From the Corner of His Eye (25 page)

Chapter 39

THE DEAD DETECTIVE,
grinning in the moonlight, a pair of silvery quarters gleaming in the sockets once occupied by his eyes.

This was the image that plied the turbulent waters of Junior Cain’s imagination when he sailed out of the driver’s door and came around to face the Studebaker, his heart dropping like an anchor.

His dry tongue, his parched mouth, his desiccated throat felt packed full of sand, and his voice lay buried alive down there.

Even when he saw no cop cadaver, no ghoulish grin, no two-bit eyes, Junior was not immediately relieved. Warily, he circled the car, expecting to find the detective crouching and poised to spring.

Nothing.

The dome light was on in the car, because the driver’s door was standing open.

He didn’t want to lean inside and peer over the front seat. He had no weapon. He would be unbalanced, vulnerable.

Still cautious, Junior approached the back door, the window. Vanadium’s body lay on the car floor, wrapped in the tumbled blanket.

He had not heard the lawman rising up with malevolent intent, as he had imagined. The body had simply rolled off the backseat onto the floor during the too-sharp 180-degree turn.

Briefly, Junior felt humiliated. He wanted to drag the detective out of the car and stomp on his smug, dead face.

That would not be a productive use of his time. Satisfying, but not prudent. Zedd tells us that time is the most precious thing we have, because we’re born with so little of it.

Junior got in the car once more, slammed the door, and said, “Pan-faced, double-chinned, half-bald, puke-collecting creep.”

Surprisingly, he received a lot of gratification from voicing this insult, even though Vanadium was too dead to hear it.

“Fat-necked, splay-nosed, jug-eared, ape-browed, birthmarked freak.”

This was better than taking slow deep breaths. Periodically, on the way to Vanadium’s house, Junior spat out a string of insults, punctuated by obscenities.

He had time to think of quite a few, because he drove five miles per hour below the posted speed limit. He couldn’t risk being stopped for a traffic violation when Thomas Vanadium, the human stump, was dead and bundled in the back.

During the past week, Junior had undertaken quiet background research on the prestidigitator with a badge. The cop was unmarried. He lived alone, so this bold visit entailed no risk.

Junior parked in the two-car garage. No vehicle occupied the second space.

On one wall hung an impressive array of gardening tools. In the corner was a potting bench.

In a cabinet above the bench, Junior found a pair of clean, cotton gardening gloves. He tried them on, and they fit well enough.

He had difficulty picturing the detective puttering in the garden on weekends. Unless there were bodies buried under the roses.

With the detective’s key, he let himself into the house.

While Junior had been hospitalized, Vanadium had searched his place, with or without a warrant. Turnabout was satisfying.

Vanadium clearly spent a lot of time in the kitchen; it was the only room in the house that felt comfortable and lived-in. Lots of culinary gadgets, appliances. Pots and pans hanging from a ceiling rack. A basket of onions, another of potatoes. A grouping of bottles with colorful labels proved to be a collection of olive oils.

The detective fancied himself a cook.

Other rooms were furnished as sparely as those in a monastery. Indeed, the dining room contained nothing whatsoever.

A sofa and one armchair provided the seating in the living room. No coffee table. A small table beside the chair. A wall unit held a fine stereo system and a few hundred record albums.

Junior examined the music collection. The policeman’s taste ran to big-band music and vocalists from the swing era.

Evidently, either Frank Sinatra was an enthusiasm that Victoria and the detective shared, or the nurse purchased some of the crooner’s records expressly for their dinner engagement.

This was not the time to ponder the nature of the relationship between the treacherous Miss Bressler and Vanadium. Junior had a bloody trail to cover, and precious time was ticking away.

Besides, the possibilities repulsed him. The very thought of a splendid-looking woman like Victoria submitting to a grotesque like Vanadium would have withered his soul if he had possessed a soul.

The study was the size of a bathroom. The cramped space barely allowed for a battered pine desk, a chair, and one filing cabinet.

The unmatched suite of bedroom furniture, cheap and scarred, might have been purchased at a thrift shop. A double bed and one nightstand. A small dresser.

As was true of the entire house, the bedroom was immaculate. The wood floor gleamed as though polished by hand. A simple white chenille spread conformed to the bed as smoothly and tautly as the top blanket tucked around a soldier’s barracks bunk.

Knickknacks and mementos were not to be found anywhere in the house. And until now Junior had seen nothing hanging on the barren walls except a calendar in the kitchen.

A cast-bronze figure, fixed to lacquered walnut in want of raw dogwood, suffered above the bed. This crucifix, contrasting starkly with the white walls, reinforced the impression of monastic economy.

In Junior’s estimation, this was not the way that a normal person lived. This was the home of a deranged loner, a dangerously obsessive man.

Having been an object of Thomas Vanadium’s fixation, Junior felt fortunate to have survived. He shuddered.

In the closet, a limited wardrobe did not fully occupy available rod space. On the floor, shoes were neatly arranged toe-to-heel.

The upper shelf of the closet held boxes and two inexpensive suitcases: pressboard laminated with green vinyl. He took down the suitcases and put them on the bed.

Vanadium owned so few clothes that the two bags had sufficient capacity to accommodate half the contents of the closet and dresser.

Junior tossed garments on the floor and across the bed to create the impression that the detective had packed with haste. After being imprudent enough to blast Victoria Bressler five times with his service revolver—perhaps in a jealous rage, or perhaps because he had gone nuts—Vanadium would have been frantic to flee justice.

From the bathroom, Junior gathered an electric razor and toiletries. He added these to the suitcases.

After carrying the two pieces of luggage to the car in the garage, he returned to the study. He sat at the desk and examined the contents of the drawers, then turned to the file cabinet.

He wasn’t entirely sure what all he hoped to find. Perhaps an envelope or a cash box with folding money, which a fleeing murderer would surely pause to take with him. Suspicions might be raised if he left it behind. Perhaps a savings-account passbook.

In the first drawer, he discovered an address book. Logically, Vanadium would have taken this with him, even if on the lam from a murder rap, so Junior tucked it in his jacket pocket.

When his search of the desk drawers was only half completed, the telephone rang—not the usual strident bell, but a modulated electronic
brrrrr
. He had no intention of answering it.

The second ring was followed by a
click,
and then a familiar droning voice said,
“Hello. I’m Thomas Vanadium—
”

Like a spring-loaded novelty snake erupting from a can, Junior exploded up from the chair, nearly knocking it over.

“—but I am not here right now.”

Swinging toward the open door, he saw that the dead detective was true to his word: He wasn’t here.

The voice continued, issuing from a device that stood on the desk beside the phone.
“Please don’t hang up. This is a telephone answering machine. Leave a message after you hear the tone, and I will return your call later.”

The word
Ansaphone
was imprinted on the black plastic casing of the machine.

Junior had heard of this invention, but until now he’d never seen one. He supposed that an obsessive like Vanadium might go to any lengths, including this exotic technology, to avoid missing an important call.

The tone sounded, as promised, and a man’s voice spoke from the box:
“It’s Max. You’re psychic. I found the hospital here. Poor kid had a cerebral hemorrhage, arising from a hypertensive crisis caused by…eclampsia, I think it is. Baby survived. Call me, huh?”

Max hung up. The Ansaphone made a series of small robot-mouse noises and then fell silent.

Amazing.

Junior was tempted to experiment with the controls. Maybe other messages were recorded on the machine. Listening to them would be delicious—even if every one of them turned out to be as meaningless to him as Max’s—a little like browsing through a stranger’s diary.

Finding nothing more of interest in the study, he considered searching the rest of the house.

The night was in flight, however, and he had a lot to do before it swooped straight into morning.

Leave the lamps burning, the door unlocked. A murderer, frantic to vanish while the victim remained undiscovered, wouldn’t be worried about the cost of electricity or about protecting against burglary.

Junior drove boldly away. Zedd counseled boldness.

Because he kept imagining the stealthy sounds of a dead cop rising in vengeance behind him, Junior switched on the radio. He tuned in a station featuring a Top 40 countdown.

The deejay announced song number four for the week: the Beatles’ “She’s a Woman.” The Fab Four filled the Studebaker with music.

Everyone thought the moptops were the coolest thing ever—
ever
—but to Junior, their music was just all right. He wasn’t stirred to sing along, and he didn’t find their stuff particularly danceable.

He was a patriotic guy, and he preferred American rock to the British brand. He had nothing against the English, no prejudices against people of
any
nationality. Nevertheless, he believed that the American Top 40 ought to feature
American
music exclusively.

Crossing Spruce Hills with John, Paul, George, Ringo, and dead Thomas, Junior headed back toward Victoria’s place, where Sinatra was no longer singing.

Number three on the charts was “Mr. Lonely,” by Bobby Vinton, an American talent from Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. Junior sang along.

He cruised past the Bressler residence without slowing.

By this time, Vinton had finished, commercials had run, and the number-two song had started: “Come See About Me,” by the Supremes.

More good American music. The Supremes were Negroes, sure, but Junior was not a bigot. Indeed, he had once made passionate love to a Negro girl.

Harmonizing with Diana Ross, Mary Wilson, and Florence Ballard, he drove to the granite quarry three miles beyond the town limits.

A new quarry, operated by the same company, lay a mile farther north. This was the old one, abandoned after decades of cutting.

Years earlier, a stream had been diverted to fill the vast excavation. Stock fish were added, mostly trout and bass.

As a recreational site, Quarry Lake could be judged only a partial success. During the mining operation, trees were cleared well back from the edge of the dig, so that much of the shore would be unshaded on a hot summer day. And along half the strand, signs were posted warning
Ungraded Shore: Immediate Deep Water
. In places, where lake met land, the bottom lay over a hundred feet below.

The Beatles began singing the number-one song, “I Feel Fine,” as Junior turned off the county highway and followed the lake road northeast around the oil-black water. They had two titles in the
American
top five. In disgust, he switched off the radio.

The previous April, the lads from Liverpool had claimed all
five
of the top five. Real Americans, like the Beach Boys and the Four Seasons, were forced to settle for lower numbers. It made you wonder who had really won the Revolutionary War.

No one in Junior’s circles seemed to care about the crisis in American music. He supposed he had a greater awareness of injustice than did most people.

On this chilly January night, no campers or fishermen had staked claims along the lake. Because the trees were far enough back to be lost in the night, the immediate shore and the pooled blackness that it encircled appeared as desolate as any landscape on a world without an atmosphere.

Too far from Spruce Hills to be a popular make-out spot for teenagers, Quarry Lake was a turnoff for young lovers also because it had a reputation as haunted territory. Over five decades, four quarry workers had died in mining accidents. County lore included stories of ghosts roaming the depths of the excavation before it was flooded—and subsequently the shoreline, after the lake was filled.

Junior intended to add one stocky ghost to the party. Perhaps on a summer night in years to come, at the edge of the lightfall from his Coleman lantern, a fisherman would see a semitransparent Vanadium providing entertainment with an ethereal quarter.

At a point where deep water met the shoreline, Junior drove off the road and onto the strand. He parked twenty feet from the water, facing the lake, and switched off the headlights and the engine.

Leaning across the front seat, he lowered the passenger’s window six inches. Then he lowered the driver’s-side window an equal distance.

He wiped the steering wheel and every surface that he might have touched during the drive from Victoria’s to the detective’s place, where he’d acquired the gardening gloves that he still wore. He got out of the car and, with the door open, wiped the exterior handle.

He doubted the Studebaker would ever be found, but successful men were, without exception, those who paid attention to detail.

For a while he stood beside the sedan, letting his eyes adapt to the gloom.

The night was holding its breath again, the previous breeze now pent up in the breast of darkness.

Having risen higher in the sky during the past couple hours, the gold-coin moon reminted itself as silver, and in the black lake, its reflection rolled across the knuckles of the quiet wavelets.