Garden of Evil (3 page)

‘OK, go ahead. What?'

‘You teach English, I know.'

‘
Remedial
English, if you want to be accurate. English for students who don't see anything wrong in saying “this pizza's good – but this pizza's a whole lot gooder – and
this
pizza's gooderer than any other pizza I ever ate.”'

Simon Silence gave Jim the faintest of smiles. ‘What I actually wanted to ask you is whether you ever give your class any spiritual guidance.'

‘Spiritual guidance? What kind of spiritual guidance? You mean religion? I don't do religion, Simon. Sometimes we talk about life and death, but only so far as they're part of a poem, or an essay, or a story we happen to be studying. “
Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me. The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.
”
Discuss.'

‘I didn't really mean that kind of spiritual guidance. I meant, do you ever give your class the benefit of your . . .' He paused, his right hand circling around and around, as if he couldn't quite find the word for it.

Jim waited patiently, but eventually he said, ‘Yes? The benefit of my what?'

‘I'm sorry, sir. I should be going, shouldn't I?'

‘No, come on, Simon. The benefit of my
what
?'

Simon Silence looked at him. The last of the smog was clearing away and the sun suddenly shone on him through the faculty room window. It lit up his face so brightly that he appeared to have hardly any features at all. His eyes were very pale blue and his eyebrows were blond. He could have been a watercolor painting that somebody had tipped their paint water over, so that all the colors had washed away.

‘My father says that we all have a gift, sir, every one of us. It is how we use our gifts that makes all the difference. I know
you
have a gift, Mr Rook. You have a rare and wonderful gift. That is why my father sent me here. I was simply asking how freely you share it with your students.'

Detective Brennan laid his hand on Simon Silence's shoulder. ‘Come on, kid. That's enough.
Vamos.
Come back tomorrow.'

Simon Silence stayed in the doorway for a while, still staring at Jim with those pale blue eyes, as if he were prepared to wait for an answer for as long as it took. The smog momentarily drifted across the sun again, and as the room darkened his features became more definite. At the same time they appeared subtly to alter, so that instead of looking innocent he appeared strangely
knowing.

‘There's just one more thing,' he said, lifting the white canvas sack off his shoulder, loosening its drawstring, and starting to rummage around in it.

‘You really should go home, Simon,' Jim told him. ‘Whatever it is, it can wait till tomorrow.'

Detective Brennan began to close the door. But before he could do so, Simon Silence took his hand out of his sack and held out a shiny pink-and-green apple.

‘This is for you, sir,' he said. ‘We have an orchard near Bakersfield, and we grow our own.'

‘An apple for the teacher?' said Jim. ‘This isn't grade school, you know.'

‘My father says that if somebody gives you a gift, you should always give them something in return. This is
my
gift, as a thank you for
your
gift.'

Jim took the apple and sniffed it. It smelled very sweet and aromatic, but it had a sourness to it, too – almost like a tamarind, more than an apple.

‘It is a variety called Paradise,' said Simon Silence. ‘We are the only orchard in the region to grow it. We bus down-and-outs and homeless people up to our orchard to pick them, and we allow them to eat as many as they like. Then we distribute them free to anybody who comes to our church to pray.'

‘OK, then thanks,' Jim told him. ‘Maybe I'll see you in the morning.'

Simon Silence gave Jim another faint smile, and then he turned around and walked away, his sandals slapping on the floor.

‘Don't envy you, teaching that fruitcake,' said Detective Brennan, closing the door.

Jim said nothing, repeatedly tossing up the apple that Simon Silence had given him, and catching it again. For several reasons, the boy had unsettled him. He was completely unlike most of the students that he had to teach in Special Class Two. He had seemed shrewd, and self-confident, and although he had a strong Southern accent he had spoken grammatically and without any slang whatsoever.

What had disturbed Jim was the way that he had wanted to talk about his gift. If he hadn't mentioned ‘spiritual guidance', Jim might have thought that he was referring to nothing more than his talent for teaching semi-literate slackers to compose a sentence that almost made some kind of sense. But it was obvious that Simon Silence was already too fluent to need much guidance in the art of expressing himself.

When he was seven years old Jim had almost died from pneumonia. After he had recovered he had gradually come to realize that his close encounter with the other side had given him the ability to see spirits, and ghosts, and every other kind of supernatural presence, from poltergeists to demons. He saw them, and he could speak to them, too, when they appeared.

He was sure that this was the gift that Simon Silence had been talking about. But how did he know about it? Jim had learned to live with it, and sometimes to use it to help people who were plagued by vengeful or angry spirits, but he couldn't understand how the son of a preacher could have come to hear about it, and why he should be showing so much interest in it.

There was another knock at the door and this time it was a woman CSI, in a noisy white Tyvek suit, her cheeks still flushed from wearing her protective helmet.

‘That's it, Detective. We're done here. We should have some preliminary reports for you by the end of the week. But at this stage I seriously don't think they're going to tell you a whole lot.'

‘Any indications yet as to how it was done?'

The CSI shook her frizzy blonde curls. ‘Not a clue, so far. No fingerprints, no shoe impressions, nothing. We have the nails, of course, and we'll be trying to trace where they came from, and we'll also be taking samples of the white paint that the vic was covered in. Animal Care and Control will be checking on the cats. They all look like pedigrees, so it's pretty certain they'll have microchips.'

‘Well, that should help us,' said Detective Brennan. ‘It can't be every day that somebody goes to a cat breeder and buys eight white Persians. Or steals them.'

‘We still have no idea how the girl and the cats were physically nailed to the ceiling,' the CSI told him. ‘If the perps used a scaffold, or stepladders, they would have had to make some kind of impression on the floor tiles. But there's zilch. No dents at all.'

Jim said, ‘Did you ever see anything like this before? I don't necessarily mean on the ceiling. But a similar sort of pattern . . . a woman with her arms and legs spread out, and all the cats around her? Or anything even remotely like it?'

The CSI shook her head again. ‘Never. And, believe me, I've seen some pretty far-out arranging, when it comes to bodies. A woman's head that was sewn on to a man's body, and the other way about. A guy who was stuffed into a racehorse, with his head sticking out from under its tail. We never found out who did it but I think we can guess what point he was making.'

Detective Brennan said, ‘Thanks, Moira. I'll wait to hear from you. Mr Rook, you can go off home if you like. You gave me your cell number, didn't you? I might have to call you if anything new comes up.'

‘Fine,' said Jim. He picked up his briefcase with the broken handle, dropped the apple into it, and left the building. Outside, it was warm now, and clear. Usually, if he was given an unexpected day off, he would head for 26 Beach Restaurant in Venice and order himself a beer and a prosciutto burger and exchange some banter with his favorite waitress, Imelda.

But today he was not in the mood for anything except going back home and trying to make sense of what had happened. He still couldn't quite believe that what he had witnessed was real.

He climbed into his car and backed out of the parking lot with a squeal of tires. He drove back down the driveway, still thinking about the girl and the cats on the ceiling; and about the dark figure he had nearly run over in this morning's smog. He had told Detective Brennan about him (or
her
, or
it
, or whatever the figure might have been) but Detective Brennan hadn't shown too much interest.

‘Like you said yourself, Mr Rook, no single person could have done this unaided.'

As he drove out between the brown brick pillars that marked the college grounds, his eye was caught by a white flicker among the trees, off to his left. He slowed down, and then he stopped, frowning, and backed his car up twenty or thirty yards and let down his window, so that he could see the white shape more clearly.

There was a small grove of shady oaks beside the road, just where it curved down from North Saltair Avenue toward Sunset. Standing under these oaks with his arms spread wide was Simon Silence, in his flappy white shirt and his flappy white pants. He had his back to Jim, so that it was difficult for Jim to tell exactly what he was doing. But what puzzled Jim most of all was that seven or eight young people were sitting around him in a semicircle, cross-legged, looking up at him with rapt expressions on their faces as if they were spellbound by something that he was saying.

From the way they were dressed, and the sports bags lying on the ground beside them, Jim could see that they were students. He backed up a little more and it was then that he recognized the lanky African-American student he had seen earlier this morning, under the cypress tree; and also the pretty blonde girl with the pink T-shirt and the scraggly hair.

Jim stayed where he was for a while, wondering if ought to go over and ask them what they were doing. He was well aware that what they got up to outside of college was none of his business. They could be jumping around stark naked or smoking crack, or both, and there was nothing he could do about it, except call the police. Besides that, he didn't even know their names yet, or how many of them were going to be joining Special Class Two. The last thing he wanted to do was to appear stuffy and censorious, even before he found out who they were. He wouldn't be able to teach them unless he earned their trust.

All the same, Simon Silence had set off his psychic sensitivity, like a burglar alarm ringing unanswered in a distant warehouse.
Something wrong here
, although he couldn't begin to guess what it was.
Something very wrong here.

He was still sitting there when there was a deafening two-tone blast on a horn. He looked into his rear-view mirror and saw that a huge black Dodge Ram was close up behind him, impatiently waiting for him to get out of the middle of the road.

He waved his arm out of the window to apologize, and pulled away. But as he did so, he saw Simon Silence turn around, and catch sight of him, and smile – that same knowing smile that he had given him before.

W
hen Jim parked on the steeply sloping driveway outside his apartment block on Briarcliff Road, he found Ricky Kaminsky sitting on the steps, playing a Spanish guitar and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.

‘Hey man, you're back super early,' said Ricky, the cigarette waggling between his lips. ‘Don't tell me – you took one look at your new class and totally freaked?'

Ricky was an artist and lived in the first-floor apartment. He was in his early sixties, with a wild mane of gray hair and a droopy gray moustache. His face was creased and leathery, as if it had been weathered by every outdoor rock concert from Woodstock to Altamont. His bare chest was brown and bony like a kipper, and he wore only a tan leather vest and jeans and six or seven necklaces of colored beads.

‘We had some security problems,' Jim told him.

‘Security problems, huh? What's that a euphemism for?'

‘I found a dead girl in my classroom. And some dead cats, too.'

Ricky narrowed his eyes, but he kept on playing his guitar. ‘No shit. What was that all about?'

‘Wish I knew. It looked like some kind of ritual.'

‘There's some fuckin' weird types out there, man. I tell you. I used to think the sixties were weird. Then I thought the seventies were weird. But today . . . whoa. The whole fuckin' world is weird. Here . . .'

He took the cigarette out of his mouth and offered it to Jim with a nod of encouragement. ‘This is good shit, man. You want to try it. Ease your troubles, that's what it does.'

Jim shook his head. ‘No thanks. I think there's enough happening in my head already, without that stuff. Anyhow, why aren't
you
working? I thought you had that commission to finish for the Westwood Library.'

‘I'm working on it, I'm working on it. I'm having a little difficulty, that's all. It's like the paint won't behave itself.'

‘What does that mean? You've bought some disobedient paint? Take it back to the art store and get your money back.'

Ricky stopped playing and propped his guitar up on the step. ‘No – I'm serious, man. I mean, you write a bit of poetry now and again, don't you? You know what it's like when the words won't do what you want them to do?'

‘Not exactly.'

‘Well, let me show you.'

Ricky stood up and led Jim up the steps to his apartment. The faded red front door was open and there was a strong smell of incense and turpentine wafting out of it. The living room was chaos. Three easels stood at angles to each other, and there were dozens of unfinished canvases stacked up against the walls. A trestle table was crowded with paintbrushes and rags and dried-out palettes, as well as scores of half-squeezed tubes of oil paint, like a writhing nest of multicolored worms.

The walls were draped with Indian durries, in red and brown and green, and brass lamps hung from the ceiling, wrapped in red silk scarves. In the corner there was an oriental-style birdcage, with a red cockatoo perched inside it.