Patterson had loved his father, and understood his impatience, as well as the romance his father felt for both the desert and for show business. To know how to soothe a skittish mount was as fine a skill as knowing how to act on no notice at all, called up because the man scheduled to play the wagon master had mumps.
Angie’s hands were intelligent, knowing. “You’re good at a lot of things, I bet,” said Patterson.
“I thought I got on your nerves,” said Angie.
“Then I certainly gave you the wrong impression,” he said.
Her lips tasted of sunlight—allspice, cloves. Christ, when was that carpet cleaner going to be done? He was right in front of the desk, now, the machine making a terrible racket. And of course you had to remember, Patterson reminded himself, that Loretta Lee was just downstairs and could walk in at any moment. Angie actually did get on his nerves, but nerves were complicated.
The man cleaning the carpet was familiar. The carpet machine he steered was a large disc that buffed the woolen rug. It wasn’t much like the sound of a distant wind now. The noise was too loud, and Patterson was about to say something when he stopped himself. How could he complain when the man was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing?
Patterson had never quite gotten used to servants, cooks, housekeepers, guards, gardeners. He had been raised around wealthy people who had been dishwashers, actors who found themselves playing Roman senators after years of cadging drinks in the sort of taverns that feature pink flamingo wallpaper. Patterson told himself that he should not let this black-haired, blue-eyed carpet specialist disturb the mood.
But, once again, Patterson knew this man from somewhere.
He was just a little too good-looking for such a menial job. He was foraging ahead with the carpet cleaner, and at his hip, pistol-fashion, the worker wore a portable vacuum cleaner, a Hoover Wet & Dry. There was eye contact.
It was the eye contact that started it, that glance, that mutual moment—this man resembled someone who had been on the show, but Patterson, with his inability to remember names, found himself fumbling mentally.
Angie had awakened to the fact that there was something wrong. It was not trouble, and certainly not danger. But Angie’s job here was to make sure that Patterson was happy, and the psychiatrist was puzzled, concerned, trying to remember.
Patterson would remember this moment, too, how from the beginning the man had made one clumsy move after another.
The blue-eyed man unhitched the portable cleaner at his belt. It would not come free. When it did, he held the portable machine like a handgun, which is exactly what it resembled at the moment—a futuristic pistol, a ray gun from some old science fiction movie.
The blue-eyed man stepped away from the carpet cleaner, the big saucer of the machine continuing its blind buffing of the carpet, filling the air with the pleasing smell of artificial lemon.
The carpet machine bumped a wall, skittered with a certain dignity toward a bookcase. The machine plowed forward, like a carnival bumper car, and struck the bookcase. Books toppled to the floor.
Things happened slowly—the blue-eyed man could not get the device in his hands to work the way he wanted it to.
Angie put out her hands, took a step toward the man who by now had the Wet & Dry in both fists. Patterson played such games himself, even as an adult, pretending that a hair dryer was a death ray.
But he knew—in his gut he knew.
The front of the portable cleaner blew off. The sound killed all other noise. Patterson could hear nothing. Or, almost nothing. There was one blast, and then another.
Angie toppled back, flung farther backward by the force of each shot, as Patterson stumbled, holding Angie upright. He couldn’t help it—it was an impulse. He was holding her as a shield, cowering, as her head burst.
Patterson was down, Angie sprawled on top of him, his face hot with something molten, a substance that flowed into his eyes, into his nostrils. He gagged.
They sounded like doors being slammed. Gunshots. He had a mental sense of what was happening, the carpet-cleaning man nailed against a wall by bullets, plaster and blood, things falling.
All of it falling, the entire room disintegrating, the match-head stink of gunfire suffocating. Patterson couldn’t take a breath. He was drowning.
Hurt, he thought.
I can’t feel it, but I’m hurt.
Loretta Lee was in the room, out of nowhere, standing in the middle of everything, emptying her gun into something on the floor.
Patterson turned his head to one side and vomited, or was it something worse—a convulsion? He retched, agonized, clearing his mouth, his throat, his being of the taste in his mouth, the stuff from the head of the dead woman in his arms.
21
There was a knock at the door, soft. Margaret wasn’t even sure she heard it, a little tapping, persistent and timid.
Then, the doorbell, a set of chimes out of the bronze age, resounding and impossible to mistake.
It was Mrs. Wye. “I tried to call you, Margaret—”
Margaret put out her hand. “You’ll wear yourself out,” she said, “running around like this—”
“Don’t worry about me,” said Mrs. Wye, and the way she said it made Margaret unsteady.
“You should be resting,” said Margaret weakly. “Look at the time.”
The elderly neighbor was dressed in a flowing dressing gown, whispering satin and a hastily knotted sash. Mrs. Wye looked years younger, flushed and wide awake.
“Haven’t you heard?” said Mrs. Wye.
The words were delivered with care, years of cinematic diction making each consonant count. The walking stick gleamed, white rubber tip lifted into the air. “It’s terrible to be the first with bad news again,” said Mrs. Wye.
Margaret heard the news through a sudden haze. Her own body detached itself from her will. Her arms hung heavy, lifeless. Her brain told her that she must have misunderstood.
Margaret rejected the message as impossible: Dr. Patterson had been shot. Other people were shot, too.
Mrs. Wye’s voice had a steady, lapping quality, impervious to Margaret’s need to deny what was being said. It was a terrible scene, on Channel Five and Two, and possibly others, Mrs. Wye wasn’t sure. She hoped Curtis was at home, and safe. “Because I worry so much about him,” said Mrs. Wye.
Curtis was running.
It was dark. He had been running for a long time, but he was not tired.
He had long ago shed his black leather overnight bag, and the cumbersome portfolio so he could make his way more easily through the streets.
As a boy he had marveled at the glow of brakelights, the way they gleamed, the essence of Christmas, of Independence Day fireworks, and not hidden away for a once-a-year festival—they were on display each night, every night of the year. Sometimes colors broke upon Curtis with an inner sweetness, a spice: headlights would dissolve on the tongue, powdered sugar, brakelights would be like red-hots, cinnamon and fire, and the proud green lights would chime in like lime sherbet, dignified and profound. Curtis had thought it was a pity Goya never had a chance to see the blaze of emergency vehicles around the metallic carnage of a crash.
Art is an afterthought, one of life’s sweet by-products. It was time to do something that mattered.
What a grand, bitter joke it was. He had thought that the famous psychiatrist was the answer. He had been there when the shooting started, actually within the walls of the house.
There had been a long moment when none of it made sense. The sounds from the distant rooms had sounded like rude merriment. Then the men in suits, lounging about the living room, had stumbled over each other. Pistols had been tugged from recesses in clothing. The coffee table, the chairs on the margins of the room, had been knocked over in the haste.
My God, a voice had cried, they got the doctor.
It was a male voice, one of the security men, the sound of his cry all the more searing because of its anguish, the men fighting
each other unthinkingly in the corridor. And somehow, when he was aware of where he was and what he was doing, he was running. Someone had called out stop him, thinking, perhaps, that the artist was a part of the conspiracy. And he was, but an innocent part.
Curtis ran. The pace was starting to hurt. There was a stitch in his side. He told himself to think of pleasant thoughts, to drive the pain from his mind.
The first box of crayons—how well Curtis remembered, the waxy smell had been so promising. His days had been ladled, his childhood a series of caring homes, nourishment provided without much love but without much harm, older men and women motivated by unthinking kindness, as trees cast their shade in the heat without considering any alternative. Curtis did not hate life.
Was someone following him? He glanced back as he ran. Cars were low, sullen shapes. A bus was a source of tinny light, the passengers a few silhouettes of heads looking away, looking out, turning to look back at him—surely at least one, lifting a hand to speak into a transmitter.
He ran faster. Sweat made him blink. The night sky was clouded over, the low overcast lit by the city below it. The damp made his hair and clothing wet as he ran, the very slight mist darkening the sidewalk in the muddle of light under the streetlamps.
He could sense the command: stop him.
He was running past parked cars, his strides carrying him down-slope, toward the freeway, 101, the lanes of traffic he had re-created on canvas so many times.
He stumbled and fell against a curb, and slumped against a big metal tub corrupted with rust, an ancient mailbox. He was on his feet again at once.
Not far, he told himself.
Almost there.
He wanted to call out: hey—look at this.
He was about to do something they couldn’t take away from him.
Curtis didn’t know when he had begun to understand the way reality worked. There had not been a single moment. Gradually, over the years, he had begin to realize that his mail had been opened before he got it, and that his telephone conversations were accompanied by the slightest hiss of static, the result of an extra shunt fed into the line so that his calls could be recorded.
As he ran he became gradually aware that there was too much similarity in the anonymous men and women he saw on the street. These were, most of them, ordinary people out to buy beer and Band-Aids. But some of them, those turning away so you couldn’t see them talking into their collar mikes, were Watchers.
If only he had known this all along. He had done all the right things, following what he interpreted as the correct format throughout his teenage years. He had believed, in those distant days, that the world was a meritocracy, that you achieved success in big things by first mastering the small, the academic, the local. He had gone to school, San Francisco State, earnestly taking classes for a semester or two in art history and watercolor, because he knew that to follow the prescribed procedure was to find success.
And it was success that he wanted, after a youth that was a string of foster homes, homes in Oakland, Berkeley, San Leandro. He had heard of artists hindered by uncaring parents, narrow-minded stepfathers, unloving guardians, but most adults in Curtis’s life had responded with kindness. One foster father let Curtis have half the space in the garage of the San Leandro tract house, and most adults had encouraged the youth, seeing in him something uncommon.
He had worked hard on his art, drawing, painting, staying up all night, aided occasionally by amphetamines he bought from other students, and by filterless cigarettes he later grew to loathe, but usually kept awake only by his desire to finish one work of art and begin another.
He had talent as a youth, and he stood in line with his registration packet, with his application for the scholarships. His life as a very young man had been a matter of standing in line, knowing how to queue, how to wait one’s turn for space in the classroom, room at the gallery, knowing how to show up to the drawing class on time, in a prominent place so the teacher could see the thin, dark-haired student with so much talent.
Until Bruno Kraft had stepped before him at his first opening, one of those white-wine and Doritos affairs. Bruno Kraft was widely published at the time, but still building his reputation. “Stop doing whatever else you’re doing,” the critic had said, “and paint.”
The stitch in his side began to hurt badly. He couldn’t tell his enemies from his friends—that had always been his problem.
The rush of the freeway traffic was loud, the ceaseless wheels of cars, of trucks, freight and lives sweeping everything to one side or the other on their way toward a thousand destinations.
Curtis stumbled again, and almost fell, but caught himself against a newspaper rack. The stitch in his side had become a steel bite. Jesus—he was tired. Sweat soaked his shirt. But he was there now—the eight lanes of Highway 101.
For a moment he saw what he had always seen in freeways, how much they promise, and how much they deliver. This is the way, the highway says. This is the way home, the way out.
He ran up the on-ramp, his knees wobbly, weak. A driver somewhere leaned on his horn. There was another twisted blare as Doppler effect bent the sound of a car horn.
In an instant he was not tired. Not even a little bit. He could see it in his mind, the painting he would make of this, a brilliant, lifetime-best painting, all light and movement.
The stitch didn’t hurt anymore. The car exhaust was sharp in his lungs. He could taste the grit, the road grease, the fumes of brake lining and transmission fluid.
Margaret ran a red light. She didn’t even see it, and then, seeing it, she was already across the intersection. She swerved to miss a woman cradling a dog in her arms. A car was double-parked in the lane ahead of her as someone heavyset and slow got out of the passenger’s side.
She had always been impatient with people who complained about the traffic in San Francisco, feeling that the problem was not nearly as bad as people contended. She steered around a large, dark car trying to edge into a parking place Margaret could see with the briefest glance was way too small.
“Among the top stories we’re following, there has been a shooting at the home of Red Patterson,” a voice on the radio was saying.
A policewoman held out her arms, palms forward in the headlights, pale as the gloves of a mime. Margaret did not stop. The policewoman pounded the hood of the BMW as Margaret finally braked. The woman’s face adopted the expressionless mask of authority as she tugged at a flashlight, her book of unwritten tickets, her radio.
Margaret left the car idling, door open in the middle of the street, and ran past the cop. The woman called after Margaret, but Margaret sprinted.
An ambulance made its way through the crowd, then gradually broke free of the knot of people and was free, siren running, lights hammering the dark.
Margaret tried to elbow through the crowd outside the fortress of Red Patterson’s home, but there were too many people. Emergency lights flashed. Yet more police cars angled into place in the street. There was chaos, a hubbub of voices, weeping people, shocked, staring, blindly curious.
A path had been cleared when a body was taken out. The path closed in again as people explained to each other what they had seen, what they had heard on the radio, what someone said they saw on the news.
Maybe it was a massacre in there. Hey, it happened all the time. Someone said they had seen Patterson on a stretcher, but somebody else said this wasn’t true. The crowd was stupid with excitement and someone else said the only thing that made logical sense: They haven’t brought Red Patterson out yet so he might be dead.
Margaret climbed forward. Let me through.
There were too many guns out in the streets, someone said. The cops couldn’t do anything. Cops made it worse. One voice rang out above the others, a man greeting his friends, who were just arriving at a run. “They shot the shit out of him!” cried the voice.
Margaret struggled, working her way toward the yellow ribbon marked Police line—do not cross. The yellow
plastic band was twisted, the imprecation not to cross upside down, backward, all but impossible to read, and yet its message did not have to be read. Its presence bespoke crime, violence, the law hastily at work. Margaret elbowed her way further and called to the woman police officer on duty that she was looking for her husband.
The woman could not hear what Margaret was calling, and did not care to approach, but a plainclothes cop recognized Margaret and pulled up the glossy yellow ribbon for her to pass into the crime scene.
It was a house of dramatic paintings, the thick carpets, slightly damp, the still-moist nap already blotted with footprints. There was the perky fragrance of lemon-scented carpet shampoo. The rooms were quiet, but with the busy murmur of a bank, an insurance company. It did not seem like a crime scene. It seemed like a very busy place where everything had to be done perfectly.
Yes, Curtis had been here just when the shooting took place, said a cop in a blue sports jacket. “I think it was him. There’s a checklist of visitors.”
“But Curtis is all right?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t even know where he is. Look around.”
She looked, and she asked, but knew as she gazed at one person after another, that Curtis had vanished. When the checklist was produced, Curtis was the only name at the top of a clean sheet, although his name was misspelled Noons.
The crowd was stirring outside. People gathered in small groups up and down the darkened street of neat lawns and careful hedges.
The policewoman made a gesture of exasperation when she saw Margaret. “This is your car,” said the woman, confirming, not asking.
“I need to find my husband,” said Margaret.
The woman made a gesture, one hand out, someone waving away a very slow fly. “I just called a tow truck.”
He’s all right, though. Wherever he is, he had to be all right. He will come back to me, she told herself. Now he doesn’t have any choice.
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