freshly polished loafers, he approached the house across the lawn, beneath the moon-sifting branches of a great pine that made itself useless for Christmas by spreading as majestically as an oak.

He supposed Victoria might have a visitor. Perhaps a relative or a girlfriend. Not a man. No. She knew who her man was, and she would have no other while she waited for the chance to surrender to him and to consummate the relationship that had begun with the spoon and the ice in the hospital ten days previously.

Most likely, if Victoria was entertaining, the visitor’s car would have been parked in the driveway.

Junior considered slipping quietly around the house, peering in windows, to be sure she was alone, before approaching directly. If she saw him, however, his wonderful surprise would be spoiled.

Nothing in life was risk free, so he hesitated only a moment at the foot of the porch steps before climbing them and knocking on the door.

Music played within. An up-tempo number. Possibly swing. He couldn’t quite identify the tune.

As Junior was about to knock again, the door flew inward, and over Sinatra having fun with “When My Sugar Walks Down the Street,” Victoria said, “You’re early, I didn’t hear your car—” She was speaking as she pulled the door open, and she cut herself off in midsentence when she stepped up to the threshold and saw who stood before her.

She looked surprised, all right, but her expression wasn’t the one that Junior had painted on the canvas of his imagination. Her surprise had no delight in it, and she didn’t at once break into a radiant smile.

For an instant, she appeared to be frowning. Then he realized this couldn’t be a frown. It must be a smoldering look of desire.

In tailored black slacks and a form-hugging, apple-green cotton sweater, Victoria Bressler fulfilled all the voluptuous promise that Junior had suspected lay under her looser-fitting nurse’s uniform. The V-necked sweater suggested a glorious depth of cleavage, though only a tasteful hint of it was on display; nothing about this beauty could be called cheap.

“What do you want?” she asked.

Her voice was flat and a little hard. Another man might have mistaken her tone for disapproval, for impatience, even for quiet anger.

Junior knew that she must be teasing him. Her sense of play was delicious. Such deviltry in her scintillant blue eyes, such sauciness.

He held forth the single red rose. “For you. Not that it compares. No flower could.”

Still relishing her little pretense of rejection, Victoria did not touch the rose. “What kind of woman do you think I am?”

“The exquisite kind,” he replied, glad that he had read so many books on the art of seduction and therefore knew precisely the right thing to say.

Grimacing, she said, “I told the police about your disgusting little come-on with the ice spoon.”

Thrusting the red rose at her again, insistently pressing it against her hand to distract her, Junior swung the Merlot, and just as Sinatra sang the word
sugar
with a bounce, the bottle smacked Victoria in the center of her forehead.

Chapter 33

OUR LADY OF SORROWS,
quiet and welcoming in the Bright Beach night, humble in dimension, without groin vaults and grand columns and cavernous transepts, restrained in ornamentation, was as familiar to Maria Elena Gonzalez—and as comforting—as her own home. God was everywhere in the world, but here in particular. Maria felt happier the instant she stepped through the entrance door into the narthex.

The Benediction service had concluded, and the worshipers had departed. Gone, too, were the priest and the altar boys.

After adjusting the hairpin that held her lace mantilla, Maria passed from the narthex into the nave. She dipped two fingers in the holy water that glimmered in the marble font, and crossed herself.

The air was spicy with incense and with the fragrance of the lemon-oil polish used on the wooden pews.

At the front, a soft spotlight focused on the life-size crucifix. The only additional illumination came from the small bulbs over the stations of the cross, along both side walls, and from the flickering flames in the ruby glass containers on the votive-candle rack.

She proceeded down the shadowy center aisle, genuflected at the chancel railing, and went to the votive rack.

Maria could afford a donation of only twenty-five cents per candle, but she gave fifty, stuffing five one-dollar bills and two quarters into the offering box.

After lighting eleven candles, all in the name of Bartholomew Lampion, she took from a pocket the torn playing cards. Four knaves of spades. Friday night, she had ripped the cards in thirds and had been carrying the twelve pieces with her since then, waiting for this quiet Sunday evening.

Her belief in fortune-telling and in the curious ritual she was about to undertake weren’t condoned by the Church. Mysticism of this sort was, in fact, considered to be a sin, a distraction from faith and a perversion of it.

Maria, however, lived comfortably with both the Catholicism and the occultism in which she had been raised. In Hermosillo, Mexico, the latter had been nearly as important to the spiritual life of her family as had been the former.

The Church nourished the soul, while the occult nourished the imagination. In Mexico, where physical comforts were often few and hope of a better life in this world was hard won, both the soul and the imagination must be fed if life was to be livable.

With a prayer to the Holy Mother, Maria held one third of a knave of spades to the bright flame of the first candle. When it caught fire, she dropped the fragment into the votive glass, and as it was consumed, she said aloud, “For Peter,” referring to the most prominent of the twelve apostles.

She repeated this ritual eleven more times—“For Andrew, for James, for John”—frequently glancing into the nave behind her, to be sure that she was unobserved.

She had lighted one candle for each of eleven apostles, none for the twelfth, Judas, the betrayer. Consequently, after burning a fragment of the cards in each votive glass, she was left with one piece.

Ordinarily, she would have returned to the first of the candles and offered a second fragment to Saint Peter. In this case, however, she entrusted it to the least known of the apostles, because she was sure that he must have special significance in this matter.

With all twelve fragments destroyed, the curse should have been lifted from little Bartholomew: the threat of the unknown, violent enemy who was represented by the four knaves. Somewhere in the world, an evil man existed who would one day have killed Barty, but now his journey through life would take him elsewhere. Eleven saints had been given twelve shares of responsibility for lifting this curse.

Maria’s belief in the efficacy of this ritual was not as strong as her faith in the Church, but nearly so. As she leaned over the votive glass, watching the final fragment dissolve into ashes, she felt a terrible weight lifting from her.

When she left Our Lady of Sorrows a few minutes later, she was convinced that the knave of spades—whether a human monster or the devil himself—would never cross paths with Barty Lampion.

Chapter 34

DOWN SHE WENT,
abruptly and hard, with a clatter and thud, her natural grace deserting her in the fall, though she regained it in her posture of collapse.

Victoria Bressler lay on the floor of the small foyer, left arm extended past her head, palm revealed, as though she were waving at the ceiling, right arm across her body in such a way that her hand cupped her left breast. One leg was extended straight, the other knee drawn up almost demurely. If she had been nude, lying against a backdrop of rumpled sheets or autumn leaves, or meadow grass, she would have had the perfect posture for a
Playboy
centerfold.

Junior was less surprised by his sudden assault on Victoria than by the failure of the bottle to break. He was, after all, a new man since his decision on the fire tower, a man of action, who did what was necessary. But the bottle was
glass,
and he swung forcefully, hard enough that it smacked her forehead with a sound like a mallet cracking against a croquet ball, hard enough to put her out in an instant, maybe even hard enough to kill her, yet the Merlot remained ready to drink.

He stepped into the house, quietly closed the front door, and examined the bottle. The glass was thick, especially at the base, where a large punt—a deep indentation—encouraged sediment to gather along the rim rather than across the entire bottom of the bottle. This design feature secondarily contributed to the strength of the container. Evidently he had hit her with the bottom third of the bottle, which could most easily withstand the blow.

A pink spot in the center of Victoria’s forehead marked the point of impact. Soon it would be an ugly bruise. The skull bone did not appear to have been cratered.

As hard of head as she was hard of heart, Victoria had not sustained serious brain damage, only a concussion.

On the stereo in the living room, Sinatra sang “It Was a Very Good Year.”

Judging by the evidence, the nurse was home alone, but Junior raised his voice above the music and called out, “Hello? Is anyone here?”

Although no one answered, he quickly searched the small house.

A lamp with a fringed silk shade spread small feathery wings of golden light over one corner of the living room. On the coffee table were three decorative blown-glass oil lamps, ashimmer.

In the kitchen, a delicious aroma wafted from the oven. On the stove stood a large pot over a low flame, and nearby was pasta to be added to the water when it came to a boil.

Dining room. Two place settings at one end of the table. Wineglasses. Two ornate pewter candlesticks, candles not yet lit.

Junior had the picture now. Clear as Kodachrome. Victoria was in a relationship, and she had come on to him in the hospital not because she was looking for more action, but because she was a tease. One of those women who thought it was funny to get a man’s juices up and then leave him stewing in them.

She was a duplicitous bitch, too. After coming on to him, after teasing a reaction out of him, she had run off and gossiped about him as though
he
had instigated the seduction. Worse, to make herself feel important, she had told the police her skewed version, surely with much colorful embellishment.

A half bath downstairs. Two bedrooms and a full bath on the upper floor. All deserted.

In the foyer again. Victoria hadn’t moved.

Junior knelt beside her and pressed two fingers to the carotid artery in her neck. She had a pulse, maybe a little irregular but strong.

Even though he now knew what a hateful person the nurse was, he remained strongly attracted to her. He was not the kind of man, however, who would take advantage of an unconscious woman.

Besides, she was clearly expecting a guest to arrive soon.

You’re early, I didn’t hear your car,
she’d said as she answered his knock, before realizing that it was Junior.

He stepped to the front door, which was framed by curtained sidelights. He drew one of the curtains aside and peered out.

The mummified moon had unwound itself from its rags of embalming clouds. Its pocked face glowered in full brightness on the spreading branches of the pine, on the yard, and on the graveled driveway.

No car.

In the living room, he removed a decorative pillow from the sofa. He carried it into the foyer.

I told the police about your disgusting little come-on with the ice spoon.

He assumed that she hadn’t phoned the police to make a formal report. No need to go out of her way to slander Junior when Thomas Vanadium had been prowling the hospital at all hours of the day and night, ready to lend an ear to any falsehood about him, as long as it made him appear to be a sleazeball and a wife killer.

More likely than not, Victoria spoke directly to the maniac detective. Even if she reported her sordid fabrications to another officer, it would have gotten back to Vanadium, and the cop would have sought her out at once to hear her filth firsthand, whereupon she would have enhanced her story until it sounded as though Junior had grabbed her knockers and had tried to shove his tongue down her throat.

Now, if Victoria reported to Vanadium that Junior had shown up at her door with a red rose and a bottle of Merlot and with romance on his mind, the demented detective would be on his ass again for sure. Vanadium might think that the nurse had misinterpreted the business with the ice spoon, but the intent in this instance would be unmistakable, and the crusading cop—the holy fool—would never give up.

Victoria moaned but did not stir.

Nurses were supposed to be angels of mercy. She had shown him no mercy. And she was certainly no angel.

Kneeling at her side, Junior placed the decorative pillow over her lovely face and pressed down firmly while Frank Sinatra finished “Hello, Young Lovers,” and sang perhaps half of “All or Nothing at All.” Victoria never regained consciousness, never had a chance to struggle.

After checking her carotid artery and detecting no pulse, Junior returned to the sofa in the living room. He fluffed the little pillow and left it precisely as he had found it.

He felt no urge whatsoever to puke.

Yet he didn’t fault himself for a lack of sensitivity. He’d met this woman only once before. He wasn’t emotionally invested in her as he had been in sweet Naomi.

He wasn’t wholly without feeling, of course. A poignant current of sadness eddied in his heart, a sadness at the thought of the love and the happiness that he and the nurse might have known together. But it was her choice, after all, to play the tease and to deal with him so cruelly.

When Junior tried to lift Victoria, her voluptuousness lost its appeal. As dead weight, she was heavier than he expected.

In the kitchen, he sat her in a chair and let her slump forward over the breakfast table. With her arms folded, with her head on her arms and turned to one side, she appeared to be resting.

Heart racing, but reminding himself that strength and wisdom arose from a calm mind, Junior stood in the center of the small kitchen, slowly turning to study every angle of the room.

With the dead woman’s guest on the way, minutes were precious. Attention to detail was essential, however, regardless of how much time was required to properly stage the little tableau that might disguise murder as a domestic accident.

Unfortunately, Caesar Zedd had not written a self-help book on how to commit homicide and escape the consequences thereof, and as before, Junior was entirely on his own.

With haste and an economy of movement, he set to work.

First he tore two paper towels from a wall-mounted dispenser and held one in each hand, as makeshift gloves. He was determined to leave no fingerprints.

Dinner was cooking in the upper of the two ovens. He switched on the bottom oven, setting it at
warm,
and dropped open the door.

In the dining room, he picked up the two dinner plates from the place settings. He returned with them to the kitchen and put them in the lower oven, as though Victoria were using it as a plate warmer.

He left the oven door open.

In the refrigerator, he found a stick of butter in a container with a clear plastic lid. He took the container to the cutting board beside the sink, to the left of the cooktop, and opened it.

A knife already lay on the counter nearby. He used it to slice four pats of butter, yellow and creamy, each half an inch thick, off the end of the stick.

Leaving three of the pats in the container, he carefully placed the fourth on the vinyl-tile floor.

The paper towels were spotted with butter. He crumpled them and threw them in the trash.

He intended to mash the sole of Victoria’s right shoe in the pat of butter and leave a long smear on the floor, as though she slipped on it and fell toward the ovens.

Finally, holding her head in both hands, he would have to smash her brow with considerable force into the corner of the open oven door, being careful to place the point of impact precisely where the bottle had struck her.

He supposed that the Scientific Investigation Division of the Oregon State Police might find at least one reason to be suspicious of the tragic scenario that he was creating. He didn’t know much about the technology that police might employ at a crime scene, and he knew even less about forensic pathology. He was just doing the best job he could.

The Spruce Hills Police Department was far too small to have a full-blown Scientific Investigation Division. And if the tableau presented to them appeared convincing enough, they might accept the death as a freak accident and never turn to the state police for technical assistance.

If the state police
did
get involved, and even if they found evidence that the accident was staged, they would most likely point the finger of blame at the man for whom Victoria had been preparing dinner.

Nothing remained to be done but to press her shoe in the butter and hammer her head into the corner of the oven door.

He was about to lift the body out of the chair when he heard the car in the driveway. He might not have caught the sound of the engine so distinctly and so early if the stereo had not been in the process of changing albums.

No time now to arrange the corpse for viewing.

One crisis after another. This new life as a man of action was not dull.

In adversity lies great opportunity, as Caesar Zedd teaches, and always, of course, there is a bright side even when you aren’t able immediately to see it.

Junior hurried out of the kitchen and along the hallway to the front door. He ran silently, landing on his toes like a dancer. His natural athletic grace was one of the things that drew so many women to him.

Sad symbols of a romance not meant to be, the red rose and the bottle of wine lay on the floor of the foyer. With the corpse gone, no signs of violence remained.

As Sinatra began to sing “I’ll Be Seeing You,” Junior stepped around the bloom and the Merlot. He cautiously peeled back two inches of the curtain at one of the sidelights.

A sedan had come to a stop in the graveled driveway, over to the right of the house, almost out of view. As Junior watched, the headlights were doused. The engine shut off. The driver’s door opened. A man got out of the car, a shadowy figure in the fearsome yellow moonlight. The dinner guest.