Fear itself: a novel

by Jonathan Lewis Nasaw

  Enjoy your stay. Not bloody likely: after sixteen hours in the womblike Volvo with nothing but the scenery and Zap’s weed for entertainment (reception was sketchy in the mountains—for some reason only country music stations were able to overcome the topography), Simon now found himself looking at essentially the same motel room he’d checked out of that morning.

  So now what? Sleep would be nice, sleep would be delightful, but Simon had been drinking road coffee all day, plus he’d ingested a few Mexican crosstops—ten milligrams of dexedrine apiece—when he’d started nodding out somewhere east of Salt Lake City, so he wasn’t sure he’d be able to knock himself out even with a Halwane.

  Still, he had to do something—he could sense the blind rat lurking. It seemed as though the rat was always lurking lately. Once, Simon had been able to go a year or two between rounds of the fear game; more recently the cycle had shortened to a month or two; and now it seemed to be spiraling in on itself even more drastically. Three games so far this month (Wayne, Dorie, and Nelson; Zap didn’t count, but Dorie did: the game wasn’t about murder, Simon always told himself—that was just something you had to do afterward if you didn’t want to end up in jail), and October wasn’t even over, yet here he was again, twitchy as a weekend tweaker on a Friday morning, reduced to making a tent of the bedclothes, firing up a joint as thick as his pinky under the covers, and like a baseball fan in January, replaying the glory days in his head. Thinking about the game was better than no game at all.

  Tonight, probably because of the time of year, Simon found himself remembering that scrawny little coke whore from La Honda. For the life of him he couldn’t recall her name at the moment, yet without her, there might not have been any game at all.

  The year was 1969, the month was October, the drug of choice was Peruvian marching powder, and Simon had recently come into his majority—if it weren’t for bad companions, he wouldn’t have had any companions at all. Except of course for the blind rat, which had been gnawing at him since Nellie had gone back into the loony bin. There didn’t seem to be enough coke in the world to keep the rat at bay and he couldn’t work up much interest in sex, plentiful as opportunities were in the circles he frequented. Compared to the ecstasy of the fear game with Nellie, there just wasn’t any point, especially in light of his ejaculatio praecox problem.

  And although in retrospect the solution to Simon’s anhedonia seems obvious, even inevitable, it wasn’t until the incident with—Corky! that was it, her name was Corky—that he’d begun to put two and two together.

  Corky What’s-her-name. White girl, rib-counting skinny. Used to hang around Ugly George’s Harley ranch in La Honda trading blow jobs for blow, when she could get any takers, and being used as a piñata by the bikers the rest of the time.

  Talk was going around, though, that Corky was about to be upgraded from piñata to feature player in an eight-millimeter snuff film, so when she popped up from the rear floorboards of Simon’s first Mercedes saloon somewhere around Daly City (Simon had recently dumped his Hog, which was being repaired out at the ranch), Simon resisted his first impulse, which was to take her back to La Honda to be there in person and watch movie magic being made.

  Who knows, perhaps Simon had a touch of the white knight syndrome himself—he certainly hadn’t done it for the free head. But although she may have been in distress, Corky was no fair damsel. She hoovered up vast quantities of Simon’s newly purchased flake, proved to be horny as a she-goat and mean as a snake once she’d finally had an elegant sufficiency, and was foulmouthed to boot, making the next-to-last mistake of her sorry life by teasing him for his lack of interest in sex, calling him a faggot, then telling him even a queer ought to be able to enjoy a good blow job.

  But she’d changed her tune pretty quickly when Simon told her that he’d had enough, that he’d just as soon stick it into a cesspool as into that sewer of a mouth, and that as soon as he was able to drive, he would be taking her back to the ranch to make her film debut. That was when things got interesting. First she cajoled, then she begged, and then, after he’d tied her up and stuffed his handkerchief into her mouth, she made her last mistake—she let the terror show in her eyes.

  The effect on Simon was as immediate, electric, and profound as that of the fear game at its most intense. Thirty years later, almost to the day, huddled under the smoke-filled covers in room 318 of the Holiday Inn Express in Ogallala, Nebraska, he could still remember the shock of recognition: he wasn’t a queer, it wasn’t Nellie, or men, or even sex in general that turned him on, it was this, all this, the sudden quiescence, the pupils gone dark and vulnerable, the mouth forced open, the trembling lips nearly as white as the handkerchief stuffed between them. It wasn’t so much Corky’s fear as it was the way the fear had transformed her, stripped her more naked than naked, until her soul was as bare as her sad, pale, skinny little body.

  Simon was so moved by the experience that he even thought about letting her go, really he did. And although it hadn’t worked out that way in the end, by the time Ugly George’s snuff film was in the can, Simon had learned another important lesson, the one about pain being anodyne to fear.

  Over time, Simon would further define his needs and desires; by specializing only in true phobics he would, in effect, transform himself from a gourmand to a gourmet, an aficionado of fear. But as much as he’d refined the game over the years, from crude targets-of-opportunity abductions to the apotheosis of the fear game, the late lamented PWSPD Association, it all had its roots in just two people, Nelson Carpenter and Corky What’s-her-name, and to those two, both gone now, Simon Childs knew that he would be forever grateful.

  6

  On her fourth night in the country, Linda managed to sleep through the worst of the quiet, awakening Monday morning to the racket of songbirds. And although she still found herself looking forward to going to work, after her Betaseron injection she brought her soy-protein smoothie out onto the porch and took her time drinking it—she had figured out by now that until Simon Childs was in custody, these early breakfasts were probably going to be her only chance to enjoy the fabulous autumn foliage in the daylight.

  And she was right—things did start heating up Monday. At six in the morning, Pacific time, federal agents, armed with search warrants obtained on the basis of Simon Childs’s bank records, raided Kenneth “Zap” Strum’s SoMa loft. The discovery of Zap’s body, the medical examiner’s estimation of the time of death, and the fact that Childs’s fingerprints were not only all over the loft, but on the murder weapon as well, put Childs in San Francisco no later than Saturday.

  Meanwhile, the evidence response techs were hard at work digging up the cellar of the Childs mansion. The corpses, in varying states of decay, were all buried at the same depth, four to six feet, not stacked vertically, but evidently Childs had laid a thin layer of cement over the entire floor of the chamber every time he buried one, either to minimize the odor or disguise the fresh patch. Only four corpses had been uncovered so far, three female, one male, but there were a dozen thin strata of cement. As per Pender’s suggestion, Linda asked Thom Davies at the CJIS in Clarksburg to massage the appropriate databases for possible matches between missing persons and found bodies.

  She also asked Thom to have copies of all reports of new so-called “stranger” homicides (assailant believed to have been unknown to the victim) received by the NCIC (National Crime Information Center) forwarded to her as they came in. Any patterns, or any correspondence of victims to names or locations that had or would come up in the Childs investigation, would not go unnoticed for long.

  Something else hadn’t gone unnoticed by Linda: all this, all she had done, all she was doing, she could do from her office chair. And all across the country, she knew, there were FBI agents performing jobs no more physically demanding than this. The only difference was that they were special agents and she was an investigative specialist. It shouldn’t have mattered to her, of course, but somehow it did. The proudest day of her life
had been the day she earned the right to call herself Special Agent Abruzzi. You shouldn’t take something like that away from somebody without an awful good reason, thought Linda.

  She didn’t have much time to brood, though. At the crack of noon—opening of business on the West Coast—Linda initiated contact with the venerable San Francisco law firm of Bobbeck, Pflueger, and Morrison, which had been administering the Childs Trust since the death of Marcus Childs, Simon’s grandfather, in1963. One switchboard operator, two secretaries, and a paralegal later, she found herself speaking with an actual Pflueger, Hearst Pflueger IV, Esq., who was, he told her during a surprisingly pleasant conversation, the third of his line to grace the firm’s letterhead. She had been prepared for a lot more resistance, but when she told him why she was calling, and what she was looking for, Pflueger was unexpectedly forthcoming, for a big-shot attorney.

  He’d been expecting a call ever since he’d read the newspaper Saturday morning, he told her. “I wish I could say I was more surprised, but my father, who was Marcus Childs’s personal attorney, always said there was more to the old man’s death than met the eye.”

  “That would have been Hearst Pflueger the third?”

  “Trey—everybody called him Trey. He thought there was something off about the grandson—unsound, I believe was the word he used.”

  “Have you ever met Simon personally?”

  “I did. I was fresh out of law school—”

  “Which one?”

  “Boalt, of course.”

  “I went to Fordham.” Might as well establish a little common ground, let him know she was a lawyer, too.

  “Yes, I thought I detected a New York accent in there somewhere. As I was saying, I was fresh out of Boalt, just passed the bar, Trey put me in charge of the trust. Basically, I controlled Simon’s money from 1967 until 1969, when he turned twenty-one, and during that period he must have called me at least every six weeks asking me to release funds above and beyond his monthly allowance, which was considerable.

  “He even showed up at the office a few times, obviously under the influence of drugs—our interactions were not at all pleasant, Agent Abruzzi. He used to refer to me as—forgive me—fuckface. Whenever somebody called the switchboard and asked for Mr. Fuckface, the switchboard operator always put him straight through.”

  “The fact that you’re alive and talking to me now, Mr. Fuh—Oh, God.”

  “Quite all right.”

  “I’ll try that again. The fact that you’re alive and talking to me now, Mr. Pflueger, tells me they could have been a whole lot more unpleasant. How long will it take you to get those records to me?”

  “I’ll make you a deal. As an attorney yourself, you understand I can’t just release a client’s confidential documents. What I can do, though, is have my people dig out the old files and start Xeroxing them while your people obtain a subpoena for them. We won’t contest it—as soon as the subpoena arrives, I’ll have the files overnighted to you.”

  “Thank you so much, Mr. Pflueger.”

  “I’m on the board of the San Francisco Symphony, Agent Abruzzi. You can thank me by catching that monster before he kills any more promising young cellists.”

  “We’re doing our best, sir.”

  “I know you are.”

  The mail arrived while Linda was on the phone asking Eddie Erickson, the case agent in San Francisco, to obtain the subpoena for the Childs Trust files. Along with a manila envelope from the Fresno Police Department, there was a box containing a videotape from the Las Vegas PD.

  Instead of going down to the DOJ-AOB cafeteria for lunch, Linda ate at her desk while running, reversing, rerunning, and rereversing an edited dub of a grainy, jerky, stop-motion security video showing two men getting into an elevator at 23:57 hours on 04/11/99.

  Simon Childs and Carl Polander, of course, in the lobby of the Olde Chicago Hotel and Casino, where the PWSPD convention had taken place. Sunday night—the convention was over, most of the attendees had checked out and gone home. Linda, who’d only seen Childs’s DMV photo, couldn’t take her eyes off him. Sitting at her desk, using the remote to operate the VCR in the corner of the room, she watched the loop over and over, until his slouching posture, his air of calm self-assurance, the way he smoothed his palm across his widow’s peak as he stepped into the elevator (probably caught a glimpse of himself in one of those convex elevator mirrors), was part of her, as familiar as her dad’s sore-footed butcher’s walk or the little moue her mom made into the mirror when she was putting on her lipstick.

  “That’s him, eh?”

  Linda looked up, startled—Pool was in the doorway. “That’s him.” She stopped the tape, rewound it, switched off the VCR. “Something occurred to me while I was watching: I’ll probably never see him.”

  “In the flesh, you mean?”

  “Yeah. By the time this is over, I’ll know more about that man than I knew about my first boyfriend, but I’ll never actually see him in person,” mused Linda, opening the envelope from the Fresno PD and placing a stack of color photographs on her desk.

  “Unlike that poor gal,” said Pool, pointing to the print on the top of the stack. Taken from a bathroom doorway, it showed a nude woman sitting up in a bathtub, her heavy breasts lolling to the sides, her head thrown back so far that her long dark hair cascaded over the back of the tub; her eyes were closed and her lips parted in what might have been ecstasy.

  Mara Agajanian, of course—and despite appearances, the picture was not soft-core porn, but evidence, as the rest of the photos (the pink-tinged water, the close-ups of the slashed wrists) made clear. But as she shuffled through them, Linda kept coming back to that first one. It was the old what’s-wrong-with-this-picture? game—she got it on the third pass.

  “Look at that,” she said to Pool, pointing to the long dark spill of hair draped over the back of the tub. “Wouldja look at that.”

  Pool, to her credit, got it right away. “He brushed her hair,” she said. “The s.o.b. brushed her hair.”

  7

  Say this about the upper Midwest: they had some terrific classical music stations. Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota—as one station faded out, another would kick in down at the bottom of the dial where public radio lived. And not just the usual suspects either, Vivaldi, Mozart, the three Bs, but a smorgasbord of off-brand baroque composers, the Albinonis and Stradellas and Guerrieris of the world. It was a musical education for Simon—as he drove, he kept making mental notes of CDs he’d be wanting to order for his collection, next time he was on-line.

  Except, of course, that he didn’t have a computer any longer—or a CD collection, or an address. It was a strange dual state of mind Simon found himself in, as the Volvo rolled across the great iron bridge spanning the Mississippi above La Crosse. He was an intelligent man, and as Sid Dolitz had pointed out to Pender only five days earlier, his manie was decidedly sans délire: on one level, he understood that life as he’d known it was over. He was a fugitive now, condemned to a short, harried existence and a violent end, either at his own hands or those of law enforcement.

  But on another, deeper level, down where the personality takes root, Simon’s grandiose sense of himself, the preternatural confidence of the psychopath, and the inability to empathize with others (Missy didn’t count, Sid would have said; psychologically, pathologically, to Simon she was not an other, but an extension of his self) or to appreciate that others lived on the same plane of consciousness as himself, with the same interior life, all combined to render Simon constitutionally incapable of imagining the universe continuing after his death. In this regard, for all his intelligence and awareness, Simon was like an infant, unable to establish any boundaries between itself and the outside world, to say this is where I end and the world begins. Simon was the universe and the universe was Simon, unable to comprehend the inevitability of its own nonexistence.

  And yet here he was, hurtling toward a certain bloody death.

  Instinctively, without being con
sciously aware of the problem, Simon knew the solution: purpose, focus, concentration. Whenever he found his thoughts drifting as he drove (and he’d been driving since 6 A.M.), whenever the riotous autumn colors, the lush music, or the elemental joy of highway speed failed to hold his interest, he turned his thoughts to Pender.

  Pender, who was responsible for Missy’s death. Pender, who was responsible for Simon’s own exile. Pender, Pender, Pender: Simon kept the image of that bald, scarred melon of a head, those ridiculous clothes, that fatuous grin, in front of him always as a lodestar. Every mile he put behind him, he told himself, brought him another five thousand two hundred and eighty feet closer to wiping the smirk right off that fat face, and replacing the dull, self-satisfied expression with one of pure, sweet fear.

  8

  “Don’t move,” called Dorie when Pender opened his eyes.

  “Why not?” He’d been dozing on a picnic blanket spread out under a wind-sculpted cypress tree at Lovers Point while Dorie painted; now he opened the other eye and saw that she’d moved back another fifteen yards or so and had swung her chair and easel around to face him.

  “You’re in the picture now.”

  “Wait.” Pender, feeling the breeze on his scalp, assumed his beret must have slipped off. He started to look around for it. Dorie called to him not to move again. “But my hat, I need my—”

  “It’s over here.” She was seated behind and slightly to the right of her easel, glancing back and forth between subject and canvas, painting rapidly with her left hand. Even at this time of day, the light was constantly changing; take too long and you find yourself finishing a different painting than the one you’d started. “I had to take it off.”