From the Corner of His Eye (60 page)

Junior in the fog. Trying oh-so-hard to live in the future, where the winners live. But being relentlessly sucked back into the useless past by memory.

Turning, turning, turning, the mysterious warning in his mind:
The spirit of Bartholomew…will find you…and mete out the terrible judgment that you deserve.

He rewound the words, played them again, but still the source of the threat eluded him. He was hearing them in his own voice, as if he had once read them in a book, but he suspected that they had been spoken to him and that—

An SFPD patrol car swept past, its siren silent, the rack of emergency beacons flashing on its roof.

Startled, Junior sat up straight, clutching the silencer-fitted pistol, but the cruiser didn’t abruptly brake and pull to the curb in front of the Mercedes, as he expected.

The revolving beacons dwindled, casting off blue-and-red pulses of light that shimmered-swooped through the diffusing fog, as if they were disembodied spirits seeking someone to possess.

When Junior checked his Rolex, he realized that he didn’t know how long he’d been sitting here since Ichabod had driven off in the Buick. Maybe one minute, maybe ten.

Lamplight still glowed behind the ground-floor front windows on the right.

He preferred to venture inside the house while some lights remained on. He didn’t want to be reduced to creeping stealthily in the dark through strange rooms: The very idea filled his guts with shiver chasing shiver.

He tugged on a pair of thin latex surgical gloves. Flexed his hands. All right.

Out of the car, along the sidewalk, up the steps, from Mercedes to mist to murder. Pistol in his right hand, lock-release gun in his left, three knives in sheaths strapped to his body.

The front door was unlocked. This was no longer one house; it had been converted to an apartment building.

From the public hallway on the ground level, stairs led to the upper three floors. He would be able to hear anyone descending long before they arrived.

No elevator. He didn’t have to worry that with no more warning than a
ding,
doors might slide open, admitting witnesses into the hall.

One apartment to the right, one to the left. Junior went to the right, to Apartment 1, where he’d seen the lights come on behind the curtained windows.

Wally Lipscomb parked in his garage, switched off the engine, and started to get out of the Buick before he saw that Celestina had left her purse in the car.

Flush with the promise of their engagement, still excited by the success at the gallery, with Angel exuberant in spite of the hour and Oreo-energized, he was amazed that they had made the transfer of the little red whirlwind from house to Buick to house with nothing else forgotten other than one purse. Celie called it ballet, but Wally thought that it was merely momentary order in chaos, the challenging-joyous-frustrating-delightful-exhilarating chaos of a life full of hope and love and children, which he wouldn’t have traded for calm or kingdoms.

Without sigh or complaint, he would walk back to her with the purse. The errand was no trouble. In fact, returning the purse would give him a chance to get another good-night kiss.

One nightstand, two drawers.

In the top drawer, in addition to the expected items, Tom Vanadium found a gallery brochure for an art exhibition. In the hooded flashlight beam, the name
Celestina White
seemed to flare off the glossy paper as though printed in reflective ink.

In January ’65, while Vanadium had been in the first month of what proved to be an eight-month coma, Enoch Cain had sought Nolly’s assistance in a search for Seraphim’s newborn child. When Vanadium had learned about this from Magusson long after the event, he assumed that Cain had heard Max Bellini’s message on his answering machine, made the connection with Seraphim’s death in an “accident” in San Francisco, and set out to find the child because it was his. Fatherhood was the only imaginable reason for his interest in the baby.

Later, in early ’66, out of his coma and recovering sufficiently to have visitors, Vanadium spent a most difficult hour with his old friend Harrison White. Out of respect for the memory of his lost daughter, and not at all out of concern for his image as a minister, the reverend had refused to acknowledge either that Seraphim had been pregnant or that she’d been raped—although Max Bellini had already confirmed the pregnancy and believed, based on cop’s instinct, that it had been the consequence of rape. Harrison’s attitude seemed to be that Phimie was gone, that nothing could be gained by opening this wound, and that even if there was a villain involved, the Christian thing was to forgive, if not forget, and to trust in divine justice.

Harrison was a Baptist, Vanadium a Catholic, and although they approached the same faith from different angles, they weren’t coming to it from different
planets,
which was the feeling Vanadium had been left with following their conversation. It was true that Enoch Cain could never be brought successfully to trial for the rape of Phimie, subsequent to her death and in the absence of her testimony. And it was also uncomfortably true that exploring the possibility that Cain was the rapist would tear open the wounds in the hearts of everyone in the White family, to no useful effect. Nevertheless, to rely on divine justice alone seemed naive, if not morally questionable.

Vanadium understood the depth of his old friend’s pain, and he knew that the anguish over the loss of a child could make the best of men act out of emotion rather than good judgment, and so he accepted Harrison’s preference to let the matter rest. When enough time passed for reflection, what Vanadium ultimately decided was that of the two of them, Harrison was much the stronger in his faith, and that he himself, perhaps for the rest of his life, would be more comfortable behind a badge than behind a Roman collar.

On the day that Vanadium attended the graveside service for Seraphim and subsequently stopped at Naomi’s grave to needle Cain, he had suspected that Phimie didn’t die in a traffic accident, as claimed, but he hadn’t for a moment thought that the wife killer was in any way connected. Now, finding this gallery brochure in the nightstand drawer seemed to be one more bit of circumstantial proof of Cain’s guilt.

The presence of the brochure disturbed Vanadium also because he assumed that after being dead-ended by Nolly, Cain had subsequently discovered that Celestina had taken custody of the baby to raise it as her own. For some reason, the nine-toed wonder originally believed the child was a boy, but if he’d tracked down Celestina, he now knew the truth.

Why Cain, even if he was the father, should be interested in the little girl was a mystery to Tom Vanadium. This totally self-involved, spookily hollow man held nothing sacred; fatherhood would have no appeal for him, and he certainly wouldn’t feel any obligation to the child that had resulted from his assault on Phimie.

Maybe his pursuit of the matter sprang from mere curiosity, the desire to discover what a child of his might look like; however, if something else lay behind his interest, the motivation would not be benign. Whatever Cain’s intentions, he would prove to be at least an annoyance to Celestina and the little girl—and possibly a danger.

Because Harrison, with the best of intentions, had not wanted to open wounds, Cain could walk up to Celestina anywhere, anytime, and she wouldn’t know that he might have been her sister’s rapist. To her, his face was that of any stranger.

And now Cain was aware of her, interested in her. Informed of this development, Harrison would no doubt rethink his position.

Carrying the brochure, Vanadium returned to the bathroom and switched on the overhead light. He stared at the slashed wall, at the name red and ravaged.

Instinct, even reason, told him that some connection existed between this person, this Bartholomew, and Celestina. The name had terrified Cain in a bad dream, the very night of the day that he’d killed Naomi, and Vanadium therefore had incorporated it into his psychological-warfare strategy without knowing its significance to his suspect. As strongly as he sensed the connection, he couldn’t find the link. He lacked some crucial bit of information.

In this brighter light, he further examined the gallery brochure and discovered Celestina’s photograph. She and her sister were not as alike as twins, but the resemblance was striking.

If Cain had been attracted to one woman by her looks, surely he would be attracted to the other. And perhaps the sisters shared a quality other than beauty that drew Cain with even greater power. Innocence, perhaps, or goodness: both foods for a demon.

The title of the exhibition was “This Momentous Day.”

As though he were home to a species of termites that preferred the taste of men to that of wood, Vanadium felt a squirming in his marrow.

He knew the sermon, of course. The example of Bartholomew. The theme of chain-reaction in human lives. The observation that a small kindness can inspire greater and ever-greater kindnesses of which we never learn, in lives distant both in time and space.

He had never associated Enoch Cain’s dreaded Bartholomew with the disciple Bartholomew in Harrison White’s sermon, which had been broadcast once in December ’64, the month prior to Naomi’s murder and again in January ’65. Even now, with blood-scrawled-and-stabbed
Bartholomew
on the wall and with
This Momentous Day
before him in the brochure, Tom Vanadium couldn’t quite make the connection. He strove to pull together the broken lengths in this chain of evidence, but they remained separated by one missing link.

What he saw next in the brochure wasn’t the link that he sought, but it alarmed him so much that the three-fold pamphlet rattled in his hands. The reception for Celestina’s show had been this evening, had ended more than three hours ago.

Coincidence. Nothing more. Coincidence.

But both the Church and quantum physics contend there is no such thing. Coincidence is the result of mysterious design and meaning—or it’s strange order underlying the appearance of chaos. Take your pick. Or, if you choose, feel free to believe that they’re one and the same.

Not coincidence, then.

All these punctures in the wall. Gouges. Slashes. So much rage required to make them.

Suitcases seemed to be missing. Some clothes, as well. Could mean a weekend vacation.

You scrawl names on the walls with your own blood, play
Psycho
with a Sheetrock stand-in for Janet Leigh—and then fly off to Reno for a weekend of blackjack, stage shows, and all-you-can-eat buffets. Not likely.

He hurried into the bedroom and switched on the nightstand lamp, without concern for whether the light might be seen from the street.

The missing paintings. The missing collection of Zedd’s books. You didn’t take these things with you for a weekend in Reno. You took them if you thought you might never be coming back.

In spite of the late hour, he dialed Max Bellini’s home number.

He and the homicide detective had been friends for almost thirty years, since Max had been a uniformed rookie on the SFPD and Vanadium had been a young priest freshly assigned to St. Anselmo’s Orphanage here in the city. Before choosing policework, Max had contemplated the priesthood, and perhaps back then he had sensed the cop-to-be in Tom Vanadium.

When Max answered, Vanadium let out his breath in a
whoosh
of relief and began talking on the inhalation: “It’s me, Tom, and maybe I’ve just got a bad case of the heebie-jeebies, but there’s something I think you better do, and you better do it right now.”

“You don’t get the heebie-jeebies,” Max said. “You
give
’em. Tell me what’s wrong.”