Fear itself: a novel

by Jonathan Lewis Nasaw

  3

  “Who was it said, beware of any venture that requires new clothes?” Pender wanted to know. Dorie had half-dragged him to Khaki’s, an upscale men’s clothier in Carmel’s Barnyard shopping center.

  “It wasn’t a woman, I’ll tell you that,” she replied. The only clothes he had were the ones he’d packed in his carry-on for what was supposed to have been a two-day trip. If she saw that yellow Ban Lon shirt one more time, she’d announced Tuesday morning, she was going to upchuck.

  Her choice of emporiums backfired on her, though. Khaki’s advertised itself as a classy, post-preppy kind of store, but Pender had made a beeline for a rack of Hawaiian shirts and picked out a couple of doozies; he was trying on Panama hats when his cell phone began chirping.

  Weird, thought Dorie, watching Pender as he wandered over to the doorway of the shop for better reception. She’d never fallen for a homely man before—it took some getting used to. Not in bed, oddly enough—she was surprised to learn how little looks seemed to matter when you were making love—but in broad daylight those eyes, under that scarred expanse of scalp, seemed much too small, and that putty nose and those LBJ ears much too big; only the full-lipped mouth was just about right, but somehow when it broke into that easy grin, it made the rest of the face seem just about right, too.

  Still, she couldn’t help comparing him to Rafael, her Big Sur carpenter. Walk into a joint on Rafe’s arm, and you could sense every other woman in the place curling up with jealousy like the wicked witch’s toes after the ruby slippers were removed. And when Rafe was working, with his muscles rippling beneath his sweat-stained T-shirt like Brando’s in Streetcar and the heavy suede carpenter’s toolbelt slung diagonally athwart his narrow hips—

  “Hey, Dorie!” Pender waved her over, his hand covering the mouthpiece of the phone. “Have you ever heard of a shrink named Luka—Janos Luka?”

  “Janos Luka? Sure, who hasn’t?”

  “Me and Abruzzi, for two.”

  “He’s a famous gestalt therapist—he worked with Perls and Maslow, all those guys. He must be about a million years old by now—he still runs the Lethe Institute, down in Big Sur. Why?”

  “Apparently he was Simon Childs’s psychiatrist at one time.” Then, into the phone again: “Linda? Yes, Dorie knows him.”

  “Hey! I didn’t say I—”

  Pender put a forefinger to his lips, gave Dorie a wink. “Yeah, he’s an old friend of hers. She says he’s pretty reclusive, though—maybe you ought to let us make the first contact…. Right, right, somebody from the resident agency should definitely do the interview itself…. Of course I will.…Okay, talk to you later.”

  “What was that all about?” asked Dorie.

  “Just a little Bureau-cratic gamesmanship. How long a drive is it?”

  “How long a drive is what?”

  “From here to Big Sur,” said Pender—and here came that grin again, lighting up his whole face, chasing away all the ugly.

  4

  Linda Abruzzi was no fool—she understood that Pender’s promise to have somebody from the FBI’s resident agency in Monterey conduct the formal interview with Dr. Luka was probably bogus. But if the priority here was catching Childs, then having a Bureau legend like E. L. Pender doing your background interviews was like having Derek Jeter for a pinch hitter: you’d be a fool if you didn’t bring him off the bench. And as a law school graduate, Linda was quite familiar with the concept of plausible deniability—as was Deputy Director Steven P. McDougal, she was reasonably certain.

  Besides, Linda had other fish to fry. In the same carton as the medical records—actually just the bills—she had found both Simon’s and Melissa’s birth certificates, so as soon as she got off the phone with Pender, she called Thom Davies and asked him to perform a little of his database wizardry.

  A few minutes later, as she was lifting the latest forensic report from Berkeley off the fax tray—middle-aged female with a titanium screw in the left femur, a type of screw that had only been in use since 1992, the medical examiner had assured Linda—Davies called back to report that Simon Childs’s long lost mother was lost no longer.

  “Good work,” Linda told him.

  “Piece of piss,” said the expat Brit. “According to social security records, she’s been living at the same address in Atlantic City for over fifteen years. If you consider four hundred and fifty dollars a month living, that is.”

  “Kimberly Rosen would,” said Linda grimly, glancing up to the two photographs from the Chicago PD she’d posted on her victims’ bulletin board. The first was a perky three-quarter head shot of Kim from the New Trier yearbook, class of ’95; the second was a full-face shot from the Cook County morgue, class of ’99.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Miss Delamour?”

  “Not Delamore, it’s Dela-moor, comme le français.”

  “Sorry, Miss Dela-moor.”

  “Aah, call me Rosie, ever’body else does.”

  Plastered, Linda told herself—four o’clock in the afternoon and she’s plastered. Interviewing drunks was like fishing—you let them ramble a bit, then you reel them in, let them ramble, reel them in. “Rosie, I’m calling about your son.”

  “Got no son.” The way she said it, though, it was less a denial than it was a renunciation. “Tried to explain, he didn’t wanna hear.”

  “Explain what, Rosie?”

  “Why.”

  “Because I’m trying to get in touch with him.”

  “No, why—explain why. Why I left.”

  Oh, swell, thought Linda: it’s turning into an Abbott and Costello routine. “When was this, Rosie?”

  “Too late. It was too late. Guess I waited too long. To call.”

  Linda tried again—this could be the break they were looking for. “Rosie, I need to know when you last spoke to Simon.” Elementary psycholinguistics: “I” statements often elicited responses where questions failed.

  “I dunno, this year, last year—no, wait, I remember. It was February—February fourth. Missy’s birthday. He wouldn’t lemme…said it would only…wouldn’t lemme…”

  Not recent, then, thought Linda, as Rosie began sobbing on the other end of the line—so much for our big break. “February fourth of this year?”

  A drawn-out, drunken wail that under other circumstances might have been almost farcical, followed by an extended silence broken by the clink of ice in a thin-walled glass. “Rosie?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Linda Abruzzi.” Linda decided not to identify herself as an FBI agent just yet—she didn’t want to arouse any maternal protective instincts. “I’m trying to get hold of Simon—it’s very important.”

  “S’matter, he knock you up or something?”

  “No, I—”

  “Listen, Bootsie honey, I haven’t seen my children since nineteen fifty-one. That’s, uh—That’s almost—That’s a helluva long time. He don’t know where I am, and if he ain’t home, I don’t know where he is. So unless you get some kind of weird kick out of making old ladies cry, why don’t you let me get back to my shows and I’ll let you get back to whatever you were doing.”

  “Rosie, there’s something you should—”

  Click. Linda redialed, but the phone was now off the hook. Fuck it, she thought, putting down the phone and picking up the fax from the medical examiner in Berkeley again. Let somebody else tell Rosie her daughter’s dead and her son’s a monster—there must be people who get paid for that.

  5

  Simon hid in a utility closet off the snake exhibit area until the last employee had left the reptilarium a little after seven-thirty. When he emerged with his pencil flashlight (the Volvo, having belonged to Nelson, was well-stocked with flashlights, flares, and even a first-aid kit), the snake room was pitch-dark save for the red glow of the exit lights over the doors.

  The glass fronts of the snake cages were set flush into a curved wall ringed by a sloping carpeted ramp from which the public could view the
snakes in safety. Simon circled the ramp all the way around to the back, until he reached the door marked Staff Only—No Public Access, which led, he had learned that afternoon, to the workroom in the center of the circle of cages. It was locked, but a hard kick sprang it; a moment later Simon found himself inside the workroom, surrounded by cages containing a veritable who’s who of the world’s most venomous snakes.

  The flashlight beam darted around the circular walls. Here a black mamba (which was actually kind of gray), there a spitting viper, a hooded cobra, an eight-foot python, a Florida cottonmouth, a Texas diamondback rattler. He hadn’t come for any of these, though. The mambas were too fast and agile, the rattlers too noisy, the cobras, cottonmouths, and vipers too venomous, and the constrictors not venomous at all.

  No, what Simon had come for was the humble eastern coral snake, Micrurus fulvius fulvius, a red-, yellow-, and black-banded member of the Elapidae family, which, with its small mouth, short fangs, and delayed-action, borderline-lethal neurotoxic venom, was perfect for his purposes. Even better, for educational reasons, the three coral snakes were housed with members of various mimic species—nonvenomous, look-alike milk snakes, scarlet snakes, and scarlet king snakes. Surely the reptilarium staff wouldn’t miss just one coral and one scarlet king out of that whole tangle.

  Simon grabbed a leather gauntlet and a snake hook, which was basically a golf club with a hook on the business end instead of a club head, and dragged a plastic garbage can over to the cage. Carefully he opened the trapdoor in the back, and holding the flashlight in his mouth, the garbage can lid in his bare hand, and the snake hook in the gloved hand, he gingerly extended the hook into the pen and positioned it under the neck of one of the corals, which accommodatingly wrapped itself around the shaft.

  This was the most dangerous part of the transfer—for a few seconds, as he lifted the snake-on-a-stick out of the cage, there were only two feet of haft between his gloved hand and the deadly reptile curled around the base of the hook, with nothing at all to prevent it from slithering up the shaft and past the gauntlet, and sinking its stubby fangs into his upper arm. But the coral knew the drill—lazily it unwound itself and dropped into the garbage can. Simon quickly clapped the lid on—fait accompli.

  Half accompli, anyway. The nearest scarlet king snake to the hatch proved equally cooperative; the only danger in this second transfer would have come if the coral had made a break for it when Simon raised the lid to drop the king in. But luckily the coral, having recently been fed, was already fast asleep again, curled peacefully in the bottom of the can, dreaming, no doubt, of fat rats and juicy, slow-moving mice.

  6

  “We should have called first,” Dorie had said repeatedly, from behind the wheel of Pender’s rented Toyota—the winding, cliff-hugging, two-lane stretch of Highway 1 between Carmel and Big Sur was definitely not a drive for a one-armed man.

  “You should have called first,” announced the young neohippie who greeted them at the door of the Lethe Institute Retreat Center of Hot Springs. Behind her, a great empty cathedral of a room—vaulted ceiling, redwood beams, and through a picture-window western wall of rose-tinted glass, nothing but ocean and sky. The smell of incense hung in the air; New Age space Muzak filled the room, where half a dozen figures in white meditation pajamas were either performing yoga exercises or training for jobs as circus contortionists.

  “So I’ve been told.” But Pender, who was wearing one of his new hula shirts and his glorious new wide-brimmed white Panama, had learned over the years that it was more difficult for somebody to turn him away from their door than it was for them to refuse him an interview over the phone. And having parked the Toyota at the top of what seemed like a sheer cliff and descended a flagstone path so steep it would have given a Grand Canyon donkey second thoughts, he was not going to be dismissed by some flunky quite so easily. “Why is that, exactly?”

  “Because Dr. Luka won’t see anybody without an appointment,” said the young woman.

  “I see. And what’s your name?”

  “I’m Lakshmi.”

  “Lakshmi, I need you to do something for me.” Linda Abruzzi wasn’t the only one who knew psycholinguistics. “I need you to tell Dr. Luka that Special Agent E. L. Pender of the Federal Bureau of Investigation wants to speak with him briefly about a former patient of his, by the name of Simon Childs. We’ll wait here,” he added—it was all about seizing the initiative.

  “Hell of a view,” Pender whispered to Dorie, as Lakshmi left the room via a side door.

  “Dramatic, anyway,” she replied. “But you could paint it with a roller.”

  Lakshmi reappeared, beckoned from the side door, and led Pender and Dorie down another fearfully steep path to the famous Lethe baths, a series of recessed natural hot tubs carved into the side of the cliff over eons by a mineral spring, and canopied by a great granitic overhang that gave the baths the feel and echo of a shallow cavern or grotto. Alone in the hottest and deepest tub, the one nearest the mouth of the spring, sat the hairiest old man Dorie had ever seen naked, or wanted to—white hair to his shoulders, bushy Santa beard, and the matted white pelt covering his chest and arms would have made a yeti reach for the Nair.

  “Come on in, the water’s fine.” His accent was a strange hybrid of hip and cultured, of Berkeley and Budapest.

  Pender shrugged, pointed to his cast, and sat down on a backless marble bench, facing the tub, with his back to the ocean. He could hear the surf crashing below; silvery reflections from the light playing off the steaming surface of the baths danced on the shiny granite walls of the cliff like hundreds of manic Tinkerbells.

  “And you, dear?”

  Dorie shuddered as she sat down beside Pender. “I may never take another bath again.”

  “Ablutophobia?”

  “Simon Childs–ophobia.”

  “Oh?”

  Dorie looked over at Pender, who nodded. He suspected her story would make a more eloquent argument for Luka’s cooperation than anything he could say. As she spoke, the damp walls of the shallow cavern gradually took on a pinkish glow from the western sky. When she’d finished, Luka asked Pender to give them a moment alone. Pender walked a few dozen paces up the flagstone path and watched the sun hovering twice its width above the curved horizon—he’d never seen anything as vast as that horizon.

  Dorie appeared around a bend in the path. “He wants to talk to you now.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “He just wanted to make sure I had a good therapist. Said he could give me a couple of names if I needed.”

  She told Pender she’d wait for him up at the house. Pender retraced his steps. The light back at the baths was now a refulgent primrose pink—it was like being inside a Tiffany lamp.

  “Tell me, Agent Pender,” said Dr. Luka, “is it FBI policy now to schlep victims around on interviews?”

  “No, I—”

  “Your relationship with Miss Bell is more of a personal nature then, I take it.”

  “Yes, we—”

  “In that case, let me give you a little professional advice, free of charge: Either Miss Bell has one of the best-integrated psyches in the western world—which her history of severe phobias would tend to argue against—or she’s heading for a psychological blowup of Hindenburgian proportions.”

  “But isn’t it possible that it could be kind of, what’s the word, empowering for her—helping put Childs behind bars?”

  “I suppose so—but if she were my patient, and I were thirty years younger, I’d kick your ass down that cliff there. Now, what is it you think I can do for you, Agent Pender?”

  “Tell me everything you can about Simon Childs—the more we know, the more likely we’ll be able to catch him before anybody else has to go through what Dorie went through. And worse.”

  “Oh, my, I have been out of touch, haven’t I? And when was it, precisely, that the privilege of doctor-patient confidentiality was revoked?”

  “Come off it, Doc—you
know perfectly well that a physician is not only permitted, but required to breach confidentiality when lives are endangered. You can’t testify in court without a waiver from Childs, but neither can you withhold information that may help us capture him.”

  “It’s been thirty-five years, Agent Pender, and my memory isn’t what it once was.”

  “Mine either,” said Pender. “I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning. But I can give you chapter and verse of every case I ever worked, and I’m willing to bet you can, too.”

  Luka sank down until he was chin deep in the steaming water, with his long white hair fanning out around his head. “Agent Pender, are you familiar with the old joke about the gay man who tells his friend that his mother made him a homosexual?”

  “‘If I buy her the yarn, will she make me one, too?’”

  “Precisely. And Simon Childs’s mother and grandfather couldn’t have done a better job of making a counterphobic phobic if they’d knitted one from a pattern. The way Simon tells it—or at least the way he told me, back in 1963 (I remember the year, because it was right around the time my friend Jack Kennedy was assassinated)—he was already suffering from multiple specific phobias by the time he and his sister were abandoned by their mother at their paternal grandfather’s proverbial doorstep after their father died—drowned drunk after driving his car into the bay, if I remember correctly.

  “First and foremost, understandably enough, little Simon was afraid of drowning. So his grandfather took it upon himself to cure him of his weakness by beating him, holding his head under water, then alternating beatings and dunkings, until Simon had learned to master his terror. Next came fear of the dark, which the grandfather cured by beating him, then locking him in the basement, then beating him some more. After nyctophobia, however, came cynophobia, the fear of dogs (specifically, his grandfather’s two attack-trained Dobermans, as I recall), which the grandfather cured by making him sleep in the kennel—and beating him, of course.