Mr. Murder (11 page)

As the Ford turns away from him and gradually recedes through the vinegar-gold autumn sunshine, he realizes the magnet which drew him from Kansas is in that car. Perhaps it is the dimly seen man behind the steering wheel—though it might not be a person at all but a talisman hidden elsewhere in the vehicle, a magical object beyond his understanding and to which his destiny is linked for reasons yet unclear.

The killer almost starts the Honda to follow the attractant, but decides the stranger in the Ford will return sooner or later.

He puts on his shoulder holster, slips the pistol into it, and shrugs into the leather jacket.

From the glove compartment, he removes the zippered leather case that contains his set of burglary tools. It includes seven spring-steel picks, an L-shaped tension tool, and a miniature aerosol can of graphite lubricant.

He gets out of the car and proceeds boldly along the sidewalk toward the house.

At the end of the driveway stands a white mailbox on which is stenciled a single name—STILLWATER. Those ten black letters seem to possess symbolic power. Still water. Calm. Peace. He has found still water. He has come through much turbulence, violent rapids and whirlpools, and now he has found a place where he can rest, where his soul will be soothed.

Between the garage and the property-line fence, he opens the gravity latch on a wrought-iron gate. He follows a walkway flanked by the garage on his left and a head-high eugenia hedge on his right, all the way to the rear of the house.

The shallow backyard is lushly planted. It boasts mature ficus trees and a continuation of the sideyard eugenia hedge, which screen him from the prying eyes of neighbors.

The patio is sheltered by an open-beam redwood cover through which thorny trailers of bougainvillea are densely intertwined. Even on this last day of November, clusters of blood-red flowers fringe the patio roof. The concrete floor is spattered with fallen petals, as though a hard-fought battle was waged here.

A kitchen door and large sliding glass door provide two possible entrances from the patio. Both are locked.

The sliding door, beyond which he can see a deserted family room with comfortable furniture and a large television, is further secured by a wooden pole wedged into the interior track. If he gets through the lock, he nevertheless will need to break the glass to reach inside and remove the pole.

He knocks sharply on the other door, although the window beside it reveals that no one is in the kitchen. When there is no response, he knocks again with the same result.

From his compact kit of burglary tools, he withdraws the can of graphite. Crouching before the door, he sprays the lubricant into the lock. Dirt, rust, or other contamination can bind the pin tumblers.

He trades the graphite spray for the tension tool and that pick known as a “rake.” He inserts the L-shaped wrench first to maintain the necessary tension on the lock core. He pushes the rake into the key channel as deep as it will go, then brings it up until he feels it press against the pins. Squinting into the lock, he rapidly draws the rake out, but it does not raise all of the pin tumblers to their shear point, so he tries again, and again, and finally on the sixth try the channel seems to be clear.

He turns the knob.

The door opens.

He half expects an alarm to go off, but there is no siren. A quick scan of the header and jamb fails to reveal magnetic switches, so there must not be a silent alarm, either.

After he puts the tools away and zippers shut the leather case, he steps across the threshold and softly closes the door behind him.

He stands for a while in the cool, shadowy kitchen, absorbing the vibrations, which are good. This house welcomes him. Here, his future begins, and it will be immeasurably brighter than his confused and amnesia-riddled past.

As he moves out of the kitchen to explore the premises, he does not draw the P7 from his shoulder holster. He is sure that no one is at home. He senses no danger, only opportunity.

“I need to be someone,” he tells the house, as if it is a living entity with the power to grant his wishes.

The ground floor offers nothing of interest. The usual rooms are filled with comfortable but unremarkable furniture.

Upstairs, he stops only briefly at each room, getting an overall picture of the second-floor layout before taking time for a thorough investigation. There’s a master bedroom with attached bath, walk-in closet . . . a guest bedroom . . . kids’ room . . . another bath . . .

The final bedroom at the end of the hall—which puts him at the front of the house—is used as an office. It contains a big desk and computer system, but it’s more cozy than businesslike. A plump sofa stands under the shuttered windows, a stained-glass lamp on the desk.

One of the two longest walls is covered with paintings hung in a double row, frames almost touching. Although the pieces of the collection are obviously by more than one artist, the subject matter, without exception, is dark and violent, rendered with unimpeachable skill: twisted shadows, disembodied eyes wide with terror, a Ouija board on which stands a blood-spotted trivet, ink-black palm trees silhouetted against an ominous sunset, a face distorted by a funhouse mirror, the gleaming steel blades of sharp knives and scissors, a mean street where menacing figures lurk just beyond the sour-yellow glow of street lamps, leafless trees with coaly limbs, a hot-eyed raven perched upon a bleached skull, pistols, revolvers, shotguns, an ice pick, meat cleaver, hatchet, a queerly stained hammer lying obscenely on a silk negligee and lace-trimmed bedsheet . . .

He likes this artwork.

It speaks to him.

This is life as he knows it.

Turning from the gallery wall, he clicks on the stained-glass lamp and marvels at its multi-hued luminous beauty.

In the clear sheet of glass that protects the top of the desk, the mirror-image circles and ovals and teardrops of color are still lovely but darker than when viewed directly. In some indefinable way, they are also foreboding.

Leaning forward, he sees the twin ovals of his eyes staring back at him from the polished glass. Glimmering with their own tiny reflections of the mosaic lamplight, they seem to be not eyes, in fact, but the luminous sensors of a machine—or, if eyes, then the fevered eyes of something soulless—and he quickly looks away from them before too much self-examination leads him to fearful thoughts and intolerable conclusions.

“I need to be someone,” he says nervously.

His gaze falls upon a photograph in a silver frame, which also stands on the desk. A woman and two little girls. A pretty trio. Smiling.

He picks up the photograph to study it more closely. He presses one fingertip against the woman’s face and wishes he could touch her for real, feel her warm and pliant skin. He slides his finger across the glass, first touching the blond-haired child, and then the dark-haired pixie.

After a minute or two, when he moves away from the desk, he carries the photograph with him. The three faces in the portrait are so appealing that he needs to be able to look at them again whenever the desire arises.

As he investigates the titles on the spines of the volumes in the bookcases, he makes a discovery that gives him an understanding, however incomplete, of why he was drawn from the gray autumnal plains of the Midwest to the post-Thanksgiving sun of California.

On a few of the shelves, the books—mystery novels—are by the same author: Martin Stillwater. The surname is the one he saw on the mailbox outside.

He puts aside the silver-framed portrait and withdraws a few of these novels from the shelves, surprised to see that some of the dust-jacket illustrations are familiar because the original paintings are hanging on the gallery wall that so fascinated him. Each title appears in a variety of translations: French, German, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Japanese, and several other languages.

But nothing is as interesting as the author’s photo on the back of each jacket. He studies them for a long time, tracing Stillwater’s features with one finger.

Intrigued, he peruses the copy on the jacket flaps. Then he reads the first page of a book, the first page of another, and another.

He happens upon a dedication page in the front of one book and reads what is printed there:
This opus is for my mother and father, Jim and Alice Stillwater, who taught me to be an honest man—and who can’t be blamed if I am able to
think
like a criminal.

His mother and father. He stares in astonishment at their names. He has no memory of them, cannot picture their faces or recall where they might live.

He returns to the desk to consult the Rolodex. He discovers Jim and Alice Stillwater in Mammoth Lakes, California. The street address means nothing to him, and he wonders if it is the house in which he grew up.

He must love his parents. He dedicated a book to them. Yet they are ciphers to him. So much has been lost.

He returns to the bookshelves. Opening the U.S. or British edition of every title in the collection to study the dedication, he eventually finds:
To Paige, my perfect wife, on whom all of my best female characters are based—excluding, of course, the homicidal psychopaths.

And two volumes later:
To my daughters, Charlotte and Emily, with the hope they will read this book one day when they are grown up and will know that the daddy in this story speaks my own heart when he talks with such conviction and emotion about his feelings for his own little girls.

Putting the books aside, he picks up the photograph once more and holds it in both hands with something like reverence.

The attractive blonde is surely Paige. A perfect wife. The two girls are Charlotte and Emily, although he has no way of knowing which is which. They look sweet and obedient.

Paige, Charlotte, Emily.

At last he has found his life. This is where he belongs. This is home. The future begins now.

Paige, Charlotte, Emily.

This is the family toward which destiny has led him.

“I need to be Marty Stillwater,” he says, and he is thrilled to have found, at last, his own warm place in this cold and lonely world.

Two

Dr. Paul Guthridge’s office suite had three examination rooms. Over the years, Marty had been in all of them. They were identical to one another, indistinguishable from rooms in doctors’ offices from Maine to Texas: pale-blue walls, stainless-steel fixtures, otherwise white-on-white; scrub sink, stool, an eye chart. The place had no more charm than a morgue—though a better smell.

Marty sat on the edge of a padded examination table that was protected by a continuous roll of paper sheeting. He was shirtless, and the room was cool. Though he was still wearing his pants, he felt naked, vulnerable. In his mind’s eye, he saw himself having a catatonic seizure, being unable to talk or move or even blink, whereupon the physician would mistake him for dead, strip him naked, wire an ID tag to his big toe, tape his eyelids shut, and ship him off to the coroner for processing.

Although it earned him a living, a suspense writer’s imagination made him more aware of the constant proximity of death than were most people. Every dog was a potential rabies carrier. Every strange van passing through the neighborhood was driven by a sexual psychopath who would kidnap and murder any child left unattended for more than three seconds. Every can of soup in the pantry was botulism waiting to happen.

He was not particularly afraid of doctors—though he was not comforted by them, either.

What troubled him was
the whole idea
of medical science, not because he distrusted it but because, irrationally, its very existence was a reminder that life was tenuous, death inescapable. He didn’t need reminders. He already possessed an acute awareness of mortality, and spent his life trying to cope with it.

Determined not to sound like an hysteric while describing his symptoms to Guthridge, Marty recounted the odd experiences of the past three days in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice. He tried to use clinical rather than emotional terms, beginning with the seven-minute fugue in his office and ending with the abrupt panic attack he had suffered as he had been leaving the house to drive to the doctor’s office.

Guthridge was an excellent internist—in part because he was a good listener—although he didn’t look the role. At forty-five, he appeared ten years younger than his age, and he had a boyish manner. Today he wore tennis shoes, chinos, and a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt. In the summer, he favored colorful Hawaiian shirts. On those rare occasions when he wore a traditional white smock over slacks, shirt, and tie, he claimed to be “playing doctor” or “on strict probation from the American Medical Association’s dress-code committee,” or “suddenly overwhelmed by the godlike responsibilities of my office.”

Paige thought Guthridge was an exceptional physician, and the girls regarded him with the special affection usually reserved for a favorite uncle.

Marty liked him too.

He suspected the doctor’s eccentricities were not calculated entirely to amuse patients and put them at ease. Like Marty, Guthridge seemed morally offended by the very fact of death. As a younger man, perhaps he’d been drawn to medicine because he saw the physician as a knight battling dragons incarnated as illnesses and diseases. Young knights believe that noble intentions, skill, and faith will prevail over evil. Older knights know better—and sometimes use humor as a weapon to stave off bitterness and despair. Guthridge’s quips and Mickey Mouse sweatshirts might relax his patients, but they were also his armor against the hard realities of life and death.

“Panic attack? You, of all people, suffering a panic attack?” Paul Guthridge asked doubtfully.

Marty said, “Hyperventilating, heart pounding, felt like I was going to explode—sounds like a panic attack to me.”