Isolde saw nothing, but as she was kicking upwards through the warm water, the alligator’s tail thumped her right leg, and she thought, Alligator, and then she was clawing to the surface and a hand grabbed her arm and pulled her up onto the deck. She saw Woody.
“Oh my God,” Isolde said, panting. “Oh my God.” She got up onto one knee and then Woody helped her to her feet. They looked at the water, which was covered with leaves and coconuts and other debris. Something was happening down there that was roiling the surface. The wind was strong now, the trees around them bending and lashing the sky. A powerful gust almost unbalanced both of them and sent them into the pool.
“Come inside!” Woody shouted. Isolde was moaning and trembling; she looked at him and then back at the pool, where the water was still heaving.
“That’s over with!” Woody shouted. He was filled with a fierce exultation, and he put his arm around Isolde and moved her toward their house.
A branch blew past them and clanged against the metal shutters of the porch. Over with? Isolde thought, as Woody pulled her inside. He slammed the door shut and slid the bolt home.
But Perry’s in the pool, she thought. He’d always be down there, and what did that leave them with now?
PART III
Vices of Miami
THE TIMING OF UNFELT SMILES
BY JOHN DUFRESNE
Sunny Isles
At 9:15 on Thursday morning, June 4, while Jordan Delreese was bludgeoning his two young children to death, I was sitting in Dr. Hamburger’s consulting room at the Sunny Isles Geriatric Clinic with my father, who was just then at a loss for words. He had been trying to explain to the doctor why he no longer felt comfortable being in the same room with his shadow. He’d said, If light can pass through the universe, why can’t it pass through me? But now he could only manage to hum and to shake his head. I highlighted a speech in my script. Dad’s contention, as near as I could figure it, was that light had a mind of its own and had taken to behaving arbitrarily and recklessly in the last six months or so. After Dr. Hamburger clicked off his desk lamp, Dad took off his eyeshade, blinked, rubbed his rheumy eyes, and asked me who I was. Dr. Hamburger tapped the side of his prescription pad on his desk blotter, leaned back in his squeaky Posturetech office chair, cast me a glance, raised his articulate brow, and lifted his upper eyelids. Lid-lifters tend to be a tad melodramatic.
Dr. Hamburger had diagnosed Dad with Alzheimer’s. Dad said he was merely closing up shop. He hadn’t lost his ability to make metaphor, not yet. And he did have his lucid moments. He was in and out, however, and he was hard to read. His expressions were often without nuance or blend. He was extremely angry, extremely happy, or extremely vacant. He could remember what he had for breakfast on June 15, 1944, in Guam (gumdrop candy, two cookies), but not that he just turned on the gas without lighting the pilot; which is why I had to move him into an all-electric, assistedliving facility.
Jordan Delreese walked down to the kitchen after slashing his wife’s throat and changing out of his blood-soaked pajamas and into a maroon polo shirt and khaki chinos. He clapped his hands and told Davenport and Darchelle to finish up their Cap’n Crunch quick like bunnies. Darchelle said she thought she heard Mommy screaming before, but then it stopped.
Jordan said, You did, dumpling. Mommy and Daddy were playing Multiply and Replenish again.
In the morning? she said. That’s silly.
Jordan asked the kids if they wanted to play a game too. They sure would. Okay, then you have to clean up your mess, put the bowls in the sink and the spoons in the dishwasher, handles up. Davenport wanted to know what the game was called. Just Rewards, Jordan said.
The kids giggled when Jordan blindfolded them. He told Darchelle to wait in her room and to count to two hundred. One Mississippi, she said. He locked her door and led Davenport to the children’s bathroom. The tub was full. He asked Davenport to lie on his back on the floor. Yes, I know the tile is cold, but it won’t be for long. Jordan took the hammer from the ledge of the tub, raised it above his shoulder, and brought it down on his son’s right eye, and then the left eye, the mouth, the forehead, the forehead again. He wiped the slick face of the hammerhead on an aqua hand towel and walked to Darchelle’s room. One hundred and eleven Mississippi, she said. Darchelle lay on the floor like her daddy asked her to. Jordan said, I saved you for last, dumpling, because you are my special angel. She did not get to say, Goody! or, Thank you, Daddy.
And then, to be extra certain that his buddy and his dumpling did not wake up in pain, Jordan laid the children face down in the bathtub. He washed his hands with antibacterial soap, singing “Happy Birthday” twice while he did. Dr. Sanjay Gupta on CNN said that’s how long it takes to wash your hands properly. Jordan went downstairs and made himself breakfast. Scrambled eggs on a blueberry Pop-Tart, sausage links, a box of grape Juicy Juice. While he ate and read the Sun-Sentinel, he called his mother and asked her if she and Dad would be home this afternoon. He’d like to pay a visit. Do I have to have a reason? His mom told him she’d make gingerbread and whipped cream. Jordan said, I’ll be there one-ish.
Jordan lifted the children out of the tub and dried them off. He noticed a small mole on Darchelle’s left hip, examined it, touched it, figured it was probably nothing. He tucked them both into Davenport’s bed, pulled the sheets to their chins, covered their faces with the lace doilies from Darchelle’s vanity. He nestled cuddly toys next to their bodies and read them the Bible story about Abraham and Isaac. He sang their favorite lullaby. Sweetest little baby, everybody knows. Don’t know what to call her, but she’s mighty like a rose. He choked back tears. Jordan decided to drive to North Beach in Hollywood, stare at the ocean, clear his head. And then maybe surprise his parents by showing up early. He’d drive by Whole Foods and pick up lunch. Some of that tabouli he likes so much. And the grilled portobellos. He cleared the table, started the dishwasher, went up to the master bath, and hopped in the shower.
I told Dad I was still Wylie, the same old Wylie.
“Well, you look a little like my boy Winston.”
“Winston was your bulldog.”
“Like Cameron, I mean.”
“Cameron’s dead. I’m all you got.”
“Where’s Birute?”
“Mom’s dead.”
“I know she’s dead. That’s not what I asked you.”
Dr. Hamburger had Dad take off his shirt—easier said than done—and climb up on the examining table. I turned my script toward the window light and read Willis’s next speech. It’s like you’re in ninth grade, and you die and go into high school. That’s all death is. I was playing Willis Harris in the Gold Coast Theatre’s production of Trailerville. Willis is a true believer. I’m not. It was one week till dress rehearsal. Or maybe you’re humming along in a big rig, and you see a long straightaway up ahead and you shift gears and jam that pedal, and just like that the hum of the engine’s an octave higher. Dying’s like that, like shifting into a higher gear. My cell phone vibrated. I excused myself and stepped out into the hall. Dr. Hamburger was trying to unknot Dad’s T-shirt from around his neck.
The call was from my friend, Detective Carlos O’Brien of the Hollywood Police Department, requesting my immediate services. He had a situation in the Lakes. Three bodies, two weapons, one missing suspect, much blood. “I need you here, Coyote. Now.”
“I’ll have to take my dad.”
“How’s he doing?”
“He’s not himself.”
“Ten minutes.”
I couldn’t leave Dad in the car with the keys in the ignition, so I opened the windows and gave him a Fifteen Puzzle, told him to slide the numbers around until they were all in order.
“In order of importance?” he said.
“In numerical order.”
I’m not a police officer. That morning I was a forensic consultant. Sometimes I work for lawyers who are trying to empanel the appropriate jury for their clients. Sometimes I sit in my office and help m
y own clients shape their lives into stories, so the lives finally make some sense. A lack of narrative structure, as you know, will cause anxiety. And that’s when I call myself a therapist. And that’s what it says on my business card: Wylie Melville, MSW, Family and Individual Counseling. Carlos uses me, however, because I read minds, even if those minds aren’t present. I say I read minds, but that’s not it really. I read faces and furniture. I look at a person, at his expressions, his gestures, his clothing, his home, and his possessions, and I can tell you what he’s thinking. I’ve always been able to do it. Carlos calls me an intuitionist. Dr. Cabrera at UM’s Cognitive Thinking Lab tells me I have robust mirror neurons. I just look, I stare, I gaze, and I pay attention to what I see.
Carlos showed me the framed wedding photo they’d found on the slain wife’s body. No, I said, I’d prefer not to see the victims. The photographer had posed the couple with Jordan’s cheek on—“applied” might be a better word—with Jordan’s cheek applied to Caroldean’s temple, and he’d canted the shot at a thirty-degree angle. I wondered what he saw that suggested the pressure and the slant. Jordan’s smile was thin, yet wide, as wide as he knew was appropriate to the occasion and pleasing to the photographer. Adequate but unfelt. His eyes were eager, yet slightly squinted. I guessed that the obvious accompanying brow lines had been Photoshopped out. You can’t trust photos to tell you the truth anymore. Caroldean wore a diamond stud in her left ear and a thin silver necklace. She had a dimple on her right cheek, like she was used to smiling out one side of her face. This ingrained unevenness suggested a lifetime of feigned emotion.
Jordan River Delreese was a thirty-five-year-old graduate of FIU’s College of Business Administration and the CEO of, and the creative force behind, Succeedingly Wealthy, Inc., a company that produced and sold motivational artwork. Like there’s this photo of crashing waves on a rocky, forested coast, and beneath it, in case you think this is just an empty, if dramatic landscape, are Jordan’s words: Sometimes amidst the waves of change, we find our true direction. Or maybe there’s a lighthouse, its beacon shining above a roiling sea, and Jordan has printed: The savage sea can pull our customers in many directions. Our duty is to light their way to safety—before the competition does. Above his desk in his office at the back of the house hung his company’s best-selling framed photo, a shot of a golf green in the brilliant light of early morning, dew still on the grass. The photo is titled Success and beneath the photo, Jordan’s inspiring words: Some people only dream of success…other folks wake up early and work at it.
You can lie with your possessions, of course. I suppose we all do this a bit, stash the Enya CDs in a drawer and leave the Chet Baker and the Louis Prima conspicuously on the coffee table. Jordan had lined his office bookshelf with the hundred-volume set from the Franklin Library of The Collected Stories of the World’s Greatest Writers, from Aesop to Thomas Wolfe. Each book had gold decor on leather boards, gilt page edges, silky end pages, and a ribbon bookmark. None of the spines had been broken; none of the pages in those volumes I checked had been thumbed.
The neatness of the office, the precise arrangement of items on Jordan’s desk—laptop computer, family photo, cherry wood and punched-black metal desk organizer, matching Rolodex and pencil cup, stapler, tape dispenser, wire mesh paper clip holder—told me that he was a man with a firm handshake, a pumper, not a wrist-grabber, a man who numbered his arguments, asked and answered his own questions, and was given to proverbial expression. Tucked into the side rail of his mocha desk pad, a note on pink “while-you-were-out” message paper, presumably to himself: Stumbling isn’t falling. I took a business card from the leather card holder. The “S” in “Succeedingly” was a dollar sign.
In the family photo, our four Delreeses are posed casually, sitting on a white rug against a white backdrop. They wear white, long-sleeved oxford shirts, white casual slacks, and white socks. Jordan’s in the middle, one hand on his leg, looking up at Darchelle, who smiles back at him. Caroldean—there’s that dimple again—has her arm around Davenport. His is the smile of a child about to drift away to sleep. You can always tell a happy marriage. People in love begin to acquire each other’s traits, each other’s styles—they begin to look and act alike. They want to please. They admire each other and, naturally enough, want to become what they esteem and cherish. That had not happened with the Delreeses.
Carlos handed me a sheet of lime-green stationery. “He left a note.”
Jordan’s writing was half-print, half-cursive; his words began with a flourish and ended with a flat line.
I killed the children. Five minutes of pain for a lifetime of suffering. I know that Jehovah will take care of my little ones in the next life. And if Jehovah is willing, I would love to see them again in the resurrection, to have my second chance. I don’t plan to live much longer myself, not on this earth. I have come to hate this life and this unreasonable system of things. I have come to have no hope. I give you my wife, Caroldean, my honey, my precious love. Please take care of her.
I told Carlos that no person who has ever tried to be honest for even one second of his life could think like this.
Carlos said, “He’s a deacon in his church.”
“Of course he is. And he’s probably a scoutmaster.”
“Soccer coach.”
“There you go.”
“So you think the volunteer work is pretense? You don’t think he’s sincere?”
I shook my head. “I think sincerity is his honesty. And I think you’d better find Mr. Delreese soon. He’s not finished. The family was just the flourish. He’ll kill again. My guess is he’s killed before.”
Back at the car, I nudged Dad awake, strapped him in his seat belt, closed the windows, cranked up the AC, and drove toward Federal Highway. I told Dad about the victims, omitting the gruesome details. He shrugged. “Life is nothing,” he said.
“But it’s all we’ve got.”
“Nothing’s plenty for me.”
“Did you finish your puzzle?”
“The zero was missing.”
“So what did you do?”
“Killed some time.” He picked up my script, fanned the pages, found a highlighted speech, and fed me my cue. “You want to lose her too?”
“A man belongs with his family, Arlis. Where we come from, the elderly are not discarded like old rags.”
“Are you listening to yourself?”
“That’s not in the script, Dad.”
“What was her name?”
“Who?”
“Your ex-wife.”
“Georgia. What about her?”
“On my mind is all. You lost her.”
“She found someone else.”
“So she’s dead to you.”
I dropped Dad at Clover House in North Miami, told him I’d pick him up on Sunday for the Marlins game.
On the way to rehearsal I took a chance. I checked Delreese’s business card and called his cell. I told him who I was and said I was hoping he could design me a piece of art I could hang in my office. What I had in mind was one of those Hubble shots of distant space, maybe the one of the eagle nebula or some radiant spiral galaxy, and it’ll say, I love the light for it shows me the way. I endure the dark for it shows me the stars. Something like that.
Jordan Delreese told his parents that the kids were swell, fit as fiddles, never been better. He asked his mother to pass the tabouli. She told him to leave room for dessert. Caroldean’s busy with her scrapbook project, he said. He told them that when he was at the beach earlier he saw this cloud that looked like an angel. Did they see it too? Like Michael the archangel. They hadn’t seen it. What do you think it means? he said.
Rain, his father said.
Jordan said, He makes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.
Amen, his mother said.
Jordan’s BlackBerry played “You Are the Wind Beneath My Wings.” He checked the number and punched Ignore.
You can’t command emotions to appear, but you can coax them, summon them. I learned that in acting class. Stanislavsky said if you move your hands in a tender way, you’ll begin to experience tenderness. You move with the quality of tenderness, in other words, and the movement will evoke the sensation of tenderness, and that sensation will lead you to the true emotion, and now you’re feeling it. No pretense. Change your expression and you change your nervous system. And you can use your own life experiences and your remembered feelings to help you understand your character. Work from an aroused emotion back to the source of it. In other words, to lie on stage, you need to be honest with yourself.
I was working on feeling Willis’s exhilaration, his joy about life after death and the promise of eternal salvation. Easy enough to slap on the brilliant smile, brighten the bountiful eyes. I stood on my toes like I couldn’t hold the good news inside, like I was bursting with beatific energy. I started hopping, pounding my fists in the air. Hiroshi, our director, asked me to take it down a notch, or several. “It’s only life everlasting, Wylie; it’s not a weekend with Madonna.” I wondered if I had any exhilaration in my past to call on. When had I ever been so deliriously excited? Maybe on my wedding day, but the failure of that whole enterprise got me sad like it always does. When I was five or six I ran everywhere. I ran to school, ran to the kitchen. I couldn’t wait to get to wherever I was going. And I was happy wherever I was. I ran down the stairs, over to the park. I ran to the swings. I ran to church. So what happened when I was seven? Hiroshi put his wrist to his forehead and told me he couldn’t take another interruption. I said, “I’m ready,” and then I saw Carlos backstage waving me over.
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