SUMMER of FEAR Page 9

  She looked afraid.

  I stepped in the direction of her disappearing car, misjudged the curb height, and lost my balance again. I was clever enough to make it look as if I was just trying to sit on the curb. So I sat on the curb. People parted around me, muttered, passed on. Amber's car vanished into a left turn on Third. I rubbed my eyes, watched a manhole cover levitate, and listened to the sharp slap of waves mixed with the hissing of car tires on pavement.

  A moment later, Grace's red Porsche appeared in front of me and I felt my daughter's strong arms lifting me up to stand on my own two, only slightly functional, feet.

  "Get in, Russell."

  I felt the transmission engage beneath me, heard the roar of the exhaust, watched the shops of Forest Avenue blink past us. I could hear myself talking. I was telling Grace everything that had happened on the nights of July 3 and 4. I was back in Amber's room, somehow, reliving every detail of those dismal nights, confessing my obsession with Amber, my run-in with Martin Parish, trying to explain to my daughter that her mother's body had disappeared and that truly, truly I loved Isabella more than any living creature and all we'd wanted was a normal life and maybe a child.... "And I swear, Grace, I just saw Amber driving a car not five minutes ago right down this..."

  My daughter's hand pressed against my mouth.

  "Shut up, Russell, you're embarrassing yourself."

  I shut up, melting into the g force of Grace's turn onto Broadway. She glanced at me.

  "Look," she said, "Amber's alive, no matter what you think you saw. It's totally in keeping with the way she is. You, of anyone, should know that. Were you as drunk that night as you are now? How in hell do you know what you saw? As for you and your pitiful obsession with Amber, well, you're just another one of a million men made stupid by her. Maybe the only man made even stupider than you is Marty. He's so fucked up, he thinks he saw me there that night, when I was watch a goddamned movie with Brent Sides."

  "You can prove that?"

  "When and if I choose to," she snapped. “I’ll tell you something, Russell. My mother is so full of deceit and manipulation, I wouldn't doubt it if she'd played a great big joke all of you. I know her. Nobody in this world has gotten more of her hatred than I have."

  "I wouldn't know."

  "You sure wouldn't. While you were slogging away the Sheriff's Department, Mom and I were galavanting around the world, having fun."

  Grace turned onto Coast Highway and headed north. She ground the car into second and shot past a tourist trying to make it across the asphalt, flipping him off through the window as we whipped by his wide-eyed face.

  "I tried to find you," I said.

  "That's not the point. You did, or you didn't. You could have found us, anyway. Those postcards I sent you from Rome? I wrote them from a boarding school not twenty miles from your home, sent them to Amber, who mailed them to you from Italy. By the time you got them, she was in Paris, anyway, used that trick a lot on you. Amber didn't want you to see me and she saw to it. It's the way she works. Funny, though, because you were one of the few men in the world she didn’t want me to see."

  "I don't understand."

  "Did you know she tried to turn me out when I was ten? Not like a whore, I mean, but like a... woman. She had me nylons and makeup and heels and pranced me around this party like some kind of show pony. She encouraged me to keep the company of men three times my age. And when I wouldn't what she wanted, when I'd dress the way a girl wants to and mouth off to her big beautiful friends and just get up and leave when I felt like it—that's when she started to despise me. Every inch I carved out for myself was a point of betrayal for her. She suffocated me. Later, she became delusional."

  "What delusions?"

  "That I was trying to take away her men. That I was stealing her money. She accused me five years ago of stealing this stupid netsuke and inro that John and Yoko had given her when we were in New York one year. She loved the ugly little thing because they'd given it to her, right? I didn't take it, but she's been obsessing over it for five years now, demanding I give it back, claiming I stole it just to hurt her. I never even wanted the goddamned trinket, though it's worth about twenty grand. But she's convinced I've got it stashed in a safe-deposit box somewhere. For that, she's threatened to write me completely out of her will."

  "And your response?"

  "I told her to fuck herself, keep her money, and leave me alone. I can work. I've got a job. Or at least I had one until those creeps Amber sent started hanging around the store. They truly scared me. They really scared me."

  "Amber sent the men?"

  "Of course she did. It's all a way to get me frightened back into her fold. She doesn't want to write me out of her will. She just wants me to lick her boots."

  Grace jacked a right turn onto Cliff and headed down toward the Canyon Road. "Look, Russell. I've got my problems, but they're not your problems. I appreciate you putting me up for a few days. Take care of Isabella—she needs you. And quit thinking about Mom. She's a waste of time. Believe me."

  I thought about these words, and they seemed to be full of great wisdom. From the mouths of babes. "Drive faster," I said.

  My head snapped back against the rest and the engine howled from behind us. "I want to see Izzy. I want to love my wife."

  "Good thinking, Russell."

  Before lying down with Isabella, I had the presence mind to retrieve the unpaid bills from the wastebasket in my study and replace them in the drawer. The act felt like a step in the right direction. It was something positive, actual, redolent of hope.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Grace had just taken Isabella her breakfast and I had just taken my second handful of aspirin in six hours when the telephone rang. It was seven in the morning, eighty degrees already, and too early for business as usual. I half-expected to hear Amber's voice on the phone. I'd replayed the vision of her in my mind a thousand times that night, even in my dreams, so many times that, by an inexplicable trick of memory, it began to seem unreal. Had I or hadn't I? It was impossible. It was true. I was outraged. I was mystified.

  I had read and reread my Journal article on the Midnight Eye—front page, above the fold—and it was good. The courthouse and crime-beat reporters would be gnashing their teeth and screaming at Karen Schultz by now. The general public would be buying even more handguns.

  I made it to the phone and said hello, my head thundering.

  There was a long silence, but I could hear breathing. "Speak up," I said. "Life is short."

  "It certainly is. Russell?"

  "Yep."

  "I am the Midnight Eye."

  I entertained the notion, very briefly, that this was a joke. I would not have put it past Martin Parish or Erik Wald or even Art Crump to call so early and with so idiotic a sense of humor. But something in the pause that followed, something the firm timbre of the voice, something I remembered from the tape left in the stereo at the site of the Wynn slaughter, something in the center of my soul suggested that I was talking to the real thing.

  "Fuck you, Jack," I said, and hung up.

  He called back immediately. The voice was even, unhurried, perhaps just slightly lower than average. To my ear, he had no accent, which means a California accent.

  "The Wynn wife was still alive when I tied her to the shower nozzle. I wouldn't have tried it with anyone who weighed over a hundred pounds. Blood drains clockwise above the equator, just like water, unless you reverse the flow. I did not. It clogged early, anyway. Cedrick Ellison had a dangling left testicle and a much smaller penis than legend gives the Negro. The picture of Jesus over Sid and Teresa's bed actually brought tears of laughter to my eyes, which, incidentally, a blue. There, Russell, a clue—even though you were rude enough to hang up on me. Convinced?"

  It was my turn to breathe wordlessly. No one on earth but a good person of the Sheriff's/Coroner's office could have know what the voice had just told me, except for the man who'd committed the acts. There is no way he could
have extrapolated that information from my article that morning, even with the strongest and most intuitive of imaginations.

  "No," I said.

  "What is your IQ?"

  "Higher than yours."

  "Mine is one thirty-six, according to the Stanford-Binet they gave us in high school. Junior year. I think I'd have done better, but I was preoccupied that day with a fantasy about the neighbor's cat. I was d-d-distracted. Are you really not convinced?"

  "No, I am not."

  The line was quiet for a moment. His stuttering d reminded me of the garbled, cryptic tape left behind. But this voice, live on the phone, had none of the rambling, slurring delivery that handicapped the maker of that tape.

  "Then ask me."

  "What do you have on your back?"

  "A green devil."

  "What does the Midnight Eye see?"

  "Hypocrites."

  "Spell it."

  "You know, this may be the last time we'll get to have a long conversation, Russell, because I know you'll report this call to the Sheriff's, Winters will install an electronic call tracer I will allegedly not be able to hear, and you and I will have to have short talks. Right now, this feels like a luxury. Let's not turn it into a spelling bee."

  The line on which we talked was dead quiet in the background, not so much as a hum, no static, clear. He could have been calling from the depths of a tomb.

  "What do you want?"

  "I liked the article. Thank you for using my name."

  "What is your real name?"

  He laughed for the first time then, a strange, muted sh-sh-sh that sounded wet, compressed between teeth or lips to draw force from both the inhale and the exhale. It sounded like something with scales escaping from a cage.

  "How is Isabella?"

  Again, it was my turn for silence. I could find no words for the protective fury inside me.

  "What do you want?" I finally said again.

  "The county should understand my quest."

  "Which is what?"

  "Cleansing."

  "The races?"

  "Absolutely. I can remember when the orange grove spread for miles and every face was a white, healthy, brave face."

  "So what?" I said. "Places change."

  "And change again, Russell. I am doing my part, signaling the change. Tell me, what has Erik Wald given you in terms profile?"

  "Nothing, yet."

  "The usual bludgeon stuff, beards and size and neo-Nazi survivalist nonsense?"

  "That's not Wald. That's the common wisdom."

  "Sh-sh-sh. Wisdom. I'll tie Wald and his ilk in knots. Their arrogance astounds me."

  "Where are you?"

  "Russell, you are a belly laugh."

  "In the county, I mean? Out of? In the state still?"

  "Very much where I belong. I was born here. There, clue number two."

  "Here, in the county?"

  "Yes, Russell, here in the county. You still think like the cop you used to be. It must be hard to write entire books when your mind is so... flatfooted. Journey Up River was good though. I think Crump is a terrible self-aggrandizer—a clown. It would be a temptation, with you there to report all of his silly Posturing. But Art Crump had no purpose other than his own sex. That's why he was so sloppy. It's hard to think clearly in the middle of a sex act, even when there's killing to be done."

  "You manage."

  "You can't say that. There have been no traces of semen left at any scene. The bodies have not been penetrated, so far as your medical examiner can tell."

  He was right, of course. An idea roamed my head, but I said nothing.

  "This is not about a man's desire," he said. "This is about the restoration of place, the dignity of an age that we cannot afford to let slip by. I'm pleased that you'll be writing my story for the county, Russell. You need me. It will be, actually, the greatest story you'll ever tell."

  "I still don't know what you want," I said.

  "One: Don't let Winters put a tracer on your phone. Record the calls if you'd like—accuracy in reporting is important, isn't it? It will allow me freedom to contact you without worry and you'll learn much more from a leisurely chat than a quick one. Two: I want you to keep Erik Wald informed of everything we say. I am interested in his... mind. Alleged mind. Three: I will make a dramatic statement very soon. I would inform the public if I were you—but that's not really your call, is it?"

  "No. What kind of dramatic statement?"

  "Russell, what do you think? Lobby on my behalf."

  I thought for a moment. "I need something from you."

  "I wonder what."

  "Someone took out a woman named Amber Mae Wilson on July the third. The club, the writing on the walls, the recorded message on tape. Then he tried to cover it all up. He removed her. Why did you do Amber Wilson?"

  I heard the sharp intake of his breath. "N-n-no!"

  "Yes."

  "Her h-head?"

  "Just like the others."

  "M-my voice, m-my writing?"

  "Identical."

  He groaned—a long, low, heartsick sound. "Then... you say the body... disappeared?"

  "Where did you take her?"

  "Was she white?"

  "Where did you take her?"

  His voice suddenly accelerated into one long run-on sentence, a stuttering river of syllables. "I didn't d-d-d-do her I’ve got no i-i-idea who would kill a w-white w-woman my q quest is not for that I have been c-c-copied and m-m-mocked and I forbid you to w-w-write this in the papers I do not white!"

  I listened to his rapid breathing.

  "I believe you," I said.

  "Ohhh..." He sighed, relief draining out of his voice and into my ear. "Ohhh..."

  "Let me give you my number for the car phone."

  "I have it," he said almost meekly.

  "Where will your 'dramatic statement' take place?"

  A long pause ensued. I could hear him breathing more slowly now.

  "You need me," he whispered, and hung up.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I had never in my life seen more activity or confusion at the Sheriff's Department than I did an hour and a half later, just before nine that morning, when I was finally admitted to the inner sanctum of Sheriff Dan Winters's office, in which loomed the sweating, nervous figures of Winters, Martin Parish, and Erik Wald.

  Of course, in the middle of our heat wave, the county building's air conditioning had overloaded and failed. Being a modern building, it had few windows that would even open. Outside, the smog lingered like smoke. Inside, the air was already stale and hot.

  Waiting, I heard the phones ringing constantly, saw the double-time scurry of deputies and clerical workers, studied the drawn, tight-lipped faces on the officers who came and went in . a steady stream from Winters's lair. The mayor of the city of Orange and one of our county supervisors made what appeared to be abrupt and pointless appearances, then marched straight

  for the pressroom. I followed, to find Karen Schultz besieged and took for myself a dozen angry stares from the media a print people who had been treated, just a few hours earlier, to my rather major scoop. Channel 5 tried to interview me, but I walked away when the reporter excused herself to the lady room for a quick makeup check. Karen brushed me with an icy glance as I closed the door behind me.

  But inside the sheriff's office, Winters, Parish, and Wald had the aura of the chosen. I could feel the energy in the hot room, the energy of organization and execution, of order method, purpose. And beneath that energy lay another: that the chaos and mayhem which had brought these men together, the silent and permeating force of their antagonist, the Midnight Eye.

  Winters slammed down the telephone and looked at me "We don't have much time. First, forget Dina. The story now is, we're deputizing the entire county, calling on every citizen watch out for each other and report back to us anything they might see, hear, smell, or dream that will help us get this guy. We've called it the Citizens' Task Force, and Wald is in c
harge as sheriff-adjutant. We're setting up phone banks, printing shirts and caps, trying to get everybody involved. Interview Wald about it. If you can't make it interesting and get us good play, we'll find someone who can. Second, you can get the ME's stuff; through Karen but not without Karen. She'll edit out what we need for ourselves. Third, we've already got a damn miracle—Wynn's next-door neighbor was shooting video of her family the day before they bought it, and we've got a suspect right there on the fucking tape. Kimmy Wynn ID'd him as positively as a kid half in shock can ID anybody, but it's a damn good start. Documents is isolating a still we'll have within the hour, and every paper and TV station that wants one will get it. Your part is to get this Task Force idea off the ground. Your part is to make us look good. We're asking for help, Russell. We're begging for it."

  Wald, standing by a window, looked at me.

  "Think you can handle that?" asked Parish.

  "You forgot point number four," I said to Winters, ignoring

  Marty.

  "Four what? What the hell are you—"

  "He called. The Midnight Eye. I just talked to him."

  A pressured silence fell over the room, as if a gun had just been cocked.

  "I'm liking this," said Wald evenly.

  Parish regarded me with his slightly droop-lidded stare.

  "Yes!" shouted Winters, driving a fist into the air. "What'd the son of a bitch say? Are you sure it was him? Any idea at all where he's calling from?"

  I told them everything we said, except our exchange about the murder of Amber.

  "Dramatic statement," muttered Winters. "Goddamned animal. Erik, you're the psychobabbler here—what's your call?"

  Wald crossed the room and stood in front of Winters. "Look at it this way, what would you do if you wanted twenty bucks from me?"

  "I'd say, 'Give me a twenty,'" Winters snapped.

  "And I'd say, 'Sure,"' said Wald, slipping out his wallet, which he dangled before Winters, showing him the Sheriff's Department Volunteer badge lodged inside. "You're busted, Dan. That's how we play him. Give him what he wants. Play along. Give him enough rope to hang himself."