“He took Amanda Palmer out to dinner last month—can you believe?” Karen said, eyes round. “I had to call him up to ask how the bill was to be categorized, and he told me all about it.”
“Uh, Amanda Palmer is…?”
“You don’t know? She’s the big new star of Fool’s Hill, that great comedy. The one set in a fire station? Well, Mr. Lomax says Amanda isn’t at all like her TV self. Really, she’s shy and kind of quiet. She wears simple little frock dresses, too, not like those glitzy ones they make her use on the show. Can you believe? So then I asked…”
George let her go on, burbling happily about the lives of people she knew only as sheets of phosphor dots on a screen. Her guileless gush was a symptom of the times, he saw, an age when shallow actors loomed as immense as Zeus and Athena, as distant as the clouds, shakers of the video earth. It was electronic idolatry. But beneath her innocent fan enthusiasm he sensed something more, a sharpness and withheld assessment. He caught that only glancingly, for her aroma and warmth were coiling up into him, suffusing the air between them on the sofa with a heavy incense of unspoken energies.
“My, you don’t know anything about the world, do you?” Karen chided him coquettishly.
“I’ve been about the Lord’s work. And my regular business, real estate, that kind of work.” His voice sounded stilted and square even to himself.
“That’s a very difficult field, a hard market.”
“It takes concentration, sure.” He was having trouble concentrating himself, with her beautiful eyes swimming so close.
“Here, I’ll show you some pictures from my album.”
“What?” Her presence made it hard to think.
“Photography’s one of my hobbies. Here are some girls at school. And my foster parents.”
“T… very nice.”
“Here I am at the beach. Do you like swimming?”
“No, I don’t do it.” The idea alarmed him. He stayed away from the swimming pool in his apartment complex.
“Oh, I love to fool around in the surf. Living here, it’s practically required.”
“Required?” Swimming. Cold waters, fears of childhood. So much he couldn’t remember from those years, but some memories danced like dust in a summer twilight.
“Oh, you’d like it if you gave it a chance. We should go to the beach together this weekend.”
The conversation was veering so fast he felt a centrifugal sense of dizzying velocities. He put out a trembling hand, as if to balance himself, and it cupped her breast. Succulent. Soft.
He stared dumbfounded at the hand as though it belonged to someone else. It moved with a will of its own. The fingers caressed the peach-colored silk blouse, feeling a tingling excitement in the soft resistance. He could not speak.
Her lips parted, letting out a sweet, long gasp, and her eyes lost focus.
George leaned forward. His lips met hers in a touch at first satiny, a supple brush that hardened into a pulse-quickening collision. She seemed to surround him. Abruptly he remembered from long ago a girl, red-haired and freckled. She had given him a sheet of paper, fetching it forth from the back pocket of her jeans, still warm, so that it carried the ample curve of her rear as he spread the sheet. His hands had felt the warm paper, acutely uncomfortable, but filled with strange wonder.
It had been a Xerox of a diagram from their Sunday school teacher, titled “For Girls Only.” In detail it showed what parts of her body a girl could allow a boy to touch, and the conditions that allowed such intimacy. A dotted line at the throat and below the lightly sketched breasts; Zone 1. You had to be going steady for that, the girl told him. Did that mean he could unhook the bra and everything? he had wondered. Zone 2 was everything below the waist, and it was shaded out. A legend below it said that you had to be engaged before anything happened there, and then not that one thing they all knew had to happen, once you got started this way.
His mind whirled, snagged in the past. The long-forgotten sketch had been a kind of release, so that he finally knew what was allowed him. Startled by the memory, he squeezed her hand. Karen gasped.
He blinked. “Oh, I’m, I’m—”
“You’re so strong, George. I like that.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“No, I—listen, I want it that way. But first, I want, I need to…”
“What?”
“Get to know you. Believe me, I’ll just feel better later, you know, when we do it, if I’ve had a chance to”—she frowned prettily, searching for words—“to really find out who you are.”
Bewildered, he mumbled, “Maybe, I guess…”
“Here, I’ll show you my life, right here in pictures. See? Here I am in the Vitality offices. That’s my boss.”
George gazed down at the ordinary office setting, flat lighting, grinning faces. One face snagged his eye, and he could not look away.
“Here, let me take your crystal cross.” He had forgotten that he was still wearing it from the Marble Cathedral service. He had gotten used to its reassuring weight on his chest. She lifted it over his head.
But George hardly noticed. Something about the office photo struck a cold knife into him. A thin man, giving the camera a grudging smile. Dressed in a gray business suit, trimly tailored.
“Oooh, what did you do to deserve a cross?” Karen swung it, gleaming in the yellow lamplight, swaying from its golden chain, the long arcs steady, beating, piling up, resounding in him.
“I—who is…”
“Oh, my boss. You really should meet him. Let’s look at some more pictures, I can show you my—”
“What does he do?”
“He runs everything, you know, everybody is very respectful. Here, we’ll just snuggle a little, and then you can have what a man ought to have.”
“Ought…” The Xeroxed sheet flickered in his mind. What was expected of him.
“What did you do to deserve this, George?”
The chain swayed. The tall floor lamps caught the greasiness of shiny metal, sending the glow refracting endlessly into his eyes. The soft, soft breast. “I, well…”
“I know what you want. I know that man was meant to rule, George. As the holy book says. As every woman knows. I understand that as well as you. Scripture says so. I want to be ruled. The others, they knew. Men in the back seats of cars, boys I went with in the pews of the church late at night, because we had no other place to go, they all knew. I welcome that. My, just look at this wonderful beautiful cross.”
George saw the barren alleyway, the leering waitress, don’t want a guy like you to get away. He let himself go into the oily oscillations of the cross, so slow, so slow.
“—as the Lord intended, the man in charge, the man on top.”
She smiled. Something sprang into his mind.
Splintered light.
Silence thick as cotton.
He was spinning down into something cold and wet and streaming with gray light, currents making his legs heavy, something coming up at him from far below, hands numb, moist, clammy, balloon breasts, mother soft, pink vast nipple suck fat slimy fingers reaching out for him, into him, parents bodies rotting, the smell and behind it a great enveloping mad redness, cat twisting on the point, steel blade gleaming, catching the streetlight glow in a grimy alley everything coming together in a vortex whorl the black lake that seized his chest and squeezed until a tormented, despairing cry burst from his lungs and shattered the warm, clasping air.
10
ALEX
For some reason there was a small videocamera in his cell. It hung high in a corner inside a wire mesh cage and watched him sit and pace and sleep and get bored. He hoped somebody was having fun watching.
The cell door was shiny steel, padded on the inside, with a square observation window and a slide port through which came bland, starchy food. The cell was painted neutral light brown and smelled bitingly of disinfectant.
The guard had told Alex that this was comparatively the penthouse luxury suite. Felony
cases got the best. Orange County jail was so crowded with those whose ambitions had gone awry that the “holding facility” had stopped taking drunks entirely and most cells held four inmates.
Alex’s suite at the Ritz had two bunk beds in it with gray sheets and two gray blankets that were neither clean nor dirty. The mattress was maybe an inch thick over crisscross metal slats. A firm sleep, he thought moodily. Except that last night he had slept little, and when he had, his dreams were of endless pursuit through swampy murk, with something unnamed and implacable hounding him as his feet grew heavier with thick, clinging mud and his lungs labored. The unseen thing following him was a shifting shadow, formless and moving, restless and hungry, always coming toward him with a steady, relentless pace.
There was a small washbasin, paper towels, and a steel toilet. Until the preliminary hearing, Alex got to wear his own clothes. After that, a trustee told him, he would wear jail denims. No shoelaces, no tie, no belt. Alex had asked him if this was to put a stop to any kinky sex in jail, and the man had simply given him a stolid stare.
It was day so the lights were on. When they had first put him here, he had recalled reading somewhere that guilty suspects fell asleep immediately in their cells, relieved that the suspense of whether they would be arrested was at last over. Innocent suspects were incensed, worried, and so stayed up. The cops knew this and used it so he lost some sleep, defiantly glowering at the TV camera. There was nothing to read, and since his cellmate had left this morning, he had plenty of time to run over the events that had led him here and to examine each for the possibility that somewhere, somehow, he could have avoided this. It would be better if he could talk to someone about it, particularly Kathryn. He had seen the I2 lawyer only briefly. Ever since the deputy had put the cuffs on him, the sheriff’s men had devoted care to seeing that none of the three arrested—Alex, Gary Flint, and Robert Skinner—talked to each other. A proper precaution, Alex realized: They might have polished their stories.
He was glad they had kept the cover story simple. Skinner and Flint had been out in the truck running errands. Alex had gone home, and then Ray Constantine had called with word that the deputies were already at Immortality Incorporated. He had tried to start his Volvo and failed, so he called Skinner and Flint on the truck’s phone. They had picked him up on their way back to I2.
It sounded moderately reasonable, and Alex liked the part about the stalled car. The cops could check that—probably already had, since Immortality Incorporated’s lawyer reported that the sheriff had more warrants to search their homes—and it was a small detail that a liar in a hurry wouldn’t include. Or so Alex had thought. He had imagined that he was handling the whole thing pretty well, considering, but a day here in this gray sameness had underlined how out of his depth he was.
He was ready for interrogation, but he had not figured on just sitting. Which meant that the I2 lawyer was having trouble getting them out.
Suspended, he thought. That was the word cryonics used to describe their patients, but it applied well here, too. Jails held you in a neutral, gray grip.
He had always thought jails were places where men yelled, banged on the bars, and ran spoons or cups along them to make a racket, and the guards rushed in to club the prisoners back. That was all TV cliché. Jail was really like being kept in a box with nothing to fight against, nobody who cared remotely about your case, not even any primary colors to stimulate the eye. Even his cellmate had listened to Alex’s tale of his arrest with what seemed to be interest and then at the end had said, “No comprendo,” rolled onto the lower bunk and dozed off. The trustee who had led the man away said he was an illegal alien from a car theft ring.
Alex was reviewing how he had gotten here for the nth time when a deputy popped the slot aside and said, “Comin’ in.” The man was brisk, efficient. Alex submitted to handcuffs. He remembered how the cuffs put on him at I2 had hurt, his hands going numb in the squad car, and how long they tingled and stung afterward. These were looser, almost pleasant by comparison. The deputy looked around the cell and asked, “Any personal stuff in here?”
“Just me,” Alex said. “I’m as personal as I get.”
In two minutes he was sitting in a soundproofed interrogation room with Detective Stern and a heavy-set man named Detweiler. More minimalism: a desk, a tilt-back chair behind it with Detweiler rocking slightly back and forth, two straight-backed chairs and a Mr. Coffee machine on a small table against the wall.
Stern took off the handcuffs, looked through a file, and opened up with detailed questions about the Hagerty body. Alex stuck narrowly to his story. No embellishments, no clever added details. When Stern ran out of steam he looked at Detweiler as if he were calling in the marines. Detweiler sat with his shirt sleeves rolled up, showing thick muscles under pale skin. Detweiler was as bald as a brick and looked at Alex as if he were a piece of furniture, just something in the line of sight. He drank coffee from a cardboard cup and not quietly. He finished the coffee, staring through Alex, and then wadded up the cup and threw it over his shoulder without looking.
“Dumb story,” Detweiler said. “Everybody at this company of yours says they dunno where the corpse is. We’re supposed to nod and go away?”
“I’m not one to tell you how to do your job,” Alex said.
“Damned right you aren’t,” Detweiler said.
From the look on Stern’s face Alex could see that Detweiler was going to run things now. Alex had always assumed that the law was paperwork and arguments by guys in three-piece suits, but Detweiler looked like something from a gangster movie, and not one of the good guys. His nose had been broken and he held his hands like blunt instruments. His muscles had started to turn to a thickening at the middle but his face was bony.
“You stole the body, and that’s felony obstruction. We’ll nail you for three to five, easy.” Stern nodded in agreement, but Detweiler didn’t notice. His eyes fixed on Alex.
“I tell you I don’t know who took it,” Alex said.
“We got evidence that one of your company trucks took a little run down to Mexico yesterday,” Detweiler said. “You got a place to stash her down there?”
“Absolutely not.” It felt good to be able to tell them the flat truth and see the scornful disbelief in Detweiler’s face. The truck dodge had been Ray’s idea.
“I could work on that with the Tijuana authorities,” Stern said with no enthusiasm.
Alex hoped Detweiler would go for that, waste some more time, but Detweiler waved the idea away. Alex sighed and repeated, “I don’t know who took it.”
“Yeah, I heard.” Detweiler snorted. “Just what I’d expect from Captain Cockroach.”
“What?”
“Think we’d miss that? A little kiddie prank that hurt some people. Well, this time it’s no prank.”
Alex shrugged. Detweiler said, “The health inspector traced those bugs back through the UCI lab. It was in the background file on your company. We couldn’t figure out how to use it, but now I think there’s plenty grounds. Plenty.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alex said automatically.
“Pattern, that’s the point,” Stern said. “Any judge would accept evidence of prior misdemeanors.”
Detweiler waved that aside. “This guy’s a flake, that’s easy to prove. But he’s covering a murder.”
Alex blinked. “What?”
“You and your friends were real anxious to get that body away from UCI,” Detweiler said.
“I should’ve done more background checking, Skipper,” Stern said. “But I did turn up that assault on the Hagerty woman.”
“Yeah, after they’d had plenty time to work on the body,” Detweiler said with disgust.
“It looked straight at the time,” Stern said evenly.
“Sure, if you’re blind. These creeps are crazy, I told you that first thing.”
“Look,” Alex said, “we didn’t do anything to the body except—”
“Freez
e it and steal it,” Detweiler spat back. “You think we’re stupid? Somebody at this body-freezing business wanted to get hands on the evidence. Probably you.”
“That’s nonsense,” Alex said. “We were carrying out Susan’s expressed wishes. We—”
“Why are the cuffs off him?” Detweiler said to Stern.
“Well…” Stern saw the look on Detweiler’s face and got up. Alex held out his hands and Detweiler said, “No, behind the back.”
Stern cuffed him while Detweiler got two more cups of coffee. Alex sat on the hard chair and wondered how long it would be before he saw his attorney again.
“I don’t wanna see his elbows,” Detweiler said, rolling his chair closer to Alex and sitting erect.
Stern nodded and tightened the cuffs until Alex’s arms were straight behind him. “Get some bite in them,” Detweiler said.
Stern tightened them again, and Alex felt his fingers start to go numb. If this was the old good cop/bad cop act, both these guys were competing for the same role.
“Let’s hear a straight story now, Captain Cockroach,” Detweiler said.
“I don’t know anything.” Alex leaned a little to each side to test his balance. He wondered how long he could sit like this without falling off.
“Tell us about the cockroach caper,” Detweiler prompted.
Alex shook his head. Detweiler said sarcastically, “Come on, make us laugh, creep. I bet you thought it was real funny.”
His hands were numb, which was better than the pain, but he would pay for that later. And if Alex made noise later, Detweiler could say the bruises were from the arresting deputies. The I2 lawyer had checked Alex over for marks when they booked him, but the bruises could take a while to come out. Not something a smart cop would do, but the contempt shown Alex here fit in with their general attitude—a corpse-stealer didn’t merit respect or constitutional niceties.
Alex sighed. He had let them talk, hoping this little chat might compromise any future court action. Most of what he knew about law he got from TV shows, and of course the I2 attorney had told him to just clam up, but he hoped he could turn this little discussion to his advantage. Questioning him this way could blow the case, bring about a major career move for Detweiler into mall security at Fashion Island.
CHILLER Page 38