The Orange Curtain (21 page)

She broke off whisking the eggs for the omelette. “Oh, you not stop
now
. No. You work for me, and I say work.”

“He said he wanted her spirit to rest.”

“How Phuong spirit going to rest if her murderer out there walking ’round?”

She put down the whisk and came over and pressed herself against him, and he had to close his eyes.

“You not the kind of man who walk away with job half done?”

He heard her giggle.

“I only half done, too. You got to cook me some more.”

“You’re very persuasive, Tien.”

“You bet.” She drew his head down and they kissed and it was a close thing whether they were going to get dinner or not. Tien decided for them by pulling back.

“Tao Quan watching. We save for afters. Here, you tear up salad.” She handed him a big romaine and a wood bowl.

“What’s Tao Quan?” he asked as she began chopping a small oval onion.

“The three kitchen gods. Every kitchen got them. Every year, right before Tet they go up to heaven and make report on what they seen.”

“Heaven wouldn’t approve of us smooching in the kitchen?”

“I don’t know, but Tet not too far away. Why take chance? You like shallot?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever had one.”

She waved a hand. “Just like onion, but better.” She set the chopped shallot aside and he was just taking over the cutting board when she hurried over. She caught his hand as he was about to slice the romaine.

“No, no, no,” she said. “Metal must not never touch lettuce. You must tear up with hand. No one tell you that?”

“No one told me that,” he said. Her hand was on his hand, and then her leg was against his leg and they didn’t get dinner after all, not for almost two hours.

He watched the beat-up Concord pull to the curb in front, the streetlight glinting off the only chrome left on the passenger side of the car, a single skewed door handle. The car looked like it had rolled, or at least toppled and then slid, the whole right side flattened out and scraped raw. The engine noise stopped and he saw Jack Liffey get out and walk around the front of his car. The man checked the VW, then glanced at the front door of the house, but chose to walk up the driveway, passing out of sight around the side of the house. Billy Gudger stayed well out of the line of sight from the side windows.

He saw himself rushing out the front door and running away down the block, his legs churning as hard as he could make them. Then he saw himself curling up into a fetal position beside the stub wall where he had watched from before, and then he saw himself standing defiantly right in the archway so someone at the back door could make him out. Things felt estranged from him, and a kind of unreality held everything in a glow that vibrated in his peripheral vision in perfect time to a throbbing he felt in his forehead. Everything was prepared, so it just had to unfold this way. He backed to the stub wall, raised the pistol with an almost uncontrollable tremor and lingered as he heard feet clomp unnecessarily loudly up the wooden stoop out back.

The toadstone is found in the head of a certain kind of toads.

—John Churchill,
Collection of Voyages and Travels
(1704)

The night had a strange look, a kind of orangeness that was fading out of the lumpy brown clouds but remaining on the air, an eerie Southern California winter phenomenon that he’d heard called, for some reason, a radioactive sky. A big sedan inched along the street behind him like a gang car searching for somebody to drive-by, and somewhere to the north there was a dull thump-thump thump-thump like a drop hammer in some ghostly steel plant.

Billy Gudger’s VW hadn’t been disturbed and the house curtains were all in the same places they had been. He could see there were no lights in the separate cottage behind so he went straight to the back door of the main house. There were no lights inside here either, but he had an inkling Billy was in there, the same hunch as before. As he came up the steps, letting his feet hit hard enough so that he wouldn’t startle anyone, he saw with a chill that the door was a half inch from being tight against the jamb. No door had a tongue that loose so it had to be ajar, but he rapped with his knuckle anyway.

“Billy, it’s Jack Liffey. I’d love to talk to you.”

He rapped again, hard enough to test the latch, and the door made a tick and gave a few inches.

“Billy, I know you’re home.”

He swung the door open and stepped in, trying to make as much natural noise as he could. There was an odd smell on the air of the service porch, the kind of musty old-lady, old-cigarette and strong-cleanser smell you got in cheap motels in the Southwest. In the kitchen, there was a box of cereal on the counter beside the stove, and he couldn’t remember whether it had been there before or not. He wished he was just a bit more observant, a rather important trait for a detective, he thought sardonically.

“I’ve been thinking about the toadstone,” Jack Liffey called evenly. “It’s quite remarkable, a whole chunk of the past of our culture that seems to have dropped out of Western Civilization without a trace. It’s as if we’d all woke up one day and we’d forgotten about maypoles or hopscotch.”

The house thrummed all of a sudden, probably a water heater coming on or—no, it was the freezer chest behind him cranking up its compressor. He could feel it in the floor.

“You seem to have found out a lot about toadstones. I’d like to know where I can look them up.”

He drifted cautiously across the kitchen, not quite sure why he was talking on and on. It was a little like whistling past a graveyard. There was an unholy mess of unwashed dishes in the sink, and a little plaque over the faucets,
The Kitchen Elves Will Do the Dishes
, reminded him of Tien’s tale of the three kitchen gods. He hoped some gods or elves were watching over him now.

Ahead he could see the big glass centerpiece on the dining room table. He decided he would go as far as the dining room and then retreat if Billy didn’t make himself known. He’d pass on his vague suspicions to Vo and go home, and the poor kid would just have to endure the Sheriff’s SWAT team crashing through the front door.

“Billy, is something wrong?”

He came slowly around the short wall beside the stove that separated the kitchen from the dining area, and nearly jumped out of his skin.

“Stop it! Stop it, you!” Billy Gudger screeched.

Jack Liffey went completely still, though his heart raced and thundered. Billy Gudger crouched beside the wall, aiming a pistol at him with both hands. He clutched the pistol with a fierce and awkward grip, neither the classic Weaver hold that pressed the knuckles of one fist against the palm of the other, nor the sissy-grip that they taught policewomen, with the butt resting on one upturned palm. The young man had one hand wrapped around the grip and the other clasping the receiver of the automatic so that if he actually fired it that way he’d get a damn good abrasion as the receiver flew back. Of course, if he fired the way he was aiming just then, Jack Liffey wouldn’t be around afterward to give him pointers on pistol technique. All of this Jack Liffey noted in a few microseconds, and then he spoke evenly and without much emotion.

“Who taught you to hold a pistol like that? You’ll hurt yourself. Here, let me show you how to do it.”

He reached out casually with one hand. It was a near thing. The boy’s face took on a deer-in-the-headlights look for an instant, and he might actually have been at the point of handing the pistol over, but he recoiled against the wall instead, as if slapped, knocking over a floor lamp behind him, startling them both with the
whump
and the breaking bulbs. Jack Liffey didn’t like the way the pistol was trembling.

“Don’t touch me! I’m
mean
!”

Jack Liffey opened his palms in a friendly way. “No, you’re not. I won’t touch you.”

“I bet you think I’m harmless!”

Absurdly, he thought of Philip Marlowe dividing the world into the anxious and the depressed. People were always dividing humanity along some simplistic axis. “Billy, I’d prefer not to think of people in terms of harmless or harmful. I’d like to think of you as bright and sad and interesting. I want to ask you about the toadstone.”

“Forget that! That’s
over
.”

“It can’t be over if you’ve got one in your head,” he said, his intuition working overtime.

The young man looked so stricken that he knew he’d struck paydirt. “That’s none of your business. Here, I’ll show you how dangerous I am. Turn around!”

“Clockwise or counter-clockwise?”

The young man’s eyes dilated and he seemed to steam and throb for a moment, like a cartoon character letting off an excess of internal pressure. “Can I give you some
advice
, Mr. Liffey?”

“I don’t think I’m in a position to decline.”

“Don’t you ever laugh at me.”

Jack Liffey nodded, as sincerely as he could, and he turned around to face away. “Okay.”

“I really
really
hate it.”

“We all do, I think. I’m sorry. Irony is a pretty bad habit. It’s really just a way of stating something while you pretend you don’t actually inhabit the thought. It doesn’t leave the other person a legitimate way to respond.”

“That’s it
exactly
.” The young man backed past him very slowly into the kitchen, then all the way to the door and shut it. “I want you to come out here slowly. Come to the freezer and look inside.”

Uh-oh, he thought. All the hair on his body was prickling. He had a horrible premonition of what he might see inside the freezer. It couldn’t be Phuong, of course, but if the young man really was a serial killer, the possibilities were endless. His mind couldn’t help itself and he pictured a freezer full of hacked-off limbs, severed heads in Saran…

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Jack Liffey asked. “Perhaps we should just talk.”

“Come here!”

He walked slowly to the waist-high freezer chest. It was an old Amana, scratched and dinged and still chugging away. A snap latch held the top down, and when he released it, the top popped up a few inches, as if something within was trying to get out. Pandora’s Box for sure, he thought, but this situation didn’t really need a classical antecedent. He lifted the lid and felt the breath of winter, and it took a moment to work out what he was looking at. It was a shoulder, back and rump, an obese woman who had been folded over to fit. She had her knees tucked, but her torso was so large it nearly filled the chest and her head had been pressed down unnaturally and forced in. There was fresh-looking blood on her dress, a lot of it, but he saw no wounds so he guessed she’d been shot from the front and then had lain bleeding on her back for a while. The skin of her neck was pale and pasty.

Sylvia Gudger? Or was the name Sophie? It had been on the sign out in front, and once again his powers of observation came into question. He’d better crank them up now, he thought with a deep foreboding. It was possible his survival was going to depend on his ability to read the tormented soul of this strange young man. Was this the mother, step-mother, aunt, older sister? He decided it was probably not a very good idea to ask.

“You still think I’m harmless?”

“No. Not at all.” Should he say he was impressed? He just let it sit.

“I can be powerful.
Shantih, shantih, shantih
.”

“Did she laugh at you?” he guessed.

“Maybe. It happened sometimes.”

“What happened sometimes?”

“You know.”

“No, I don’t,” Jack Liffey insisted.

“
This
. People laugh and end up like this.”

“It doesn’t just happen, Billy.”

“Yes it does.”

Jack Liffey closed up the freezer chest and latched it. It wasn’t easy to do, physically or emotionally. That had been a human being. When you got too far from childhood, he thought, for no particular reason, life got dangerous. “Do you want me to help you?”

He heard a snort of exaggerated derision. “By calling the police?”

“If I wanted to call the police, they’d be here now, lots of them.” He turned around and watched the young man carefully. His guard came up and so did the pistol. “I came by myself because I didn’t want a bunch of SWAT cops shooting out your windows and hurting you.”

“You’re just trying to trick me.”

“I didn’t know…
this
had happened, I won’t lie to you, but I knew you needed a friend. Didn’t I say that through the door?” He tried another surmise. “You needed someone like an uncle or a father to talk to.”

“Don’t give me a lot of Freudian father stuff. I don’t believe in all that.”

“Actually, I think Freud thought boys had a natural rivalry with their fathers. I don’t believe that, either.”

“Fathers are just bullshit. You can make yourself into anything you want, and you don’t need some damn other one to help you.”

“Maybe you’re stronger than me. I hurt for a long time after my father died. I felt alone. I didn’t even see him much the last few years, but I think I needed to know he was there, and he was still somebody I could go to. Somebody who knew a lot of things I didn’t know, who’d seen things and places and people I’d never see. He was a decent man from another era than mine. I wish I’d started talking to him more and listening to him.”

The young man seemed on the verge of tears. Somewhere Jack Liffey had read an article of advice to young women worried about being abducted which favored establishing as many human ties as possible with the abductor. It seemed a sensible idea.

“My father was a lifelong pacifist. During the war he got himself a job in the Merchant Marine so he could contribute to fighting Hitler but wouldn’t have to carry a gun. I want to tell you about a time when I was about nine years old.”

There didn’t seem to be any objection.

“We were walking along the tidepools at White Point in San Pedro. I don’t know if you know it.” The young man shook his head. “Back then it was pretty isolated, down at the bottom of a cliff with only a dirt road that descended pretty steeply to a spot where a few cars could park beside the rocky beach. We took the old Mercury down there and we were walking along the rocks, peering into the tidepools at sea anemones and hermit crabs and mussels. I think I was looking for pretty shells to stick in my pockets, though we might have been collecting big flat rocks. My dad used them to build walls around our house.