From the Corner of His Eye (49 page)

Slow deep breaths.

He took a long shower, as hot as he could tolerate, until his muscles felt as soft as butter.

For breakfast, he avoided sugar. He ate cold roast beef and drank milk laced with a double shot of brandy.

The weather was good, so he went for a walk, though he crossed the street repeatedly to avoid passing newspaper-vending machines.

Shopping for fashion accessories relaxed Junior. He spent a few hours browsing for tie chains, silk pocket squares, and unusual belts.

Riding the up escalator in a department store, between the second and third floors, he saw Vanadium on the down escalator, fifteen feet away.

For a spirit, the maniac lawman appeared disturbingly solid. He wore a tweed sports jacket and slacks that, as far as Junior could tell, were the same clothes he’d worn on the night he died. Apparently, even the ghosts of Sklent’s atheistic spiritual world were stuck for eternity in the clothes in which they had perished.

Junior glimpsed Vanadium first in profile—and then, as the cop rode down and away, only the back of his head. He hadn’t seen this man in almost three years, yet he was instantly certain that this was no coincidental lookalike. Here went the filthy-scabby-monkey spirit itself.

Upon reaching the third floor, Junior ran to the head of the down escalator.

The stumpy ghost departed the sliding stairs at the second floor and walked off into women’s sportswear.

Junior descended the escalator two steps at a time, not content to let it carry him along at its own pace. When he reached the second floor, however, he found that Vanadium’s ghost had done what ghosts do best: faded away.

Abandoning his search for the perfect tie chain but determined to remain calm, Junior decided to have lunch at the St. Francis Hotel.

The sidewalks were crowded with businessmen in suits, hippies in flamboyant garb, groups of smartly attired suburban ladies in town to shop, and the usual forgettably dressed rabble, some smiling and some surly and some mumbling but as blank-eyed as mannequins, who might be hired assassins or poets, for all he knew, eccentric millionaires in mufti or carnival geeks who earned their living by biting heads off live chickens.

Even on good days, when he wasn’t hassled by the spirits of dead cops and wasn’t prepping himself to commit murder, Junior sometimes grew uncomfortable in these bustling crowds. This afternoon, he felt especially claustrophobic as he shouldered through the throng—and admittedly paranoid, too.

He warily surveyed those around him as he walked, and looked over his shoulder from time to time. On one of these backward glances, he was unnerved but not surprised to see Vanadium’s specter.

The ghost cop was forty feet behind him, beyond ranks of other pedestrians, every one of whom might as well have been faceless now, smooth and featureless from brow to chin, because suddenly Junior could see no countenance other than that of the walking dead man. The haunting visage bobbed up and down as the grim spirit strode along, vanishing and reappearing and then vanishing again among all the bobbing and swaying heads of the intervening multitudes.

Junior picked up his pace, pushing through the crowd, repeatedly glancing back, and although he caught only quick squints of the dead cop’s face, he could tell that something was terribly wrong with it. Never a candidate for matinee-idol status, Vanadium looked markedly worse than before. The port-wine birthmark still pooled around his right eye. His features were not merely pan-flat and plain, as they had been before, but were…
distorted.

Bashed. His face appeared to have been bashed. Pewter-pounded.

At the next corner, instead of continuing south, Junior angled aggressively in front of oncoming pedestrians, stepped off the curb, and headed east, traversing the intersection against the advice of a Don’t Walk sign. Horns blared, a city bus nearly flattened him, but he made the crossing unscathed.

As he stepped out of the street, Don’t Walk shortened to Walk, and when he checked for pursuit, he found it. Here came Vanadium, who would have been shivering in want of a topcoat if his flesh had been real.

Junior continued east, weaving through the horde, convinced that he could hear the ghost cop’s footsteps distinct from the tramping noise made by the legions of the living, penetrating the grumble and the bleat of traffic. Hollow, the dead man’s tread echoed not only in Junior’s ears but also through his body, in his bones.

Part of him knew this sound was his heartbeat, not the footfalls of an otherworldly pursuer, but
that
part of him wasn’t dominant at the moment. He moved faster, not exactly running, but hurrying like a man late for an appointment.

Every time Junior glanced back, Vanadium was following his wake through the throng. Stocky but almost gliding. Grim and grimmer. Hideous. And closer.

An alley opened on Junior’s left. He stepped out of the crowd, into this narrow serviceway shaded by tall buildings, and walked even more briskly, still not quite running because he continued to believe that he possessed the unshakable calm and self-control of a highly self-improved man.

At the midpoint of the alleyway, he slowed and looked over his shoulder.

Flanked by Dumpsters and trash cans, through steam rising out of grates in the pavement, past parked delivery trucks, here came the dead cop. Running.

Suddenly, even in the heart of a great city, the alleyway seemed as lonely as an English moor, and not a smart place to seek asylum from a vengeful spirit. Casting aside all pretense of self-control, Junior sprinted for the next street, where the sight of multitudes, swarming in winter sunshine, filled him not with paranoia or even uneasiness, anymore, but with an unprecedented feeling of brotherhood.

Of the things you couldn’t have seen coming, I’m the worst.

The heavy hand would come down on his shoulder, he would be spun around against his will, and there before him would be those nailhead eyes, the port-wine stain, facial bones crushed by a bludgeon….

He reached the end of the alleyway, stumbled into the stream of pedestrians, nearly knocked over an elderly Chinese man, turned, and discovered…no Vanadium.

Vanished.

Dumpsters and delivery trucks hulked against the building walls. Steam billowed out of street grates. The gray shadows were no longer disturbed by a running shade in a tweed sports jacket.

Too rattled to want lunch at the St. Francis Hotel or anywhere else, Junior returned to his apartment.

Arriving home, he hesitated to open the door. He expected to find Vanadium inside.

Nobody was waiting for him except Industrial Woman.

Needlepoint, meditation, and even sex had not recently provided him with significant relief of tension. The paintings of Sklent and the works of Zedd were packed in the van, where he couldn’t at the moment take solace from them.

Another milk and brandy helped, but not much.

As the afternoon waned toward a portentous dusk and toward the gallery reception for Celestina White, Junior prepared his knives and guns.

Blades and bullets soothed his nerves a little.

He desperately needed closure in the matter of Naomi’s death. That was what these past three years and these supernatural events were all about.

As Sklent so insightfully put it: Some of us live on after death, survive in spirit, because we are just too stubborn, selfish, greedy, grubbing, vicious, psychotic, and evil to accept our demise. None of those qualities described sweet Naomi, who had been far too kind and loving and meek to live on in spirit, after her lovely flesh failed. Now at one with the earth, Naomi was no threat to Junior, and the state had paid for its negligence in her death, and the whole matter
should
have been brought to closure. There were only two barriers to full and final resolution: first, the stubborn, selfish, greedy, grubbing, vicious, psychotic, evil spirit of Thomas Vanadium; and second, Seraphim’s bastard baby—little Bartholomew.

A blood test might prove that Junior was the father. Accusations might sooner or later be made against him by bitter and hate-filled members of her family, perhaps not even with the hope of sending him to prison,
but solely for the purpose of getting their hands on a sizable part of his fortune, in the form of child support.

Then the police in Spruce Hills would want to know why he had been screwing around with an underage Negro girl if his marriage to Naomi had been as perfect, as fulfilling, as he claimed. Unfair as it seems, there is no statute of limitations on murder. Closed files can be dusted off and opened again; investigations can be resumed. And although authorities would have little or no hope of convicting him of murder on whatever meager evidence they could dig up,
he would be forced to spend another significant portion of his fortune on attorney fees.

He would never allow himself to be bankrupted and made poor again. Never. His fortune had been won at enormous risk, with great fortitude and determination. He must defend it at any cost.

When Seraphim’s bastard baby was dead, evidence of paternity would die with it—and any claim for child support. Even Vanadium’s stubborn, selfish, greedy, grubbing, vicious, psychotic, evil spirit would have to recognize that all hope of bringing Junior down was lost, and it would at last either dissipate in frustration or be reincarnated.

Closure was near.

To Junior Cain, the logic of all this seemed unassailable.

He prepared his knives and guns. Blades and bullets. Fortune favors the bold, the self-improved, the self-evolved, the focused.

Chapter 64

NOLLY SAT BEHIND
his desk, suit jacket draped over the back of the chair, porkpie hat still squarely on his head, where it remained at virtually all times except when he was sleeping, showering, dining in a restaurant, or making love.

A smoldering cigarette, usually dangling aslant from one corner of a hard mouth set in a cynical sneer, was standard issue for tough-guy gumshoes, but Nolly didn’t smoke. His failure to develop this bad habit resulted in a less satisfyingly murky atmosphere than the clients of a private dick might expect.

Fortunately, at least the desk was cigarette-scarred, because it came with the office. It had been the property of a skip-tracer named Otto Zelm, who’d made a good living at the kind of work Nolly avoided out of boredom: tracking down deadbeats and repossessing their vehicles. On a stakeout, Zelm fell asleep in his car, while smoking, thereby triggering the payoff of both life-and casualty-insurance policies, and freeing the lease on this furnished space.

Even without the dangling cigarette and without the cynical sneer, Nolly had an air of toughness worthy of Sam Spade, largely because the face that nature had given him was a splendid disguise for the sentimental sweetie who lived behind it. With his bull neck, with his strong hands, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up to expose his lovely hairy forearms, he made a properly intimidating impression: as if Humphrey Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre had been put in a blender and then poured into one suit.

Kathleen Klerkle, Mrs. Wulfstan, sitting on the edge of Nolly’s desk, looked diagonally across it at the visitor in the client’s chair. Actually, Nolly had two chairs for clients. Kathleen could have sat in the second; however, this seemed to be a more appropriate pose for a hawkshaw’s dame. Not that she was trying to look cheap; she was thinking Myrna Loy as Nora Charles in
The Thin Man
—worldly but elegant, tough but amused.

Until Nolly, Kathleen’s life had been as short on romance as a saltless saltine is short on flavor. Her childhood and even her adolescence were so colorless that she’d settled on dentistry as a career because it seemed, by comparison to what she knew, to be an exotic and exciting profession. She’d dated a few men, but all were boring and none was kind. Ballroom-dancing lessons—and ultimately competitions—promised the romance that dentistry and dating hadn’t provided, but even dancing was somewhat a disappointment until her instructor introduced Kathleen to this balding, bull-necked, lumpy, utterly wonderful Romeo.

Whether or not the visitor in the client’s chair had ever known much romance, he unquestionably had experienced too much adventure and more than his share of tragedy. Thomas Vanadium’s face was a quake-rocked landscape: cracked by white scars like fault lines in a strata of granite; the planes of brow, cheeks, and jaws canted in odd relationships to one another. The hemangioma that surrounded his right eye and discolored his face had been with him since birth, but the awful damage to his bone structure was the work of man, not God.

In the noble ruin of his face, Thomas Vanadium’s smoke-gray eyes were striking, filled with a beautiful…sorrow. Not self-pity. He clearly didn’t regard himself as a victim. This, Kathleen felt, was the sorrow of a man who had seen too much of the suffering of others, who knew the evil ways of the world. These were eyes that read you at a glance, that shone with compassion if you deserved it, and that glared with a terrifying judgment if compassion wasn’t warranted.

Vanadium hadn’t seen the man who had clubbed him from behind and who had smashed his face with a pewter candlestick, but when he spoke the name
Enoch Cain,
the quality in his eyes was not compassion. No fingerprints had been left, no evidence in the aftermath of the fire at the Bressler house or in the Studebaker hauled from Quarry Lake.

“But you think it was him,” Nolly said.

“I
know.
”

For eight months following that night, until late September of 1965, Vanadium had been in a coma, and his doctors had not expected him to regain consciousness. A passing motorist had found him lying along the highway near the lake, soaked and muddy. When, after his long sleep, he awakened in the hospital, withered and weak, he’d had no memory of anything after walking into Victoria’s kitchen—except a vague, dreamlike recollection of swimming up from a sinking car.

Although Vanadium had been morally certain about the identity of his assailant, intuition without evidence was not sufficient to stir the authorities into action—not against a man on whom the state and county had settled $4,250,000 in the matter of his wife’s mortal fall. They would appear either to be incompetent in the investigation of Naomi Cain’s death or to be pursuing Enoch in the new matter out of sheer vindictiveness. Without
stacks
of evidence, the political risks of acting on a policeman’s instinct were too great.

Simon Magusson—capable of representing the devil himself for the proper fee, but also capable of genuine remorse—visited Vanadium in the hospital, soon after learning that the detective had awakened from a coma. The attorney shared the conviction that Cain was the guilty party, and that he’d also murdered his wife.

Magusson considered the assaults on Victoria and on Vanadium to be hideous crimes, of course, but he also viewed them as affronts to his own dignity and reputation. He expected a felonious client, rewarded with four and a quarter million instead of jail time, to be grateful and thereafter to walk a straight line.

“Simon’s a funny duck,” Vanadium said, “but I like him more than a little and trust him implicitly. He wanted to know what he could do to help. Initially, my speech was slurred, I had partial paralysis in my left arm, and I’d lost fifty-four pounds. I wasn’t going to be looking for Cain for a long time, but it turned out Simon knew where he was.”

“Because Cain had called him to get a recommendation of a P. I. here in San Francisco,” said Kathleen. “To find out what happened to Seraphim White’s baby.”

Vanadium’s smile, in that tragically fractured face, might have alarmed most people, but Kathleen found it appealing because of the indestructible spirit it revealed.

“What kept me going these past two and a half years was knowing that I could get my hands on Mr. Cain when I was finally well enough to do something about him.”

As a homicide detective, Vanadium had a career-spanning ninety-eight percent closure-and-conviction record on the cases he handled. Once convinced he had found the guilty party, he didn’t rely solely on solid policework. He augmented the usual investigative procedures and techniques with his own brand of psychological warfare—sometimes subtle, sometimes not—which frequently encouraged the perpetrator to make mistakes that convicted him.

“The quarter in the sandwich,” Nolly said, because that was the first stunt that Simon Magusson had paid him to perform.

Magically, a shiny quarter appeared in Thomas Vanadium’s right hand. It turned end over end, knuckle to knuckle, disappeared between thumb and forefinger, and reappeared at the little finger, beginning its cross-hand journey once more.

“Once out of the coma and stabilized for a few weeks, I was transferred to a hospital in Portland, where I had to undergo eleven surgeries.”

He either detected their well-concealed surprise or assumed they would be curious as to why, in spite of extensive surgery, he still wore this Boris Karloff face.

“The doctors,” he continued, “needed to repair damage to the left frontal sinus, the sphenoidal sinus, and the sinus cavernous, which had all been partially crushed by that pewter candlestick. Frontal, malar, ethmoid, maxillary, sphenoid, and palatine bones had to be rebuilt to properly contain my right eye, because it sort of…well, it dangled. That was just for starters, and there was considerable essential dental work, as well. I elected not to have any cosmetic surgery.”

He paused, giving them a chance to ask the obvious question—and then smiled at their reticence.

“I was never Cary Grant, to begin with,” said Vanadium, still ceaselessly rolling the quarter across his fingers, “so I had no big emotional investment in my appearance. Cosmetic surgery would have added another year of recuperation time, probably much longer, and I was anxious to get after Cain. Seemed to me this mug of mine might be just the thing to scare him into an incriminating mistake, even a confession.”

Kathleen expected this would prove to be true. She herself was not frightened by Thomas Vanadium’s appearance; but then she had been prepared for it before she first saw him. And she wasn’t a murderer, fearful of retribution, to whom this particular face would seem like Judgment personified.

“Besides, I still live by my vows as much as possible, though I’ve had the longest continuing dispensation on record.” A smile on that cracked countenance could be touching, but an ironic look now worked less well; it gave Kathleen a chill. “Vanity is a sin I’ve more easily been able to avoid than some others.”

Between his surgeries and for many months thereafter, Vanadium had devoted his energies to speech therapy, physical rehabilitation, and the concoction of periodic torments for Enoch Cain, which Simon Magusson was able to implement, every few months, through Nolly and Kathleen. The idea wasn’t to bring Cain to justice by torturing his conscience, since he’d allowed his conscience to atrophy a long time ago, but to keep him unsettled and thereby magnify the impact of his first face-to-face encounter with the resurrected Vanadium.

“I got to admit,” Nolly said, “I’m surprised these little pranks have rattled him so deeply.”

“He’s a hollow man,” Vanadium said. “He believes in nothing. Hollow men are vulnerable to anyone who offers them something that might fill the void and make them feel less empty. So—”

The coin stopped turning across his knuckles and, as though with volition of its own, it slipped into the tight curve of his curled forefinger. With a snap of his thumb, he flipped the quarter into the air.

“—I’m offering him cheap and easy mysticism—”

The instant he flipped the coin, he opened both hands—palms up, fingers spread—with a distracting flourish.

“—a relentless pursuing spirit, a vengeful ghost—”

Vanadium dusted his hands together.

“—I’m offering him fear—”

As though Amelia Earhart, the long-lost aviatrix, had reached out of her twilight zone and snared the two bits, no tumbling coin glinted in the air above the desk.

“—sweet fear,” Vanadium concluded.

Frowning, Nolly said, “What—it’s up your sleeve?”

“No, it’s in your shirt pocket,” Vanadium replied.

Startled, Nolly checked his shirt pocket and withdrew a quarter. “It’s not the same one.”

Vanadium raised his eyebrows.

“You must’ve slipped this one in my pocket when you first came in here,” Nolly deduced.

“Then where’s the coin I just tossed?”

“Fear?” Kathleen asked, more interested in Vanadium’s words than in his prestidigitation. “You said you’re offering fear to Cain…as if that was something he would want.”

“In a way, he does,” Vanadium said. “When you’re as hollow as Enoch Cain, the emptiness aches. He’s desperate to fill it, but he doesn’t have the patience or the commitment to fill it with anything worthwhile. Love, charity, faith, wisdom—those virtues and others are hard won, with commitment and patience, and we acquire them one spoonful at a time. Cain wants to be filled quickly. He wants the emptiness inside
poured
full, in quick great gushes, and
right now.
”

“Seems like lots of people want that these days,” said Nolly.

“Seems like,” Vanadium agreed. “So a man like Cain obsesses on one thing after another—sex, money, food, power, drugs, alcohol, anything that seems to give meaning to his days, but that requires no real self-discovery or self-sacrifice. Briefly, he feels complete. However, there’s no substance to what he’s filled himself with, so it soon evaporates, and then he’s empty again.”

“And you’re saying fear can fill his emptiness as well as sex or booze?” Kathleen wondered.

“Better. Fear doesn’t require him even to seduce a woman or to buy a bottle of whiskey. He just needs to open himself to it, and he will be filled like a glass under a faucet. As difficult as this may be to comprehend, Cain would choose to be neck-deep in a bottomless pool of terror, desperately trying to stay afloat, rather than to suffer that unrelieved hollowness. Fear can give shape and meaning to his life, and I intend not merely to fill him with fear but to drown him in it.”

Considering his battered and stitched face, considering also his tragic and colorful history, Vanadium spoke with remarkably little drama. His voice was calm, nearly flat, rising and falling so little that he almost talked in a monotone.

Yet Kathleen had been as totally riveted by his every word as ever she had been by Laurence Olivier’s great performances in
Rebecca
and
Wuthering Heights.
In Vanadium’s quiet and in his restraint, she heard conviction and truth, but she detected something more. Only gradually did she realize that it might be this: the subtle resonance arising from a good man whose soul, containing not one empty chamber, was filled with those spoon-by-spoon virtues that do not evaporate.

They sat in silence, and the moment held such an extraordinary quality of expectation that Kathleen would not have been surprised if the vanished quarter had suddenly appeared in midair and dropped, winking brightly, to the center of Nolly’s desk, there to spin with perpetual motion, until Vanadium chose to pluck it up.

Nolly finally disturbed the quiet: “Well, sir…you’re quite a psychologist.”

That saving smile once more returned lost harmony to the scarred and broken face. “Not me. From my perspective, psychology is just one more of those easy sources of false meaning—like sex, money, and drugs. But I will admit to knowing a thing or two about evil.”

Daylight had retreated from the windows. Winter night, wound in scarfs of fog, like a leprous mendicant, rattled out a breath as though begging their attention beyond the glass.

With a shiver, Kathleen said, “We’d like to know more about
why
we did the things we did for you. Why the quarters? Why the song?”