by Dean Koontz
“I wouldn’t argue with you about that.”
“What I really am is fifty. Or maybe forty-nine. No older than fifty-one. I was a snot-nosed kid when Vietnam was hot.”
From a coat pocket he fished out a bottle of Purell and began to sanitize his hands.
“You use a lot of that stuff,” she said.
“I’d drink it by the quart if it did the job on my insides like it does my hands.”
“Have you had lunch yet?”
“I don’t eat three squares. Don’t need ’em.”
“Well, I can bring you some lunch from the café. You liked their food at breakfast.”
When he squinched his hairy face, he seemed to be looking out at her from shrubbery.
“It won’t come out of your hundred,” she said, and she gave him five more twenties.
As he tucked the money away, he looked around suspiciously, as if countless thieves were gathered on the stairs behind him, waiting for the chance to turn him upside down and his pockets inside out.
“On the other hand,” he said, “I can’t abide offendin’ a lady.”
“What would you like?”
“They have a nice cheeseburger in there?”
“I believe they do. You want fries or something?”
“Just a nice cheeseburger and Seven Up.”
She brought the cheeseburger in a take-out bag and a medium 7 Up in a paper cup. “I told them just a little ice.”
He surreptitiously mixed part of a pint of whiskey with the soda. “You’re a scary woman, the way you know a man’s mind.”
He didn’t talk while he ate. She found it best not to watch.
High above, seagulls performed ballets blancs. They cried down the day, and though their voices would have been annoying if issued close at hand, they were otherworldly and haunting from a height.
When Barney finished eating, he said, “You don’t have no damn reason to care, but you know what I like most about you?”
“What’s that?”
“You give me money without naggin’ about spendin’ it on drink.”
“It’s your money now, not mine.”
“Not many left who don’t lecture about every damn thing.”
After he threw away the burger bag and the paper cup, he picked up his trash bag of belongings. “You walk with me just up there past the pier? Till I’m sure no greedy pirate’s followin’ me?”
“Sure.”
They had gone a little way when he said, “I made a whole lot of bad choices in my life, but you know what?”
“What?”
He chuckled. “Give me a chance, I’d make ’em all over again.”
He was quiet for a few steps. Then: “It’s a beautiful, terrible world, isn’t it?”
She smiled and nodded.
“You know what I once was before I was this way? I once was a waiter in a fancy restaurant. Tips were big. Made good money. I once was like a youth counselor and lay minister in my church. I coached a Little League team. I knew baseball like nobody else.” He had come to a stop. He regarded the gulls adance in the sun-shot air. “Funny, but most of the time, I can’t remember how all that went away.”
“It never went away,” Jane said. “It’s still part of who you are. It always will be.”
His stare was clearer now than before. “That’s a way of thinkin’ about it. And maybe true.” He looked back along the path they had followed. “Nobody’s lurkin’. I’m safe enough now.”
When he looked at her again, a memory from childhood for a moment carried her back twenty years. She had found a bird’s nest that some predator must have cast down from tree to lawn. Three small eggs had been clawed and bitten open, their contents eaten. Barney’s eyes were not faded-denim blue; they were precisely the pale robin’s-egg blue of those sad and broken shells.
“What is it?” he asked.
“What is what?”
“What is it you want to ask?” When she didn’t reply, he urged, “Go ahead, whatever it is. Nobody and nothin’ offends me anymore.”
After a hesitation, she said, “The other people who…who live the way you live. Do any of them ever commit suicide?”
“Suicide? Well, you got to set aside half of them, ’cause they’re crazy as shithouse rats. Pardon my French. They don’t know from suicide ’cause they aren’t half sure whether they’re alive or already dead. The rest of us? Suicide? Hell, we’re clawin’ at life every day just to hang on. Unless you mean slo-mo suicide like takes forty years of hooch and tick bites and rotten teeth and sleepin’ out on cold nights ’cause I don’t want any shelter nanny tellin’ me what to do. But that’s not suicide. It’s more like early retirement and poor man’s adventure. God wants to yank me out of here, He’s gonna have to pull real hard, I got roots like an oak tree.”
She said, “I’m glad to hear it.”
Belated understanding softened his life-hardened face. “Who was it of yours who took their own life?”
She was surprised that she told him. “My husband.”
For a moment, Barney seemed overwhelmed by this revelation. He opened his mouth but could think of nothing to say. He looked at the gulls far above and then at her again. Tears shimmered in his eyes.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you, Barney. I’m dealing with it. I’m okay.”
He nodded, worked his mouth soundlessly, nodded again, said at last, “Whyever he might’ve did it, it never could’ve been you.”
He turned from her and shuffled away, bent under his backpack, carrying his trash bag, hurrying as best he could, as if it must be this very kind of thing, the tragedies of the world, from which he had so long been running.
She called after him, “Roots like an oak tree, Barney.”
He raised one arm to wave, indicating that he had heard her, but he never looked back.
33
* * *
FROM THE COAST, Jane drove Wilshire Boulevard east toward Westwood, the big risks of the day behind her, a smaller risk ahead.
The heavy traffic labored through the sunshine, the drivers aggressive, few conceding equality to others under the rules of the road, with the consequence of stop-and-go progress, much barking of brakes, much bleating of horns.
For some reason, she recalled Bertold Shenneck as he had been in his videos: the kindly face, the appealing smile. And she thought of the mice with brain implants, marching in organized phalanxes, as though to martial music on a parade ground….
The one regret she had about the operation in Palisades Park was that she’d needed to use her FBI credentials to be allowed to scout the hotel thoroughly to determine the best way to use it and to conduct surveillance from inside its front doors.
Paloma Wyndham, the general manager, would perhaps feel that she had been played by an arrogant agent of the Bureau or she would figure that the ID had been forged. In either case, she was all but certain to call the Los Angeles field office to file a complaint or to do her citizenly duty and report an agent impersonator.
The last thing Jane needed was to have the Bureau diligently on her trail in addition to the still-nameless forces determined to put an end to her investigation into the plague of suicides.
Of all buildings opposite the park, the hotel had been by far the best facility to serve as a way station for the transfer of the files from the briefcases to the trash bag, though she’d considered using her Ford instead. She could have parked along Arizona Avenue, a few spaces off Ocean, could have been waiting behind the wheel with the engine running. Nona could have skated to the vehicle. But if Radburn’s people were close behind her when she got to the Ford, there would have been no way to delay them—no equivalent of a chain and padlock—to keep them from dragging Nona down.
Besides, if she had used the car, Jimmy and his crew would have seen it and captured the license-plate number. If subsequently the conspirators behind the suicides tracked her to Vinyl and Jimmy, then they would know what she was driv
ing, and she would have to abandon the Escape. She didn’t have the federal government’s deep pockets; she couldn’t be tossing away cars every few days.
In Westwood, near UCLA, Jane cruised in search of a house where she had once attended a dinner party. She didn’t recall the address; but she knew that she would recognize the place.
In ten minutes, she found it. Georgian architecture. Stately but not immense. A columned front porch without railing. Brick walls painted white.
She parked two blocks away on a parallel street and walked back to Dr. Moshe Steinitz’s residence.
Moshe was a forensic psychiatrist, recently retired at eighty. He’d had his own psychiatric practice in addition to being a valued professor at UCLA. He had lectured periodically at the FBI Academy in Virginia, and sometimes advised Behavioral Analysis Units 3 and 4 on difficult cases involving serial killers.
Three years earlier, Moshe half reasoned and half intuited the answer to why a killer operating in suburban Atlanta had cut out and taken away his victims’ eyes. That theory led to the capture of one twisted individual, Jay Jason Crutchfield, the very night that he would have murdered an eighth woman.
Jane doubted that a visit to Moshe Steinitz involved a large risk. He had stopped lecturing at the Bureau when he retired more than a year earlier. She and the psychiatrist weren’t close friends. But he had advised on three of her cases; they liked each other.
She climbed the front steps, rang the bell.
He answered the door in a white shirt, blue bow tie, charcoal dress slacks, and pale-blue Skechers sport shoes with orange laces. He’d always worn Oxfords before. Skechers were retirement gear.
Scowling over reading glasses pulled halfway down his nose, he seemed to be expecting one annoyance or another, but he smiled when he saw who had come calling. “What a world of wonders,” he declared. “If it isn’t the girl with eyes bluer than the sky.”
“How are you, Dr. Steinitz?”
Taking her arm to escort her over the threshold, he said, “I am very well indeed, and I’m even better now that you have swept in like a fresh breeze.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t call ahead.”
Closing the door behind them, Moshe said, “Then there would have been no surprise, and I enjoy surprises. But what happened to your long lovely golden hair?”
“Cut it, dyed it. Needed a change.”
At five feet five, just an inch shorter than Jane but seeming shorter still, Moshe was slightly plump, with a warm smile and sad eyes. His face had been so gently folded by time and so respectfully drawn by gravity that advanced age was, in his case, a grace.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” she said.
He looked her over as if assaying a great-grandchild whom he had not seen in months and whose growth he found remarkable. “As you know, I’m retired for a second time, without a profession, with only leisure activities, so of course I’m desperate for interruptions.”
“I’d be grateful for an hour of your time. I need your thoughts about something.”
“Come on, come with, back to the kitchen.”
She followed him past the archway to the living room, in which stood a Steinway. Arranged on the lid were silver-framed photographs of Moshe and his late wife, Hanna, with children and grandchildren.
Jane had not known Hanna, who had died nine years earlier, but when she’d been here for dinner, she’d been cajoled into playing the piano for Moshe and his other guests. She performed two pieces of her choice: Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” and Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes.”
When there had been questions about her father, as there had been all her life, she explained that her mother was the one who encouraged her musicianship, and she turned the questions aside in such a way as to imply that she was most protective of her father’s privacy. She’d been aware of Moshe watching her with keen interest during this, and she’d been certain he suspected the true reason for her discretion was darker than she suggested, though he had never broached the subject with her.
Now, a step or two past the living room archway, Moshe stopped and turned to her and put one hand to his mouth as if it had just occurred to him that he had committed a faux pas. “Before I retired, many of the students at the university took great offense if anyone used the word girl when referring to a female sixteen or older. I was advised that one must say ‘woman.’ I hope I didn’t offend when I called you a girl there on the doorstep.”
“I don’t traffic in politically correct bushwah, Moshe. I like being the girl with eyes bluer than the sky.”
“Good, good, I’m so glad. One reason I retired the second time is, these days, the more infantile the students, the more seriously they take themselves. They are generally a humorless lot.”
In the kitchen, he drew out a chair for her at the dinette table.
“Coffee, tea, soft drink? Perhaps an aperitif? It is a quarter to five, only fifteen minutes short of a respectable cocktail hour.”
She voted for the aperitif, and he poured two small glasses of Maculan Dindarello.
As he sat down to his drink, Moshe said, “I was shocked and dismayed to hear about Nick. A terrible loss. I’m so sorry, Jane.”
Because he had been retired for a year and no longer consulting on Bureau cases, she had assumed that he didn’t know Nick was gone.
Jane wondered if Moshe still had active ties with the FBI—and if she had made a grave mistake by coming here.
34
* * *
THE FIRST TIME Moshe Steinitz retired, he was sixty-five. Hanna died five years later, and at seventy Moshe went back to work as a practicing psychiatrist, professor, and sometime Bureau consultant.
Upon his second retirement, at seventy-nine, he terminated all three jobs with no intention of returning to any. Or so he said.
He claimed that he knew about Nick only because Nathan Silverman, Jane’s boss, emailed him the news when it was a week old.
“By then, I imagined you’d talked about it with so many people, the last thing you needed was to go over it again with me.”
“I was grieving and furious at the same time, and didn’t know who to be furious with. I wasn’t fit to talk to anyone.”
“Genuine as it might be,” Moshe said, “too much sympathy can start to seem like pity, which only makes the grief more depressing. I asked Nathan to give you my sympathy, tell you to call me if ever you wanted. I’m sorry to hear he didn’t pass the message along.”
“He might have,” Jane said. “There were some things I just wasn’t hearing in the first couple weeks after it happened.”
In her experience, Moshe was the furthest thing from a liar. She was impelled to trust him.
She sipped the Dindarello and said, “So how’s retirement the second time around?”
“I read fiction, which I never had much time for when I worked. Take long walks. Garden, travel a little, poker with some friends who’re old coots like me. I futz and fiddle and fart around.”
By the time she got to the purpose of her visit and told him about the rising rate of suicides, he had poured a second serving of the aperitif. The sky beyond the window was a deeper shade of blue than before, gathering into it the first few sooty particles of dusk.
She took from her purse the spiral-bound notebook in which she entered coded names and facts pertinent to her investigation. There were also items written in plain English, including the contents of the final statements left by some who had killed themselves. She had collected information on twenty-two suicides, though there had been only ten notes among them.
“I’ve studied them until they’ve just become words,” she said. “Maybe there’s meaning in them I can’t see. Maybe you’ll see it.”
Occasionally she shared the notes with those she interviewed, and a couple of Xeroxes were folded in the notebook.
When she gave a copy to Moshe, he put it facedown on the table. “Please read them to me first. Then I’ll look at them. The spoken word and
written word are weighted differently. There are nuances you get only by hearing, then seeing, then comparing impressions.”
She started with the most personal of the ten. “This one is what Nick left. ‘Something is wrong with me. I need. I very much need. I very much need to be dead.’ ”
Moshe sat in silence for a moment after Jane had read Nick’s words. Then he said, “It’s not a typical last testament. It doesn’t explain his reasons or ask forgiveness. It doesn’t say good-bye.”
She said, “It’s nothing like Nick. It’s his handwriting, but otherwise I’d think someone else wrote it and put it with his body.”
Closing his eyes and cocking his head as though hearing those eighteen words in memory, Moshe said, “He’s saying he’s compelled to kill himself, and he knows the compulsion is wrong. A significant percentage of suicides do not think they’re doing the wrong thing. If they thought that, they wouldn’t do it.” He opened his eyes. “What was Nick’s state of mind just before…?”
“He was happy. Talking about the future. What he wanted to do when he retired from the Corps. I could read him like a newspaper, Moshe. He couldn’t pretend happiness and fool me. Anyway, he was never depressed. I was making dinner. He set the table, opened a bottle of wine. Singing along with the music, a Dean Martin album. Nick was totally retro when it came to music. He said he was going to the john, he’d be right back.”
“Read another.”
She identified the second decedent as a thirty-four-year-old network television executive, highly paid and rapidly advancing in the company. He had left the note for his fiancée, an actress. “ ‘Do not cry for me. This will be a pleasant passage. I have been told. I am looking forward to the journey.’ ”
“A man passionate about his religion?” Moshe asked.
“No. As far as anyone knew, he wasn’t a believer. He certainly wasn’t a churchgoer.”
“ ‘I have been told.’ So if not God, if not a Bible or Quran or Torah, who or what told him the passage would be pleasant? The easy inference is that he must have been hearing voices.”