Velocity (15 page)

chapter 30

GUILT SPILLS ITSELF IN FEAR OF BEING SPILT,
someone had said, perhaps Shakespeare, perhaps O. J. Simpson. Billy couldn’t remember who had nailed that thought so well in words, but he realized the truth in the aphorism and felt it keenly now.

At the house, Sergeant Napolitino climbed the front steps and crossed the porch, stepping over the pint bottle and whatever spilled whiskey had not yet evaporated.

“Too Joe Friday,” Sobieski said.

“Excuse me?”

“Vince. He’s too deadpan. He gives you those flat eyes, that cast-concrete face, but he’s not really the hardass you think.”

By sharing Napolitino’s first name, Sobieski seemed to be taking Billy into his confidence.

Astutely alert for deception and manipulation, Billy suspected that the sergeant was no more taking him into his confidence than a trapdoor spider would greet an in-falling beetle with gentleness and brotherhood.

At the house, Vince Napolitino disappeared through the open front door.

“Vince has still got too much of the academy in him,” Sobieski continued. “When he’s seasoned a little more, he won’t come on so strong.”

“He’s just doing his job,” Billy said. “I understand that. No big deal.”

Sobieski remained in the driveway because he still at least half suspected Billy of some crime. Otherwise the two deputies would have searched the house together. Sergeant Sobieski was here to grab Billy if he tried to run.

“How’re you feeling?”

“I’m all right,” Billy said. “I just feel stupid putting you to all this trouble.”

“I meant your stomach,” Sobieski said.

“I don’t know. Maybe I ate something that was off.”

“Couldn’t have been Ben Vernon’s chili,” Sobieski said. “That stuff is so hot it
cures
just about any sickness known to science.”

Realizing that an innocent man, with nothing to fear, would not stare anxiously at the house, waiting for Napolitino to finish the search, Billy turned away from it and gazed out across the valley, at vineyards dwindling in a golden glare, toward mountains rising in blue haze.

“Crab will do it,” Sobieski said.

“What?”

“Crab, shrimp, lobster—if it’s a little off, it’ll cause true mayhem.”

“I had lasagna last night.”

“That sounds pretty safe.”

“Maybe not
my
lasagna,” Billy said, trying to match Sobieski’s apparent nonchalance.

“Come on, Vince,” the sergeant said with a trace of impatience. “I know you’re thorough,
compadre.
You don’t have to prove anything to me.” Then of Billy he asked, “You have an attic?”

“Yeah.”

The sergeant sighed. “He’ll want to check the attic.”

Out of the west came a flock of small birds, swooping low and then soaring, swooping low again. They were flickers, unusually active for this heat.

“Are you hunting for one of these?” Sobieski asked.

The deputy offered the open end of a roll of breath mints.

For an instant Billy was bewildered, until he realized that his hands were in his pockets again, fingering the bullets.

He took his hands out of his chinos. “I’m afraid it’s a little late for this,” he said, but accepted the mint.

“Occupational hazard, I guess,” said Sobieski. “A bartender, you’re around the stuff all day.”

Sucking on the mint, Billy said, “Actually, I don’t drink that much. I woke up at three in the morning, couldn’t turn my mind off, worrying about things I can’t control anyway, thought a shot or two would knock me out.”

“We all have nights like that. I call it the blue willies. You can’t drink them away, though. A mug of hot chocolate will cure just about any insomnia, but not even that works with the blue willies.”

“When the hooch didn’t do the job, it still seemed like a way to pass the night. Then the morning.”

“You hold it well.”

“Do I?”

“You don’t seem blotto.”

“I’m not. I’ve been tapering off the last few hours, trying to
ease
out of it to avoid a hangover.”

“Is that the trick?”

“It’s one of them.”

Sergeant Sobieski was easy to talk to: far
too
easy.

The flickers swooped low in their direction again, abruptly banked and soared and banked again, thirty or forty individuals flying as if with a single mind.

“They’re a real nuisance,” Sobieski said of the birds.

With pointed bills, flickers sought preferred houses and stables and churches of Napa County to drill elaborate lacelike patterns in wooden cornices, architraves, eaves, bargeboards, and corner boards.

“They never bother my place,” Billy said. “It’s cedar.”

Many people found the flickers’ destructive work so beautiful that damaged wood trim was not always replaced until time and weather brought it down.

“They don’t like cedar?” Sobieski asked.

“I don’t know. But they don’t like mine.”

Having drilled its lacework, the flicker plants acorns in many of the holes, high on the building where the sun can warm them. After a few days, the bird returns to listen to the acorns. Hearing noise in some, not in others, it pecks open the noisy acorns to eat the larvae that are living inside.

So much for the sanctity of the home.

Flickers and sergeants will do their work.

Slowly, relentlessly, they will do it.

“It’s not such a big place,” Billy said, allowing himself to sound slightly impatient, as he imagined that an innocent man would.

When Sergeant Napolitino returned, he did not come out of the front door. He appeared along the south side of the house, from the direction of the detached garage.

He did not approach with one hand resting casually on his gun. Maybe that was a good sign.

As if by the sight of Napolitino, the birds were chased to a far corner of the sky.

“That’s a nice wood shop you’ve got,” he told Billy. “You could do just about anything in there.”

Somehow the young sergeant made it sound as if Billy might have used the power tools to dismember a body.

Looking out across the valley, Napolitino said, “You’ve got a pretty terrific view here.”

“It’s nice,” Billy said.

“It’s paradise.”

“It is,” Billy agreed.

“I’m surprised you keep all your window shades down.”

Billy had relaxed too soon. He said only half coherently, “When it’s this hot, I do, the sun.”

“Even on the sides of the house where the sun doesn’t hit.”

“On a day this bright,” Billy said, “dodging a whiskey headache, you want soothing gloom.”

“He’s been tapering off the booze all morning,” Sobieski told Napolitino, “trying to ease his way sober and avoid a hangover.”

“Is that the trick?” Napolitino asked.

Billy said, “It’s one of them.”

“It’s nice and cool in there.”

“Cool helps, too,” Billy said.

“Rosalyn said you lost your air conditioning.”

Billy had forgotten that little lie, such a small filament in his enormous patchwork web of deceit.

He said, “It conks out for a few hours, then it comes on, then it conks out again. I don’t know if maybe it’s a compressor problem.”

“Tomorrow’s supposed to be a scorcher,” Napolitino said, still gazing out across the valley. “Better get a repairman if they aren’t already booked till Christmas.”

“I’m going to have a look at it myself a little later,” Billy said. “I’m pretty handy with things.”

“Don’t go poking around in machinery until you’re full sober.”

“I won’t. I’ll wait.”

“Especially not electrical equipment.”

“I’m going to make something to eat. That’ll help. Maybe it’ll even help my stomach.”

Napolitino finally looked at Billy. “I’m sorry to have kept you out here in the sun, with your headache and all.”

The sergeant sounded sincere, conciliatory for the first time, but his eyes were as cold and dark and humbling as the muzzles of a pair of pistols.

“The whole thing’s my fault,” Billy said. “You guys were just doing your job. I’ve already said six ways I’m an idiot. There’s no other way to say it. I’m really sorry to have wasted your time.”

“We’re here ‘to serve and protect.’” Napolitino smiled thinly. “It even says so on the door of the car.”

“I liked it better when it said ‘the best deputies money can buy,’” said Sergeant Sobieski, surprising a laugh from Billy but drawing only a vaguely annoyed look from Napolitino. “Billy, maybe it’s time to stop the tapering off and switch to food.”

Billy nodded. “You’re right.”

As he walked to the house, he felt they were watching him. He didn’t look back.

His heart had been relatively calm. Now it pounded again.

He couldn’t believe his luck. He feared that it wouldn’t hold.

On the porch, he took his watch off the railing, put it on his wrist.

He bent down to pick up the pint bottle. He didn’t see the cap. It must have rolled off the porch or under a rocker.

At the table beside his chair, he dropped the three crackers into the empty Ritz box, which for a while had held the .38 revolver. He picked up the glass of cola.

He expected to hear the engines of the patrol cars start up. They didn’t.

Without glancing back, he carried the glass and the box and the bottle inside. He closed the door and leaned against it.

Outside, the day remained still, the engines silent.

chapter 31

SUDDEN SUPERSTITION WARNED BILLY THAT AS
long as he waited with his back against the door, Sergeants Napolitino and Sobieski would not leave.

Listening, he went into the kitchen. He dropped the Ritz box in the trash can.

Listening, he poured the last ounce of whiskey from the bottle into the sink, and then chased it with the cola in the glass. He put the bottle in the trash, the glass in the dishwasher.

When by this time Billy had still heard no engines starting up, curiosity gnawed at him with ratty persistence.

The blinded house grew increasingly claustrophobic. Perhaps because he knew that it contained a corpse, it seemed to be shrinking to the dimensions of a casket.

He went into the living room, sorely tempted to put up one of the pleated shades, all of them. But he didn’t want the sergeants to think that he raised the shades to watch them and that their continued presence worried him.

Cautiously, he bent the edge of one of the shades back from the window frame. He was not at an angle to see the driveway.

Billy moved to another window, tried again, and saw the two men standing at Napolitino’s car, where he’d left them. Neither deputy directly faced the house.

They appeared to be deep in conversation. They weren’t likely to be discussing baseball.

He wondered if Napolitino had thought to search the woodworking shop for the half-cut, one-by-six walnut plank with the knothole. The sergeant would not have found that length of lumber, of course, because it did not exist.

When Sobieski turned his head toward the house, Billy at once let go of the shade. He hoped that he had been quick enough.

Until they were gone, Billy could do nothing other than worry. With everything he had to fret about, however, it was odd that his all-enveloping fog of anxiety quickly condensed upon the bizarre idea that Ralph Cottle’s body no longer lay under the desk in the study, where he had left it.

To have moved the cadaver, the killer would have had to return to the house while both of the deputies had been speaking with Billy in the driveway, before he himself had returned to the house. The freak had proved his boldness; but this would have been recklessness if not the worst temerity.

If the corpse had been moved, however, he would have to find it. He couldn’t afford to wait until it turned up by surprise in an inconvenient and incriminating moment.

Billy withdrew the .38 revolver from under the sofa cushion.

When he broke out the cylinder and checked to be certain all six rounds were whole and loaded, he assured himself that this was an act of healthy suspicion, not a sign of creeping paranoia.

He followed the hallway as the disquiet that rang softly along his nerves quickened and, by the time he crossed the threshold into the study, swelled into clamorous alarm.

He shoved the office chair out of the way.

Embraced on three sides by the knee space, in the soft folds of his baggy and rumpled suit, Ralph Cottle looked like the meat of a walnut snugged inside its shell.

Even minutes previously, Billy could not have imagined that he would ever be
relieved
to find a corpse in his house.

He suspected that several pieces of subtle but direct evidence tying him to Cottle had been planted on the man’s body. Even if he took the time for a meticulous inspection of the cadaver, he would surely miss one incriminating bit or another.

The body must be destroyed or buried where it would never be found. Billy had not yet decided how to dispose of it; but even as he coped with the mounting developments of the current crisis, dark corners of his mind were composing gruesome scenarios.

Finding the body as he left it, he also discovered the computer screen aglow and waiting. He had loaded the diskette that he’d found in Cottle’s dead hands, but before he had been able to review its contents, Rosalyn Chan had called to ask if he had just phoned 911.

He rolled the office chair in front of the desk once more. He sat before the computer, tucking his legs under the chair, away from the corpse.

The diskette contained three documents. The first was labeled W
HY
, without a question mark.

When he accessed the document, he found that it was short:

Billy read the line three times. He didn’t know what to make of it, but the hook wounds in his brow burned anew.

He recognized the religious reference. Christ had been called a fisher of men.

The easy inference was that the killer might be a religious fanatic who thought he heard divine voices urging him to kill, but easy inferences were usually wrong. Sound inductive reasoning required more than one particular from which to generalize.

Besides, the freak possessed a knack for duplicity, a faculty for obfuscation, a talent for deception, and a genius for carefully crafted enigma. He preferred the oblique to the straightforward, the circuitous to the direct.

W
HY.

Because I, too, am a fisher of men.

The true, full meaning of that statement could not be surmised let alone ascertained in a hundred readings, nor in the limited time that Billy currently could devote to its analysis.

The second document was labeled H
OW
. It proved to be no less mysterious than the first:

Although without rhyme or meter, that triad seemed almost to be a stanza of verse. As with the most recondite poetry, the meaning was not on the surface.

Billy had the strange feeling that those three lines were three answers and that if only he knew the questions, he would also know the identity of the killer.

Whether that impression might be reliable intuition or delusion, he had no time just now to consider it. Lanny’s body still awaited final disposition, as did Cottle’s. Billy was half convinced that if he consulted his wristwatch, he would see the minute and hour hands spinning as if they were counting off mere seconds.

The third document on the diskette was labeled W
HEN
, and as Billy accessed it, the dead man in the knee space seized his foot.

If Billy could have breathed, he would have cried out. By the time the trapped exhalation exploded from his throat, however, he realized that the explanation was less supernatural than it had at first seemed.

The dead man had not seized him; in Billy’s agitation, he had pressed his feet against the corpse. He tucked them under the chair once more.

On the screen, the document labeled W
HEN
offered a message that required less interpretation than W
HY
and H
OW
.