Mr. Murder (36 page)

Marty was the first to break the comfortable silence between them. “When Vera Conner had the stroke and we spent so much time that week in the lounge outside the intensive care unit, there were a lot of other people, came and went, waiting to learn whether their friends and relatives would live or die.”

“Hard to believe it’s almost two years Vera’s been gone.”

Vera Conner had been a professor of psychology at UCLA, a mentor to Paige when she had been a student, and then an exemplary friend in the years that followed. She still missed Vera. She always would.

Marty said, “Some of the people waiting in that lounge just sat and stared. Some paced, looked out windows, fidgeted. Listened to a Walkman with headphones. Played a Game Boy. They passed the time all kinds of ways. But—did you notice?—those who seemed to deal best with their fear or grief, the people most at peace, were the ones reading novels.”

Except for Marty, and in spite of a forty-year age difference, Vera had been Paige’s dearest friend and the first person who ever cared about her. The week Vera was hospitalized—first disoriented and suffering, then comatose—had been the worst week of Paige’s life; nearly two years later, her vision still blurred when she recalled the last day, the final hour, as she’d stood beside Vera’s bed, holding her friend’s warm but unresponsive hand. Sensing the end was near, Paige had said things she hoped God allowed the dying woman to hear:
I love you, I’ll miss you forever, you’re the mother to me that my own mother never could be.

The long hours of that week were engraved indelibly in Paige’s memory, in more excruciating detail than she would have liked, for tragedy was the sharpest engraving instrument of all. She not only remembered the layout and furnishings of the ICU visitors’ lounge in dreary specificity, but could still recall the faces of many of the strangers who, for a time, shared that room with her and Marty.

He said, “You and I were passing the time with novels, so were some other people, not just to escape but because ... because, at its best, fiction is medicine.”

“Medicine?”

“Life is so damned disorderly, things just happen, and there doesn’t seem any point to so much of what we go through. Sometimes it seems the world’s a madhouse. Storytelling condenses life, gives it order. Stories have beginnings, middles, ends. And when a story’s over, it
meant
something, by God, maybe not something complex, maybe what it had to say was simple, even naive, but there was meaning. And that gives us hope, it’s a medicine.”

“The medicine of hope,” she said thoughtfully.

“Or maybe I’m just full of shit.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Well, I
am,
yes, probably at least half full of shit—but maybe not about this.”

She smiled and gently squeezed his hand.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but I think if some university did a long-term study, they’d discover that people who read fiction don’t suffer from depression as much, don’t commit suicide as often, are just happier with their lives. Not all fiction, for sure. Not the human-beings-are -garbage-life-stinks-there-is-no-God novels filled with fashionable despair.”

“Dr. Marty Stillwater, dispensing the medicine of hope.”

“You
do
think I’m full of shit.”

“No, baby, no,” she said. “I think you’re wonderful.”

“I’m not, though.
You’re
wonderful. I’m just a neurotic writer. By nature, writers are too smug, selfish, insecure and at the same time too full of themselves ever to be wonderful.”

“You’re not neurotic, smug, selfish, insecure, or conceited. ”

“That just proves you haven’t been listening to me all these years.”

“Okay, I’ll give you the neurotic part.”

“Thank you, dear,” he said. “It’s nice to know you’ve been listening at least
some
of the time.”

“But you’re also wonderful. A wonderfully neurotic writer. I wish I was a wonderfully neurotic writer, too, dispensing medicine.”

“Bite your tongue.”

She said, “I mean it.”

“Maybe
you
can live with a writer, but I don’t think I’d have the stomach for it.”

She rolled onto her right side to face him, and he turned onto his left side, so they could kiss. Tender kisses. Gentle. For a while they just held each other, listening to the surf.

Without resorting to words, they had agreed not to discuss any further their worries or what might need to be done in the morning. Sometimes a touch, a kiss, or an embrace said more than all the words a writer could marshal, more than all the carefully reasoned advice and therapy that a counselor could provide.

In the body of the night, the great heart of the ocean beat slowly, reliably. From a human perspective, the tide was an eternal force; but from a divine view, transitory.

On the downslope of consciousness, Paige was surprised to realize that she was sliding into sleep. Like the sudden agitation of a blackbird’s wings, alarm fluttered through her at the prospect of lying unaware—therefore vulnerable—in a strange place. But her weariness was greater than her fear, and the solace of the sea wrapped her and carried her, on tides of dreams, into childhood, where she rested her head against her mother’s breast and listened with one ear for the special, secret whisper of love somewhere in the reverberant heartbeats.

Still wearing a set of headphones, Drew Oslett woke to gunfire, explosions, screams, and music loud enough and strident enough to be God’s background theme for doomsday. On the TV screen, Glover and Gibson were running, jumping, punching, shooting, dodging, spinning, leaping through burning buildings in a thrilling ballet of violence.

Smiling and yawning, Oslett checked his wristwatch and saw that he had been asleep for over two and a half hours. Evidently, after the movie had played once, the stewardess, seeing how like a lullaby it was to him, had rewound and rerun it.

They must be close to their destination, surely much less than an hour out of John Wayne Airport in Orange County. He took off the headset, got up, and went forward in the cabin to tell Clocker what he had learned earlier in his telephone conversation with New York.

Clocker was asleep in his seat. He had taken off the tweed jacket with the leather patches and lapels, but he was still wearing the brown porkpie hat with the small brown and black duck feather in the band. He wasn’t snoring, but his lips were parted, and a thread of drool escaped the corner of his mouth; half his chin glistened disgustingly.

Sometimes Oslett was half convinced that the Network was playing a colossal joke on him by pairing him with Karl Clocker.

His own father was a mover and shaker in the organization, and Oslett wondered if the old man would hitch him to a ludicrous figure like Clocker as a way of humiliating him. He loathed his father and knew the feeling was mutual. Finally, however, he could not believe that the old man, in spite of deep and seething antagonism, would play such games—largely because, by doing so, he would be exposing an Oslett to ridicule. Protecting the honor and integrity of the family name always took precedence over personal feelings and the settling of grudges between family members.

In the Oslett family, certain lessons were learned so young that Drew almost felt as if he’d been born with that knowledge, and a profound understanding of the value of the Oslett name seemed rooted in his genes. Nothing—except a vast fortune—was as precious as a good name, maintained through generations; from a good name sprang as much power as from tremendous wealth, because politicians and judges found it easier to accept briefcases full of cash, by way of bribery, when the offerings came from people whose bloodline had produced senators, secretaries of state, leaders of industry, noted champions of the environment, and much-lauded patrons of the arts.

His pairing with Clocker was simply a mistake. Eventually he would have the situation rectified. If the Network bureaucracy was slow to rearrange assignments, and if their renegade was recovered in a condition that still allowed him to be handled as before, Oslett would take Alfie aside and instruct
him
to terminate Clocker.

The paperback
Star Trek
novel, spine broken, lay open on Karl Clocker’s chest, pages down. Careful not to wake the big man, Oslett picked up the book.

He turned to the first page, not bothering to mark Clocker’s stopping place, and began to read, thinking that perhaps he would get a clue as to why so many people were fascinated by the starship
Enterprise
and its crew. Within a few paragraphs, the damned author was taking him inside the mind of Captain Kirk, mental territory that Oslett was willing to explore only if his alternatives were otherwise limited to the stultifying minds of all the presidential candidates in the last election. He skipped ahead a couple of chapters, dipped in, found himself in Spock’s prissily rational mind, skipped more pages and discovered he was in the mind of “Bones” McCoy.

Annoyed, he closed
Journey to the Rectum of the Universe,
or whatever the hell the book was called, and slapped Clocker’s chest with it to wake him.

The big man sat straight up so suddenly that his porkpie hat popped off and landed in his lap. Sleepily, he said, “Wha? Wha?”

“We’ll be landing soon.”

“Of course we will,” Clocker said.

“There’s a contact meeting us.”

“Life is contact.”

Oslett was in a foul mood. Chasing a renegade assassin, thinking about his father, pondering the possible catastrophe represented by Martin Stillwater, reading several pages of a
Star Trek
novel, and now being peppered with more of Clocker’s cryptograms was too much for any man to bear and still be expected to keep his good humor. He said, “Either you’ve been drooling in your sleep, or a herd of snails just crawled over your chin and into your mouth.”

Clocker raised one burly arm and wiped the lower part of his face with his shirt sleeve.

“This contact,” Oslett said, “might have a lead on Alfie by now. We have to be sharp, ready to move. Are you fully awake?”

Clocker’s eyes were rheumy. “None of us is ever fully awake.”

“Oh, please, will you cut that half-baked mystical crap? I just don’t have any patience for that right now.”

Clocker stared at him a long moment and then said, “You’ve got a turbulent heart, Drew.”

“Wrong. It’s my stomach that’s turbulent from having to listen to this crap.”

“An inner tempest of blind hostility.”

“Fuck you,” Oslett said.

The pitch of the jet engines changed subtly. A moment later the stewardess approached to announce that the plane had entered its approach to the Orange County airport and to ask them to put on their seatbelts.

According to Oslett’s Rolex, it was 1:52 in the morning, but that was back in Oklahoma City. As the Lear descended, he reset his watch until it showed eight minutes to midnight.

By the time they landed, Monday had ticked into Tuesday like a bomb clock counting down toward detonation.

The advance man—who appeared to be in his late twenties, not much younger than Drew Oslett—was waiting in the lounge at the private-aircraft terminal. He told them his name was Jim Lomax, which it most likely was not.

Oslett told him that their names were Charlie Brown and Dagwood Bumstead.

The contact didn’t seem to get the joke. He helped them carry their luggage out to the parking lot, where he loaded it in the trunk of a green Oldsmobile.

Lomax was one of those Californians who had made a temple of his body and then had proceeded to more elaborate architecture. The exercise-and-health-food ethic had long ago spread into every corner of the country, and for years Americans had been striving for hard buns and healthy hearts to the farthest outposts of snowy Maine. However, the Golden State was where the first carrot-juice cocktail had been poured, where the first granola bar had been made, and was still the only place where a significant number of people believed that sticks of raw jicama were a satisfactory substitute for french fries, so only certain fanatically dedicated Californians had enough determination to exceed the structural requirements of a temple. Jim Lomax had a neck like a granite column, shoulders like limestone door lintels, a chest that could buttress a nave wall, a stomach as flat as an altar stone, and had pretty much made a great
cathedral
out of his body.

Although a storm front had passed through earlier in the night and the air was still damp and chilly, Lomax was wearing just jeans and a T-shirt on which was a photo of Madonna with her breasts bared (the rock singer, not the mother of God), as if the elements affected him as little as they did the quarried walls of any mighty fortress. He virtually strutted instead of walking, performing every task with calculated grace and evident self-consciousness, obviously aware and pleased that people were prone to watch and envy him.

Oslett suspected Lomax was not merely a proud man but profoundly vain, even narcissistic. The only god worshipped in the cathedral of his body was the ego that inhabited it.

Nevertheless Oslett liked the guy. The most appealing thing about Lomax was that, in his company, Karl Clocker appeared to be the smaller of the two. In fact it was the
only
appealing thing about the guy, but it was enough. Actually, Lomax was probably only slightly—if at all—larger than Clocker, but he was harder and better honed. By comparison, Clocker seemed slow, shambling, old, and soft. Because he was sometimes intimidated by Clocker’s size, Oslett delighted at the thought of Clocker intimidated by Lomax—though, frustratingly, if the Trekker was at all impressed, he didn’t show it.

Lomax drove. Oslett sat up front, and Clocker slumped in the back seat.

Leaving the airport, they turned right onto MacArthur Boulevard. They were in an area of expensive office towers and complexes, many of which seemed to be the regional or national headquarters of major corporations, set back from the street behind large and meticulously maintained lawns, flowerbeds, swards of shrubbery, and lots of trees, all illuminated by artfully placed landscape lighting.