The Whispering Room

by Dean Koontz

  When they had been allowed through the checkpoint and were rolling once more, Jane said, “Did he actually look anything like your brother Lev?”

  “I don’t have a brother Lev,” Bernie said. “I have a brother Shem, but I couldn’t use his name ’cause it wouldn’t surprise me if a cop knew from Shem Riggowitz.”

  “I can see why Miriam wanted to drive everywhere with you.”

  “You travel well yourself, missy. And you played Alice just right. A person might think you’ve had a lot of practice at this.”

  “I wish I didn’t.”

  “By the way, that’s a fine wig. The trooper never spotted it.”

  “I’m not wearing a wig,” Jane lied.

  “Missy, I made my money from wigs. Both human hair and the finest synthetic fibers. Elegant Weave—that was the company name—sold wigs up and down the eastern seaboard, in fourteen states and the District of Columbia. You can’t fool me about wigs.”

  “Sorry for trying. I bought this one and four others from people who also sell false ID, driver’s licenses, contacts that change your eye color, and probably other stuff I don’t want to think about.”

  “Next time you see them, you tell them Bernie Riggowitz of Elegant Weave says they’ve got first-class product.”

  They passed a couple miles in silence, drinking the last of the Mountain Dew, before Jane said, “You haven’t asked what I’m running from.”

  “Haven’t and won’t, bubeleh. I don’t want to be disappointed if it’s not as glamorous as I imagine.”

  4

  * * *

  In their room at the Deerpath Inn, the sisters took turns using the bathroom. Jolie was already settled in bed, sitting up against the headboard, when Twyla appeared in silky white pajamas with a reproduction of an Andy Warhol soup can on the blouse.

  As her sister pulled back the covers on her side of the queen-size bed, Jolie said, “Can I ask you something and you promise to be straight as a ruler with me?”

  “When have I ever not been straight with you?”

  “So is something wrong in your life?”

  Getting into bed, Twyla sighed and said, “Charles isn’t married, and I’m not pregnant.”

  “I don’t mean any of that.”

  Twyla frowned. “Then what do you mean?”

  “You’re not sick or anything?”

  “Do I look sick? I think I look pretty darn good.”

  “Fabulous. I hope I look as good when I’m your advanced age.”

  “I doubt you will,” Twyla said. “I think I’ve got more of Mother’s genes and you’ve got more of Daddy’s.”

  That was like the old Twyla.

  Jolie said, “Well, I just worry about you, that’s all, out there in Boston.”

  “Now you sound like Daddy—Boston half a world away.”

  “So you’re all right?”

  “I’ve never been better. Go to sleep, Jo. A long day tomorrow.”

  Instead of turning off the nightstand lamp, Twyla clicked it to a dimmer setting. She had a magazine.

  “You’re not turning in?” Jolie asked.

  “I won’t keep you awake. I just want to read this article I didn’t finish on the plane.”

  Jolie slid down from the headboard and turned on her left side, her back to Twyla. She waited to hear a page being turned. The sound didn’t come. Twyla was not a slow reader. Jolie waited for the page. Waiting, she fell asleep.

  5

  * * *

  Bernie had slept most of the day, with the intention of driving through the soothing night with memories of Miriam. Jane had been on the move since 4:20 this morning, when she’d awakened in the motel in Ardmore, Oklahoma. By 11:35 Thursday night, as they reached Van Horn, Texas, she couldn’t stop yawning.

  “Sleep, sleep,” Bernie said. “An owl should be as awake as me. If I need you, I’ll give a shout.”

  If it turned out Jane couldn’t trust him, then her intuition was not worth beans anymore, and she was as good as finished anyway. She powered the back of her seat to a slant and closed her eyes.

  He said, “Can you sleep to some music?”

  “Right now, I could sleep to artillery fire.”

  “I’ll keep it soft.”

  He fiddled with the CD controls, and when the music came on, Jane said, “Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Orchestra. You like big-band music, swing?”

  “I don’t know one big band from another.”

  “Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman. Great stuff.”

  “Miriam liked to watch Lawrence Welk on TV way back when. I know his music is corny.”

  “It is what it is, nothing to be ashamed of. He gave people what they wanted. He just never stretched, never had an edge.”

  “You know music?”

  She almost said, I can rock a piano. She was too tired to trust herself in conversation. “Good night, Grandpa.”

  Her dreams were not unpleasant, with bubbles in them.

  When she woke after an hour or so to Welk in full mellow mode with “Apple Blossom Time,” the Mercedes wasn’t in motion. She sat up, alarmed. They were parked on the shoulder of the highway.

  Bernie wasn’t in the car. She needed a moment to locate him in the darkness, a few steps off the road, his back to her, urinating.

  When he returned to the car and saw her awake, he said, “Sorry. Prostate like a cantaloupe. If you need lady facilities, we’ll be fueling in El Paso in forty minutes.”

  “No, I’m good.”

  She closed her eyes as he took a foil-wrapped hand wipe from a supply in the console box and tore it open. The fragrance of lemons.

  As she fell asleep, she wondered if they were close enough to El Paso that cell service was good. But if he’d had his phone when he got out of the car, who could he have called? He hadn’t turned her over to the police at the roadblock, when he’d had the chance.

  She had to trust him. Controlled paranoia was a survival mechanism. Unrelieved paranoia was a greased chute into madness.

  As if drugged, Jane slept undisturbed during the fuel stop in El Paso.

  6

  * * *

  Sometime in the night, Jolie Tillman half woke, still oppressed by exhaustion. The hotel room lay quiet. She listened for Twyla’s breathing in the bed beside her but didn’t hear it.

  The lamp had been turned off. Because they hadn’t closed the draperies at the windows, moonglow and ambient rays from the lamplit streets were admitted, the palest of light faintly fingering the surfaces of everything, as if the ghost of a blind man had come to haunt by touch what he had never seen in life.

  If Twyla hadn’t been wearing white pajamas, which attracted the phantom light, Jolie would not have seen her in the armchair, where she sat facing the bed. Twyla might have been sleeping, though her posture seemed to be that of someone alert in the gloom. A cowl of shadow concealed her face, and if her eyes were fixed on Jolie, no glimmer of reflection confirmed her stare.

  The figure was so deathly still in the stillness of the room that Jolie was not convinced of her own wakefulness. She closed her eyes and opened them and closed them and opened them again, and the occupant of the armchair did not fluidify and flow away as it might have in a sleeper’s fancy. But weariness weighed down on Jolie, and her leaden eyelids closed and did not open, so that the question—reality or dream?—went unanswered.

  7

  * * *

  With a crick in her neck and a sour taste in her mouth, Jane woke to the bass purr of an engine. No Lawrence Welk. She opened her eyes as day was breaking across grasslands low between two mountain ranges, early sun tracing volcanic slopes to broken crests softened by millions of years of erosion and swales of forest.

  Bernie Riggowitz had made good time to El Paso and across the southwest corner of New Mexico into Arizona, about three hundred miles in less than four hours.

  As Jane powered her seat into an upright position, Bernie said, “You slept like a kitten full up with cream.”


  “Yeah, well, I feel like a cat that’s been fighting all night.”

  “Say we stop in Wilcox for gas and breakfast, say you take the wheel from there, we can make Nogales by ten o’clock, eleven.”

  Massaging the back of her neck, she said, “I’m not sure about the ‘we’ part. My plan was to put you out somewhere on the south side of Tucson and make the last hour to Nogales on my own, before any stolen-car report you filed could be a worry.”

  His smile sagged in the sad-clown folds of his face, but then he declared, “Shmontses! Are we partners here or are we partners?”

  “We’ve never been partners, Bernie.”

  “Then what have we been, I ask you?”

  “Kidnapped and kidnapper.”

  “Are you going for crazy here? Do I look kidnapped? You thumbed a ride, I give a ride, we’re in a thing here.”

  “The man in Nogales is dangerous.”

  “I know from danger. All my life, I’ve had IRS up my toches.”

  “You’re forgetting this,” she said, drawing her pistol.

  “Again with the gun? We’re past guns, if you haven’t noticed.”

  She thought about it awhile. “This guy in Nogales is expecting me Saturday. Just me. When you do business with him, he doesn’t want you bringing your grandfather. I need to call him, move up the meet, but I’ll need a story. You can’t be Bernie Riggowitz, king of wigs.”

  “I never said king. Tacky. We’ll be in Wilcox in forty minutes. They have a Best Western, we’ll cook up a story over breakfast.”

  “You leave the cooking to me.” She considered the situation in Nogales for a few minutes. If she took the Mercedes there without Bernie, she’d have to leave it for Enrique to ship to Mexico when she left in her new wheels. She knew Bernie too well now to jack his car and swap it to Enrique. She said, “Do you have a hat?”

  “Absolutely. Do I have a head? I’ve got hats.”

  “If you’ve got a hat that works, then we have a story.”

  “The story is a hat?”

  “The story depends on how you look in the hat. And everything depends on you doing exactly and only what I tell you to do.”

  “I would give you trouble? I wouldn’t. This will be fun.”

  “It won’t be fun, but it’ll be interesting. And we could end up in a shitstorm.”

  8

  * * *

  Whether or not Twyla spent part of the night in the armchair, she was in bed when she rose at five o’clock Friday morning.

  The little disruption that she caused was enough to wake Jolie, who watched her sister through slitted eyes as she took her purse from the nightstand and went into the bathroom.

  Twyla had never been inconsiderate, but for all her grace, she had always been a noisy girl. Noisier than this. The care with which she eased out of bed, picked up her purse, and closed the bathroom door behind her were out of character and suggested an intention to deceive.

  Jolie slid from the bed even more quietly than Twyla had, eased around the foot of it, and put one ear to the bathroom door in time to hear the soft tones as her sister entered a number on her phone.

  Whoever she called must have answered, and she did not identify herself before saying, “I was supposed to call you this morning, but I can’t remember why.” After a pause, she said, “All right.” Another pause. “We’re driving to Indianapolis to meet someone. I don’t know who or where. My mother will call my father when we’re almost there.” Pause. “Okay, yes, I will. Just a second.”

  In the bathroom, Twyla turned on the water in the sink.

  Jolie could hear her sister still talking on the phone, but the sound of rushing water splashing into the porcelain bowl prevented her from understanding what was being said.

  Which was why Twyla cranked on the water in the first place. She wasn’t washing her hands and conducting a phone conversation at the same time. And whoever was at the other end of the line had told her to do it.

  Jolie stepped away from the bathroom door and sat in the armchair from which her sister had or had not watched her sleeping in the night.

  Sight unseen, knowing nothing but his first name, she didn’t like this Charles character. What kind of boyfriend wanted his girl to report on her family in such a sneaky fashion? For what reason? And why would Twyla do it?

  Jolie decided it was time to open Twyla’s suitcase again and take out the drugs and syringes. Go to Mother with the evidence. And with all the details of Twyla’s curious behavior.

  However, as the faucet in the sink was shut off and the water in the shower came on, she decided that it was almost time to go to Mother but not quite.

  Seventeen years of sibling love and only good-natured rivalry, seventeen years of laughter and mutual dreaming and more hours of girl talk than could be counted had woven a bond between them that if not sacred was certainly hallowed and pure and genuine, a bond not to be strained or broken lightly. She owed Twyla the chance to reconsider whatever she was doing. When they got to Indianapolis and Mother received further directions from Daddy, if then Twyla seemed in a sweat to get somewhere private and make a phone call, Jolie would rat her out.

  That’s what it would be, sad to say. Ratting out Twyla would be a terrible thing, a relationship-damaging thing, but it wouldn’t be as bad as Twyla, on some exotic drug, ratting out the rest of the family for God knows what purpose.

  9

  * * *

  Enrique de Soto, car salesman without a sign or an advertising budget, maintained his showroom in a series of barns on a former horse ranch near Nogales, Arizona. The barns weren’t as old as they appeared to be. Enrique and his men antiqued them to suggest the property belonged to a family at the end of several generations of bad luck.

  The front barn was weathered gray with crusted black-brown inlays that suggested rotten wood, mottled with eczemalike patches of faded red paint from a distant age of prosperity. In the event that any person of authority not on Enrique’s graft list stopped for a look-in, this barn closest to the county road was stocked with the sorriest collection of antiques in the Southwest, as if the de Soto family was a pack of delusional hoarders for whom the words antiques and junk were synonyms, and whose customers shared their delusion.

  While Jane stood inside the doublewide doorway with the owner, waiting for her new wheels to be brought around, Enrique stared in fascination at the elderly man behind the wheel of the Mercedes. Bernie Riggowitz wore a snap-brimmed hat with a round, flat crown, a porkpie hat that had been popular with certain tough guys at least since the days of Prohibition. The engine of the E350 was running, air conditioning on, windows closed, and Bernie stared straight forward, a hard look on his face, as if being here was beneath him, considering that it was such a small-potatoes criminal enterprise.

  “Sure, I heard some about Meyer Lansky,” Enrique said. “Who never heard about Meyer Lansky? Biggest Jew Mob boss ever. They call him somethin’ different in those Godfather movies. But this dude, he’s not Meyer Lansky. Meyer Lansky, he was dead before I was born.”

  “I didn’t say he was Meyer Lansky. I’m not into voodooing up dead mobsters. I said he’s bigger than Meyer Lansky.”

  Enrique was a hard man who would kill if absolutely necessary, but he had a sweet boyish face and the unimposing physical presence of a jockey. He clearly liked the idea that a big-time crime boss could be as diminutive as the collection of dewlaps and wrinkles wearing a porkpie hat and waiting sternly in the Mercedes.

  “But I never heard about some new Jew Mob boss.”

  “You won’t have,” Jane said. “And he’s not new, Ricky. Does he look new? He’s been king behind the scenes for forty years.”

  “So what’s his name?”

  “You don’t want to know. He wouldn’t want you to. Once you know…nothing good can happen for you. The big mistake Lansky and those other wise guys made was wanting to be known, admired, feared. To this man’s way of thinking, being known is inviting trouble.”

  Enrique fav
ored her with a heavy-lidded sideways look. “You bullshittin’ me? How’s he do business, nobody knows his name?”

  “I didn’t say nobody knew it. The people who need to know it, they know it. But that’s a pretty tight circle.”

  “Dude like him don’t travel with some gun muscle?”

  “What do you think I am?”

  “Yeah. Okay. But if he’s who you say, what’s he doin’ here? He want a bite from my apple? Nobody gets a bite from my apple.”

  “Relax, Ricky. I mean no offense when I say this, so don’t go all Latin temper on me. But this man here wouldn’t find your little operation worth his time. It’s chickenshit to him. He makes deals in the tens and hundreds of millions. He’s here because he’s with me, we’ve been doing business, we have mutual respect. We go way back.”

  “You go way back? So how old are you—fifteen?”

  She laughed and put one hand on his shoulder and squeezed and said, “You know how to melt a girl’s resistance, Ricky. Way back for me is five years. Listen, you know who I am, right?”

  “Everybody knows you these days. I wish you didn’t give up your old look, though. I liked your old look.”

  When Marcus Paul Headsman, the serial killer, had been caught in a car stolen from Enrique, when he had tried to sell out this specialist in preowned vehicles, and when the FBI had been too busy to care about de Soto’s enterprise, Enrique had been surprised to be able to stay in business unmolested. When Jane first came to him for wheels—the Ford Escape was their second transaction—she’d given him the impression that she deep-sixed the file on him to make sure he remained a free man. Enrique knew zip about law-enforcement personnel shortages and the prosecutorial overload that required a triage approach to selecting which crimes to punish. Instead, he liked to think a good-looking FBI agent took such a shine to him that she blinded the eye of the law to his very existence.