Fear itself: a novel

by Jonathan Lewis Nasaw

  “I’m rooting for the attic,” Linda said weakly.

  “Don’t worry,” said Reilly. “Like I said, coral venom is only borderline lethal, plus there’s often a delayed reaction, plus Animal Control’s supposed to be on their way over with the specific antivenin.”

  “When did you become such an expert on venomous snakes, Reilly?” Buchanan asked him.

  “Since Herro got the printout from Poison Control about fifteen minutes ago.” Reilly nodded toward the fax stuffed into his kit. “You think there’s a chance in hell I’d be up here otherwise?”

  “Could I see that?” Linda asked.

  “Here you go.”

  …reaction to envenomatim may be delayed from four to twelve hours…. Clinical manifestations…bilateral ptosis, diplopia, anisocoria, myalgia, dyspnea, respiratory paralysis. Death from acute respiratory failure.

  Linda handed the sheet back to Reilly. “Translation?” Still all business.

  “Ptosis—that’s the drooping eyelids. Diplopia is double vision, anisocoria is the different sized pupils, myalgia is muscle pain, dyspnea is air hunger. Respiratory paralysis is actually paralysis of the diaphragm. Basically, she suffocated to death. He must have held it right up to her jugular, see…?”Again he tilted Gloria’s head up.

  “Don’t do that,” snapped Linda, who was still about a million miles away emotionally, but approaching earth at light speed.

  “What’s your problem? I guarantee you she doesn’t care.”

  “She was my college roommate,” Linda said softly, as Buchanan put his arm around her shoulder again and steered her back into the bedroom.

  “I feel like I’m missing something here, Abruzzi. What’s the connection with Childs—what was he doing here?”

  By now, Linda should have been ready for the question. She’d had plenty of time to prepare her answer on the ride down: Gloria was afraid of snakes. I was researching the case; I told her about phobia.com. She must have gone on-line. Childs got her address somehow.

  Yeah, that’d work, she’d told herself, that’d play. But that was before she’d seen Jim’s mangled, eyeless corpse in those ridiculous red bikini briefs; seen Gloria exposed, naked and vulnerable for once. Roomed with her for two years, never once saw her naked or vulnerable.

  Suddenly Linda felt immensely tired. “It’s a long story,” she told Buchanan. “Is there someplace I can sit down?”

  2

  “I left you. That’s what he told you?” Rosie took a slug out of the bottle, then offered it around.

  Cappy shook his head. Simon refused it, too—thanks to the crosstops, his mind still felt razor sharp, and he wanted to keep it that way. “‘Like Moses among the bulrushes,’ were his exact words. I always pictured us in reed baskets on the doorstep.”

  “What else did he tell you?” She raised the bottle for another slug—seeing the ghost of Marcus Childs had sobered her up something awful. Simon reached for the bottle, intending to take it away from her before she managed to overcome her unaccustomed state of coherence, but the look she gave him as she clutched it to her chest reminded him so sharply of Missy that he couldn’t go through with it.

  “That you called us the brats, that you said the brats would cramp your style.”

  “Nothing about your father, though?”

  “He never talked about my father at all. What was he like?” Simon asked eagerly.

  “Danny? Sweetest man you’d ever want to meet. A real prince. In fact, that’s how we girls referred to him down on the line.”

  “The ‘line’?”

  “The assembly line—I started working in the Emeryville plant in 1942. When Danny got out of the Navy in forty-six, your grandfather put him in charge of converting the plant from wartime production. Everybody thought we’d all get fired when the vets came back, but somehow he kept on every girl who wanted to keep working, and hired back the vets, too. The crown prince, we called him. And it was kind of like a fairy tale. He gave me a ride home one night—don’t ever let anybody tell you there’s no such thing as love at first sight.

  “But when your grandfather found out about it, he hit the roof. Said I was beneath Danny—said it to my face. Said I was Okie trash, a gold digger. He gave your father an ultimatum: me or his inheritance. Love or money.”

  “And he chose love.” Simon had meant to sound derisive, but somehow it didn’t come out that way.

  “We chose love,” said Rosie. “We moved to Vallejo. One of Danny’s old crew got him a job working in the shipyard. You were born six months later. We were poor but happy. I know that’s a cliché, poor-but-happy, but it was true. And even when Missy was born—it was a shock, everybody said put her in a home, but we loved her so dearly—we all did. You did—you were always so sweet to her. Sure, money was a problem, but then the Korean War started up and they converted the shipyard to submarine maintenance. Danny called me one afternoon, said he’d just been promoted to foreman. He was going to have a few beers with the guys to celebrate.”

  Rosie raised the bottle to her lips and glared at Simon as she took another stiff belt, as if daring him to try to take it away from her again. “A few beers with the guys,” she repeated. “On the way home, his car went off the road, ended up in San Pablo Bay. The wreck didn’t kill him—they said he’d drowned. I got the call while I was nursing Missy. My milk went dry that night and never let down again.”

  “And that’s when you dumped us off with Grandfather?”

  “No, that’s when I went to your grandfather to ask him for help. I was penniless, you were still his grandchildren—where else could I turn? And guess what?—he gave me an ultimatum. He was big on ultimatums, your grandfather. He was also big on buying people. He hadn’t been able to buy his son, but he could buy his grandchildren. He told me he’d give me fifty thousand dollars and see to it that my children would be raised in the lap of luxury, and that Missy would get the best care available. In return, I had to sign a legal document relinquishing my parental rights and agreeing to drop out of your lives forever.”

  “That’s twenty-five grand per kid. Not bad money in those days.”

  “Try to put yourself in my shoes, Simon. I was in my mid-twenties, two kids, one with Down syndrome. The only work I’d ever done was on the assembly line at the Childs plant, and nobody was hiring women for that kind of work in 1951. And even if I’d found work, what kind of life would it have been for you and Missy? At best, latchkey kids; at worst you’d have ended up in a foster home and Missy in an institution.”

  “Never,” muttered Simon. “We’d have made it somehow.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. Have you ever been poor, Simon? Have you ever gone to bed hungry? Have you ever wanted for anything? Anything at all? I don’t know who this Ida was, but she was right about one thing: there’s nothing harder in this world than for a mother to give up her children. Even if the choice is to watch them starve. Every day of my life I’ve had to wonder whether I made the right decision.”

  Again, that unfamiliar feeling—the tug of empathy. Simon fought against it. “But you must have known—you had to have known what kind of a monster he was.”

  “No, I—”

  “He beat me, Mom, he whipped me every night.”

  “Please, Simon.” Rosie covered her ears.

  “He locked me in the cellar, Mom.” Simon leaned forward, pulled her hands away, put his face against hers, brow to brow. “He held my head under water, Mom. He made me sleep with the dogs, Mom. He—”

  “No, Simon. Please.”

  But Simon was not about to stop now. This was more like it, he told himself, this was more like what he’d had in mind, coming here in the first place. She was a clever old gal, he had to give her that—she’d nearly gotten to him with her fairy tale, her sob story. But in the end she was no better than Grandfather Childs had painted her. Worse, in a way: she hadn’t just abandoned baby Missy and little Simon, she’d sold them.

  Grownup Simon snatched the vodka bottle f
rom between his mother’s legs, thrust it toward her. “Here you go, Mom, have another drink. Then you won’t have to think about how Missy used to cry herself to sleep every night, holding your hairbrush in her little hand. It was the only thing she had to remember her mother by; it was—”

  “That’s enough,” Cappy said quietly, as a sobbing Rosie buried her face in her hands. It was the first time he’d opened his mouth since Simon had pulled the gun on him. “Can’t you see she’s suffered enough?”

  Who hasn’t? thought Simon, raising the Colt, leveling it directly at the old man’s face, and drawing back the heavy hammer. With his new clarity of mind, he could see the next few seconds as if they’d already happened, only in slow motion. The bullet spinning out of the rifled barrel, the impact, dead center, between the eyes, the spray, the sitting body lifting from the bed with the impact, slamming into the wall behind it, sliding down, trailing a smear of blood.

  Or was that only something he’d seen in a movie? Of course—how very cheesy of me, Simon thought. In real life, it would be nothing like that. There would be nothing balletic about a forty-five-caliber bullet hitting a face at point-blank range.

  On the other hand, there would be nothing left of the face, either.

  Rosie continued to sob. Simon tuned her out, but kept the gun trained on Cappy. This wasn’t about her, anymore. The question had been asked and answered—she’d had her say. This was about Simon, this was about survival. His plan, insofar as he’d had one when he’d left the Gees, was to finish his unfinished business with Rosie (although just how that would play out was something he had not allowed himself to think about), then double back to Maryland for the doubleheader, the game to end all games.

  Now, however, with his newfound clarity of mind, Simon realized what a sorry, drug-addled excuse for a plan that was. Pender, Skairdykat—these weren’t feeble, neurotic PWSPDs; they were trained FBI agents, even if Skairdykat did have MS, according to Gloria. If Nelson’s body had been discovered, if the Volvo had been spotted or the Gees missed at work this morning—if any one of a dozen likely possibilities had occurred, at best Pender and Skairdy would already be on the alert; at worst, they’d have an ambush set up.

  But that image, the image of a faceless corpse, was beginning to resonate for Simon. A real plan began to form itself. Vague at first—just a series of short takes, quickly rejected. A faceless corpse and a suicide note—he and Cappy were about the same size. But the body of an old man wouldn’t fool the FBI for long. How about a faceless corpse and a fire? Ludicrous: how could a man shoot himself, then set himself on fire? Just a fire, then—but where would he put the note. In the bath? Along with Rosie’s body? Yes!

  No. The stand-in corpse would still have to be charred beyond recognition. In which case it wouldn’t take an FBI agent to smell a setup—who but a Buddhist monk would commit suicide by self-immolation?

  So much for Plan A. Cappy and Rosie were still frozen in place. Either they hadn’t blinked yet, or time had stopped, or Simon’s thoughts were moving at the speed of light as he began working on Plan B. As of this moment, Cappy and Rosie were both still unaware of…well, of the nature of Simon’s little problem with the police. Could Simon convert them into allies? You didn’t play the fear game for thirty years without having learned a thing or two about acting.

  Okay, then, say you win them over. Rosie’d be a piece of cake, and also the key to Cappy. But then what? Was there some way to persuade them to cover for him? Mislead his pursuers, stall them somehow, send them off on a wild-goose chase? But once they were in contact with the authorities, they wouldn’t be likely to remain unaware of the…nature of Simon’s problem. Not long enough for Simon’s purposes.

  Then it came to him: Plan C. C for Combination. A little of Plan A, a little of Plan B—but not in that order. Slowly Simon lowered the Colt’s hammer, then the gun, then his head.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I’m so sorry—and I’m so ashamed. Maybe you should turn me in. It doesn’t matter to me anymore. Nothing matters to me anymore—not since Missy died.”

  3

  Is there someplace I can sit down? It was not a rhetorical question—you couldn’t just plop down in the middle of a crime scene. Buchanan led Linda to the kitchen, which the evidence response techs had vacated after picking up a good set of latents from a dirty glass and sending the thumbprint to IAFIS, the CJIS Division’s high-speed Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System.

  He brought her a glass of water, sat down next to her at the glass-topped tubed-steel kitchen table—not across from her, so it wouldn’t seem like an interrogation. Linda appreciated the courtesy. She wasn’t sure what to expect when she finished telling him about Skairdykat. Would he turn away from her in disgust? Notify OPR? Ask for her badge?

  None of the above. Buchanan was a field agent, and as such, a practical man. He waited, he listened, he nodded, and when she was done, he asked the only question of immediate practical interest: “How much does Childs know?”

  For the next twenty minutes, they spitballed all the possible scenarios. Had Childs simply assumed Gloria was Skairdykat and acted accordingly? Both the manner of her death and the fact that Childs had left the coral behind (they were still assuming it was the coral the HRT had spotted on the way in) certainly argued for that scenario, suggested Buchanan.

  “I wish I could buy it,” Linda said, almost wistfully. “But he could have more than one snake. And it just doesn’t make sense that Childs would never have told them what he was doing there, why he’d broken into their house, or that Jim and Gloria, who are both very intelligent people—” She interrupted herself. “—were very intelligent people, that neither of them would have figured out how it was that somebody named Skairdykat ended up contacting the PWSPD through their computer.”

  “Let’s take Jim out of the equation,” said Buchanan. “He has a skull fracture you can see gray matter through—let’s say he got it in the initial attack. That leaves Gloria. She was your friend—she might have covered for you.”

  “You think? When did they first tag the Volvo?”

  “Ten-thirty.”

  “And what’s her estimated time of death?”

  “Reilly says sometime between midnight last night and dawn this morning. What with her in the water and all, they won’t be able to narrow it down any further until they get her on the slab.”

  The slab. Runnels for the blood. They’ll open her up right down the middle like a—

  No. Not there, Linda ordered herself—don’t go there. Stick to your job while you still have one. “Okay, say a minimum of two hours. If it was me, I’d have spilled my guts in two minutes.”

  “And she had your new address?”

  “Yeah—I’m staying at Ed Pender’s place.”

  “Out by the canal?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Think he’ll come after you?”

  “If she told him I was Skairdykat, definitely. If she also told him I was FBI, probably not.”

  “It might be worth a shot, though,” said Buchanan eagerly. “I know that place—it’d be perfect for an ambush. One road in, one road out, plenty of cover for the snipers—he comes after you there, his ass is ours.”

  Buchanan’s excitement was contagious. “He’d probably come around back,” Linda offered. “I could be up on the porch. Then when he—What?”

  Buchanan was shaking his head. “As my daughter would say, that is so not happening.”

  “C’mon, I could—”

  Another agent interrupted them. “Okay if I check the redial now?”

  “Did you dust it yet?”

  “No, Joe, I’m a complete idiot,” the man said, taking the wall phone off the hook. “Of course I dusted it, what do you think?” He pushed a button on the handset, listened for a second or two, then asked whoever had picked up: “Actually, operator, I need to know what city you’re in…. No, this is Special Agent Stroud with the FBI. I’m redialing from a phone at a crime scen
e—we’re trying to ascertain…Right, right…I’ll hold.”He turned back to Buchanan with his hand over the mouthpiece. “It’s directory assistance for Atlantic City—she’s getting a supervisor.”

  “Atlantic City?” Linda’s head jerked around so swiftly she almost gave herself another Lhermitte’s.

  “Yeah, I—”

  “Never mind, I know who he was calling.”

  “Who?”

  “His mother lives in Atlantic City—he was calling his mother.”

  Buchanan already had his cell phone out; he punched a speed-dial number. “This is Buchanan. Get me the R.A. in Atlantic City. If nobody’s there, track ’em down—this is crash priority.” He looked over at Buchanan, who was still on hold. “When the supervisor comes back on the line, get a phone number and an address for…?”He looked back to Linda.

  “Delamour,” said Linda. “Rosie Delamour.”

  “How much does she know?”

  “As of four o’clock yesterday, diddly-squat.”

  “Well, let’s hope she’s still blissfully—” Then, into the phone: “Yeah? Yeah, okay…LaFeo, this is Buchanan from Washington. We think Simon Childs might be heading your way.”

  4

  After taking care of a few minor housekeeping details (yes, the patio door of 1211 Baja Way had been unlocked; no, Pender hadn’t broken in; yes, Pender had had reason to believe Mr. Carpenter might have been in immediate physical danger; no, Miss Bell hadn’t intentionally misled the mailman into thinking she was a federal agent—that sort of thing), Pender and Dorie drove back to Carmel.

  He didn’t offer any details as to what had been in the bathroom; she didn’t ask. But that wasn’t the real elephant-that-nobody’s-talking-about in the car on the drive down; the real elephant for Dorie was that this was going to be their last night together—Pender had booked an eight o’clock flight out of San Francisco tomorrow morning.

  So it took her completely by surprise when he asked her, hypothetically speaking of course, how long it would take her to pack.